Beyond Beyoncé : intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary American hip-hop, ca. 2010-2016

Includes abstract and vita.Notions of hip-hop automatically often rely on the construction of the rapper as a black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man. Artists that fall outside of this "normative" identify, including black women, white men and women, and queer and trans invidivuals, employ performance strategies that engage with and challenge this construction in order to render themselves legible to hip-hop audiences. Taking as its starting point the many scholarly discourses surrounding the performer Beyoncé, this dissertation examines several of these strategies through a series of case studies that combine reception history with musical, textual, and visual analysis. Following an introduction that lays out key concepts and theoretical frameworks, the first chapter focuses on Nicki Menaj and her recent shift to a performance style in which she balances a feminine gender presentation with a hardened, masculine lyrical approach. Chapter 2 examines ways in which white women rappers Iggy Azalea and former members of the White Girl Mob (Kreashawn, Lil Debbie and V-Nasty) misappropriate black culture and concepts of "ratchetness" while mediating their white female identities and negotiating the identities of mainstream hip-hop. In chapter 3 I demonstrate how white, cisgender, hererosexual male rapper Macklemore's strategy for negotiating and articulating his own whiteness further marginalizes black LGBTQ artists by echoing white, mainstream concerns that hip-hop, and by extension, black communities are inherently more homophobic than white-dominated music genres and the communities that produce them. Chapter 4 explores the work of queer black artists active primarily in New York City, including Le1f, Zebra Katz, Ckes da Killa, and Azealia Banks, focusing on the influence of Ballroom culture on their musical output and positioning them within a black queer musical lineage. In the fifth and final chapter I explore the contemporary dominance of openly queer and trans rappers in New Orleans bounce, a local hip-hop genre, a phenomenon that is part a consequence of the displacement and devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Ultimately, this dissertation uses feminist, queer, and critical race frameworks alongside musical analysis tp de-center the normative rapper figure and assert that hip-hop is a musical response to the socio-political experiences of all its practitioners