Though rap music and hip hop culture have origins primarily in New York and Los Angeles (“Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill gang is the first known rap song to chart in 1979), with groups such as The Last Poets, Sugar Hill Gang, and NWA, there emerged a new sound out of places such as Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta by the 1980s. This was a regional sound coming out of the Deep South initially shaped by artists such as The Geto Boys and Outkast, now known as the Dirty South genre of Rap. This Renaissance in Black music culture overlapped with the rise of disco, trap (also a Dirty South sub-genre of rap) and the increasing popularity of electro-dance music. All genres with ties to drag culture, LGBTQ MCs, and impresarios.
Bounce, as a music produced in response to race and gender oppression in the American South characterized by ass-shaking music, movement, twerking, or frenetic provocative dancing, should lead us to think about the dance floor as a type of rival geography in Black life—amid the rising AIDS crisis of the 1980s—to this current moment of socio-economic and climate catastrophe.
In her groundbreaking text Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie Camp innovatively applies the concept of rival geography (a phrase coined by Edward Said) to the lives and experiences of enslaved women in the American South. Camp demonstrates in her text how Black women made use of space in liberating ways while illustrating the utility of the phrase for understanding marginalized groups under oppressive systems. This phrase is a useful tool for understanding the way Black women and LGBTQ communities have used culture, space, and movement to reinvent themselves on the dance floor, and beyond, thereby shaping, not only popular music culture but sex and gender intimacies in American society.
Scholars and historians of LGBTQ experiences have long discussed the ways that this community has made use of space to counter repression. These include foundational works about space and the LGBTQIA+ community, such as Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (Routledge, 1995) by David Bell and Gill Valentine and Queer Sites: Urban Histories Since 1600 (Routledge, 1999) edited by David Higgs. The first definitive book-length history of Bounce was written by Matt Miller entitled Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identities in New Orleans (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Some more recent work that focuses on marginalized groups related to the LGBTQIA+ community in international contexts include Queer Nightlife (Michigan University Press, 2021) edited by Kemi Adeyemi, and Kareem Khubachandani, et. al, and the forthcoming Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) by Lauron J. Kehrer. Essays in this forum build on and expand this existing knowledge to explore this move in Black intellectual and cultural life from the 1970s to the present.