But seriously and honestly, seriousness ALL the fucking time isn't necessary now is it? What a drag. Really, you can tell someone knows their stuff backwards and forwards when they can make a joke out of it. Suggesting that Doug was all offended and his nose out of joint, how utterly silly.
Oh yeah and Paula, who elected you/hired you as LBO greeter? Be sure to offer everyone a shopping cart (a.k.a 'buggy' in the South) when they come through the door and you're all set!! Good idea, a virtual greeting for all newbies.
Oh and I swear that my LBO welcome kit said the limit was 5 posts a day. Oh well.
on to butler and hip hop....
Frances asked
>are we doing a paper or a book? I have somehow
forgotten. Sweet Alec, if
>we decide to do something that you can't get, I'll
copy it and post it to
>you. Snit and I are both limited by the same mediocre
university library,
>so it won't be anything too obscure, unless Snit has
a secret stash of
>Butleriana.
I bought Gender Trouble years ago for a course and have read that. So if Butler's a must then I'd rather do Psychic Life or Bodies that Matter. Otherwise I'm game for anything else--almost--that you n Alec would like to read. Maria Gilmore, you game? Paula? Any pomo bashers anxious to actually read some of it and then *really* bash it. Take it from me, it's much more fun that way.
Maria, by far the best discussion of hip hop culture and its subversive roots and potential is Tricia Rose's _Black Noise_ Rose argues that it is not the lyrics that reveal an ideological critique. Rather, it is that hip hop culture--the music, the block parties, freak nik, language, graffiti, clothing styles, comportment, the use of white music for purposes other than it was intended--should be read as an attempt to take back and reclaim public spaces in order to have some control over and assert Black identity in the face of a culture industry that has monopolized that representation. She discusses all this, too, in the context of political economy analyses of urban life, deindustrialization, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. She has a really fascinating discussion of graffiti artists who entered that world because their opportunities for employment as graphics artists dried up with technological shifts in graphics production. Similarly, she traces the closed off vocational aspirations of rap dj's and rap artists who found and carved out creative outlets despite everything that stood in their way.
Rose goes on to grapple with the contradictory character of rap music--of course, could it be any other way?--asking whether hip hop culture, rap specifically, can *really* be a form of ideological (ground up) critique if, in fact, its consumers are mostly whites. In other words, how could anything subversive be actually enjoyed by whites?
Rose's answer is that we should recognize that hip hop culture and rap music in particular is interpreted rather differently depending on the social location (subject-position as some prefer) of those who are doing the interpreting. Or, as one of my white students wrote in her journal: "My son likes to listen to it and once in a while I hear the lyrics and wonder what I should say. I'm not a prude by any means and I know that my parents didn't like the music that I listened to and it was full of references to sex and drugs. And the trouble is, when it comes to drugs I'll tell my kids that I support legalization. But when it comes to rap music....I just don't know. So, I just keep my mouth shut, knowing that if I say anything at all against it then I'll just encourage him to listen to it all the more. And if I say anything against then I might just be supporting racism which I don't want to do. I don't know if I should say anything about the sexism, the violence. I only hope that because he's white then he won't fully identify with it all."
On the more pessimistic side, more atuned to what you're already reading about is _Black Culture Industry_ Ernest Cashmore.
Oh and I have a former colleague, Redell Hearn, who's done work on the representation of women in rap music videos and Black women's responses to and reappropriation of those images for their own purposes. She was an art history major, so I thought you might be interested!
Anyway, there are more refs regarding Black women's struggle with the representations of women in rap music, but I can't find my list of references right now. I'll send them on later though!
SnitgrrRl