Twerk sumn!: theorizing Black girl epistemology in the body

ABSTRACT

In conversations about appropriation and appreciation, twerking is illustrated as a medium that non-Black people are celebrated for (with awards and global tours), while Black people – especially Black girls – are not afforded just celebrations. Using the ‘Dunham method’ and the current critical discourses surrounding twerking, this essay explores the possibilities for self-expression and sexuality for Black girls. Using Beyoncé’s music video for ‘Sorry’ and Louisiana rapper Tokyo Vanity’s music video for ‘That’s My Best Friend’ (2015), in this essay I consider the possibilities for visible sexual self-expression for Black girls in a digital world. I argue that Black girls’ use of twerking videos to celebrate and challenge each other’s self-expression provides an opportunity to enjoy their bodies and reclaim the possibilities of pleasure in blackness and girlhood/womanhood. I extend contemporary Black feminist scholarship on Black women’s sexuality to consider Black girls as an epistemological imperative in the future of Black feminist scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Appropriation
• dance
• hip-hop
• pleasure
• performance
• sexuality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank audiences at the Association for the Worldwide African Diaspora and Show and Prove conferences as well as reviewers for the profound feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Aria S. Halliday, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Africana Feminisms in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the editor of The Black Girlhood Studies Collection and has published in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Girlhood Studies, and SOULS.

Notes

1 Borelli (2016) further contextualizes hip movements in the diaspora, particularly for ‘mulata’ women in Cuba and the ‘bewitching’ qualities of her hips. Within the US, there were many playful slang variations for dancing or hip movements, especially in Blues songs by Bessie Smith, Lucille Bogan, and others.

2 From Lorde’s (1984) articulation of the erotic to Collins’s (2004) Black Sexual Politics and more recent studies of Black pornography, queer identity, and sexual pleasure, Black feminist scholars have always embraced discussions of sex and sexuality in the experiences and political concerns of Black women. Hip-Hop feminists like Aisha Durham, Brittney Cooper, and Susana Morris, since Joan Morgan’s call to further embrace the contradictions of living a feminist life in a Hip Hop cultural landscape in 1990, have pushed scholars to consider the complicated relationship between Black women’s sexuality and the objectification of Black women’s bodies. Here and elsewhere, I am interested in expanding these theoretical and cultural conversations to Black girls to better understand the ways that they experience pleasure, the erotic, and their bodies in contemporary U.S. culture. See Lorde (1984), Morgan (1999), Collins (2004), Stallings (2007), Peoples (2008), Nash (2014), Miller-Young (2014), Halliday (2017), and Davis and the BSE Collective (2019).

3 In a discussion of the connections between ‘black dance’ and ‘black identity,’ Thomas F. DeFrantz (2001, p. 12) explains, ‘the practical activity of my dance – my gesture, my words, and what I mean to tell you by my stance – all contribute to how I construct my own black identity. It is not a singular construction.’

4 While Stephanie Batiste identifies the imperial relationship Dunham had to Black diasporic dance practices through her anthropological work, especially as she categorized them as ‘primitive,’ I use Dunham to think about the fluidity of Black performance practices even as they have relationships inflected with imperial and capitalist impulses. See Batiste (2011) and Osumare (2010).

5 While I focus specifically on theorizing Black girl epistemology through dance performance, I also acknowledge the history of Black women (and men) performers on stages in the U.S. and abroad that inform the field of dance and dance theatre that Black girls offstage also occupy; for more information on how Black dance travels, popularizes, and is carried into ‘modernity’ by white dancers, see DeFrantz (2004), Manning (2004), Chude-Sokei (2006), and Gotman (2018). For more on Black dance community and kinship, see Bailey (2013).

6 Vine was a social media platform that allowed users to upload 6.5 s videos and looped the videos; Twitter purchased Vine in 2012 and closed the app in January 2017 after it fell in popularity to Facebook-owned, video- and pictured-based social media apps, Snapchat and Instagram.

7  Gaunt (2016) notes that there are dangers inherent in the popularity of Black girls twerking videos via the digital pornographization of young Black girls. While I agree with these arguments, I look at the girls in the videos rather than the mechanisms that continue to endanger and sexualize them.

8 Gaunt’s (2018) work documents the great volume of twerking videos that are Black girls, of very young ages, twerking by themselves in their bedrooms.

9 Brown’s (2008b) use of a cipher (or cypher) derives from an informal gathering of rappers, dancers, and beatboxers in which each person is allowed time to show off their skills.

10 It is also important to note that there is a tension between the audience and the performer that I am explicitly not engaging in focusing specifically on Black girls as producers and consumers of twerking videos; what happens when other individuals watch videos of Black girls twerking is the subject of another article.

11 While in our contemporary discussions of childhood, one does not become an adult until they are legally of age – these distinctions do not hold true in the 18th and 19th centuries for Black girls. The distinction of adult versus child, then, becomes one of experience and knowledge and of the prerogative of the archive-hunter. Therefore, I contextualize Tokyo Vanity’s video as an expression of girlhood, one that follows other scholars – namely, Ruth Nicole Brown – that privileges experience and behaviour over age to craft theories of girlhood.

12 While I struggle to re-disperse, in some ways, such ridiculous aspersions of Williams, we must continually name the atrocities we experience to mark the ways others like to use us yet abuse us. See Rankin (2014).

13 Bernstein (2011) explains the constructed ideological connections between childhood, whiteness, and innocence.

14 Love (2012) interviews Black girls about the scripts from rap music and Hip-Hop culture that celebrates big butts and women’s sexual potential. McMillan (2015) presents self-objectification as a framework to interpret Black women performers’ agentive choice to present themselves despite the histories of Black women’s objectification. More research could explore how Black girl twerk dancers understand their own decisions to present their bodies as objects.