- David Gilbert "Funking-Up Lift: Parliament/Funkadelic’s Radical Representations of Black Masculinity"
- Charles L. Hughes "Size Ain’t Shit”: Bushwick Bill, Sex and Disability"
- Tyina Steptoe "Hip Hop’s Queer Masculinities"
Moderator: Christina ZanfagnaFrom brooding bluesmen to hip-hop gangstas, the history of Black popular music is often structured around iconic figures of Black manhood. These presentations, usually connected to broader tropes and stereotypes surrounding African American men, often limit the cultural presentation of Black music and Black masculinity. But they have also provided Black artists with fertile terrain to trouble existing boundaries of race, gender and sexuality through their music, even (or perhaps especially) when working within the genres that produced them. This panel considers several of those artists, spotlighting iconoclastic figures from funk to hip-hop to musical theatre whose work pursues alternative musical conceptions of Black masculinity. David Gilbert shows how the work of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic created “more inclusive, transgressive identities for African-American men” that both affirmed and challenged the advances of the Civil Rights and Black Power era. Tyina Steptoe considers how Lil Kim’s work with male collaborators “allowed young black men to perform aspects of femininity” and queerness “without drawing homophobic backlash” in a cultural and musical era of “masculine hardness.” Charles L. Hughes addresses how the Geto Boys’s Bushwick Bill performed a disabled remix of hip-hop masculinity that “negotiated the hypersexuality often attached to Black men and the asexualization ascribed to the disabled.” Finally, Lisa B. Thompson analyzes Colman Domingo’s recent, soul-influenced production
A Boy and His Soul as “both a coming of age narrative and a coming out story” that “explores black masculinities and highlights the fundamental relationship between soul music, memory, identity and cultural belonging within African American culture.” Addressing intersections between race, gender, sexuality and disability, and utilizing both close analysis and broad context, the panelists will argue that these musicians are crucial to understanding the shifting terrain of Black masculinity – musical or otherwise – in a post-soul world.
