Twerkin’ Diaspora: Reading Urban Afro-Femme Performance (#RUDigitalBlackness2016)
In November of 2014, Jamie Moore AKA Betty Butt, a founding member of “The Official Twerk Team,” was shot and killed inside her Atlanta apartment complex. Her murder briefly made local news and was reported by several online “urban news” outlets but never broke national headlines. Nevertheless, a number of West African news and celebrity gossip sites covered this event, mourning the death of a “YouTube sensation.” One can be sure that when Twerk Team posted their first video to YouTube in 2009 they were not the only young black women “shakin’ ass” in the comfort of their own homes, in nightclubs and on the Internet. Platforms like YouTube, geared towards user-generated content, helped foster a participatory online community opening the Southern nightclub dance circle to a global audience.
One of the most recent posts on Moore’s twitter is photo of her in a mesh turquoise bodysuit, bedazzled eye make-up and color coordinated yarn locs. Captioned “Betty Butt/Ameti/Yemoja,” the photo evokes Ile Ife, the Yoruba cosmological order from which Yemeya/Yemoja — orisha of the sea — emerges.
Moore’s explicit embodiment of Yemeya illustrates a diasporic consciousness that many online users and cultural critics would be hard pressed to afford someone whose ass has been the sole focus of their popularity. Digging through the social presence of yet another dead black woman in age of #SayHerName, forced me to confront the lifelessness of body I had spent hours engaging as a site of resistance.
I offer this essay in memorium of Jamie Moore, in praise of ass-werk and painstakingly aware of the limitations of theory.
Urban Afro-Femme
“Twerk” as the language and aesthetic of mastery of a distinctly urban, black and femme sexuality as illustrated by The Original Twerk Team substantiates the black woman’s ability to “make use of her own materiality within narratives in which they are the subject” (Brooks, 2006). Despite their intentions and potential, these representations are often consumed and spread by folks (black and white alike) invested in explicit heteronormative readings via online platforms like WorldStarHipHop[1]. The fact that this radical reclamation of body and narrative is so readily consumed by the same masculinist scripts it rebuffs is not the issue I wish to take up in this paper. Rather, I focus on the spread of the urban-afro femme performance aesthetic between black femme performers and its centrality to global conceptions of black popular culture.
Expanding Kim Butler’s theory of diaspora as “a framework for the study of a specific process of community formation” to account for the ways Twerk may stand as a performative black feminist engagement within and beyond the global Hip-Hop community as formed through urban black engagement with social media (YouTube, Twitter , Facebook, WhatsApp), I evoke New Media understandings of networked communities (Butler 2006, Albert et.al. 2009). At the meeting of these two theoretical frameworks the Urban Afro Femme Performance aesthetic can be understood as the product of a community with a sense of membership and belonging with a primary function to achieve connectedness using interactive technology.
While polyrhythmic back, thigh and hip isolations have long been associated with dance traditions throughout the African Diaspora[2], “twerking,” by name, emerged as the dance counterpart to southern raunch-rap in 1993 when New Orleans Bounce MC DJ Jubilee commanded audience members to “shake it like a dog” and “twerk” as part of the instructional dance song “Do The Jubilee All.” Jubilee is credited as the first to say “twerk” on vinyl, but it was female Bounce MC Cheeky Blakk who furthered the cultural institutionalization of twerk by putting it in the title of 1995s “Twerk Something” (Graham, 2013).[3] Blakk’s counter-scription of New Orleanean bounce sexuality as something men can perform too gestures towards a coded iteration of black feminist resistance.
From it’s inception ‘Twerk’ operates as venue for what I call a distinctly urban afro-femme praxis. This praxis is one of resistance, vulgarity, technique and pleasure. I define urban afro-femme praxis as an embodied engagement with hyper-visibility (consciously and sub-consciously) invested in the music and culture of southern Hip-Hop. Often but not exclusively centering black women’s bodies, urban afro-femme praxis is a black feminist reading of global black popular culture attune to the agency and power of black femme performers across class distinctions and national boundaries.
As a text that is both pseudo-pornographic and, by its broadest definition cinematic, the twerk video becomes the venue for the ecstatic flight of the black femme (as gleaned from the work of Jennifer Nash 2014 and Kara Keeling 2007). Nash uses ecstasy to refer to “both the possibilities of female pleasure within a phallic economy and the possibilities of black female pleasure in a white-dominated representative economy” (Nash 2014, 2). Nash’s use of ecstasy emphasizes expression of unnamed enjoyment in “embodied racialization” (2014, 2). I find this emphasis on “embodied racialization” pertinent in that it allows for an understanding of the ways urban afro-femme praxis is clearly invested in the enjoyment of bodies, dances, and music that are all marked as black.
If we presume twerk is the vernacular contraction of “to work,”[4] implying that there is a kind of cultural work being performed across boundaries of neighborhoods, cities, states and ultimately nations, twerking can be understood as a gendered and embodied medium through which black female performers can choreograph a kind of cultural sustenance. Thinking in line with Fredrick Knights’ work on the active role African agricultural labor systems and techniques played in the historical and economic trajectories of Anglo-American colonies, I imagine twerk (and urban-afro femme praxis at-large) as another crucial ‘labor system’ in the historical trajectory of all the places black folk spread to (Knight 2012). To ‘twerk Diaspora’ is to queer it by radically centering black women’s possession of their bodies while remaining cognizant of the ways bodies move, are moved, and have been moved by broader structural systems of demand/domination.[5]
The urban afro-femme emerges from two main diasporic flows of cultural information: 1) Post-Katrina migration of New Orleans’ urban black population (and their cultural products) to other southern metropoles — namely Atlanta and 2) the digital radiation of twerk videos by way global black engagement with YouTube . In 2009, through the then amateur oriented media platform of YouTube, Betty Butt, Mizz Twerksum, and Lady L crafted performance personas that shamelessly celebrated their excess flesh and a capacity for movement neither innate to all black women or necessarily limited to those born female bodied. Presenting, and later professionalizing, the body’s performance of sexuality is undoubtedly a variant of erotic labor. This outright performative investment in the carnal has been treated by the dominant black feminist canon as distinct from erotic empowerment.[6] The erotic is honored in abstract as a practical understanding of intimacy in its purest most radical incarnation while the black woman’s body remains publically freighted with the historical wounds of the race. This paper aims to align itself with the current of black feminist text that take interest in black women’s cultural and sexual heterogeneity.[7] At the cross section of black feminist theory and black performance studies[8] I see potential for Jenkins, Ford and Green’s (2013) invocation of ‘spread’ as a way to afford the consumer an active role in the dissemination of media. With respect to the phenomena I am analyzing, spread becomes indicative of the ways YouTube videos allow audiences to observe the dancing black female body from a sanitized distance. This experience of reception mediated by the Internet is distinct from that of the ‘stickiness,’[9] funk and theoretical messiness of engaging the actual site of the dynamic black female body.
Ass-Werk
As early as 1910 it had been noted in the study of dance that “buttocks direct their aerodynamic fuselage everywhere… emotion from dancing is certainly the most pleasant movement felt by the buttocks, the most vibrant, the most irresistible” (Emery 1988, Ryle 2000). The buttocks or ass became symbolic of the distinction between Europeanist and Africanist aesthetic with the latter always cast as savage. In Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool, Brenda Dixon Gottschild presents the Africanist aesthetic as one that places value on the “democratic autonomy of body-parts,” where bodies are presented as multidimensional, evidenced by s or z-curve body profiles “ribs and belly forward, buttocks back, and knees bent in postures that suggest motion and kinetic energy” (Gottschild 2003, 147–148). This s or z-curve is easily recognizable as a common twerk-stance.
Nicole Fleetwood posits ‘excess flesh’ as a disidentification with the (white) male gaze “that seizes upon the scopic desires to discipline the black female body through a normative gaze that anticipates its rehearsed performance of abjection” (Fleetwood 2011, 112). Twerk videos enact excess flesh by showcasing the “kinetic orality” of the black female body (Gaunt 2015, 247).
Extending the feminist performance studies conception of body work, a theory of the ways the movement of marginalized bodies disrupts the distinctions between labor and rationality (Joseph 2000), into the context of black (ass) music, Jason King writes:
“…the white body comes to symbolize rationality while the black body exist to perform the physical labor which that abstracted rationality requires…this racialized divide, which is also a conflation of the human laborer with property, is tragically transconstituted in terms of gender” (2001, 437).
The first video posted to the Official Twerk Team Youtube channel on June 5, 2009 to date has 217,549 views. This number is not truly reflective of the videos reception and spread because as explained in a video posted that same week titled “The Official Twerk Team- PSA,” this is the groups third try on Youtube after their accounts had been repeatedly shut down after the persistent “flagging” of their videos as explicit material.[10] Crunk as ever Twerk Team tells viewers that they are back and here to stay. “Ya’ll thought ya’ll was gonna get ride of us,” Betty Butt declares, “we twerk team! You gon’ know about us, your children gon’ know about us, your grand children gon’ know about us, your great grand children gon’ know about us, we gon’ stay ‘round like tires.” This bid for futurity is couched in awareness of their inherent precarity and ambitions for a more stable, independent Internet presence through their own “TwerkTeamAtl.com” (2009). Which never comes to fruition.
In Conclusion
The Twerk Video as popularized by Atlanta’s ‘The Official Twerk Team” showcases movement that is meant to be “spreadable” while taking choreographic cues from the preferred “stick” of Southern strip-club floor routines. The homemade amateur composition of early Twerk Team videos, I posit, answer the black feminist call for representations of black women conceptualized and produced by black women themselves. The call is heard and responded to throughout the African Diaspora as the urban afro-femme’s body in motion continues to disrupt the grammar of legibility.
Endnotes
[1] Hip-Hop news/gossip blog most popular for its video selection ranging from music videos, fight complications and other amateur content. Spotlights an “ICandy” of the week black/latina model who often displays her twerking skills. Recently launched a full “WorldStarCandy” site.
[2] Mapouka in Cote d’Ivoire, Leumbeul in Senegal, Chakacha in Kenya, Azonto in Ghana, Dancehall dubbing in Jamaica, Perreo in the Dominican Republic
[3] The Vh1 article “Twerking: A Complete History” appears after Miley Cyrus’ 2013 VMA performance and is framed by stills from Beyonce’s “Check On it”(2006), a Nicki Minaj instagram post and Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” video. The latter is notable for Cyrus’ overt use of well-endowed black women as twerking props, asses to be smacked, by and in contrast to her white clad petite bleach-blonde frame.
[4] Kyra D. Gaunt, “YouTube, Twerking & You: Context Collapse and the Handheld Co-Presence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 27, no. 3 (September 2015): 244–273
[5] Thinking specifically about matters of the flesh, Hortense Spillers and later Alexander Weheliye call to question the idea of a “cultural sustenance” predicated on black women’s bodies. Thinking about the political imperatives black hunger and white cravings. Thinking about what it means to categorize the labor of black bodies as sort of distained delicacy on the global market.
[6] See Audre Lorde Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power. United States: Out & Out Books,U.S.(1981); Alice Walker You can’t keep a good woman down. London: U.K / The Womens Press (1982); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1985). Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (1988): 912–90. Catharine MacKinnon, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 301–2.
[7] See Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” differences 6 (1994): 126–45; Tricia Rose, Longing to Tell (New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003); Tricia Rose, “Two Inches or a Yard: Censoring
Black Women’s Sexual Expression,” in Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Mignon R. Moore, “Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black
Lesbian Communities,” Signs 32 (2006): 113–39; Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers,and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” in BlackQueer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
[8] See Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool, 1st ed. (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). ; Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Alison D. Goeller, eds.,Embodying Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance (Forecaast Vol 4) (Germany: Lit Verlag, 2001); Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); Janell Hobson, “The “Batty” Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body”,Hypatia 18, no. 4 (November 2003): 87–105, doi:10.1111/j.1527–2001.2003.tb01414.x.; Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography(United States: Duke University Press, 2014); Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (United States: New York University Press, 2014); Kara Keeling and Lisa Lowe, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (perverse Modernities), ed. Judith Halberstam (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007).
[9] As explained by Jenkins, Ford and Green ‘Stickiness’ is the traditional way to describe the aspects of media texts which engender deep audience engagement and might motivate them to share what they learned with others. This deep audience engagement — as opposed to wide/broad — places emphasis on the static time audiences spend on the specific site/host of the content (2013, 4).
[10] Around this time Youtube added “age restriction” to certain videos requiring users to log in and confirm that they were over 18. Twerk Team’s videos were filed in this category even though the performers themselves were underage.
