No Way of Seeing: Mainstreaming and Selling the Gaze of Homo-Thug Hip-Hop

Autor: Robin R. Means Coleman, Jasmine Nicole Cobb
Rok vydání: 2007
Předmět:
Zdroj: Popular Communication. 5:89-108
ISSN: 1540-5710
1540-5702
DOI: 10.1080/15405700701294053
Popis: This essay examines the attempt to market to a mainstream audience a gay, Black rapper—Caushun—who embodies competing claims of “thug” masculinity and “queen” femininity. We argue that Caushun might experience failure because his music, and more importantly his music videos, will offer his target audience “no way of seeing” authenticity in his intersecting identities. That is the viewing experience, theorized as the gaze (Mulvey, 1975), when applied to Caushun, demonstrates “gaze gone wrong.” He offers himself up as a “homo-thug” in a homophobic genre, even as the thug identity in hip-hop is marked by its hyper-masculine, violent, and homophobic rhetoric. Caushun lays bare a host of social and marketing challenges that demand exploration.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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