“Sissy Style”: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in New Orleans Bounce Dance

Hip hop music and dance are inextricably linked elements of hip hop culture. Indeed, many of the origin stories we tell about hip hop center on interactions between DJs, early MCs, and dancers.² In our narratives, we often discuss how some of the most transformational changes in early hip hop musical techniques were developed with the expressive needs of dancers, especially b-boys and b-girls, in mind. As hip hop music developed as a recorded media commodity following the 1979 release of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” emphasis moved from the early focus on live, multimedia community practice to hip hop as aural performance. Greg Dimitriadis notes that following the emergence and growing demand for rap records, “attention thus shifted to rap’s verbal discourse…decreasing the importance of dance, live congregation, and those who could create a live scene.”³ His study is primarily focused on commercially successful, mass-mediated recordings by artists such as N.W.A., Public Enemy, and Run-D.M.C., however, rather than scenes outside of New York and Los Angeles that remained largely local. In these scenes, such as that in New Orleans during the 1980s and 1990s, dance continued to be inseparable from the aural and sonic aspects of hip hop culture. It is not that hip hop and dance were divorced, but that discourses focused on the mass-mediated sound recording and often neglected to account for the continued relationship between hip hop music and dance.

One result of this shift in focus is that, as Imani Kai Johnson reminds us, hip hop dance is one of the original elements of hip hop about which there is the least amount of scholarship.⁴ The separation of music and dance in hip hop scholarship is related to what Kyra Gaunt refers to as the “musicological tendency to analyze sound as a text and interpret the compositional intent of composers and seminal artists.”⁵ In chronicling examples of Black music scholarship to highlight the ways many foundational studies in this area have been male-centric and have neglected the body and physical modes of expression, she notes that the

Similarly, Joseph G. Schloss notes a “hesitancy to focus on the body in discussions of the arts of the African diaspora, for fear of implying that the activity is not intellectual.”⁷ In hip hop scholarship, especially that which is focused on the recorded commodity of rap music, dance and other modes of physical expression are often marginalized topics. Gaunt’s framework of kinetic orality, the “transmission and appropriation of musical ideals and social memories passed on jointly by word of mouth and by embodied musical gestures and formulas” brings together these interrelated musical and gestural practices and is particularly apt when applied to hip hop.⁸ As Gaunt notes, kinetic orality is a useful way to highlight gendered expression in Black girls’ embodied performances as well as, I would argue, Black queer embodied performances.

Racial and gender associations have also influenced hip hop scholarship’s lack of attentiveness to dance. As Maxine Leeds Craig argues, American cultural assumptions since the 1950s suggest that dance is feminized, an assumption that upholds hegemonic ideals of not just masculinity, but white masculinity specifically.⁹ Craig traces the “long-standing racist associations between blackness, femininity, sensuality, the body, emotional expressiveness, and lack of control, on the one hand, and between white masculinity and the opposite characteristics of rationality, intellect, and emotional control, on the other.”¹⁰ Some of the anxieties around feminization of dance that discourages (white) men from dancing stem from the associations with dance and sexual activity that are rooted in heteronormativity and that emphasize male-female partnered dancing. Hip hop dance in its many forms can include partnered dances but more commonly focuses on individual or communal dancing, reflecting its roots in African and African diasporic practices. For example, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon explores the role of social dance formations in African American culture, arguing that “social dancing links African-Americans to their African past more strongly than any other aspect of their culture.”¹¹ She points out that from the middle passage through the mid-twentieth century and beyond, social dance has provided opportunities for enacting resistance against exploitation and oppression, as well as serving as an important site for Black socialization. Race, gender, and sexuality are intersecting aspects of identity that are articulated through African American social dance formations, including those found in hip hop.

The relationship between dance and music in New Orleans bounce is therefore not unusual, but rather connected to the history of hip hop culture and the even longer history of Black musics and social dance; however, it provides us with a clear example of this relationship where queer interventions in gendered gestures are particularly evident. Bounce is a subgenre in which, since the early 2000s, queerness is both audible and visible. The development of “sissy style” shaking, in congruence with the rise of “sissy rappers,” reflects one mode through which Black queer men resist hegemonic (white) masculinities.¹²

An examination of bounce music and its related dance styles helps to illuminate the interrelatedness of sound, gesture, and performance in hip hop. As mentioned, styles of music and dance coalesced in what would later be named hip hop culture in the Bronx. Johnson writes:

Johnson notes that many of the shared African aesthetics that are found in various styles of hip hop dance include “polyrhythms, improvisation, call and response, spiritual communion, and a number of elements that, though not exclusive to the African diaspora, are central to its aesthetics.”¹⁴ These aesthetic elements can be found in both bounce music and dance.

New Orleans bounce first emerged in the early 1990s and quickly became an iconic, localized style. Matt Miller traces the “emergence of bounce as a distinctive local subgenre” to the release of MC T. Tucker and DJ Irv’s 1992 song, “Where Dey At,” and other subsequent songs that heavily sampled The Showboys’s 1986 recording, “Drag Rap.”¹⁵ He writes that the use of this sample generated the new style, which included “polyrhythmic layering of musical elements, tempi between 95 and 105 b.p.m. [beats per minute], vocal performances in cellular structures, [and] an emphasis on collective experience based in call-and-response rather than individual narrative.”¹⁶ Since about 2000, the genre has sped up in tempo, making it suitable for more frenetically paced movements, especially twerking. This faster tempo has also attracted the attention of national artists who have begun to incorporate bounce style into their mainstream work.

As scholars such as Matt Miller and myself have documented, the resurgence of bounce in the early 2000s was related to the emergence of a critical mass of so-called “sissy rappers,” such as Sissy Nobby, Big Freedia, and Katey Red, on the scene.¹⁷ In addition to increasing tempos and songs that explicitly incited dancers to shake and twerk, the increased presence, visibility, and influence of queer artists challenged heterosexist constructions of local hip hop. Artists such as Big Freedia, who now identifies as both gay and nonbinary, disrupt binaries of male/female, hetero/homosexual, cisgender/transgender, and more. As the bounce artist with the most national platform, Big Freedia has become a spokesperson for bounce music and dance outside of New Orleans and has also been asked to clarify her own gender and sexual identity. In 2020 The Root ran a piece in which she addressed such questions:

Big Freedia reminds us that pronouns are not the same as gender identity, which is also not inherently stable and unchanging. She refers to herself as a gay male but also disrupts a binary understanding of what that means by also identifying as gender nonconforming. While she does not articulate this explicitly, she also challenges notions of queer identity that are defined by white racial constructions, as well.

Big Freedia’s self-fashioning reminds us that “sissy” in sissy bounce should not be understood as exclusively gay or male. As Black queer studies scholars such as Marlon B. Ross and Roderick Ferguson have theorized, sissy is a heterogenous configuration of race, gender, and sexuality.¹⁹ “Sissy bounce” does not just refer to bounce as practiced by gay men, although gay men are prominent. It refers to any number of gender and sexual identities that can be understood as Black and queer. While Black queer women remain in many ways on the periphery, they are not excluded per se; individuals may elect to perform or participate in any combination of styles that most suits their own sense of gender identity.

Developments in bounce music and shaking styles are concomitant. Both remained largely local phenomena for quite a while, even though they are related to other hip hop music and dance styles found in the U.S. and especially in other parts of the South. As the diaspora created by Hurricane Katrina, utilization of digital means of music and video dissemination, and generally more national attention to these hyperlocal expressions increased, both bounce music and dance have been interpolated in various ways into broader American hip hop and pop cultures during the 2010s and early 2020s. It is necessary to consider first the specific local contexts of shaking before considering how it has manifested outside of New Orleans.

Perhaps one of the most important relationships mediated through bounce is that between the MC/rapper and the dancers because MCs are responsible for facilitating dancing, which in turn raises the level of energy in performance between both parties. Indeed, bounce rappers’ performances are geared towards dancers, or convincing audience members to dance. Dance is such an important aspect that most rappers hire dancers to tour and perform on stage with them, while engaging audience members in dance as well; like the second lines of New Orleans, audience members are expected to participate in bounce performances not necessarily by singing along, but by moving their bodies to that beat. Dancing is therefore the main medium through which audiences participate in the call and response aspect of bounce. As the most visible aspect of the genre, bounce dance has also made appearances in national popular culture and in this way helped some bounce artists gain footholds in national markets.

The earliest bounce hits, such as those by DJ Jubilee, were all about inventing new dance moves and commanding the audience to perform them. Some of the king of bounce’s most recognized callouts include “do the dirty bird,” “shake it like a sissy,” “wobble it,” “walk it like a dog,” and, as the title of one of his most well-known hits indicates, “Do the Jubilee All.”²⁰ One way this tradition continues today is in the form of the roll call. The roll call is a call and response technique wherein the rapper focuses on one particular dancer, either one he or she knows or someone he or she has singled out in the crowd and calls for them to dance. Rapper Keno (formerly Fly Boi Keno) defines roll calling as “commanding” the dancers: “You say a certain word and that’s what they do. It’s like you’re giving directions, and that’s why I like it so much. It’s like a call and response; Imma say this and you gonna do this.”²¹ Ha Sizzle claims to have originated the trend of roll calling, but his style is only one of the most recent manifestations of rapper/dancer interaction. He explains his technique as follows:

Roll calling therefore involves taking a dancer’s name and transforming it into a chant that propels the dancer into action. It can include suggestions for dance moves (“back it up,” “twerk something”), sound effects and vocalizations (“brrrr!”), and encouragement (“Get moving”). And while Sizzle is insistent that he developed this particular style of rapper and dancer call and response, he argues that the style is now out there for anyone to develop as they want:

In the example above, Ha Sizzle offers the known name of a dancer; however, he can and does use his roll call style on audience members whose names he does not know. He explains a few techniques he uses for engaging unknown audience members at his live shows:

Ha Sizzle demonstrates that engaging audiences in dancing is one of the main goals for bounce rappers, and they develop and employ their own original techniques to do so. The dancers in turn respond to the rappers by performing as they are asked, often on stage during live shows. It is common for bounce rappers to not only have their own dancers on stage during performances, but also to call up members of the audience to get on stage so their dance moves can be in the spotlight along with the rapper.

This practice of calling dances reflects practices dating back to the antebellum period when traditional West African dance practices were adapted by enslaved African and African-descended people in North America. Hazzard-Gordon describes the practices, gestures, and aesthetics of the enslaved that reflected their African past:

Hazzard-Gordon gives examples of dances that used gestures drawn from everyday actions, including those associated with work (“pitchin’ hay,” “corn shuckin’,” etc.). The earliest bounce dances similarly referenced gestures from everyday movements. Shaking continues to value the isolation of movement of specific body parts, especially the shoulders, feet, or buttocks, while maintaining control and stillness over the rest of the body.

There are many different variations of bounce dance, or shaking, movements with varying degrees of difficulty. Ha Sizzle believes that contemporary bounce has five elements: hustle, wobble, wiggle, swiggle, and acrobats. He explains:

All these shaking techniques involve lower and/or upper body movements that focus on the shoulders and/or buttocks. And while rappers often perform and travel with their own dancers, as the roll call approach demonstrates, everyone in attendance is encouraged and expected to dance, regardless of their level of ability.

In shaking, as in other forms of dance, there are gestures that are gendered in particular ways: shoulder and footwork are associated with men (boy style) while twerking and other forms of butt shaking are closely associated with women (girl style). However, the lines between dance styles are extremely malleable, and many dancers move freely between styles. “Sissy style” combines twerking with shoulder and/or footwork, allowing especially gay men to engage in gestures that are typically reserved for women. In this way, dancers embody the fluidity of expressions that are made possible in twenty-first-century bounce more so than in many other hip hop genres. Openly queer and trans bounce artists (including dancers) open up additional possibilities for gender expression beyond the binary.

The fluidity that is often expressed between styles embodies the kind of gender and sexual fluidity that is expressed in bounce music. DJ Rusty Lazer explains:

As Rusty Lazer notes, it is typically the queer men who adopt a combination of so-called girl and boy styles, making them among the most visible and sought-after dancers. By using the term “liberated,” Lazer suggests that there are more accepted ways for men to express themselves through bounce dance styles than there are for people of other genders. Bounce provides a space for diverse gender expression but offers more possibilities for people who were assigned male at birth than it does for others, thus keeping gay men in a relatively privileged position.

Shaking in bounce is an example of both a racialized and gendered performance and a performative act in which gender and racial identity are co-constructed. Judith Butler famously posited that gender is constructed through a series of performative or discursive acts, many of which are subconscious, and is not contingent upon biological facts.²⁷ But as Black critical theorists such as E. Patrick Johnson have argued, Butler’s formation strips the gendered subject of agency in constructing their own identity, especially as it relates to a politics of resistance in a Black queer context. Drawing on the work of queer scholars of color, such as the late José Esteban Muñoz, Johnson proposes situating Butler’s formulation of performativity in conversation with performance theories in order to highlight both the material realities of marginalized groups as well as how members of those groups use discourses to disrupt and undermine hegemonic power structures through performance.²⁸ In the context of bounce, this approach allows us to recognize that while shaking consists of performative acts in which gender is constructed and conveyed, the Black queer practitioners who blend gendered styles to reflect their own queer identities are both participating in and actively disrupting those gender discourses. These is an example of what Muñoz calls “disidentification,” which is

The queer men who have created a hybrid bounce dance style reconstruct the encoded messages of multiple contextually dominant groups: the dominant white culture of the United States and the largely heterosexual Black culture of previous bounce iterations. Their recombinations of dance movements previously gendered as “boy style” and “girl style” work both within and against bounce’s gender discourses.

So-called sissy style bounce dance is also a form of what Clare Croft calls “queer dance,” “the pleasures and difficulties of moving between multiple, layered identities.”³⁰ She adds: “No single entity marks something as queer dance, but rather it is how these textures press on the world and against one another that opens the possibility for a dance to be queer.”³¹ It is important to recognize this style of shaking as distinctly queer, while at the same time situating it as not apart from, but rather vary much integrated within bounce culture at large. Croft writes:

The spaces in which one might participate in bounce, either as a listener, dancer, or performer (or some combination of these) includes nightclubs like Vibe, but also block parties, family gatherings, any kind of social gathering, queer or otherwise. The development of sissy style does not necessarily stem from a need to assert queerness in opposition to homophobia or transphobia in these spaces, even though it may push back against those oppressions. It does function as an assertion of identity in a way that, as Croft notes, insists on other possibilities outside a male/female, or masculine/feminine divide. These possibilities are beneficial not only to LGBTQ participants, but also to anyone confined by strict social boundaries around gender and sexuality.

Sissy style bounce, like other Black queer forms of dance such as voguing and J-setting, is an adaptation of pre-existing styles combined with innovations to convey new racialized and gendered meanings. The distinct categories for voguing in Ballroom competitions, such as vogue femme, are determined by participants’ gender identity and the style of performance, either masculine, feminine, or moving between the two. As Darrius Stephens, co-captain of the dance group Dance Champz of Atlanta, notes, one of the key elements of J-setting is “being able to go in and out of femininity and masculinity” in a single performance.³³ Bounce is distinct from these other dance genres because it focuses on frenetic movements in place for short periods of time with breaks between, rather than smoother, often mobile performances (marching in J-setting or walking the runway in Ballroom), and the gestures of bounce developed in relation to the African and Afro-Caribbean influences specific to New Orleans. Sissy style, however, shares with these other genres a reconfiguring of gendered gestures to convey Black queer gender performances across a spectrum of femininity and masculinity.

While in many hip hop communities we might expect there to be some pushback against the high visibility of queer men dancing at shows rather than exclusively in LGBTQ social spaces, in bounce this is not the case. Rusty Lazer chalks this phenomenon up to the live-and-let-live mentality of life in New Orleans:

Lazer’s statements on bounce dance are echoed in comments made about bounce music by New Orleans producer and rapper Mannie Fresh, who also stated in 2013 that there were a lot of gay artists in bounce but “it don’t bother nobody in the city because it’s just a flavorful city. We just embrace everything, we not trippin’.”³⁵ As I’ve written elsewhere, many have attributed the presence and influence of queer artists as unique to New Orleans. This does not negate the presence of homophobia in the city and its music scenes, but it does point to an environment that has been unusually accepting of queer communities, which is aligned with New Orleans’ history as a haven for queer expressions, particularly in the American South.

In addition to expressing and constructing gendered, racialized, and sexual identities, shaking is used as a tool for mitigating and working through post-Katrina trauma. As I have written elsewhere, queer and trans bounce rappers were among the first to return to New Orleans following Katrina to begin performing live shows, and they also performed bounce for audiences composed of a diaspora of people from New Orleans who had been displaced by the storm.³⁶ Artists such as Ha Sizzle, Big Freedia, and others, aided by newly available digital means of dissemination (including YouTube, which launched in 2005), brought the sound of bounce to those in cities, such as Houston, Baton Rouge, Dallas, and more. But it was also artists such as Sissy Nobby, who claims to be the first to have performed a live show in New Orleans after Katrina, who performed locally as venues first started to open back up, providing a soundtrack for recovery.³⁷

In New Orleans, there is a long tradition of turning tragedy into a celebration for those who continue living, especially in the practice of funeral second lines. Anthropologist Helen A. Regis explains the multiple meanings of “second line”:

As both Regis and Joel Dinerstein similarly note, the key element here is participation; in a second line, “everyone is supposed to dance or, at the very least, roll wid it: as a phrase, this refers both to the physiological movement—a sort of half-crouched, bent-over, rolling dance-walk—and the philosophical import of maintaining one’s spiritual balance in the face of social and economic pressures.”³⁹ Matt Sakakeeny also describes “A successful second line parade [as] an act of reciprocity: in a circular dialogue, musicians respond to audiences responding to their music.”⁴⁰ Second lines, then, provide opportunities for enacting kinetic community responses to grief, especially in the context of jazz funerals. They offer a much-needed respite in a world full of racial and class disparities. In post-Katrina New Orleans, shaking took on a similar role.

In his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk highlights how physical movement can and should play a role in trauma care.⁴¹ He describes how both rhythm and a sense of communal practice can help patients healing from trauma feel confident and empowered. He writes:

Kolk focuses here on the therapeutic role of community theater, but the same could be said for engagement in social dance. Shaking provides both the sense of community, especially the participation in call and response, and the active physical movements that draw one into sensations of the body. Kolk also draws attention to how communal rhythm and dance can have a similar therapeutic effect, noting that “collective movement and music create a larger context for our lives, a meaning beyond our individual fate.”⁴³ Shaking, with its emphasis on rhythm and repetition, as well as individual expression within a communal practice, is beneficial in this regard because it grounds the individual in movement, in their body, within the context of community practice.

Shaking styles also require that individual dancers, when engaged in the most flamboyant gestures, insist on taking up space. As my opening vignette illustrates, dance spaces can be dedicated (dance floors or stages) or improvised (barstools, living rooms, etc.), but participants lay claim to the space by literally grabbing on and bending over. Cornel West writes about the “bodily stylizations” that “assert one’s somebodiness in a society in which one’s body has no [perceptible] public worth.”⁴⁴ Gaunt adds:

Shaking, a style of dance that shares some relationship to gestures taken from the second line traditions but that resists the respectability politics that would police which parts of the body can and should be highlighted and celebrated, does this work in New Orleans, especially in a post-Katrina context. It highlights the ways that Kessel’s arguments about the role of gesture, rhythm, and communal practice in healing from trauma overlap with Gaunt’s historical situating of kinetic orality as Black practice. Shaking, which predates the storm and draws on West African dance gestures, has always been used to assert a “somebodiness” for Black New Orleanians since its inception, but was redeployed after Hurricane Katrina as a trauma response. As bounce music was shared both within the city and its diasporic communities, shaking was not the only form of movement that worked to mitigate post-Katrina trauma, but it was a significant one both within and outside of the city.

As dance scholar Paul Scolieri notes, “Dance performs multiple and complex roles in refugee communities worldwide—as a form of cultural currency, survival strategy, movement therapy, political activism, and social service.”⁴⁶ For fans, both in the city and in the New Orleans diaspora, bounce music and shaking played an important role in the process of rebuilding and retaining cultural traditions. While some might read twerking and other styles of shaking as explicitly sexual, inside New Orleans shaking can be an expression of athleticism, intimacy, resistance, and so much more. Like the tradition of the second line, shaking is a way of transforming grief into joy, suffering into escape, and oppression into celebration. Ha Sizzle told me:

Ha Sizzle continued to explain the positive energy of bounce, noting that, “It helps you, it helps you take off a lot of negativity…it can take you from bad, upset to, that right song come on and you just start bouncing on and say, you know what? This is my song. I’m ‘bout to dance.”⁴⁸ Bounce music is the necessary catalyst for the transformations that shaking enables, whether it is through the infectious beat alone or the combination of tempo and satirical lyrics, such as those found in 5^th Ward Weebie’s post-Katrina hit, “Fuck Katrina.” As in the second lines, everyone, regardless of their level of experience, is expected to participate, thus engaging in this kinetic community experience of catharsis and healing.

The role bounce played in helping participants process grief grew out of older New Orleans traditions, specifically that of the second lines. It was because bounce is music for dancing, and because of the intimate and highly physical styles of dance so closely associated with the music, that bounce performances became cathartic moments of release and trauma recovery for those affected by Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the storm. Yet, it is also this close relationship between music and dance that has helped bring bounce into national focus.

Following the disasters and displacements of Hurricane Katrina, bounce rappers, especially LGBTQ artists who had formed both personal and professional networks by way of shared queer and trans identities, were among the first to return and begin performing live music for a city that desperately needed it. Filling a vacuum left by the many musicians who sought refuge in other cities, LGBTQ bounce artists such as Sissy Nobby and Katey Red gained increased opportunities and popularity. Musicians who had been displaced to other cities found similarly displaced audiences craving the music of their hometown. Some, such as Ha Sizzle, who had fled to Houston just before the storm, began performing across the American South, both connecting to displaced audiences from New Orleans and building a new network of bounce fans. The video sharing platform YouTube, which had launched in the same year as Katrina, also helped bounce artists, including LGBTQ artists, share their music beyond the genre’s native city.

Despite the heightened national profile of bounce artists, in the 2010s many audiences outside of New Orleans became increasingly familiar with bounce culture not necessarily through its distinct musical style, but through its associated dances. Most notably, in August 2013, Miley Cyrus employed one bounce dance move, twerking, at her strangely staged MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) medley performance of her single, “We Can’t Stop.” The performance transitioned into Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and featured the singer emerging from a giant stuffed teddy bear and, at one point, bending over and twerking against Thicke’s crotch. Her performance brought the dance into the homes of an estimated 10.1 million viewers and sparked a nationwide conversation regarding the explicitly sexual nature of her dance moves, as well as the dance’s origins.⁴⁹ For better or worse, Miley Cyrus made “twerk” part of the larger American pop culture lexicon.

While Cyrus’s performance generated controversy in the media, aside from a few subtle (and even fewer overt) mentions of Cyrus’s seemingly novice skills (or lack thereof), many New Orleans bounce rappers were glad that Cyrus had brought national attention to their local culture. There was a sense her stage antics had provided them with opportunities to explain to others outside their communities what twerking is really all about. When asked by New Orleans bounce historian Holly Hobbs what she thought about Miley Cyrus, Cheeky Blakk, the rapper who first used the term “twerk” in her 1994 song “Twerk Something,” stated this:

In an article for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, music writer Fensterstock noted that Blakk did not see Cyrus’s VMA performance as racist. She writes:

On the one hand, Cheeky Blakk’s easy-goingness regarding Cyrus’s twerking reflects a larger trend in bounce where artists add their own twist to concepts presented by other artists before them. Like Ha Sizzle’s view on other bounce rappers adapting his roll call technique to their own performance styles, some artists feel that having their concepts borrowed and adapted is a sign of their own skill, that they created something worthy of becoming a trend among others. On the other hand, however, she also subtly undermines the performance by joking that it may be an immature way of “acting out,” and by noting that interest in Cyrus’s twerking will ultimately lead back to her because she was the move’s creator.

Big Freedia also benefited from Cyrus’s performance, even if she was critical of it. In an interview for Bust magazine, she noted of the VMA performance:

For Freedia, it was not just Cyrus’s appropriation of a Black dance style that troubled her, but the fact that she did not perform the dance well. She continued:

Whatever her criticisms of Cyrus’s use of the New Orleans dance style, Freedia capitalized on the singer’s controversial performance and the new popularity of twerking. She released a bounce song response called “Twerk It,” appeared in multiple tutorial videos and television shows demonstrating proper twerk technique (including appearances on “The Real” and “White Guy Talk Show”), released her own Twerk App (users downloaded the app and recorded video of themselves twerking and superimposed it on scenes of Freedia and her dancers twerking, which they could then share on social media), and even staged an event in which she broke the Guinness World Record for most people twerking simultaneously, with three-hundred fifty-eight people twerking together for two minutes.⁵⁴ Her efforts as twerk teacher and ambassador supported her tongue-in-cheek offers to Cyrus to help improve her own skills. They also served as advertisements and support for her reality television show.

As Gaunt notes, there is more to twerking than “just shaking your hips indiscriminately:”

While Cyrus’s performance did highlight the perceived sexual nature of twerking, in its original bounce context, twerking is not inherently sexual, just like any other popular social dance. Big Freedia’s interventions helped to shift perceptions of twerking outside of New Orleans to those more aligned with local conceptions of the dance style. She both mitigated the assumed hypersexuality that had been attached to the style outside its native city and brought her own Black queer, nonbinary approaches to a broader American public.

The generally positive reaction to the increased popularity of bounce outside of New Orleans, despite its roots in Cyrus’s performances, is also indicative of bounce artists’ belief that their style of music is for everyone, and if audiences are respectfully engaging, they should feel free to embrace the local dance styles. It is important to note that it is primarily queer and trans bounce artists who have been ambassadors for both bounce music and dance outside of New Orleans, but they have encouraged participation from a large swath of audiences, queer or not. Twerking lessons are available at New Orleans dance studios, and when I attended live shows, I was often asked if I was there to shake. One can choose a style based on one’s own gender identification or dance preferences, but it is expected that if you listen to bounce, you also shake.⁵⁶

Bounce and its related dance styles are illustrative of the ways music and dance continue to be interrelated in hip hop. Considering these two elements concurrently allows us to consider how physical gesture and sound both can be used in marginalized communities to articulate specific racial, gendered, and sexual subjectivities. Dance’s physical movements are also foundational modes of mitigating trauma for marginalized communities. Centering the music-dance relationship in bounce also helps us tease out ethical and cultural concerns related to appropriation of these local expressions in the national mainstream. Furthermore, approaching bounce music and dance as intertwined helps us to better understand the queer expressions found in this subgenre not just through abstract sound but also as embodied Black queer practice. As a site where race, gender, and sexuality are co-constructed and performed, bounce dance developed in tandem with music by queer artists to better express specific Black queer genders, especially those of and related to the sissy. Even though it was developed and is practiced primarily by Black queer men, “sissy style” actively disrupts binaries of male/female, hetero/homosexual, cis/transgender, etc. “Sissy style” is an embodied, physical, and visual expression of queer identities in hip hop that belongs not to individual star performers but to collective participants.

A few days after my visit to Club Vibe, queer and trans communities across the country were shocked by a massacre at another LGBTQ club, Pulse Night Club in Orlando. Like Vibe, the clientele at Pulse was composed of largely queer and trans people of color, and like the shakers I had observed a few nights before, many had gone out that night to dance. As the tragedy demonstrated, however, for queer and trans folks it is never as simple as going out to dance—dancing is an act of becoming, and act of recovering, and an act of resistance. As scholars and practitioners continue to explore the relationships between music and dance, especially within marginalized communities, this framework must drive our research. We must unfortunately consider the role of trauma in the music and dance practices of LGBTQ communities, including LGBTQ communities of color. But we should also center their resilience: They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re going to twerk.