Hip Hop Subculture

Hip-hop music has been a part of my musical repertoire from early adolescence, and more recently, an art form I have been interested in exploring from a more critical and academic perspective. I’ve wanted to extend my knowledge beyond hip-hop as a pastime and into hip-hop as a social tool with the power to create, reproduce, and challenge dominant social life. This consideration facilitated my research question: “How is homosexuality represented in hip-hop music and communities?” Due to hip-hop's entrenched roots of heteronormativity and rigid gender identities, homosexual representations in hip-hop are generally negative, derogatory and exploitive in nature. However, as mainstream society and media continues to embrace homosexuality as a
Hegemony refers to the process whereby dominant ideologies and cultures are transmitted through the use of culture and media to reproduce and gain the un-coerced support of those who consume it (Lull, 1995). Those who are most effected by hegemonic communications are typically the lower classes, as they are not in privileged positions to reproduce or challenge dominant cultural ideologies (Davidson, 2015a). The music industry is a mass media tool that creates, reproduces and authenticates hegemonic ideas about class, race, gender, sexuality and citizenship to various subcultures (Chiu,
Sexuality and gender are understood in hip-hop through the perspective of the heterosexual male and phallus, thereby women are passive vehicles for male pleasure as well as symbols of the anti-masculine (Davidson, 2015d). Hegemonic masculinity in hip hop is understood as practices that embody and justify the central position of patriarchal society, including any practices that continue to exclude women and any femininity from asserting power and control (Chiu, 2005; De Riddler & Dhaenens, 2014). Hip-hop hyper-males perform their gender by exerting control and agency over their heteronormative life, which includes the continuous reinforcements of ideals essential to maintaining their patriarchal power and dominance over women and alternative sexualities. Homosexuality, as a result, exists in opposition to acceptable norms and beliefs, thereby marking it as an indicator of deviance and divergence to the dominant discourse.
Negative Representations of Homosexuality in Hip-Hop Hill (2009) argues that while most of popular music is heteronormative in how it unquestionably reinforces heterosexuality, the explicit homophobic discourse is overrepresented within the hip-hop genre. The following section will outline several methods of which negative representations of homosexuality are communicated in hip-hop.
Lyrical