On blacks and gays and gals in New Orleans

As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing. Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity inversion. There’s just something in the culture that’s a lot more lax about gender identity and fanciness. I don’t want to say that the black community in New Orleans is much more accepting of the average, run-of-the-mill gay Joe. But they’re definitely much more accepting of gay people who get up and perform their gayness on a stage.

And:

When Freedia or Nobby’s singing superaggressive, sexual lyrics about bad boyfriends or whatever, there’s something about being able to be the ‘I’ in the sentence. That’s not to say that women can’t like the more misogynistic music too. I like it — some of it’s good music. But it’s tough to sing along about bitches and hos when you’re a girl. When you identify with Freedia, you’re the agent of all this aggressive sexuality instead of its object.

So says writer Alison Fensterstock in New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap in the New York Times Magazine. The piece is about New Orleans bounce, and its variant known as “sissy bounce,” a term that Fensterstock reluctantly takes credit for coining.

So we have queer men as a vehicle for heterosexual women to express aggressive sexuality in the way heterosexual male rappers do. And we have queer men being unabashedly queer for predominantly heterosexual audiences. What does that say, if anything, about the gender politics of bounce and (cisgendered) women?

(Read through to the end for a hypothesis.)