Overview

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent mass displacement of black neighborhoods in New Orleans, black queer performers redefined notions of belonging throughout the city. These unlikely figures, such as artists Big Freedia and Vockah Redu, played a significant role in calling the displaced back home and serving as beacons of hope. In Raising the Bottom, Alix Chapman engages in performance ethnography, taking to the stage while writing about the lives of these bounce artists and their extended community. He theorizes an epistemology of the bottom—a way of knowing, praxis, and aesthetic—which contests hierarchies of value that place black and queer bodies at the lowest rungs of the social ladder. By engaging in this bottom episteme, bounce performers leverage pleasure and coalition to transform collectives not meant to survive crisis and disaster. Raising the Bottom shows how black queer artists address, remix, and redirect stereotypes to amplify community power, pleasure, and solidarity.

Full Product Details

9781478033707

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Reviews

""Raising the Bottom is a groundbreaking treatise on the sexual politics of Black cultural expression in New Orleans. Alix Chapman transports us to nightclub stages and block parties where self-described 'sissies' make life and face death through bounce music. Through their pleasure and pain, love and loss, we see the perils and possibilities of Black queer life from the bottom up.""--Matt Sakakeeny, author of, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans

Author Information

Alix Chapman is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.

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