Hip Hop headz in sex ed: Gender, agency, and styling in New Zealand

Abstract

This study examines Hip Hop styling, gender, and sexual agency in a sex education class. The focus is on the indirect indexing of gender by a female-bodied student through the Hip Hop cultural personas of braggadocio and swagger, providing a rare look at 'mundane' performances of Hip Hop and its relationship to gender. Discourse analysis demonstrates that she used Hip Hop styling to manage ascriptions of sexual agency during a discussion task as she repeatedly recontextualized the telling of a classroom incident. Her language use afforded the trying out of identity meanings and required complex discursive work in relation to constructs such as masculinity, femininity, straight, and lesbian. These processes assisted her to negotiate how sexual agency might fit with her various identifications and identities. Therefore the potential for Hip Hop styling to connect identities with language has implications for both sexuality education and the study of sociolinguistics. (Agency, gender, Hip Hop, performativity, sexuality, social identities, styling)∗