Double Entendre Got Bodied: Subversive Ambivalence and Latinx Young Men Rappin Under the White Gaze

• In Event: The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Hip-Hop Pedagogy From the United States to South Africa

Abstract

In this paper I explore how a small group of Latinx young men made use of creative space within a Hip Hop after-school program. I examine how they crafted epistemologies and personas that were in tension with what many of their teachers constructed as safe, successful, and scholarly ways of being and knowing (e.g. seeing complexity and value in the choices of their gang-affiliated peers, etc.). They also confessed how peers and adults in their neighborhoods who participated in local alternative and illicit economies (e.g. drug dealing, working in food service, etc.) had anxieties about their participation in schooling and desires for formal higher education. While both their teachers and peers/adults in their neighborhoods pushed for the young men to either choose “school” or “the streets”, the young men managed to maintain a strategic illegibility that granted them access to resources, safety, and social prestige. They simultaneously escaped the danger of being written off as “gangsters” by teachers, as much as they avoided being marked as “nerds” and “sell-outs” by peers/adults in their neighborhoods. Much of this illegibility was worked out in their rapping, where they took advantage of the Hip Hop aesthetics of realness, freshness and creative vulnerability to performatively theorize this subversive lack of clarity in self (Chang, 2006).

In this way, I argue the young Latinx men became the embodiment of double entendre (Foreman & Neal, 2004; Perry, 2004). Just as they composed raps that made use of word play with double or more meanings, they constructed personhoods that quite literally embodied double or more meanings. They performed a calculated, subversive ambivalence that allowed them to survive the multifaceted expectations of the hood, and the school. Their bodies became wordplay. They were in a constant state of embodied ambivalence, strategically performing, rapping, and narrativizing personas that allowed them to synchronously survive the classroom and the hood, subverting the “White gaze” and the gaze of the streets (Alim & Paris, 2017; Anderson, 1999; Morrison, 1998). Ultimately, I explore how these young men became the embodiment of triple entendre. That is, they also made use of subversive ambivalence to simultaneously give themselves the time and space to covertly theorize and (re)imagine freedom. They gave themselves the opportunity to innovate personas and personhoods loyal to their own epistemological constructions of self, with the hope of expanding and building new worlds of possibility. In this paper I will also explore how their precarious efforts often came dangerously close to failure. In the context of living as young men of color within a highly surveilled working-class community, their agentive performances and declarations of self could not escape White heteropatriachal violence and containment.

The data for this paper comes from over 500 hours of applied ethnographic research at a Bay Area high school. Research included semi-structured interviews, participant observation in the classroom of a restorative justice teacher, and participatory action research. As a part of my participatory action research, I began three different after-school programs based in hip hop, boxing, and critical feminisms.

Author

• Casey Philip Wong, Stanford University