The Transition Of Desi Hip-Hop: Rap Concerts With Genderqueer Resistance

If you know one thing about rap music, it is the street origins of the genre. Images of revolutionary rhymes emerging from urban underbellies, with assertive, red-blooded men battling it out to the beats, come to mind. So what do you get when you introduce the Queer Eye to a stage reserved for the sigma male? Performing gender on the hip-hop stage Now let a girl speak 2 hazar nakhun every week How can she afford? Kari mai hustle, batti pe me mange na bhik — Kinari, Feminine Plural While a certain liberal, urban demographic is slowly warming up to the existence of the LG&B, everything that starts and follows the T is still seen as elusively absurd and embarrassingly shameful. A major reason for this confusion, and consequent queerphobia, is the dominance of the idea that gender is a naturally constructed category. A man is a man because of the protrusion, and a woman is a woman because of the hole. Mai thoda sa aisa glamorous kapde pehnti Toh tum kya kya bolte ho — Kinari, Charpai But if we move beyond this somewhat amusing obsession with the phallus and start to genuinely engage with the absurd, we find...