Dancing the Mask (Part 2)

I’m not interested in being ‘the cool teacher’ but I am insistent upon trying to understand the lives of my students which lends to keeping up-to-date on urban youth culture and what is happening in the wider community outside the classroom. It happened with the tragic when Kimani Gray got shot in 2013, it mattered that my male students- as brilliant as they are -were getting stopped and frisked by police on the street, it was necessary to (try to) understand young American women’s impassioned fascination with Beyonce and now in the recent weeks, young southern innovation has given us a dance called the “Nae Nae”.

When I saw the dance for the first time, I immediately thought it was a distanced evolution of ‘voguing’ which uses house music and emerged from the gay black and latino community many many years ago. The Nae Nae involves a certain bend at the wrist that causes the hands to curve outward, and one’s arms are stretched away from the body. This allows the dancer to take up/occupy a large circular space. The knees are bent and one rocks from left to right with a four-count freestyle move, then the main Nae Nae rock. (see video)

Finding these upturned hand-movements (that we can well consider to be effeminate) in a southern hip hop dance, is an interesting gender transgression for me, considering the prevailing attitudes towards the LGBT community within black urban culture. Additionally, the dance was being done mainly by young African American males and appeared to center on a certain mimicking of the female form with the chest-led swing and a posterior pop resulting from the knee-bend.

In hip hop, bell hooks talks about black men being subject to patriarchal objectification through the white male gaze thus leading to their feminization. Her argument is that in order to resist this domination, black men have resorted to hypermasculinity, 1 an image/idea that has no shortage of expression within hip hop culture. The Nae Nae reads as an alternate expression of black masculinity, one that moves away from the hard and fast, sharp movements of break-dancing and introduces something less rigid, more playful and gives a stylized performance of gender and gender-bending. This is refreshing to me on some levels because we are finally deciding that we having nothing to prove to the world and whatever gazes are being enforced, so that this then becomes the new resistance.

In my own experience, I have too often played the ‘male role’ at my church’s dance classes whether it was ballroom, latin or contemporary, and these instances never made me more masculine than I was, but it instead gave me an appreciation for what my dancing partner was doing and kind of empathetic understanding. Knowing both ends allowed me to communicate better with my partner which builds trust, co-operation and ultimately community.

Christmas Dinner: Photographed by Nicholas Nichols, © 2012.

Imani Perry notes that “African American performance has been a site for the imagination of future possibilities… the political, imaginary, and historical reckoning” 2. The Nae Nae makes me question the possibility of realizing sameness and equity within the black community. What if just like these high school kids, we’d put our differences aside, enjoy each other’s company and engage one another. Dance can be a political instrument of unity, and change. What would happen if we lived beyond the stereotype and danced (as the cliche goes) like nobody (or no system of bodies) was watching? Dancing out of the entrapment.

1. hooks, bell. "Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic." Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Comp. Thelma Golden. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994. 127. Print.

2. Perry, Imani. "B-Boys, Players, and Preachers: Reading Masculinity." Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 122. Print.