So now twerking is cultural appropriation?

TWERK

TWERK (Photo credit: mikeywally)

In the wake of Miley Cyrus’ apparently disastrous performance on MTV’s 2013 Video Music Awards show, I’ve been seeing a lot of conversations (or more often, declarations) about twerking as a form of cultural appropriation. Twerking, according to what I’m reading, is intimately bound to black culture and when white women integrate it into their own dance performances, they are essentially stealing black culture — appropriating to themselves the street cred of more authentic dancers and musicians while avoiding, due to their racial privilege, the more negative sexual and cultural disempowerments that come with being a woman of color.

OK, that’s not entirely a horrible argument. It’s true that, for the most part, black women are judged more harshly for outward displays of sexuality, which reinforce racist stereotypes about black people being innately animalistic, uncivilized, unintelligent, and deserving of their lower social status. White women can often imitate tropes of black sexuality and “shake off” the essentializing that comes with them, presenting their sexualized performances as “just for fun”. The appropriation of black sexuality as a liberating force for white womanhood has a long history — we can see it at work, for instance, in Sophie Tucker’s early-career (c. 1910) blackface performances, in which she sang bawdy songs full of double entendre (and often single entendre) as an ersatz black woman, then shed off the implications of blackness by reclaiming her whiteness, peeling off a glove at the end of her act to reveal the light skin beneath.

Cultural appropriation can do real damage to communities. Blackface perpetuated and exaggerated black stereotypes and arguably contributed to the longevity of Jim Crow segregation (itself named after a popular blackface character). Representations by white women of hyper-sexualized black, Native American, Southeast Asian, and other minority women in our “she was asking for it” rape culture contribute to the high levels of sexualized violence faced by women of color, and the ease with which that violence is dismissed by law enforcement and by the wider mainstream population. (Remember the Duke case a few years ago? Within hours of the accusations filed by a black stripper against members of the Duke Lacrosse team, articles were appearing all over the media blaming her for leading the alleged perpetrators into rape — long before any evidence about the case was made public.) White popularization of black music styles in the mid-20th century left many of our greatest musical innovators penniless while their imitators went on to fame and fortune. The use of American Indian caricatures as sports team mascots continues to make it difficult for Native Americans to be taken seriously on issues ranging from the misallocation of tribal resources and theft of tribal lands to crushing unemployment rates and skyrocketing health issues.

And so on. But while there are some pretty obvious acts of cultural appropriation out there (a white actor playing a Native American character in a movie, for instance), rejecting out of hand any imitation of one culture by another — even in the power-laden social context of modern racism — is a dangerous, dangerous trap. To insist that these acts, behaviors, beliefs, and whatnot belong to group A and those acts, behaviors, beliefs and whatnot belong to group B and only members of Group A can do things in set A and only members of group B can do things in set B is a recipe for essentialism, racial antagonism, and cultural stagnation.

The goal of social justice politics simply cannot be to build walls around cultures and ethnicities that cannot be crossed. Hell, that was the core tactic of racist politics for the last 400 years — separating and setting against each other poor and working class whites on one side, blacks on the other, and various other groups that might be present on yet another. Reiterating the politics of racism in the name of social justice cannot be reasonable, right?

So back to twerking. The origins of twerking are a little hazy, but we do know it started appearing in recorded music in the mid-90s in the New Orleans and Miami bounce and hiphop scenes, largely in lyrics by black men. (Interestingly, the word “twerk” as a form of dance only starts appearing in print in the early 2000s, though it was quite common in work on nuclear physics and Indo-European etymology in the early ‘70s [Google Ngram Viewer].) What’s pretty clear is that twerking emerged as a dance move in nightclubs and as a word in dance hall music.

But by the mid- and late-1990s, hiphop and related styles had long since entered the mainstream of American music — actually, of world music. Both the dance and music of once-black venues were entirely mainstream. Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé, 2 Live Crew, and other musicians recorded and released songs about twerking (or twirking, in Destiny’s Child’s case) not as part of secret underground racial resistance movements but for promotion on MTV and sale at Sam Goody. Twerking was, nearly from its inception, part of the public sphere, a public sphere shared by black and white and other clubgoers and music consumers alike.

I’d argue that twerking — along with contemporary hiphop and other once-racially-identified forms of music, dance, and art — is in the public domain, part of the pool of culture that none of us have a choice but to draw from. But that doesn’t mean the word or the dance move are free for the taking — they have implications, and those implications have consequences. Art is communication, and communication exists in context. Just like one person can use the N-word to signify a shared bond with his or her friends and another can use the same word to signify his or her hatred of those very same people, twerking can signify different things to different people in different contexts. By all accounts, Miley Cyrus’ performance was terrible and laden with racist and sexist signifiers, even leaving out the apparently clumsy attempt at twerking. For many commentators, it came across as a desperate attempt by a child star to gain some degree of adult credibility by imitating the moves and tropes of black hiphop performers — exactly the opposite of the authenticity that seems to have been Cyrus’ goal.

But in the end, that’s on Cyrus and the particular context she created with her performance, not something innate about the act of twerking itself. In and of itself, twerking is a kind of rhythmic twitching of the backside and rough approximation of the movements of intercourse, a function of human anatomy that gains meaning only in the context of its execution. As a way of highlighting a performer’s sexuality, it’s practiced by dancers of many ethnicities in strip clubs, dance halls, and burlesque stages on a nightly basis without much, if any, racial significance. In the end, it’s a fairly trivial thing, a dance move — but it feels like if something this insignificant can’t be shared by people of different backgrounds, then we don’t have much chance at all when it comes to the things that profoundly affect our lives: sexual violence, racialized poverty, environmental racism, educational inequality, and so on.

I don’t usually post related articles from the Web, but I figured it would be good to include a small taste of the commentary generated by Miley Cyrus’ act and how people are talking about twerking and cultural appropriation in relation to it. These articles aren’t necessarily endorsed by me, they just represent the breadth of talk on this matter.

6 comments to So now twerking is cultural appropriation?

  • ASY

    I think that objections to authenticity and essentialism often miss a key component of appropriation–namely, the accumulation of capital implied in the word’s roots in “property.” While some may want not to “share,” as you put it, I think it might be better to consider a certain double standard. Afro-diasporic movements and musics are among those that tend to be classified as “folk”–and since individual authorship often cannot be assigned, these forms become the artistic property of those with stronger ties to literacy and the law. It would be one thing if those who took writing credit or earned performance dollars by that which they appropriated shared both credit and profit with those who inspired them. But, what we have now is a one-way system, in which “folk” creators are expected to share while named performers get exclusive property rights. To cite a canonical example, while Madonna did not have to pay the performers of Harlem’s ball scenes for borrowing “voguing” from them, if someone includes Madonna’s “Vogue” in a film, she and other named authors must be paid.

    While maybe not everyone expresses it so clearly, for most of us, criticizing appropriation is less about maintaining cultural boundaries than it is about stimulating a more equitable redistribution of profits. Those cultural forms designated as “folk” have had too much of “belonging to everyone” and murky cultural origins. New conceptions of authorship exceeding that which is written and exceeding the individual are needed to propel the very sharing you would like to see, but at a material level and not only a cultural one.

  • ASY: I don’t disagree, at all — part of the context of any act has to include the power imbalances in which it occurs. But two things: 1) Today’s published black musicians have the same licensing machine behind them that Madonna has — I don’t think Beyonce is at any greater risk than Madonna (or Miley Cyrus, for that matter), given how today’s labels and licensing regimes work (or lesser, given how freely music is distributed through non-paying channels…). And more importantly: 2) Even given historical and contemporary power inequalities, there simply HAS to be a way to recognize the free and open flow of cultural practice across ethnic and other cultural boundaries. Historically black dance and music styles make up the very fabric of today’s pop cultural universe — there are two generations now that have grown up listening and dancing to hiphop and R&B, and to claim that only one subsection of them gets to follow that musical tradition *is* essentialist and about maintaining cultural boundaries, to the detriment of all sides.

    It is absolutely appropriate to recognize and address histories of inequality, and to recognize and address our own complicities in perpetuating those inequalities. But I think it’s also appropriate to recognize and celebrate the influence and spread of cultural production outside of the purely commercial world of royalties and intellectual property. I don’t think it has to be a matter of one or the other; culture is tricksy that way.

  • […] an opinion on any aspect of twerking. There are two reasons for this: 1: these articles already exist. 2: I’m physically incapable of writing an article eliciting an opinion on this topic. See […]

  • Thomas Genet

    Twerking, hip hop dance moves, pop locking, break dancing, moon walking, et cetera, belong to black culture. There is no instance of such dance styles in Caucasian history. There you will find stiff, group dance forms like the waltz, the polka, and square dancing. Twerking is directly derivative of tribal dance forms and movements. Pop locking, “The Robot”, break dancing, et cetera, are related to dance forms that originated in black Cali communities in the 1960s. White people have a long standing problem with cultural appropriation. Go to Great Britain to see all of the great antiquities of Africa. Review the achievements of cultural icons like Elvis Presley and the Beatles and follow their roots back to black American rhythm and blues. You are so off base with this silly article which is based upon a silly premise that black culture is in the public domain and therefore easy pickings and up for grabs by anyone who wants to claim it as their own. I call bullshit on that notion and thief! You would think that whites would get tired of stealing from other races of people and start to focus their efforts on making something of their own cultural roots. However, this behavior shows no sign of letting up and, in fact, it seems to be getting more brazen. White people steal. That’s what you’re good at. It appears to be the only thing.

  • WJJ

    Dustin, twerking is cultural appropriation and thievery. I read a cosmo article recently that credited “the spread of twerking,” with a white woman. Really, twerking started in Africa and it was already spread by the middle passage. That is why you can find some variation of booty dancing in the Caribbean, Brazil, Latin America and pretty much anywhere that enslaved Africans were taken. Black women have been booty dancing for generations and it was seen as ghetto, trashy and slutty until a white woman with a very flat behind showed up and appropriated it. Now, white women are being paid to appropriate and mimic what Black women have been doing.

    It is racist to call something ghetto and low class on Black women and laud and praise it on white women. It’s the same thing with full lips, braids and full behinds. Why were Black women mocked and derided for naturally having these features, but when a white celebrity has them their sexy and worthy of respect and adoration. Kim K, Kylie Jenner, Angelina Jolie all get the benefit of the doubt for having features that are in abundance within the Black female population.

    there was a psychology today article years ago that said that black women were objectively ugly, yet when white/light women appropriate our features or aspects of our culture, they are lauded as beautiful. Same way the media loves doing specials and “studies” about how unwanted black women (see video below) and promoting black male celebrities with white/light wives like Kanye and kim. It’s all designed from a white supremacist mindset. the idea being that white women and white men are superior. white women naturally are assumed to be superior and more beautiful, according to white supremacy, so when a black woman does something that makes black women look attractive, it gets appropriated.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjSh_esW9W4

    It is about more than just twerking, it is white supremacy.

    https://books.google.com/books?id=6y5SKe325PUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=black+women+beauty+and+politics+of+race&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIwqOHu8ucxwIVyHo-Ch1HnwSH#v=onepage&q=black%20women%20beauty%20and%20politics%20of%20race&f=false

  • Hank

    @Thomas

    “I call bullshit on that notion and thief! You would think that whites would get tired of stealing from other races of people and start to focus their efforts on making something of their own cultural roots.”

    You mean, make something of our cultural roots in “waltz, the polka, and square dancing”? I would rather die than learn any of those things. And while we’re on the topic, “making something of [our] own cultural roots” strikes me as a somewhat monocultural ideal. Interest in “white cultural” roots is a thing I find most often associated with the Tea Party and neo-Nazis…

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