About
11
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Introduction
I am interested in the cultural politics of breaking. Drawing on my own breaking practice, and interviews with Australian breakers, I use breaking as a vehicle to explore broader questions about the body, identity, and belonging, and what space there is for transgression and transformation. My research draws on hip-hop studies, dance studies, popular music studies, ethnography, and cultural theory.
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Publications
Publications (11)
In this article, I analyse how bodily potential is culturally regulated in Sydney's breakdancing (breaking) scene through drawing both on my breakdancing practice and interviews conducted with prominent figures in this scene. I critically examine my lived experiences as one of only a few female breakdancers ("b-girls") in Sydney through analytic au...
This article analyses how ‘all style’ battles facilitate a queering of hip hop’s dance floor. ‘All style’ battles incorporate various ‘street dance’ styles and their respective music genres (such as breaking, popping, locking, [freestyle] hip hop, waacking, krumping and house). The intermixing and joining of divergent performativities, styles and c...
It is not enough to simply observe the dance floor as a site of free expression as the body is always a product of its social conditioning. As a female breaker in the Sydney scene, my corporeal experience of the dance is always shaped by the masculine history of its organisation. While breaking does, of course, offer great potential for developing...
Representation is a central tenet of hip-hop culture, yet women’s experiences and contributions have long been invisibilised. This article reveals some of the barriers to visibility facing women in breaking (“b-girls”). It shows how b-girls respond to gender-based challenges and their sense of obligation to be visible in order to promote gender equ...
In September 2019, industrial band Konqistador released Nafada, a nine-track album that is in collaboration with female Arab-Muslim hip-hop artists originating from various regions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The purpose of Nafada was to shine a light on women artists existing within regimes characterised by censorship, obscurantism...
This chapter is an exploration into how breakdancing (“breaking”) can be a vehicle for understanding the inherent tensions and dualities of the night, or what I term the “nocturnal paradox”. It moves beyond hegemonic discourses and regulations of night-time culture that are increasingly focused on its economic valorization to show how breaking—an a...
This thesis critically interrogates how masculinist practices of breakdancing offers a site for the transgression of gendered norms. Drawing on my own experiences as a female within the male-dominated breakdancing scene in Sydney, first as a spectator, then as an active crewmember, this thesis questions why so few female participants engage in this...
In this article, I highlight the system of relays between Deleuze and Guattari’s (2010) ‘Body without Organs’ (BwO), the gender politics of Sydney's breakdancing scene that regulate ‘what a body can do’, and my own breakdancing (b-girling) practice. The BwO is not a static notion, but both ‘a practice [and] a set of practices’ through which the bod...
Shifting Sounds: Musical Flow: A Collection of Papers from the 2012 IASPM Australia/New Zealand Conference
