In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent mass displacement of black neighborhoods in New Orleans, black queer performers redefined notions of belonging throughout the city. These unlikely figures, such as artists Big Freedia and Vockah Redu, played a significant role in calling the displaced back home and serving as beacons of hope. In Raising the Bottom, Alix Chapman engages in performance ethnography, taking to the stage while writing about the lives of these bounce artists and their extended community. He theorizes an epistemology of the bottom—a way of knowing, praxis, and aesthetic—which contests hierarchies of value that place black and queer bodies at the lowest rungs of the social ladder. By engaging in this bottom episteme, bounce performers leverage pleasure and coalition to transform collectives not meant to survive crisis and disaster. Raising the Bottom shows how black queer artists address, remix, and redirect stereotypes to amplify community power, pleasure, and solidarity.

Alix Chapman is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.

Preface: Bourbon Street Blues  ix
Introduction. Project Music  1
1. Catch Dat Beat: Performing Pleasure and Coalition  25
2. Get It How You Live: Twerking for Survival  49
3. Back of Town: A Bottom Geography  71
4. Touching the Rim: Gentrification, Popular Culture, and the Collective Asshole  96
5. Raising the Bottom: Church Girls and Secular Music  122
Acknowledgments  143
Notes  147
References  163
Index  175