There's always room for "ironic" queer hipster appropriation!

So. Butch/Femme by Team Gina. I watched it. I'm writing about it because a lot of people seem to like it.

There is much that doesn't sit quite right--the queasy, quasironic objectification of butch women, the latent transphobia, the apparent fatphobia, the dancing. The most consistent and egregious problem here, and in all the Team Gina material I've come across, is the thoughtless and insulting appropriation of hip hop.

Team Gina are hardly the first white women, queer or otherwise, to adopt a version of specifically black masculinity towards their own sexual empowerment (cough, Madonna, cough) and they follow in the Vampire Weekend mode of "appropriation is a non-issue because I said so."

According to The Advocate, the Ginas "don't take their skills too seriously." Well, that's a relief. Why, then, have your rapping be the centerpiece of your music? The result would be perfectly suitable for a hairbrush mic in front of your friends at a sleepover, but the Ginas have actually released this to the public--and without much reverence displayed to the genre or self deprecation, the result is, at best, a delusional display or privilege and, at worst outright mockery of this corner of black culture.


Yes, we're white, we're girls, we're queer. We're not trying to act like something that we're not. But we both like and listen to hip-hop, so there is no way to not put it in our music.
- Gina Genius/Young.

Beside the obvious fallacy that the only alternative to supressing a musical impulse is to parody, Tem Gina's actual music (as opposed to their posturing,) has very little hip hop in its DNA. Musically it is more Peaches by ways of years of bedroom Casio xeroxing. The Gina's actually appear to have stopped listening to hip hop somewhere around 1996, their reference points limited to 80s/90s greatest hits and novelty favorites (dig that musty Sir Mix-A-Lot gag) and The Beastie Boys. When I've seen them explicitly acknowledge their inspirations, they're limited to 80s mainstream kid-culture nostalgia (ie Salt n Pepa*)consistent with their schtick. Unlike other rappers from Aesop Rock to Eminem to MC Paul Barman, the Ginas have not publicaly grappled with the problematics of doing hip hop while white (not that they really make hip hop music, but they adopt mostly dated versions of its trappings, claim to rap and seem to embrace the hip hop label for their music.) Nor do they, unlike the above artists, pay respect to the (black) artists and innovators who made them fall in love with it.

There is no meaningful engagement with hip hop in this music, it is just something cool/funny/hot-t-t to appropriate at whim, cuz it feels good. It's just another costume accessory to put on with those hipster Jane Fonda leotards. White queer people sometimes have this problem where they think anything they do is subversive if it's queered. Look at Shirley Q. Liquor.

I can't find my copy of Black Face, White Noise right now, but I believe in it Michael Rogin discusses how whites in the vaudeville era used blackface not only to simply, consciously mock black people (they might not see their act as mockery at all,) but to better access a deeper emotion and passion that they felt their whiteness denied them. White people trying on blackness to better "get down" didn't close down with vaudeville theater or decrease in social acceptability of actual burnt cork on white faces. It is reasonable to expect white performers--particularly those who claim to have progressive-to-radical politics, as the Ginas have, to be mindful of this history when trying on blackness in their art.

Someone on Feministe posted the video. The comments are a piece of work. While some people--including those who had enjoyed the video--were able to engage in a critical discussion, others flipped their lids at the idea that anyone would dare to criticize a band they like to listen to--a queer feminist band none the less! And the reinvented wheels spin round and round...

*No disrespect to SNP.