The only time I’m really happy is hanging upside down on my head in the middle of the dance floor. I see breakdancing as a form of meditation.”

-B-Boy “Face”

Complicated webs of identity inform social and cultural schemas. If dance is symbolic of culture because it inscribes social values on the body, then it follows that values about gender, race, and class are manifest in dance as well as on the body. Like a code written on the body, dance is an essay, epic, novel, or poem about culture articulated through the vehicle of the body. Pointing out gender, ethnicity, and class as an inherent category for the analysis of dance illuminates greater understanding of the relationship between dance and culture. How is dance a cultural identity?
Forms of dance that originated on the street such as break-dancing have a direct relationship to the cultural community. Breakdancing’s inception from the street equips the dance form with a metaphorical and ethnographic symbology as a response to the life of a people. How is breakdancing a response to mainstream culture? How has mainstream culture commercialized and appropriated images from “b-boy” culture?

What is it in the essence of breaking that charges it’s cultural and political power? Is it a form of revolution? How does it deconstruct black male identity? What is its relationship to hip-hop and graffiti art? Where are the women in breakdancing? Which leads to my final questions: Were men the life-givers to break dancing as a form? If so could the b-boy/b-girl culture only have been forged by men as a direct response to society? The breakdancer embodies the archetype of the warrior and therefore a discussion of gender as a category of analysis is essential. The aim of this paper is not to answer any of the questions proposed earlier, but rather to examine break dance culture through the lens of gender.

To frame the question of gender relationships in break dance culture it is important to have working definitions of both gender and breakdance. The concept of gender is a highly debated topic. While the American Heritage dictionary vaguely defines it as a “sexual category; males or females as a group,” much feminist scholarship argues that gender is different than sex and is socially constructed. “Anglo-American” feminists argue that sex is biology and like femininity, gender is socially constructed, while “feminists influenced by psychoanalysis” assert that “sex and gender identity are closely intertwined” (G. Studies 239). In her essay The Traffic in Women (1975) Gayle Rubin “distinguishes between biological sex, which is natural, and gender, which is culturally constructed, and argues that women are conditioned into assuming ‘feminine’ identities which transform them into objects of exchange between men” (ibid 312). For the purposes of this paper I will take the position that gender is a cultural construction of identity- one that I believe should be a choice.

“Break Dance” is a term coined by the media in the early 80’s as a poor interpretation of the dances done by the “b-boy.” According to Mr. Wiggles of the Rock Steady Crew, DJ Kool Herc conceived the term “b-boy” around 1975. He writes, “Coined by Kool Herc to describe the elite dancers at his partys [sic]…Herc originally meant “break boy,” but depending on what area you were from in the Bronx. The definition could have been “beat boy,” or “bronx boy” (wiggles 1). To describe “breaking” Mr. Wiggles calls it “an original hip hop dance.” He writes in the Misconceptions of Hip Hop, “Breaking: comes from more of the James Brown era and feel.” He argues that breaking is not a sport, “and if it should appear on a sports network or Olympic category, it should be listed as a dance, or a dance sport” (Wiggles 2). Most importantly, to understand “breaking” one must understand it’s relationship to hip hop culture. Breaking is a fundamental element of hip hop culture. Also essential to hip hop culture are the MC, DJ, and writer (graffiti artist). About the MC (master of ceremonies) Mr. Wiggles argues “If you can’t write, perform, create a show, do routines, and rock the crowd you’re not an MC.” MC’s of the early 80’s and 90’s adapted “freestyle” as a musical form. Freestyle on the microphone is improvisatory in the same way breaking is improvisatory. The DJ in hip hop culture is the music maker. The beats of the MC or DJ are the “break beats” that the b-boy dances to.
Hip hop is inherently gendered and intrinsically racialized which makes the politics of breaking complicated.

During the 1960’s, overt discrimination and racial tendencies flourished throughout the United States, particularly within urban metropolitan areas. Artists such as Marvin Gaye and Gil Scot Heron wrote and produced music addressing these issues. At the same time Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. were leading black communities throughout the nation in the midst of the same racial issues. More locally, The Black Panthers (formed in the heart of Oakland, California USA) reigned and voiced its views of current events at the time…Between the Black Panther organization and the music and movement of both James Brown and The Temptations, very few will argue about their responsibility for what inspired into Oakland’s revolutionary “rhythmic and robotic” dance art form (wiggles/audionaughts 1).

How is hip hop gendered and racialized? Ted Polhemus writes in his essay Dance, Gender and Culture, “At the most fundamental level of analysis dance, gender, and culture are one and the same thing”(Carter 171). He continues by examining the three categories separately in order to demonstrate this argument. About culture he writes,
Furthermore, movement and other physical styles are in any society imbued with symbolic meaning with the result that how we use and move our bodies is inevitably the occasion for the transmission of all sorts and various levels of socio-cultural information including, most importantly those meanings which exceed the limits of verbal language (Carter 173).

Polhemus’ assertion supports the idea that culture can be transcribed onto the body in specific way that fundamentally includes identity. The body is just one of the myriad vehicles that can inscribe culture. Of the millions of ways to inscribe culture, be it music, language, or government, the body harbors the closest connection to identity. This is not to say that the body is the best vehicle to translate identity or even the most common, but it is intrinsically inseparable.
It is impossible to talk about breaking without viewing the bodies that dance it. Somehow in that viewing, the distance from the viewer and the dancer, or the viewer and the dance for that matter becomes laden with the possibility of political opinions. There is a “politic of seeing,” as bell hooks puts it in her book Art in My Mind, and “the perspective from which we approach art is overdetermined by location” (hooks 2). Seeing is political. The politics of vision can convolute the true meaning of an image-if there is such a thing as true meaning. If anything, the politics of what we think and see when we look at art is complex, laden with relationality of the viewer to object/subject and vice versa. The range in between the intimacy or distance one feels in relation to art allow multiple meanings to occur. If art is ontologically indefinable, which I believe it to be, then the definition comes from the meaning we give it. In other words the meaning is there because we put it there. The same could be said for dance, gender, and culture.
Breaking has multiple levels of cultural significance. One example is the way breaking emerged from the “ghetto” as an inner city art form. Ben Higa wrote in The Vibe History of Hip Hop,

It was 1970, and Black Los Angeles was restless…still recovering from the ’65 uprising that left a ‘charcoal alley’… and crippled and already decimated community. That fall, Don Campbell accidentally gave birth to a form of urban ethnic dance that would soon flood the blossoming club circuit-and ultimately change the direction of music in L.A. (Higa, 1).

Campbell’s movements became known as “Campbellocking.” Higa also states, “The dance was nothing short of revolutionary” (ibid, 1). Revolution is dependent on culture and community. Campbell’s movement style suggests something about his culture. Culture is not one monolithic entity that all people experience the same, but it can be symbolized or represented through different mediums including dance. In this way, dance can serve to reinforce cultural values. I argue that Campbell’s movements inscribe beautifully the collective consciousness of his South Central community-fragmented, disjointed, and “locked.” Campbell says, “Locking gives you the freedom to go from your emotions with your movements” (ibid, 1). bell hooks also writes similarly about her high school experience with art, “Nothing folks said changed my longing to enter the free world of art and be free” (Art on My Mind, 1). Breaking or any art form for that matter can be, as bell hooks says, a location for freedom where culture can re-create itself, in turn reclaiming and reshaping its own meaning. For marginalized groups, this is even more important.

Breaking is racialized in the sense that the racist practices and institutions that oppress black people have historically prosecuted black dance, and then shamelessly exploited it. For example, in 1980 the High Times Crew was arrested in the New York subway for what the police mistook to be “fighting.” The supposed “fighting” was actually breakdancing (George, 18). In 1984 the San Bernardino City Council “votes to impose a fine for public dancing because it interferes with mall shopping,” despite police reports that show that breaking had actually decreased gang violence (ibid, 23). Only one year after police arrested members of the High Times Crew, ABC’s 20/20 airs a report in classic blaxploitation style on the new “rap phenomenon.” Shortly after, 1983 release of the film Flashdance “hastens the burnout of breaking” (ibid, 22). Pop culture’s fascination with break dance brought negative consequences. Racist ideologies inscribed in US culture were used against b-boy culture, as it happened to be mostly non-white. The stereotype of the “violent” black man was perpetuated by the police’s assumption that groups of “b-boys” were automatically gang members, and therefore violent by nature. Similar racial stereotypes attached to hip hop culture are that MC’s and DJ’s are Black, breakers are Puerto Rican and graffiti writers are White. Mr. Wiggles states that these are “just some of the many stereotypes that movies and the media created,” vis a vis methods of blaxploitation (Wiggles miscon, 1). The media has not reconciled its misrepresentations of hip hop culture to this day. People magazine, from March of 1994 defines break dancing in a pop-culture Glossary as “a hyperathletic and gravity-defying form of street dancing in which the participant makes like a Slinky in time to music that comes from a boom box (People, 2). Certainly a gross exaggeration meant to be humorous, this poorly informed definition perpetuates ignorant attitudes toward break dancing. Much attention is paid to the virtuoso feats of male b-boys like head spins, flips, and the “windmill.” For example, Frank Owen in his article Breaking’s New Ground: Generation Next Spins on its Head calls a breaking “routine” performed by a dancer named Face “half art, half sport—that encompasses back flips, hand stands, and body spins.” Even though his article is much more thoughtful and informed than People magazine’s article, Owen falls short by sensationalizing the stunts of break dancing, in turn devaluing it by not presenting a complete description. He writes, “Hydro, also 20 attempts one of the most difficult and dangerous routines in breakdancing. Standing on his head, he spins his body while his locked legs rotate like the sails of a windmill (Owen, 1). Focusing on the virtuoso elements of breaking is a gendered approach because automatically breaking will be thought of as a man’s sport. Social constructions of gender divide men and women into binary roles. Stereotypes propagated by gender roles tend to emphasize that men are “strong” and “powerful” while women are “weak” and “powerless.” Using breaking as an example, these binary roles are represented physically. In other words for female breakers to succeed it is not uncommon for them to appropriate movement, dress, and attitude that it considered “male.” Women breakers can spin on their heads, do back flips, and perform the “windmill,” but the way b-boy culture has been established eliminates possibilities for women to join in the ranks with their b-boy counterparts. Often times they must assume “masculine” postures and clothing styles to find a niche in the b-boy community.

Nelson George organizes the following four African American “character types,” Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos, in his book by the same name. Articulating thoughtfully the problematic nature of lumping individuals into one group identity he remains clear about the nuanced way the four categories have influenced the US over the past 20 years. About the B-Boy he writes, “The B-Boy has rightfully been the most celebrated and condemned of these figures, since he combines the explosive elements of poverty, street knowledge, and unfocused political anger” (George, 2). The role of the b-boy/b-girl is important to hip hop because of their ability to embody physically the cultural symbolism in hip hop culture. Certain aspects of hip hop culture can be abstracted from their bodies when they are breaking. The “cultural symbolism” (as Ted Polhemus called it) of hip hop culture is written on the breakdancing body. Paradoxically, this can be both pejorative and empowering depending on what ideas on being inscribed.

It is not hard to see why breaking could be confused with violence. What is violence? What does it look like? Interestingly the act of competing with other b-boys is know as a “battle” (wiggles/slang 2). Two opposing crews or individuals “battle” it out through movement. Ironically, when the cops arrested members of the High Times Crew in 1980 for “fighting,” they were actually “battling.” In b-boy/b-girl culture to battle is to be confrontational, but to battle is not to be violent. Not meant to be interpreted literally, but rather metaphorically. Stereotypes of the black man as angry and violent are inscribed on the black male body in ways that make it inescapable for young black men’s art to be questioned for it’s supposed innate “violence.”
In a December 2001 issue of The New Republic dance critic Jennifer Homans wrote about Rennie Harris’s breakdancing company Puremovement in ways that perpetuate racist thinking. She writes, “Harris’s dances are violent, angry compendiums of hip hop jargon and rap. Hard bodies hurtle through space with abusive force in a pitiless, unrelenting display of black “attitude” and street smarts.” Puremovement is composed of a majority black male performers and Homan’s description of Harris’s dances as “violent,” and “angry,” needs not go unnoticed. Her article published in 2001 lacks awareness of its own use of racist stereotypes and oppressive modes of thinking. Clearly Homan’s does not understand the style of breakdancing and from her privileged position can write about “black attitude,” which is something she embarrassingly proved she knows nothing about. Maybe she would have felt differently had there been a majority of women performers. Women can be just as “violent” or “angry” as men, but this is not the point. The point is that the stereotype of the angry, violent black man looms over the head of hip hop culture and informs gender roles in breakdance culture.

Stereotype functions to keep oppressive power structures in place. Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought writes, “A system of oppression draws much of its strength from the acquiescence of its victims, who have accepted the dominant image of themselves and are paralyzed by a sense of helplessness” (Collins, 119). Stereotype’s ontological duty to oppression is not only to maintain its structures but it also serves to further oppress already marginalized groups. Exposing the falsity of stereotype is like “decolinizing” the mind from colonialist ways of thinking. In her book
Art on My Mind bell hooks writes,

All colonized and subjugated people who, by way of resistance, create an oppositional subculture within the framework of domination recognize that the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle (hooks, 57).

The problem for women in b-boy culture is not as much a matter of misrepresentation as it is lack of representation. B-boy culture was conceived on men’s terms, and as a result women are still underrepresented. Even the gendered language of breakdance culture illuminates gender dynamics. The language used to talk about breakdancing is contingent upon the expression “b-boy.” The female alternative, “b-girl” is comparable but not a replacement of its “b-boy” counterpart. No one would call a crew of male breakers “b-girls,” but a mostly male crew with female members would easily be referred to as “b-boys.” The first all women MC crew was called the Mercedes Ladies. There has not been a comparable a women b-girl crew.
In Nelson George’s Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: A Chronicle of Post-Soul Culture only 35 out of 318 chronicled entries are named in association with women. Included in those mentioned are, Whitney Houston, Robin Givens, Alice Walker, Tina Turner, Pam Grier, Patti LaBelle, Shirley Chichlom, Twyla Tharp and bell hooks. Also included in the chronicle are notable achievements related to break dancing such as DJ Kool Herc’s performances at the Hevalo club where he “specializes in short ‘break’ sections of records (1975), Sugar Hill Gang’s premiere of the “first rap wrap hit” called “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), the documentary Style Wars airs on PBS about breaking and graffiti (1983), and New York City cops mistaking break dancing for fighting and arresting members of the High Times Crew for “fighting” in the New York Subway where the first known pictures of break dancing are taken (1980). It is not hard to see that “Post-Soul” culture is male-identified

It is not just “Post-Soul” culture that is dominated by men but also hip hop culture. Ian Maxwell wrote in his article Hip Hop Aesthetics and the Will to Culture,
It is clearly the case that artistic creativity is understood implicitly as a masculine prerogative: Hip Hop is a brotherhood. Women rarely rap, instead contributing (sung) backing vocals to the male rapping voices. Women who succeed in winning respect do so by participating in activities coded as being masculine in orientation. (Maxwell, 5).

In reference to the black community Toni Cade Bambara wrote in her groundbreaking essay, On the Issues of Roles, “Now it doesn’t take any particular expertise to observe that one of the most characteristic features of our community is the antagonism between our men and our women” (Collins, 153). From this statement it follows that study of Black feminism or Latina feminism is necessary to understand gender dynamics of an art form conceived by marginalized people.
Art historian Linda Nochlin’s essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists? forged new territory for feminist artists by asserting, “the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian is proving to be inadequate (Reckitt, 204). I assert the same question to hip hop culture. Why have there been no great women breakers? With further research I might find that the sexism within b-boy culture has hidden from view the great women break dancers. Using Linda Nochlin as an example is helpful and at the same time it is not enough. Breaking is not a white centered art form. Developed by minorities, mostly Black men, breaking comes from the bodies and cultures of marginalized groups. In other words to use a white feminist argument for a non-white women’s cause is perpetuating oppressive circumstances and thinking. Subjugated knowledge implies that the “marginal knower” has a privileged view that can only be seen from their perspective. What is a marginal knower? In the case of breakdance it is the person on the inside that society pushed to the outside margins. Is breakdance a Black aesthetic? If so, how does it appear from the inside as opposed to the outside? What is Black culture? One way to describe it is by recognizing that it is not one monolithic entity. Feminist critic bell hooks writes in Art on My Mind, “Living in white supremacist culture, we mostly see images of black folks that reinforce and perpetuate accepted, desired subjugation and subordination of black bodies and white bodies (hooks, 96).

Approaching a feminist reading of hip hop culture and break dance culture with emphasis on black feminism is the most sound approach to understanding the complicated webs of oppression that inform gender relations. bell hooks writes in Art on My Mind “within sexist and racist iconography it (the black female body) is often depicted as a site of betrayal. Just as the white female body most often symbolizes innocence and virtue, the absence of sexual passion, the black female body is usually marked as the opposite” (hooks, 17). Representation is not, no matter how close to the truth, a just replacement of reality. In an interview with artist Allison Saar hooks says “It is important when we look at the wok of any group of people who’ve been marginalized, whether we’re talking about white immigrants or any of us, that there be a willingness to acknowledge complexity-profundity-multilayered possibility” (ibid, 26).

Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Though: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, articulates myriad ways Black women are objectified in US culture as the “other”. She writes, “Domination always involves attempts to objectify the subordinate group” (Collins, 71). Dominating ideologies that oppress black women are made visible by placing them in reference to the body. Bodily representations of the black woman are highly stereotyped. Collins traces the origin of black female stereotypes to the “dominant ideology of the slave era,” that “fostered the creation of several interrelated, socially constructed controlling images of Black womanhood” (ibid, 72). Collins writes about stereotype in Black Feminist Thought,
Portraying African-American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mammas helps justify US Black women’s oppression. Challenging these controlling images has ling been a core theme in Black feminist thought (Collins, 69).

The stereotype of the Mammy, the “faithful, obedient, domestic servant (ibid, 72). Collins writes, “By loving, nurturing, and caring for her White children and “family” better than her own, the mammy symbolizes the dominant groups perceptions of the ideal Black female relationship to elite White male power” (ibid, 72). The “mammy” stereotype alone cannot control black women’s “behavior,” and therefore is seen in contrast with a more recent image of the “matriarch.” “While the mammy typifies the Black mother figure in White homes, the matriarch symbolizes the mother figure in Black homes.”

“Matriarch’s” are stereotyped as aggressive, unfeminine, and supposedly emasculate their lovers (ibid, 75). Both the mammy and the matriarch are constructed in relation to black poverty. Once again class is intrinsically connected to race and sex. The most recent manifestation of pejorative stereotype is that of the “welfare mother” or “welfare queen.” A phrase coined by Ronald Reagan, that degrades Black women’s class status by stereotyping women living in poverty as criminals taking advantage of a system.

Among other degrading images are the “hot mammas”, “jezebels”, and “hoochies” that are all examples of hypersexualized derogatory stereotypes. bell hooks writes about the intersection of race with sex in Art on My Mind,

Few contemporary American artists have worked with images of the black female body in ways that are counterhegemonic. Since most black folks in the United States are colonized-that is think about “blackness” in much the same ways as racist white mainstream culture-simply being a black female artist does not mean one possesses the vision and insight to create groundbreaking revolutionary images of black females (hooks, 95-6).

Both the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement engendered offshoots in the art world. Both are intrinsically tied to the development of b-boy culture. Visual artists such as Faith Ringgold worked as a black artist and activist. She examined intersections where artists could contribute to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965, an exhibition called “Black and White” dealt with race issues, but was also composed exclusively of male artists. “Afro-American” artists in the 70’s were not communicating with Black feminist artists. Sexism in the black community often put black women in the position of choosing either race over gender, or gender over race to maintain solidarity. Faith Ringgold’s work was included in a 1971 exhibition titled “Where We At Black Women Artists” (Reckitt, 23). She is a revolutionary figure for many reasons. For example, in 1968 she led a picket against the current Whitney Museum exhibition that contained the work of no black artists. In 1969, she led a movement to petition the Museum of Modern Art to open a Martin Luther King Wing specifically to show work of artists with varying ethnicities. In 1971 she formed WSABAL (Women, Students, Artists, Black Arts Liberation). She is best known for her work that uses the flag as a figurative vehicle to refer to ideas of nation, and imbedded in nation are ideas of race. She has no counterpart in b-girl culture. One might compare her to revolutionary women hip hop artists, but there is no such figure in break dance culture. This is not to say that women have not influenced b-boy culture, but little has been written to document or acknowledge women as a separate category of analysis. In the early eighties, feminist scholars and social scientists introduced the concept that one cannot look at categories of sex without simultaneously considering categories such as race, and class. Discussing the way society oppresses women requires an understanding of sexism. bell hooks defines feminism in her book Feminism is for Everybody as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (hooks 1). I argue that if feminism will succeed to end sexism it will simultaneously succeed in eliminating racism.

Adding break dance to the dance history cannon means allowing the voices of marginalized groups to define, and redefine its meaning. As bell hooks says, “allowing the voice of subjugated cultures to remake history” (hooks Art on My Mind, 87). Black feminist perspectives are the critical to deconstructing gender relations in hip hop culture. Patricia Hill Collins writes in Black Feminist Thought that “Traditionally, the oppression of black women’s ideas within White-male centered social institutions led African-American women to use music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for constructing a Black feminist consciousness” (Collins, 252). Black feminist consciousness can be white feminist consciousness, which can be global feminist consciousness. Looking at gender in breakdance requires recognition of race alongside gender inquiries. A feminist approach is capable of deconstructing gender roles in b-boy/b-girl culture. However it is important to maintain awareness of how feminist thinking can also harbor racist ideologies. I suggest that black feminist thought can be a powerful source for understanding gender in breakdancing as well as hip hop culture in general. In order for b-boy culture to more fully embrace its b-girl counterpart ideas of black feminism must be implemented into greater gender awareness.

Bibliography

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