Hip-hop's Early Introduction to Sex: Queer Readings of Black Male "Rape" in Popular Culture

Abstract

abstract:In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there were several stories in the popular media about Black men's and boys' experiences of childhood sexual violence. Though this media attention is noteworthy given the stereotypes of Black men as hypermasculine and hypersexual that have positioned Black men as beyond the pale of public sympathy, stories of Black male sexual victimization can also traffic in narratives of deviance. This article examines media representation of the childhood sexual experiences of national recording artists Chris Brown and Lil Wayne to show how deterministic narratives of sexual deviance and sexual victimization circumscribe Black men's sexual stories and proposes a way of reading these stories beyond those narrative constraints.