Sights and Sounds of Joyful Resistance: Hip Hop, TikTok, and Bi+ Women's Identities

Abstract

This thesis examines the representation of women’s bisexuality in contemporary North American popular music and digital spaces, addressing how bi+ hip hop artists challenge reductive portrayals that contribute to bisexual erasure and stereotyping. It pursues three interrelated inquiries: how diverse women-identifying performers craft transgressive representations of bisexuality; how online affective archives on platforms like TikTok empower bisexual women to negotiate “third spaces” of resistance; and how redefining bisexuality as a transgression of normative boundaries can expand discourses on authenticity in queer and hip-hop studies. These inquiries are vital for understanding the ways in which people with marginalized identities can reconfigure cultural narratives and contest dominant media frameworks. Employing a mixed-methods design, the study is built around case studies of three artists, Ashnikko, Princess Nokia, and Snow tha Product. Synthesizing close readings of music videos, discourse analysis of digital fan interactions, and multimodal assessments of self-representation (analyzing visual, sonic, and textual elements across various media), each case study examines how artists and fans create affective archives on digital platforms (Cvetovich, 2003). In these alternative spaces, bi+ identities are historicized, validated, and reimagined as acts of joyful resistance – a process marked by playful self-celebration and a deliberate repudiation of heteronormative constraints on queer/bi+ people. This study finds that these cultural productions (including music, music videos, and social media content) not only subvert reductive narratives but also actively construct resilient counter-narratives, reframing contemporary discourses on sexuality, gender, and authenticity via a “bi+ worldview” (Nelson, 2023). In doing so, this dissertation contributes to feminist media studies, queer theory, and cultural studies by positioning bi+ representation as a dynamic form of feminist work, offering critical insights for ongoing discussions in both academic contexts and digital activist spaces.