Abstract

This thesis draws on theories of affect, performativity, and dance practice to consider how women with varying feminist values negotiate them within sexist hip hop spaces. Using a targeted group of research participants, accessed through snowball sampling, the author engaged in four different outings which produced four specific scenic descriptions and twelve interviews to better investigate if such a negotiation is possible. Taking the view that negotiation can occur between feminist values and sexist hip hop spaces through the body, this research demonstrates four particular tactics through which such a negotiation occurs. In engaging theories of affect and performativity in dance the author outlines humour as intervention, hypersexualization of movement as a resistance, memory and nostalgia as a buffer and disassociation as negotiation, as tactics that reveal themselves in sexist hip hop spaces