Across contemporary culture, Black artists are increasingly foregrounding performative strategies that expose the limits of traditional racial and gender scripts, constructing emancipatory narratives through performances that challenge dominant expectations. From gender-nonconforming satire to confrontations with misogynoir to interventions in historically white musical genres, Black performers are reconfiguring the boundaries of cultural participation and identity. Examining these interventions within a single session highlights shared strategies of resistance while showcasing the diversity of expressive forms through which emancipatory narratives emerge. These papers reveal how artists mobilize performance to resist historical constraints, recast representational possibilities, and create new spaces of belonging. By treating performance as a site of world‑building, political critique, and embodied liberation, this session illuminates how musical and cultural expression becomes a powerful tool for narrating the self beyond the limits imposed by white supremacy and patriarchal gender norms.

The session has a scholarly foundation in performance studies, Black feminist thought, and cultural theory. Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s concept of “kaleidoscopic Blackness” provides a critical lens for understanding how satire allows for multiple, evolving articulations of Black identity that defy flattening (Morgan, Laughing to Keep from Dying). Similarly, thinkers such as Patricia Hill Collins (Black Sexual Politics) and Joan Morgan (hip-hop feminism) emphasize how Black women navigate intersecting structures of misogyny, respectability, and racialized desire through expressive culture. Recent scholarship in country music studies further highlights how Black performers have been integral to the genre’s development, even as the industry often excludes or marginalizes them. Together, these frameworks underscore the political stakes of performance and its capacity to generate narratives of refusal, reclamation, and emancipation.

The session will open with a brief introduction from the organizer (5 minutes), followed by three 15‑minute papers (45 minutes). The final 30 minutes will be dedicated to discussion, with at least 15 minutes reserved for unstructured conversation to allow presenters and audience members to explore connections among the papers and to raise broader questions about race, gender, and performance.

Cole Lowman analyzes how Lil Nas X and Tyler, The Creator enact kaleidoscopic Blackness by mobilizing gender-nonconforming performance within the realm of Black musical satire. Through alter egos, carceral imagery, and playful yet incisive aesthetic choices, these artists produce narratives that challenge normative constructions of Black masculinity. Their performances transform satire into a liberatory practice that opens new imaginative terrains for queer and gender-expansive Black self-fashioning. These artists’ work exemplifies emancipatory narrative-making through the joyful, defiant refusal of prescriptive identity roles.

Drawing on Black feminist theory and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Sexual Politics, Wendy Gokhool tensions between activism, hypersexuality, and survival in hip-hop feminist discourse. The paper focuses how on Shante in Roxanne Roxanne and Winter Santiaga in Sista Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever navigate misogynoir, intra-racial conflict, and the fraught terrain of empowerment, demonstrating how Black women create complex emancipatory narratives in a cultural field shaped by gendered violence, historical trauma, and contested forms of agency.

By highlighting how contemporary Black country artists Shaboozey and Tanner Adell mobilize swagger, hyper-femininity, and stylized presence, Lauryn Jones demonstrates how their performances claim space within a historically exclusionary tradition, expanding the genre’s imaginative and demographic possibilities. Because country music’s conventions are deeply racialized, Black performers must negotiate expectations around authenticity, femininity, and masculinity in ways that white artists do not, and their interventions constitute emancipatory narratives that rewrite who can belong in country music and on what terms.

Together, these papers illuminate how Black performers use musical and cultural expression to craft narratives of liberation—stories that resist confinement, reclaim identity, and remake artistic landscapes, and the presenters represent a diversity of academic voices. The scholars are women and gender non-conforming individuals from diverse academic positions. Lowman is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at a public R1 institution; Gokhool is an industry professional, pursuing a PhD in Montréal; and Jones is a PhD student at a private university.