Black LGBTQ+ Soundscape Ecologies and the Politics of Illegitimated Language: Ballroom, Mixes and Beyond

My Master's Report maps Black LGBTQ+ language and sonic culture in the late 21st century from Beyoncé's samples in the Renaissance album. These samples are a rich archive of Black femme, queer, trans and gender non-conforming language, soundscapes, performance, identity/kinship systems and critical Black queer geographies that call for deeper exploration. As a linguistics and Black Studies scholar, I utilize sociolinguistic methods of discourse analysis (social impact/identity formation), phonetic/phonological analysis (sound production), and regional dialectal analysis (NY/NJ, Philly and Texas AAE)(Lanehart 2021). My theoretical frameworks are sonic labor & Black queer work of language (Brooks 2023) (Lane 2019), soundscapes (Schafer 1994), the queer Black aesthetic of the "unmastered" (Powell 2019), queer of color critique (Ferguson 2004), and sonic Afro-modernity (Weheliye 2005). These are all featured as annotations of the samples I am analyzing, and major themes are the annotation sets: Black Sonic Traditions, Black Regional Phonetic Features, Black LGBTQ+ Discourse (discursive tools), Soundscapes, and Ballroom Music's features as a genre. My main argument is that the sovereignty of Black LGBTQ+ language systems, sound systems and soundscapes are elided by contemporary musical renderings like “PURE/HONEY” and other mainstream appropriations.