Interesting article in the Village Voice about a Brooklyn subculture of young, thugged-out Black and Hispanic lesbians, women who’ve taken male gangsta rappers as their models. They treat their femme lesbian counterparts like property ("It’s a property thing," says one of the women in the article); a lot of them deal drugs to support themselves, their women and their bling; and they dress, act and talk like the stereotypical hip-hop thug playa.
I don’t think that I believe that all gender is performance, but I read something like this and it makes me wonder (maybe it’s like 72% performance).
I was also fascinated to learn that many of the women have organized themselves into "houses," which are kind of a synthesis of the whole hip-hop gang-tribe thing and "the extended-families structure used by previous generations of New York gays and lesbians." It’s like the Wu-Tang Clan meets Paris is Burning.
