Raising the Bottom

Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Alix Chapman

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478038610
  9781478033707
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062226
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent mass displacement of black neighborhoods in New Orleans, black queer performers redefined notions of belonging throughout the city. These unlikely figures, such as artists Big Freedia and Vockah Redu, played a significant role in calling the displaced back home and serving as beacons of hope. In Raising the Bottom, Alix Chapman engages in performance ethnography, taking to the stage while writing about the lives of these bounce artists and their extended community. He theorizes an epistemology of the bottom—a way of knowing, praxis, and aesthetic—which contests hierarchies of value that place black and queer bodies at the lowest rungs of the social ladder. By engaging in this bottom episteme, bounce performers leverage pleasure and coalition to transform collectives not meant to survive crisis and disaster. Raising the Bottom shows how black queer artists address, remix, and redirect stereotypes to amplify community power, pleasure, and solidarity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: Bourbon Street Blues
• Introduction: Project Music
• Chapter One: Catch Dat Beat: Performing Pleasure and Coalition
• Chapter Two: Get It How You Live: Twerking for Survival
• Chapter Three: Back of Town: A Bottom Geography
• Chapter Four: Touching the Rim: Gentrification, Popular Culture, and the Collective Asshole
• Chapter Five: Raising the Bottom: Church Girls and Secular Music
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index