4 “Too Many Man”? Using Digital Technology to Develop Critical Media Literacy and Foster Classroom Discourse on Gender and Sexuality

A Life of Grime: Critical Digital Pedagogy in Popular Music

Advanced Popular Music Studies (APMS) is a third-year elective undergraduate module that I coordinated. This module was designed to fit with the specialism of the lecturer who taught it each year, affording relative freedom with respect to the syllabus as long as content was constructively aligned with the course’s core learning outcomes. I therefore saw this as an opportunity to interface more concertedly with the student cohort. As long as their work was rigorous and demonstrated an understanding of wider issues of contemporary popular practice, the subject matter—and examples utilized—could converge more readily with students’ interests and social justice themes.

Grime music is well suited for such discussions. The commercial resurgence of grime in the 2010s prompted much popular critical commentary as well as a growing amount of academic work. Grime has been positioned in these discourses in a manner similar to much writing on popular music: it has been tied to a particular place and set of social circumstances (East London and black British working-class men), associated with a few leading figures (Dizzee Rascal, Skepta, Stormzy), and ascribed an increasingly fixed kind of social significance. An engagement with grime, then, might enable students both to explore and to critique these issues, consequently developing their critical media literacy skills. Hall (2017, p. 344) has noted how “hip-hop-based curricular interventions are driven by a desire to teach critical media literacy and foster critical consciousness, especially as they intersect around racial identity politics.” This is also true for grime.

The genre is subject to racialized popular writing and censorship through regressive social policy (see Riley, 2017). Media publications often resort to somatic readings of grime performance, rendering it as a priori primitive. In 2004, for example, a journalist writing for a prominent newspaper in the United Kingdom compared grime performance to “relentless assault and battery” (Campion). For journalist Simon Reynolds, East London MC Crazy Titch “hoarsely holler[ed]” down the microphone (2007, p. 377). These ascriptions are both complicit with prior racialized writing on Afrodiasporic practice such as reggae and hip-hop and demonstrate an enduring racism within writing that needs to be addressed (see Gilroy, 2002). Therefore, through brokering these tensions and issues, students hopefully would develop a more nuanced approach to black musical practice and refine their critical media literacy skills.

This module that I taught was intended to interrogate representations of gender and sexuality within popular music. Grime music—and hip-hop more broadly—have problematic relationships with the representation of women. By working with audiovisual examples throughout the course, I intended to address hypermasculinity within the form, question how a “politics of respectability” is imposed on black musical styles (in ways that other forms are not subjected to), and foreground female and LGBTQIA+ practice2 within the form (Brooks-Higginbotham, 1993).

Adopting an equitable agenda that exhibits a focus on female and LGBTQIA+ practice can be an act of world making by dislodging a hegemonic masculine understanding of hip-hop and grime practice. Issues of hypermasculine posturing are covered in Jeffrey Boakye’s Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime but made manifest in creative practice. Boakye (2017, p. 103) examines fifty tracks from grime’s emergent canon, noting how a large majority of work “endors[es] misogyny as a by-product of asserting their masculinity [through] objectifying women to be won like a trophy or fixed like a problem.” Furthermore, North London grime collective Boy Better Know’s single “Too Many Man” (2014) mockingly addresses gender disparity in the club at grime events. The track’s sardonic hook “we need some more girls in here, there’s too many man,” does not call for greater representation. Rather, it rearticulates the male gaze, presenting women as sex objects.

This module, through both addressing aspects of grime that engage with misogynoir and hypermasculinity and celebrating the work of female and LGBTQIA+ artists in grime, employed grime as a critical lens to deliver a full appraisal and engage students with complex discussions on gender and sexuality in popular music.

Matrices of Domination: Foregrounding the Student Voice Using Digital Technology

In addition to using grime as a critical lens and an “enabling text” for these sorts of discussions, I wanted to foreground the student voice as part of a critical digital pedagogical framework. Grime music’s commercial resurgence meant that the form was common parlance for my cohort, and there was real scope for students’ contributions to influence course content as the module progressed.

Incorporating technology as part of teaching should not be seen as arbitrary or an afterthought. My key concern was to locate how students could collaborate and contribute without rearticulating patterns of dominant behaviour. This is where the digital becomes valuable. In her work on radical musicking and the rise of critical pedagogy within a music setting, Juliet Hess (2017) highlights tensions in the classroom that can arise from adopting a critical pedagogical framework. With the fundamental aim to democratize the classroom, there is a danger that—by asking for students’ contributions—the same, often white male, voices are heard again and again (p. 178).

For Patricia Hill Collins (2000), there exists a matrix of domination in the classroom: certain students have privilege over others because of factors such as race, gender, and class. Recognizing this and dismantling, rather than reinscribing, the dominant is a crucial consideration. One way that I addressed this in my teaching is through anonymous digital contributions, which to some extent absolved positionality. And though I continue to use a wide array of digital technology in teaching, issues of anonymity were assuaged in this instance through the employment of a collaborative post-it tool, or an online sandpit, named Padlet.

Padlet and similar tools are now used in a number of educational circumstances, including music (Dunbar, 2017, p. 27; Sundararajan & Maquivar, 2017). In my case, Padlet acted as a supplement to the university’s virtual learning environment. Prior to the commencement of the 10-week APMS course, I set up Padlet with columns for each week of the teaching session and a brief selection of resources. From that point onward, I gradually introduced ideas and encouraged contributions (see Figure 4.1). Rather than students putting up their hands, being chosen on the spot in class, or reinscribing patterns of domination, students could present their ideas without fear of judgment from peers or the “professorial gaze.” I aimed to move outside the institutional glare and empower all students to guide progression of the class and its content.

Addressing Misogynoir and Developing Critical Media Literacy

After a number of weeks working informally with Padlet in the classroom, I set my first instructional task using it. This task formed part of week 6’s session on gender and sexuality. There were a couple of reasons that I chose this session to ask students to use Padlet actively (rather than rely on informal suggestions). First, grime’s problematic relationship with hypermasculinity (addressed above) offered grounds to interrogate these issues head on. Second, I wanted to give students space in which to become acclimatized to Padlet. Imposing a new system too quickly can be construed as unwelcoming. Rather, I hoped that Padlet would be a collaborative, student-led space. By week 6, students had become free flowing with suggestions, and I thought that we were in a position of trust that meant there would be a number of really interesting contributions.

Before the session, I asked students to suggest ideas on Padlet, from any form of grime practice that broadly related to articulations of gender and/or sexuality. I deliberately left this open so that there would be scope to critique hypermasculine assertions alongside the practice of female, non-binary, and LGBTQIA+ grime MCs. Nearly half of the students put forward suggestions on Padlet, and the class had its highest attendance (92%) since the introductory lecture of the module. This was perhaps because students had a vested interest in the material on show (a factor facilitated by the anonymous posting through Padlet).

The in-person session started with a lecture that provided theoretical grounding, followed by a seminar-style discussion of three musical examples, the latter two selected by students: Dead Black Ting by Lioness, Hood B*tch by South London rapper Ms Banks, and Hoe Diaries by gay femme MC Karnage Kills. Critical to this discussion was the nature of the analysis undertaken as a group. For Karvelis (2018, p. 47), music videos offer an “unparalleled glimpse into realities.” Here I diverged from this unexacting approach and encouraged students to look at the deliberated meaning making at work in the performance and its visual representation. Part of engaging with the digital extends to having a firm pedagogical framework that augments the cohort’s critical media literacy. In doing so, I encouraged the cohort to move into a complex discussion of the expectations and taxonomies imposed on non-male hip-hop practice and how artists have counteracted these representations, referring to Missy Elliot as a disrupter of expectations of how women should “perform correctly” in hip-hop (Lane, 2011, p. 775; White, 2013). Here, then, we were not only analyzing songs as a group but also critiquing artists’ performativity, visual practice, and normative gender expectations.

The first student example discussed was Hood B*tch by Ms Banks (GRM Daily 2019), which repurposes hypermasculine tropes within her context as a rapper. Aside from the song’s producers, Splurgeboys, the only men who feature in the video occupy a subservient role: either raining plaudits on Banks as she walks down a makeshift catwalk or handing over money to Banks at gunpoint in a foiled drug deal. These aspects are furthered by the sexual autonomy asserted in her lyrical content: in the first verse, men are always on “her dick”; later she raps that she doesn’t “need dick I have my own toy” before the sound of a vibrator cuts through the mix. This toying with male subjectivity recalls Perry’s (1995, p. 526) work, which notes how female MCs “enter the male body, generally as a metaphor for their strength and power, but also to expand self-definition.” Furthermore, Banks embraces derogatory terminology, such as “b*tch,” subverting its meaning as an act of reclamation, much like its usage by Juice Crew’s Roxxane Shanté and MC Lyte (Keyes, 2002, p. 200). In addressing the inversion of gender stereotypes by Banks, students were able to engage fully in critical media literacy (as per the definition of Tobias, 2014), observing Banks’s confounding of normative expectations and hegemonic power relationships.

In the subsequent class discussion, we continued to speak about visual representation, lyrical content, and performativity. One student brought up Banks’s use of “ratchet”—a term derived from Louisianan creole for “wretched”—as an empowering term, and the significance of her gold “grille” of teeth, with reference to St. Louis rapper Nelly’s 2005 hit “Grillz.” We then spent a substantial portion of the discussion going through these themes as a group.

One moment in particular was challenging yet led to a beneficial outcome. A male student, typically outspoken in class, voiced a regressive opinion challenged by nearly all other members of the cohort. This moment, which had the potential to be fractious, actually saw the class collaborate, enter into fervent discourse (without my interjection as lecturer), and challenge this student’s position. In this instance, the tools were at hand for the students through both theoretical grounding and practical application. Its success was crucially augmented by empowering students to speak. Their suggestions through Padlet were legitimised by being used as part of course material, and the class felt confident enough to challenge a base-level reading of femininity and move productively toward a resolution.

This was evident in feedback from students at the end of the course. One student stated that “I enjoyed the group discussion that came from this. It also challenged me to do my own research, so I could share something on the Padlet.” Another student commented that “it was nice to have input into the lecture, . . . made it a more interactive session.” A third student was disappointed about not contributing: “I didn’t end up posting anything, and I wish that I had done after seeing how people’s posts were discussed in class.” These reflections and the outcome in the session indicate both the substantial engagement of all students and the enlivening classroom discourse that arose from examining these examples, with peers questioning another student’s reductive readings of femininity.

The track Hoe Diaries by Karnage Kills, the second student-chosen example used in the session, was also of particular interest. The track spoke evocatively to Kills’s positionality as a gay femme MC in the grime scene while celebrating his sexuality. The following discussion helped to consolidate the set reading from Rinaldo Walcott (2013) on heteronormativity and how hip-hop performance—and hip-hop pedagogy—can challenge and overcome stereotypes. Later that week a student anonymously posted an interview with Kills that went into greater depth about his approach as an artist, and another student based the final assessment on LGBTQIA+ practice.

Pedagogical Praxis: Implications and Moving Forward

The activity that I have described here carries wider implications for critical pedagogy not only in music but also in other fields seeking to employ digital technologies. First, it has shown how the combination of digital tools and a critical pedagogical frame enabled me to create a collaborative space that fostered student contributions and remedied patterns of domination and fear of the professorial gaze that pervade the typical classroom environment. Students’ contributions made me realize their wealth of knowledge. Their suggestions were provocative, relevant, and unfamiliar to me.

Second, I found value in teaching curriculums receptive to the student base in the locale where I teach. Although grime is predominantly popular in the United Kingdom, a similar approach could be employed in other locations: for example, gqom in Durban, drill in Chicago, or bongo flava in Dar Es Salaam. With a local genre as a critical lens through which to teach complex issues, students were able to interrogate normative representations of gender, sexuality, and race because of their familiarity with the content on show. Developing critical media literacy skills with examples from an abstracted social milieu can be challenging. A move toward localized and student-led content offers a “way in” to critique and comment on wider issues of power, race, and hegemonic constructions of gender.

Third, there exists a longer-term, transformative need for critical digital pedagogy to be fully realized within an educational setting that employs relatable material from local contexts as teaching tools. As Bali (2014, p. 4) notes, “each [student] has valuable experience from their own context to bring to the classroom,” and we must continue to take steps toward realizing the value of students’ ideas and experiences through digital means or otherwise. If we are to move from word to world making, in a shift from theorizing to implementing practical changes, then a more concerted effort needs to be made to ensure student engagement and involvement with syllabus construction across the board rather than in isolated sessions as part of elective modules.

Fourth, issues of positionality must be considered. As Hess (2017) pointed out, there is a danger that an educator’s own privilege—for example, my privilege as a white male teaching within a critical digital pedagogical framework—can affect the learning process. Although my initial use of Padlet in the classroom was part of a continued commitment to the student voice, and the recognition of black creative practice in what are still majority white spaces, limitations still exist. Dominant patterns can still be rearticulated in the classroom itself, and a white scholar’s presence at the front of the class—irrespective of the potentialities of technology—can perpetuate inequity. Academic institutions must challenge “dominant paradigms” and build toward a more representative environment in which to learn and flourish. Although I have shown in this chapter how critical pedagogy in a hybrid context can foster enlivening classroom discourse and develop critical media literacy, further steps must be taken. Digital technologies should therefore be used in conjunction with equitable hiring, teaching, and learning practices to substantiate real and considered change.

Key Takeaways

• There is a need for critical digital pedagogy to be fully realized within an educational setting that employs relatable material. Using local musical forms as a critical lens encourages participation and allows students to develop their critical media literacy skills.
• Co-creation of content brings forth fervent classroom discourse and instances of reciprocal peer learning.
• Anonymous contributions help to facilitate and encourage student engagement with challenging theoretical issues and break down patterns of domination in the classroom.
• Digital technologies should be used in conjunction with equitable practices to substantiate real and considered change in higher education.

Notes

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