"Release Your Wiggle"Big Freedia's Queer Bounce

This article examines the music and performances of Bounce artist Big Freedia as part of a queer Bounce diaspora. Drawing attention to diasporic traditions, Freedia’s music and performances reveal the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, geography, and class that converge in Bounce. These intersections are often obscured in mainstream imaginings of this music but her form works against dominant myths of Bounce as a local, hyper-masculine and hyper-heterosexual form. Underscoring the queer intersectionality of Bounce and its global influence, her performance mode complicates the ways New Orleans working-class black southernness has been represented, consumed, and reproduced in the popular realm. Freedia invites audiences to consider the dynamism of black southern working-class subjectivities. As a result, her music promotes inclusion as she teaches appropriate ways to consume the form and troubles tourist-oriented interactions with Bounce.