Articles

In my first article Evaluating Agency and Responsibility in Gendered Violence: African American Youth Talk About Violence and Hip Hop it opened up with some statistics from the CDC and from the National Institute of Justice saying that 11.9% of girls in high school have been sexually assaulted and 20% of girls in high school reported either being sexually or physically abused by a boyfriend.  In this study they wanted to get insight into what teenagers who were African American thought about violence in a romantic relationship.  They decided to use focus groups to get that insight.  They had a total of 35 teenagers 18 girls and 17 boys ages 14 to 17 from 2 different cities.  They broke those down into 3 groups in each city, an all girl group, an all boy group and a mixed group. Of those 23 of their mother's either had some college or had a college degree 6 said their mother didn't finish high school.  23 of the participants said their father had some college or a degree while 5 of their father's had less than or did not complete high school.  They used the funnel approach during the focus groups that is where moderator had some questions that they needed to get into the conversation and the other moderator watched for time and also helped to interrupt when the discussion started heading in a direction that wasn't important for this study.  They had 3 modules (topics) they wanted to address in the focus groups 1. Love is Blind 2. Assessing images of women and men in hip hop 3. Date rape of a hip hop fan.  While evaluating the transcripts they actually found that they needed to recode their findings to find the themes that were present and found that there were in fact 3 main themes that were voiced: 1. Women's behavior causes abuse 2. "Nasty" women vs. powerful men in hip hop 3. Hard or soft? Sexy or innocent? Girls negotiating images of hip hop femininity.  With the first theme they found that what was being focused on was women's behavior.  They stated that there is a line that a female can cross for being too sexy and if a female crosses that line it may open up the doors for males to think it's ok to abuse her.  With the 2^nd theme the major difference between the males and female groups were that the girls believed that guys in hip hop had a better image that the females in hip hop.  Usually females were viewed as a ho rather than powerful like males.  The males in the group didn't want to dress like the rappers did in the videos because they didn't want to be viewed as a thug.  With the 3^rd theme they used the example of Lil' Kim and how they saw her as a strong women but because of her attire she was looked at as a ho.  The participants instead choose to look at Eve who was viewed as strong and they admired her, she wouldn't dress as a ho.

With my 2^nd article Resistance Under the Black Light Exploring the Use of Music in Two Exotic Dance Clubs it wanted to examine how dancers used music in the clubs to feel empowered and also to protest against the owner.  An interesting fact was shared and that is that from 1987 to 2000 the number of exotic dance clubs doubled in the United States.  For this research the author went to two different dance clubs Glitters and Flame which are both in the New England area.  She was both an observer and a participant.  She did not inform the owner nor did she inform the customers that she was a researcher.  In Glitters she spent about 120 hours in about a 3 month time frame just observing what went on between the dancers and the regulars.  She was able to informally interview 15 female dancers and formally interview 2.  With Flame she actually worked as a dancer and spent about 340 hours over a 6 month period.  She was able to conduct 16 semi-formal interviews with the female dancers and 3 formal interviews.  Both clubs targeted white males Glitter was for more of the working class while Flame targeted more of the suburbanite.  What she found was that the owners were trying to enforce only certain music be played for the dancers performance and what ended up happening was that the females ended up either having their regulars request certain songs and the owner would have to play it because the customer is always right.  Or the dancer would just play whatever song she wanted and pay the fine that was enforced if you played a song that was not okayed by the owner.  One of the dancers said she would even start to tell some of her regulars that certain songs were "their songs" so that they would be more likely to request that particular song and she could dance to it.  She found that the music did in fact serve as a mean for the dancers to express themselves about their unhappiness with the inequality in the workplace.