Trap Feminism Vol. 4: Young Thug – Trap’s Gender Bender

Thus far, my exploration of trap feminism has focused on the music, which is important because trap culture is visually inspired and illustrated by that genre. In the previous volumes of this series, I’ve examined some trap lyrics to pull out potentially feminist themes like women’s economic agency, liberation from ageism and other kinds of body- and class-policing, and most recently, romance as performed by Fetty Wap. But I have not paid enough attention to personal identity performances of specific trap artists, and how those performances might be transgressive or progressive.

Enter Young Thug. Monikered “Thugger,” this trap artist rose to fame after his debut single “Stoner” dropped in 2014, followed by “Lifestyle” (with fellow Rich Gang member Rich Homie Quan), which was included in both Pitchfork and Complex’s “Best Songs of 2014” lists. “Lifestyle” also reached number 1 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip Hop Airplay chart. Musically, there isn’t anything very unique about Young Thug except for the fact that he sounds exactly like Lil Wayne (which is another can of worms that you can read about here). Lyrically, Young Thug fulfills most of the trap music prerequisites: drug sales, drug use, casual sex, elaborate spending, and the occasional nod to the personal trauma and pain in his life. Not horribly misogynist (by trap standards), but not feminist either.

But it’s Young Thug’s presentation and performance outside of his music that has piqued my interest the most. Some trap aficionados are on the fence about Young Thug because of his public deviations from heteronormative masculinity. A trap feminist lens allows us to not only recognize and call out the homophobia mediating such responses, but provides the space to explore the radical possibilities of alternative gender performances in such a gendered genre.

Not long after his debut, people began to raise their eyebrows at Young Thug, who frequently refers to his guy friends as “lovers,” “baes,” and “hubbies.’ Obviously, heteronormative masculinity calls for men to avoid even the slightest affection towards other men (even friends and family) like the plague. A guy can barely congratulate a friend on a job well done without an obligatory “no homo.” So it is no surprise that there was backlash to Young Thug’s expressions of close and visible male friendships. How did Young Thug take the criticism? He was unbothered. Young Thug explained himself as follows:

It’s the language. It’s nothing stupid and fruity going on. It’s the way we talk, it’s the way we live. Those are my baes, those are my lovers, my hubbies, whatever you want to call them.

In a landscape where public declarations of brotherhood and male friendship can easily be obscured by homophobia, Young Thug insists on making it a priority by exaggerating just how much his squad means to him.

In addition to words and terms, Young Thug uses fashion to challenge expectations of masculine gender presentation. In a widely circulated spread to accompany an interview in Dazed Magazine, Young Thug was photographed in a Gucci dress and in another shot, a tutu skirt. After making headlines and being asked about his choice to don women’s clothing he, once again, had a practical answer:

Because women’s clothes are [slimmer] than men’s clothes. The jeans I got on right now, they’re women’s jeans. But they fit how they’re supposed to fit. Like a rock star. The only thing I probably have in men’s is, like, briefs. T-shirts. Ninety percent of my clothes are women’s.

There are several nuances in the way Young Thug’s eclectic personal style strengthens his mainstream marketability. It’s a fact not even the Dazed interviewer, Patrik Sanberg, could ignore. “Thug’s wild style has accelerated his trajectory from a fringe psychedelic rapper to front-and-centre heir apparent to hip hop’s empire,” he wrote. The hegemonic conceptions of race, sexuality, and gender are not absent from Dazed, nor any other media entity, so the interview puts Thug’s affiliations with trap in juxtaposition with his “eccentric” image. And it is worth considering how even the slightest possibilities of queerness are able to designate a subject as “other” and transform their existing meanings – in Thugger’s case, a violent, drug induced masculinity that is the acceptable trope in trap culture. The literal layering (via women’s clothes) of queerness onto Young Thug shifts his predictable-but-not-typically-welcomed image into a postmodern, cool kid spectacle. The gaze shifts from one of avoidance and condemnation to casual fascination.

It’s Thug’s willingness to exist in these spaces of both/and and neither/nor that is perhaps most admirable to me. He has defined himself as cisgender and straight, but he also isn’t jumping through hoops to prove it to folks. A few months ago in the above video, he debuted a snippet of a new track. He’s sitting next to a male friend or relative who is using one hand to hold a handgun, a symbol of dominant masculinity in trap music. The man’s other hand is hoisted high above his head, swaying to the music in an intentionally slow and melodic way that is super familiar to anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with Black gay men. There is no attempt to reconcile supposedly (but obviously not inherently) contradictory signals. Thugger laughs, and uses his own hand to throw up his set. All is right in his world.

Young Thug is a testament to the vastness that is trap feminism. The nooks and crannies that hold such micro (and macro) deviations are endless.  The meat of trap feminism is in it’s contradictions and non-answers, proving that it is certainly a part of a hip hop feminist lineage that fucks with “the grey.”

Header image via.