ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the digital circulations of material produced by the queer feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. When investigating Sookee’s online presence, I refrain from conceptualizing the virtual world as a type of “cyberutopia” (Nancy Paterson 1998 ; Liesbet van Zoonen 2002 ), drawing instead on a model of queer cyberfeminism that surpasses the binaries of mind/online (agency) versus corporeality/offl ine (cultural determination). With recourse to Butler, Grosz and Barad’s thinking on performativity, corporeality, and “agential intra-activity” (Karen Barad 2003 ), I will demonstrate that Sookee’s raps as well as the accompanying videos and spoken-word poems celebrate language’s political potency-its capacity to provoke critical thought and challenge normative socially constructed assumptions relating to gender, sexuality, and race, in particular. At the same time Sookee’s work and the comments she makes on her website, on Facebook, and on Twitter make reference to the importance of considering the materiality of the embedded and embodied subject, an emphasis which reveals the artist’s reluctance to over-rely on the discursive paradigm alone to enact her
ABSTRACT This paper employs the fi gure of the “interface” to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a signifi cant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts-regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee’s material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic diff erence by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context.
