“That $hit Ain’t Gangsta”: Symbolic Boundary Making in an Online Urban Gossip Community

This paper examines how commenters (N= 290 posts) to an urban gossip blog interpret the meaning of ambiguously sexual behavior: a kiss shared by two male gangsta rappers. It shows that fans use the same interpretive repertoire to come to very different conclusions about the meaning of the rappers’ sexual orientation in the wake of the kiss. Other research finds that hegemonic masculinity has expanded to include touch between men as a legitimate expression of heterosexual intimacy, yet that literature ignores or pathologizes marginalized men (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; McCormack and Anderson 2014). Our study makes up for this gap by exploring the frames and concerns native to hip-hop culture that explain how fans label the rappers’ sexuality as a result of the kiss. We find that fans are particularly concerned with policing the boundary around thug masculinity, the most valorized form of masculinity within hip-hop culture