Representing Ratchet: Screening Black Lesbian Sex and Ratchet Cultural Politics

Abstract

I have thus far discussed the layers of cultural and sexual politics that revolve around the word ratchet, the way BQW utilize the Black Ratchet Imagination to remake Black cultural spaces for the expressed purposes of honoring their own pleasure, and what it means for BQW to embody ratchet ways of being as middle-class and class mobile BQW subjects. In this chapter, I hone in on the way BQW create representations which are situated within the ratchet/boojie politics of the Scene. How do they engage in the production and dissemination of cultural artifacts that might represent BQW as ratchet/boojie? And what is at stake when those representations position BQW as ratchet/boojie? In the previous chapter, I discussed a strip club transformed into a ratchet scene space for BQW. BQW queered hip-hop esthetics, Black youth culture, and explicit Black female sexuality, effectively transforming the structures of feeling such that it was Black female same-sex desire that reigned in contexts (the strip club and hip-hop songs) where BQW’s desire is typically foreclosed. Just as BQW have found ways of reorganizing space and queering Black cultural formations in ways that allow them to be seen and heard on their own terms, I consider another tool BQW employ to make themselves both seen and heard: YouTube.