‘Slay’ bells ring? A semi-seasonal post on the origins of the term ‘yas’.

This post responds to the Reply All podcast from the 7th of July 2016 entitled Disappeared. If you would like to listen to it first, the link is: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/. I will be focusing on the second half of the podcast from 19 minutes onward. However, the first half is an equally fascinating discussion about Left-Pad, Azer Koçulu, and opensource licensing of code, which I equally recommend that you listen to.

That being said, the second half explores the origins of the term ‘yas’, which is an incredibly popular way of expressing an intense appreciation for something or someone on the internet; any brief jaunt through Twitter, Tumblr, or potentially Facebook will undoubtedly return at least one use of it. For example (credit for all tweets given to the original account holders):

The tweet above appears to relate to the viral video that is credited with bringing ‘yas’ into popular culture, as is referenced in the Reply All podcast.

This tweet (above) is also interesting from an analysis perspective, and potentially offers an explanation for the popularity of the expression. It also engages with an interesting facet of drag culture as an exaggeration of stereotypes or gendered characteristics, as well as performed expressions of emotion.

There are even gifs of velociraptors from Jurassic World with ‘yas’ superimposed upon them:

Returning to the original usage, however, I myself have used ‘yas’ on Twitter multiple times in response to things I loved. However, quite shamefully, I had no idea of its etymology. The Reply All podcast informed me that it first appeared in Harlem in the 1980s as a part of ball culture – specifically drag balls. Here is the origin of my shame as one of the communities with which I identify most as a bisexual woman is the LGBTQIA+ community. Clearly, I need to widen my knowledge of LGBTQIA+ history beyond UK borders. Regardless, learning about ball culture, the related house families that took in young, queer Black and Latinx people, and hearing Jose Xtravaganza speak about his own experiences with the House of Xtravaganza (of which he is now the Father) was both enlightening and emotive. I later went on to watch Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, which offers an intimate portrayal of multiple drag balls and speaks to numerous queens about their backgrounds and their experiences of being drag queens in New York City. It is an amazing and incredibly emotional documentary. It also expanded upon the Reply All podcast for me, in that the queens in Paris is Burning explain the meaning behind many more popular terms used at drag balls, almost all of which I have seen and heard used online today. I recommend that you watch the documentary for a better understanding than I can provide in a short blog post.

The main thing that irritates me about the popular culture usage of ‘yas’ and other drag terms is not the fact that they have been popularised, per se, but that they have been popularised at the expense of their cultural heritage. I have no problem with multitudes of people using these words, but they have no idea of the atmosphere in which they were birthed. The vast majority of people using these words don’t understand why the subculture from which they come came into being; they don’t appreciate the immense hardships that these groups of people faced, or the relief of the sense of belonging that using these words and understanding them within gay culture gave. They are now part of mass culture. It feels almost as if by absorbing and appropriating gay language, popular culture has subsumed gay subculture, taken what it wanted, and spat the gay people out as ‘still not accepted’. It doesn’t come from a place of welcoming acceptance of gay culture and inclusion of popular slang used by the gay community with knowledge of the words’ heritage; it just lifts the word and erases its past and present as a ‘gay’ word. Homophobic people, transphobic people, biphobic people – people who are just unnaccepting of any and all parts of queer life and the queer subculture use ‘yas’ both online and in real life.

It is ironic in a way that a word with a queer history exists in the mouths of people who would absolutely ‘gag’ – in the basic sense of the word – and wash away all traces of it if they knew it had been used to celebrate drag queens and positive queer youth culture. But it also just stings. Part of the balls in Harlem was a competition to see if people could ‘pass’ for a certain gender or social class: they played with normative culture, and now one of their celebratory words is normative culture, but without them. It is still used by queer subcultures online, but many of those people are equally as unaware of the origins of one of their most-used words as I was. I think the main thing that saddens me is just that the revival of a word into mass usage doesn’t necessarily mean that social or societal groups are progressing and diversifying, but almost that popular culture is continually homogenising history and subculture into a mulch of ‘accepted’ popular culture. Words are stolen, repurposed, or even used in the way in which they were originally intended, but by different groups of people that cast them as monochromatic.

Popularising gay culture and drag culture is in no way bad when it reflects a more positive attitude towards LGBTQIA+ people: this is incredibly necessary, and a wider occurence of positive attitudes towards queerness would save so many people so much pain. But I don’t feel like that’s what this is. For me, and in my experience, the success of ‘popular gay culture’ like Ru Paul’s Drag Race has been mostly down to a fetishization and exoticising of gay culture for a straight, cisgendered audience who want to ogle the exiled ‘different’ people and the way in which ‘they’ live. There are, of course, LGBTQIA+ people who adore Ru Paul and feel represented by it, but its encouragement of stereotypes and high-performance ‘gayness’ has often been a turn-off for me and others in my own life. I do not speak for everyone and I am not trying to, but this is my personal discomfort with the ways in which ‘popular gay culture’ is sold.

I think that by educating anyone and everyone who uses the word ‘yas’, or any of the other terminology that originates in drag culture, we could solve the problem of it being appropriative. That way, those who are accepting of its origins and willing to continue the process of educating others can continue to use the words, fully aware of their history, and anyone who is upset by gay or drag culture will probably dislike the taste of ‘yas’, and cease to use it, thus eliminating the appropriation.

 

Some links for further reading/ watching:

• Paris is Burning can be found on Netflix.
• Reply All podcast number 69: Disappeared. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/
• https://www.pride.com/movies/2015/5/20/10-things-paris-burning-taught-us
• Drag terminology explained:  https://www.reddit.com/r/rupaulsdragrace/comments/1zpy2z/drag_terminology_explained_for_the_newbies_like_me/
• An interesting article by Edward Canlon about Dorian Corey, one of the stars of Paris is Burning. TW for disturbing events. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935316?seq=12#page_scan_tab_contents

Janelle Monáe: An analysis of the official short film entitled ‘Many Moons’.

This analysis of Monáe’s short film will be split into two sections: the first my initial thoughts and interpretations, and the second some further thoughts informed by reading Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s ‘Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race’, published in Camera Obscura number 70;  Daylanne K. English’s and Alvin Kim’s  ‘Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monae’s Neo-Afrofuturism’ from American Studies 52.4; and John Calvert’s ‘Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism’, published by The Quietus. All three essays are linked at the end of this post. To give a brief background to ‘Many Moons’ for readers who may not be acquainted with either the film or Monáe herself, the feature takes place in the last remaining city on Earth, Metropolis, in the year 2719. Monáe’s character is Android No. 57821 – Cindi Mayweather – who is already branded a rebel for falling in love with a human, and for leading an enlightened android rebellion, a key part of which was creating ‘a rebellious new form of pop music known as cybersoul’ (quotation taken from the liner notes of the Metropolis EP). This ‘cybersoul’ is exemplified in ‘Many Moons’.

Upon first listening to the track and watching the official video (fan-made versions and videos ‘inspired’ by Monáe’s also exist on YouTube), I was first struck by the video’s pixellation, which is clearly visible even when watching the HD 2009 version, rather than the original 360p 2008 incarnation. Presumably, then, the visible pixels are a deliberate artistic choice. The reason this struck me particularly is because the video is intended to be set in 2719, by which time technology may be expected to have advanced beyond what we call high-definition today, let alone the now-outdated 2009 offering. However, I then realised the immediate effect that actually seeing the pixels has: it forces the viewer to consciously recognise the screen at which we are looking. We are aware of the technology we are using, causing additional attention to be directed towards the technology featured in the video and the use, or lack of, digital screens and machines. Pushing deeper, the antiquated sensation that looking at pixels produces (I myself spent a good two or three minutes selecting the 720p HD setting on YouTube, then refreshing the video and trying again when it appeared not to load) highlights the temporality of the setting, and the transient, disposable nature of technology: we become hyper-aware of the age of Monáe’s video, and the disconnect between the year 2719 and seeing pixels. Once we have ascertained that yes, whatever device we are watching on is not malfunctioning, and yes, there was HD video in 2009, these pixels can only be attributed to the time portrayed within the narrative of the film – 2719 Metropolis then takes on a monochrome tarnish of age, like an iPhone X running iOS 3. From the first few seconds, it feels that there is something unsettlingly technologically antediluvian about this supposedly futuristic world. When the parade of available Android women of colour up for auction begins, the ‘something’ is given a name.

From here, the essays mentioned above offer a deeper understanding of Monáe’s use of technology and the invocation of the slave trade by exploring race as technology. ‘Technology’ as I understand it so far may here be defined as something that is used as a tool; it can be employed to benefit a section of society by creating images and categories, or individually to build a performed persona. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay in Camera Obscura particularly sets out how viewing race as technology separates itself as a ‘body of scholarship’ from viewing race as a biological or cultural phenomenon. Specifically, she states that ‘it [considering race as technology] also highlights the fact that race has never been simply biological or cultural, but rather a means by which both are established and negotiated.’. Looking then at ‘Many Moons’, by performing as Cindi Mayweather, Lady Maestra: Master of the Show Droids, and as every other female Android in the film, Monáe visually harnesses the element of technology as a means of exposing the way in which the black female body is commodified and consumed as a purchasable entity in society. As she pushes a switch at her temple at 0:39, her skin changes from pure white to her natural colour, signalling the beginning of her perfomance; from this it may be interpreted that there are expectations of how one should perform as a black woman in society. The character of Mayweather, however, refuses to conform to these trends, and the Metropolis saga (continued across multiple EPs and albums) presents a harnessing of race as technology for revolutionary ends.

I could write a very long essay about the musicality and political elements of Monáe’s work, but I will end this post here. Please see below for links to all essays mentioned for further reading, and to the HD version of ‘Many Moons’ on Monáe’s YouTube channel.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race’:  http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/content/24/1_70/7.full.pdf

Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim, ‘Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monae’s Neo-Afrofuturism’:  file:///C:/Users/Student/Downloads/4475-8068-1-PB.pdf

John Calvert, ‘Janelle Monáe: A New Pioneer Of Afrofuturism’:  http://thequietus.com/articles/04889-janelle-mon-e-the-archandroid-afrofuturism

Janelle Monáe, ‘Many Moons’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZyyORSHbaE