Amena Johnson (she/her) is an educator, community organizer, and cultural strategist whose work sits at the intersection of Black history, queer theory, and embodied storytelling. She is the creator of Queer Hip Hop, a course she developed for Georgetown University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program that asks not whether hip hop is queer, but how deeply it always has been. With over two decades of experience in LGBTQ advocacy, higher education, and community engagement, she has trained educators and nonprofit service providers on diversity and inclusion. A speaker, facilitator, and cultural consultant, Dr. Johnson brings scholarship and performance together as complementary tools for justice. She currently serves as LGBTQ Liaison for Montgomery County, Maryland, and sits on the board of Appomattox for Equality.
Project: Slaying Without Credit (working title)
Hip hop is one of the most commercially dominant cultural forces in the world, and one of the most misunderstood in terms of its origins. This research argues that hip hop did not emerge from a vacuum. It was nourished by an ecosystem of Black and Latinx queer creativity spanning disco, house music, ballroom culture, street fashion, and vernacular language. As the genre ascended commercially, those queer roots were systematically erased. A pattern emerged of cultural extraction inseparable from the intersecting forces of homophobia, misogyny, anti-Blackness, and capitalist music industry greed. Slaying Without Credit traces this story across five interconnected domains. Sonically, hip hop’s most immediate ancestor, disco, was born in queer Black and Latinx clubs, and the “disco sucks” backlash of the late 1970s was as much a homophobic purge as a musical shift. Aesthetically, the performance vocabulary, competitive structure, and concept of “realness” developed in ballroom culture permeated hip hop’s visual and performative identity. Linguistically, ballroom vernacular, slay, shade, serving, werk, fierce, now saturates global popular culture, almost never traced to the queer Black communities who coined it. Economically, the music industry monetized this extraction while its originators remained marginalized. And through a hip hop feminist framework, this research holds space for the contradictions, nuances, and uncomfortable truths that respectable discourse refuses to hold. This research feeds directly into a live performance work that enacts the same argument through embodied storytelling, DJ culture, spoken word, and drag performance. The Queer Black Femme body is itself a site of knowledge production, and this project treats it accordingly. To understand hip hop’s gender politics, you must understand its queer roots. Recovering that history is not merely academic. It is an act of gender and racial justice.