21st-century hip hop feminist scholarship now spans beyond Black American idioms to include global gender dynamics. However, US-centric racial frameworks often obscure local constructions of power and gendered systems. A nuanced understanding of international hip hop feminism requires analyzing the interplay between localization and gender expression. Positioned as a geographic and culturally distinct outlier to the mainland United States, Hawaiʻi offers a compelling case study on the intersection of domestic status and outsider identity, underpinned by a local culture rooted in Indigenous Hawaiian values that seek to reclaim power as opposed to equality within a colonial patriarchal system. This paper serves as an initial investigation into establishing a theoretical basis for a Hawaiʻi hip hop feminist framework. I argue that the Hawaiʻi emcees analyzed in this study localize hip hop music through processes that intertwine equitable gender values (mana wāhine), sovereignty narratives (ea), and deeply felt place-based connections (aloha ʻāina) to the point that one becomes inseparable from the other. Through the analysis of lyrical texts, vocal techniques, and embodied practices I suggest that the potential for gender parity could serve as a definitive characteristic of Hawaiʻi hip hop, thereby distinguishing it within the global hip hop landscape. This research is based on observations at live performances, cyber ethnography, and interviews with artists recently active in the city of Honolulu. In this presentation, I expand upon extant studies on sonic resistance strategies in the Pacific by providing an in-depth analysis on how female gender expression contributes to this discourse.

In light of recent attempts by city officials to rejuvenate Boston’s nightlife economy, this paper examines one subcultural scene—underground techno—with a foundational role in global nightlife culture, yet a complicated relationship with Boston. I investigate how the city’s material and regulatory constraints shape the formation and sustenance of underground techno, highlighting the importance of local collectives. Despite a young and transient population, a comparative lack of infrastructure, and strict legal codes, the scene has nonetheless persisted. While existing scene studies tend to highlight either the social (community, identity) or the spatial (urban geography, venues), this paper analyzes how material constraints force the social to adapt to external pressures, revealing how distributed agency across human and non-human actors contributes to subcultural scene formation. Actor-Network Theory, Dynamical Systems Theory, and spatial theory help identify the emergent self-organization of socio-material networks, reframing genres, collectives, and scenes as dynamic processes rather than static categories. Drawing from autoethnography and interviews with organizers, DJs, and dancers, I argue that subcultural scenes materialize through the repetition and iteration (both key sonic aspects of techno) of networks—the same process by which space becomes place. As humans confront a rapidly shifting technological horizon compounded by increasing isolation, understanding the forces that keep people connected becomes crucial. Ultimately, it is the momentary 1-to-1 connection between two individuals confirming each other’s realities that seeds any network, which through continual reproduction and iteration, reaches temporary states of consolidation that we register as genres, collectives, scenes, and places.

Queer subcultures have seen various degrees of resurgence post pandemic. The furry community has had to grapple with a sudden surge in convention attendance, caused in part by rising popular musicians identifying as furry artists. Issues surrounding growing attendance numbers, seen recently at Bewhiskered and Anthrocon, go beyond financial. Organizers for these recent furry conventions have outright banned the existence of “room parties”, a practice that has historically included do-it-yourself music performances to showcase independent Furry artists, pointing to concerns of safety, optics, and noise. The relationships between hierarchies of sound ecology are cross-examined with hierarchies of queer coalition building. Fieldwork and archival footage lead to listening to furry convention sound ecology as a site for coalition building through points of collision with history, space, the intrapersonal, and the institutions of music. History’s collision is addressed through comparative sound analysis of archival recordings of furry convention spaces in the 80s and 90s with field recordings at Bewhiskered 2026 and Anthrocon 2026, highlighting how changes in community structure dictate sound ecology, which in turn dictate one’s intrapersonal relation to identities. Convention organizers thus reinforce institutions of music through their committal to top-down structures, causing fissure with previously established networks of DIY events by enacting officially organized concerts and raves at conventions. Tracing how larger discourses of queer optics actualize themselves as sonic objects and absences lead to a problematization of queer hierarchical community structures and their power to shape space as a field for identity building and queer coalition.

From hip hop to reggaeton to bhangra, the autonomous bass-and-drum grooves providing the foundation for global dance beats follow precedents set by Jamaican dancehall rhythms, whose earliest manifestations reveal aesthetic roots in the brief but pivotal period of stylistic innovation glossed as rocksteady. While often represented as little more than a transitional style between ska and reggae, due to the “essential Americanness” that such researchers as Lloyd Bradley hear in its soul-influenced vocals, rocksteady looms large in oral-historical accounts of prominent musicians, who place the emergence of the foregrounded, often percussive electric basslines and the one-drop drum-set conception—which Kenneth Bilby considers fundamental to the “re-indigenization” of the music—firmly within its seminal developmental ambit. In this paper, I draw upon artist interviews, ethnographic field research, and musicological analysis to cast new light upon the development of rocksteady’s startlingly original bass conceptions, which abandoned the walking basslines of African American jazz and boogie-woogie, in favor of locally conceived paradigms evincing noteworthy affinities to roots-drumming traditions like nyabinghi, while owing surprisingly little to the Motown/Stax-era soul models avowedly embraced by the musicians. As I demonstrate, from the time of their appropriation by the Muscle Shoals production team in the States—predating reggae’s rise to international prominence with Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” or Jimmy Cliff’s “Harder They Come” —rocksteady rhythms helped set in motion cycles of cross-fertilization blurring the boundaries between local and global, national and international, and ultimately leaving a distinctive Jamaican imprint upon cosmopolitan dance culture worldwide.