“There Were Females That Danced Too”: Uncovering the Role of Women in Breaking History

The dominant narrative regarding breaking history is that the dance developed as an “exclusively male” expression of inner-city “machismo.” In this study, I challenge this narrative by bringing in the voices of breaking's often-neglected founding practitioners. By juxtaposing primary testimonies with mainstream representations, I aim to show how women have histoirically played a critical role in the dance, and how hegemonic discourse has obscured our understanding of hip-hop's beginnings. I also consider how uncovering the role of women in breaking's history reframes prevailing conceptualizations of its gender performance.

We Are All Made

John Fletcher and William Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (ca. 1613–1614) includes a version of the anti-masque morris dance from Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, part of the nuptial celebration for King James’s daughter. When transferred to the stage, the dance became a commodity with multivalent appeal. If the court anti-masque parodically appropriated the folk dance, then as the stage reappropriated the dance, it weakened the parody and applied a new sheen of court association, selling the opportunity to experience part of a well-known royal event. At the same time, the dance’s success within the play makes an argument for the skill of both the middling sort and the players who act them. Finally, the dance provides a venue for the expression of female cross-class desire, which, unlike the destructive male expression of desire through combat, brings social and economic success to its participants.

The costs of being male: are there sex-specific effects of uniparental mitochondrial inheritance?

Eukaryotic cells typically contain numerous mitochondria, each with multiple copies of their own genome, the mtDNA. Uniparental transmission of mitochondria, usually via the mother, prevents the mixing of mtDNA from different individuals. While on the one hand, this should resolve the potential for selection for fast-replicating mtDNA variants that reduce organismal fitness, maternal inheritance will, in theory, come with another set of problems that are specifically relevant to males. Maternal inheritance implies that the mitochondrial genome is never transmitted through males, and thus selection can target only the mtDNA sequence when carried by females. A consequence is that mtDNA mutations that confer male-biased phenotypic expression will be prone to evade selection, and accumulate. Here, we review the evidence from the ecological, evolutionary and medical literature for male specificity of mtDNA mutations affecting fertility, health and ageing. While such effects have been discovered experimentally in the laboratory, their relevance to natural populations—including the human population—remains unclear. We suggest that the existence of male expression-biased mtDNA mutations is likely to be a broad phenomenon, but that these mutations remain cryptic owing to the presence of counter-adapted nuclear compensatory modifier mutations, which offset their deleterious effects.

Dntf-2r, a Young Drosophila Retroposed Gene With Specific Male Expression Under Positive Darwinian Selection

A direct approach to investigating new gene origination is to examine recently evolved genes. We report a new gene in the Drosophila melanogaster subgroup, Drosophila nuclear transport factor-2-related (Dntf-2r). Its sequence features and phylogenetic distribution indicate that Dntf-2r is a retroposed functional gene and originated in the common ancestor of D. melanogaster, D. simulans, D. sechellia, and D. mauritiana, within the past 3-12 million years (MY). Dntf-2r evolved more rapidly than the parental gene, under positive Darwinian selection as revealed by the McDonald-Kreitman test and other evolutionary analyses. Comparative expression analysis shows that Dntf-2r is male specific whereas the parental gene, Dntf-2, is widely expressed in D. melanogaster. In agreement with its new expression pattern, the Dntf-2r putative promoter sequence is similar to the late testis promoter of β2-tubulin. We discuss the possibility that the action of positive selection in Dntf-2r is related to its putative male-specific functions.

The molecular through ecological genetics of abnormal abdomen in Drosophila mercatorum. VI. The non-neutrality of the Y chromosome rDNA polymorphism.

An association between quantitative variation of rDNA on the Y chromosome and male expression of the juvenilized, adult cuticle of the abnormal abdomen syndrome has been found for Drosophila mercatorum. Many pleiotropic effects of this syndrome have been described previously for females, but little was known about possible pleiotropic effects in males. The effects on males open up new avenues for the action of natural selection operating on the system. In females, the syndrome causes an increase in egg-to-adult development time, precocious sexual maturation, increased fecundity and decreased longevity. In addition to the cuticle phenotype, in males abnormal abdomen causes delayed sexual maturation, increased longevity, and decreased mating success, yet no change in egg-to-adult development time. Thus the syndrome has opposing fitness effects in the two sexes, which may help explain the genetic polymorphism observed in this system. Although investigated intensively, associations between naturally occurring Y-linked polymorphism and fitness phenotypes have not been found in Drosophila melanogaster.