Illustration by Z.Hill of Rhyanes entering juvenile prison
Creative Expressions of Masculinity
In & Out of Juvenile Detention
This summer HHA instructor Lecroy Rhyanes is teaching at the UTEP College of Liberal Arts. Check the hashtag #TBW2016cj. Below is a course description and history.
This hybrid course will explore how incarcerated youth express gender identity through the creative arts. We will pay particular attention to how such youth understand and articulate what it means to be a man. Students in this course will analyze primary sources, including poetry recordings, Hip Hop music, and stories created by incarcerated youth from the borderlands.
Course meetings will take place once a week in the evening face to face along with an interactive online learning component that will utilize both multi and social-media resources. Online work will consist of reflective responses to the course text titled Hidden Truth, Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison by Adam Reich and The Beat Within, a weekly publication of writing and art from incarcerated youth. The Beat Within, founded in 1996, shortly after the death of Hip Hop icon Tupac Shakur, celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2016.
The primary sources to be utilized for this course date back to the Instructor Lecroy Rhyanes’ volunteer activities inside of juvenile detention centers in El Paso, Texas and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Between 2006-2014, Rhyanes encouraged incarcerated youth to write poetry to send to The Beat Within and recorded hundreds of poems, Hip Hop songs, and music composed by the youth. The primary goal was to engage youth in creative learning and share the recordings amongst the youth in the prison, their families, the prison staff, and the community. The program was called Voices Behind Walls (VBW), a volunteer creative expression and arts program.
Students in this course will analyze how creative expression programs such as VBW, The Beat Within, and The Hidden TREWTH - Reich’s newspaper program facilitated inside juvenile detention - help incarcerated youth reflect on who they are and where they’re from. Primary sources, such as the VBW recordings will provide examples of how male youth living on the border understand themselves, their lives, and who they are as men through rhyme. Most of the incarcerated youth that participated in VBW, we will discover understand masculinity through Hip Hop, and these “Hip Hop masculinities” are inseparable from criminalized understandings of maleness (to be tough, violent, or gangsta). At the same time, Hip Hop is also inseparable from its ability to reconnect youth to community, knowledge of self, and using creative expression as restorative practice. With these ideas in mind, this course ultimately aims to explore the possibilities of creative expression as well as how incarcerated youth experience and articulate gender.
Course meetings will take place once a week in the evening face to face along with an interactive online learning component that will utilize both multi and social-media resources. Online work will consist of reflective responses to the course text titled Hidden Truth, Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison by Adam Reich and The Beat Within, a weekly publication of writing and art from incarcerated youth. The Beat Within, founded in 1996, shortly after the death of Hip Hop icon Tupac Shakur, celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2016.
The primary sources to be utilized for this course date back to the Instructor Lecroy Rhyanes’ volunteer activities inside of juvenile detention centers in El Paso, Texas and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Between 2006-2014, Rhyanes encouraged incarcerated youth to write poetry to send to The Beat Within and recorded hundreds of poems, Hip Hop songs, and music composed by the youth. The primary goal was to engage youth in creative learning and share the recordings amongst the youth in the prison, their families, the prison staff, and the community. The program was called Voices Behind Walls (VBW), a volunteer creative expression and arts program.
Students in this course will analyze how creative expression programs such as VBW, The Beat Within, and The Hidden TREWTH - Reich’s newspaper program facilitated inside juvenile detention - help incarcerated youth reflect on who they are and where they’re from. Primary sources, such as the VBW recordings will provide examples of how male youth living on the border understand themselves, their lives, and who they are as men through rhyme. Most of the incarcerated youth that participated in VBW, we will discover understand masculinity through Hip Hop, and these “Hip Hop masculinities” are inseparable from criminalized understandings of maleness (to be tough, violent, or gangsta). At the same time, Hip Hop is also inseparable from its ability to reconnect youth to community, knowledge of self, and using creative expression as restorative practice. With these ideas in mind, this course ultimately aims to explore the possibilities of creative expression as well as how incarcerated youth experience and articulate gender.
