Renegades Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok

Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok explores how hip hop culture -- principally music and dance -- is used to construct and perform identity and maintain a growing urban youth subculture. This community finds its home on Dubsmash, a social media app that lets users record short dance challenge videos before cross-sharing them on different social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat.

Author Trevor Boffone interrogates the roles that Dubsmash, social media, and hip hop music and dance play in youth identity formation in the United States. These so-called Dubsmashers privilege their cultural and individual identities through the use of performance strategies that reinforce notions of community and social media interconnectedness in the digital age. These young people create a sense of identity and community that informs and is informed by hip hop culture. As such, the book argues that Dubsmash serves as a fundamental space to fashion contemporary youth identity. To do this, the book re-appropriates the term "Renegade" to explain the nuanced ways that Dubsmashers take up visual and sonic space on social media apps to self-fashion identity, form supportive digital communities, and exert agency to take up space that is often denied to them in other facets of their lives.

Trevor Boffone is a Lecturer in the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston and a Spanish teacher at Bellaire High School. His work using Dubsmash and TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, ABC News, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood, among numerous national and local media platforms. He is the co-editor of Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theater; Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature; Shakespeare and Latinidad; and Seeking Common Ground: Latinx and Latin American Theatre and Performance.