Twerking
Twerking (/ˈtwɜːrkɪŋ/; possibly from 'to work') is a type of dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving throwing or thrusting the hips back or shaking the buttocks, often in a low squatting stance.
[8] As a tradition shaped by local aid and pleasure clubs, block parties and second lines,[9] the dance was central to "a historical situating of sissy bounce—bounce music as performed by artists from the New Orleans African-American community that [led to] a meteoric rise in popularity post-[Hurricane Katrina after 2005].
"[10] In the 1990s, twerking had widespread appeal in black party culture throughout the hip-hop/rap region known as The Dirty South, including New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, Virginia Beach, Miami, and Atlanta.
[14][15] The Oxford English Dictionary defines an early 19th-century use of the word as a blend of "twist" (or "twitch") and "jerk", which was reported by the BBC in conjunction with the black cultural context.
[21] The Oxford English Dictionary defines twerking as dancing "in a sexually provocative manner, using thrusting movements of the bottom and hips while in a low, squatting stance".
[22] Merriam-Webster gives the definition as a "sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting".
‘The only dance that was permitted during times of Spanish rule’, mapalé became associated with rebellion through its liberatory insistence on the body’s value as a vector for the transmission of ancestral knowledge (Davila 2009, 120).
[8]‘Where dance on a social level was criminalized, in Mapalé, it continues to be an indestructible force of Afro-Colombian identity within the fabric of the Atlantic Coast’ (Davila 2009, 134).
[8]Other ‘serpentine’ dances that presaged twerk are the Georgia crawl and ‘the sensuous grind’ called ballin’ the jack, both with their heyday in the nineteen-teens (Gaunt 2012, 108; George-Graves 2009, 59; Oliver 1999, 107–108).
In the same period, ‘From Florida came the Swamp Shimmy, in which vigorous undulations of body, hips, and limbs made up for lack of forward movement’ (Oliver 1960, 149).
Enslaved people performed sinuous snake hip and fish tail dances on plantations during festivals and special gatherings, such as celebratory dinners.
[7] In 1992, Panamanian singer Renato recorded the videoclip "El más sensual" (the most sexy), a reggae song with the twerking dance.
In November 2018, the City Girls released a song called "Twerk" featuring rapper Cardi B which peaked on the US Billboard Hot 100 at number 29.
[41] In March 2013, American pop singer Miley Cyrus posted a video on Facebook which featured her performing a twerking routine while wearing a unicorn suit, to the 2011 single "Wop" by J.
Also in March 2013, Mollie King, an English singer-songwriter and lead vocalist of British-Irish girl group The Saturdays, was seen twerking when her bandmate Rochelle Humes uploaded the footage on YouTube.
[44] In September 2013, Hudgens was later seen twerking, this time to the song "Bubble Butt", during her performance at Bootsy Bellows in West Hollywood, with her girl group YLA.
[53] Brown dedicated the song "to all the ladies that like to turn up and have fun," in which he raps "Toes on the wall and her ass in the air / And she twerk that thing like she ain't have a care".
[57][58] In August 2013, the song "Twerk", by Lil Twist, featuring pop singers Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, was leaked online.
[66] Also in September, "Twerk" from the MTV VMA show was named the Top Television Word of the Year (Teleword) of the 2012–2013 TV season by the Global Language Monitor.
[73] In October 2013, Valerie Dixon who was 27 years old, was arrested in Lake County, Florida, because she was twerking and speaking foul language in front of a school bus.
Other arrests in Florida for electric twerking in public include the video blogger Carmel Kitten and two unnamed Canadian tourists.
