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AbstractUsing methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as "country boys." In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric—in this case, that something or someone "is not racist"—even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith's success, particularly since he is best known for his "redneck" alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.

This article exposes the role of expressive culture in the rise and spread of late twentieth-century Hindu identity politics. I examine how Hindu nationalism is fuelled by an affective attachment to the Indian classical dancer. I analyse the affective logics that have crystallised around the now iconic Indian classical dancer and have situated her gendered and athletic body as a transnational, globally circulating emblem of an authentic Hindu and Indian national identity. This embodied identity is represented by the historical South Indian temple dancer and has, in the postcolonial era, been rebranded as the nationalist classical dancer—an archetype I refer to as the modern courtesan. I connect the modern courtesan to transnational forms of identity politics, heteropatriarchal marriage economies, as well as pathologies of gender violence. In so doing, I examine how the affective politics of 'Hinduism' have functionally weaponised the Indian dancing body. I argue that the nationalist and now transnationalist production of the classical dancer-courtesan exposes misogyny and casteism and thus requires a critical feminist dismantling. This article combines ethnographic fieldwork in classical dance studios in India and the United States with film and popular media analysis to contribute to critical transnational feminist studies, as well as South Asian gender, performance and media studies.