A sea of green: Gang cosplay and affective belonging at NBA YoungBoy's MASA tour

Authors

  • Andrea A. Lewis University of North Carolina at Greensboro

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2026.3185

Keywords:

Affect, Gang culture, Hip-hop fandom, Live concerts, Participatory culture

Abstract

This autoethnographic article introduces gang cosplay as a framework for understanding the widespread fan practice of wearing gang-coded colors at hip-hop concerts, focusing on lime green bandanas at NBA YoungBoy's 2025 Make America Slime Again tour. Drawing on affect theory, performance studies, and fan studies, I argue that this practice operates as a bounded, participatory ritual through which fans access belonging, joy, and collective identity, while also raising ethical tensions around commodification, risk, and unequal exposure to surveillance.

Downloads

Published

2026-09-14

Issue

Vol. 49 (2026): General

Section

Symposium

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea A. Lewis

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

TWC Nos. 25 onward are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC by 4.0). For an explanation of the journal's reasoning, see the TWC editorial Copyright and Open Access. TWC Nos. 1 through 24 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, with TWC, not the author, retaining copyright.

Presses whose policies require written permission for reproduction should contact the TWC Editor; such permission is routinely given for no fee.