Kinetic Identities: Understanding Doechii’s Genre-Fluid Digital Works through Body Motion (2025)

I grew up with the pads of my fingertips pressed against a touch screen, where the ridges of my DNA met the threshold between the material and immaterial. But this barrier was never a border between life and fiction. Instead of a novel escape vortex from the world, the internet was an extension of my reality. There was never a real transition between solely existing in the physical and fragmenting into a hybrid digital-organic entity, or, as Cyberfeminists call it, a Cyborg. Hybridity is inescapable as a Filipino-American; my body learned how to play like my childhood friends in my white, suburban hometown, but would point with a pout like it was born and raised in the Philippines. My body rests in tension, and the internet extends the tension to the intangible. Similarly, my creative tendencies as an artist are eclectic due to this exposure to an infinite, limitless digital world where one can hop between musical genres, scenes, and practices. To me, genre to the artist mirrors identity to the body; it is intersectional, dynamic, and expansive. It belongs to a lineage yet charts its own path. 

Existing research on the relationship between music and the body, while ever-growing, remains isolated from identity, consequently assuming homogenous bodily performances and experiences. We recognize a connection between the body and understanding/perceiving music. As Godøy and Leman write in Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, “We experience and understand the world, including music, through body movement–when we hear something, we are able to make sense of it by relating it to our body movements, or form an image in our minds of body movements” (Godøy and Leman 2010, 3). Furthermore, we explore how we view movement as an indicator of performance quality. In the 2017 study, “Body Sway Reflects Leadership in Joint Music Performance,” researchers found that “...performers' ratings of the 'goodness' of their performances were positively correlated with the overall degree of body sway coupling, indicating that communication through body sway reflects perceived performance success.” (Chang et al. 2017, E4136) 

This research fails to acknowledge and celebrate the marginalized bodies creating impactful work, and risks flattening their depth due to our lack of understanding. This is the case for the queer, Black, female-identifying, genre-fluid artist, Doechii. Although she receives well-deserved recognition, many online critics still misinterpret her artistry due to a lack of attention to bodily expression. In this paper, I propose that the fluidity of genre and self-expression in internet culture has made body movement even more central to how we understand music as an intersectional, interdisciplinary art form. By examining Doechii’s digital work through existing research on body movement, genre, and digital culture, I aim to reveal how body motion shares a symbiotic relationship with sound; it is not a product of performance, nor a means of sound-making, but an integrated component of an artist’s work and identity.