Notions of hip-hop authenticity often rely on the construction of the rapper as a black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man. Artists that fall outside of this “normative” identity, including black women, white men and women, and queer and trans individuals, employ performance strategies that engage with and challenge this construction in order to render themselves legible to hip-hop audiences. Taking as its starting point the many scholarly discourses surrounding the performer Beyoncé, this dissertation examines several of these strategies through a series of case studies that combine reception history with musical, textual, and visual analysis.