CHAPTER 10 The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House: Hip Hop, Young M.A., and Gender Norms

Abstract

Immediately electrifying the rap game, Young M.A. entered the hip hop scene in 2016 and quickly became one of a few openly gay artists to make it big in hip hop. For many LGBT youth, Young M.A. invokes adoration and respect as a long-awaited depiction of the historically excluded queer rapper. For others, she brings controversy. Some critics call out what they perceive to be Young M.A.’s own disdain for women, while dedicated fans interpret it as turning gender on its head by a woman “doing what the men do.” For other listeners, she sparks derision and outright hostility as a reaction to her failure to adhere to expected gender norms. The reaction to Young M.A.’s groundbreaking entry into the hip hop scene represents an important crossroad for a music genre and culture that rebukes racism on one hand, yet often fails to pivot to embrace a progressive vision of gender equality on another. In this chapter, a Black teen and creative writer inspired by Young M.A. and a Black civil rights scholar offer their collective insights on the artist’s lyrics and rise to fame in the hip hop industry. They contend that as long as hip-hop culture shuns those who fail to conform to expected gender norms – norms that are the vestiges of White American culture and perpetuated through legal doctrine – it will fall short of its revolutionary potential to vocalize a radical social justice vision. A hundred years before the hip hop movement began, the United States Supreme Court relied on gross gender norms and stereotypes to exclude women from the practice of law, invoking what one Justice characterized as an “axiomatic truth” that “God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute laws.” The legal enforcement of this type of patriarchal structure is the root of multiple forms of gender discrimination still present today, including misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. Hip Hop’s current embrace of these gender norms is simply “serving the master” by partaking in the subordination of Black girls, Black women, and Black LGBT people. As Audre Lorde brilliantly put it, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”