Dirty South Feminism: The Girlies Got Somethin’ to Say Too! Southern Hip-Hop Women, Fighting Respectability, Talking Mess, and Twerking Up the Dirty South

Adeerya Johnson

doi:10.3390/rel12111030

Abstract

Within southern hip-hop, minimal credit has been given to the Black women who have curated sonic and performance narratives within the southern region. Many southern hip-hop scholars and journalists have centralized the accomplishments and masculinities of southern male rap performances. Here, dirty south feminism works to explore how agency, location, and Black women’s rap (lyrics and rhyme) and dance (twerking) performances in southern hip-hop are established under a contemporary hip-hop womanist framework. I critique the history of southern hip-hop culture by decentralizing male-dominated and hyper-masculine southern hip-hop identities. Second, I extend hip-hop feminist/womanist scholarship that includes tangible reflections of Black womanhood that emerge out of the South to see how these narratives reshape and re-inform representations of Black women and girls within southern hip-hop culture. I use dirty south feminism to include geographical understandings of southern Black women who have grown up in the South and been sexually shamed, objectified and pushed to the margins in southern hip-hop history. I seek to explore the following questions: How does the performance of Black women’s presence in hip-hop dance localize the South to help expand narratives within dirty south hip-hop? How can the “dirty south” as a geographical place within hip-hop be a guide to disrupt a conservative hip-hop South through a hip-hop womanist lens?

Highlights

Dirty south feminism works to centralize the importance of Black womanhood and girlhood through performances of twerking and booty shaking, and southern lyrical themes that situate understandings of the agency and lived realities of Black women who engage in southern culture
The underlying theme of dirty south feminism works to explore and uplift what southern Black womanhood and girlhood means while studying the impact of race, class, religion, gender and sexuality that emerges through performances of southern hip-hop dance cultures
Black women disrupt respectability within southern hip-hop while supporting the sexual, economic, and geographical politics of the dirty south through the public sphere, bringing wreck and southern performances and culture. My understanding of this phenomenon through dirty south feminism is grounded in the process of thinking about the socio-political and cultural space of southern hip-hop expression and identity in which

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations When it comes to the dirty south, the place-based hip-hop subculture includes dance/party-based music, skating rinks, strip clubs, luxury Cadillac cars, and often objectifying women through pimp personas and misogynoir with hypersexual lyrics. The foundation of the musical and cultural traditions that make southern hip-hop different regionally is the southern economics with ties to slavery, carceral history and modernity that shapes Black southern identity, which emerges in the music and all five of the pillars of hip-hop. I argue through the literature surrounding dirty south feminism that Black women and girls disrupt respectability politics within southern hip-hop while providing sexual, economic, and political support through their lyrical and performative contributions

Dirty South Feminism and the Women of the South

Southern Girl and Atlanta

Battling the Heteronormativity and Respectability

Conclusions