It’s All in the Name: Hip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Making of a Hip Hop Dancer

Abstract

It’s All in the NameHip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Making of a Hip Hop Dancer Carol E. Henderson (bio) [A]s evidenced by the zombie-like stare in my neighbor’s eyes, the ghetto’s dues for emotional immunity is high. —Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost Despite the diversity of fans and artists on the commercial margins, then, the public struggle over hip hop is waged over the images, stories, and market power associated with black male and black female bodies. —Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars Hip hop has long been a lightning rod for discussions of black womanhood and sexuality. Such conversations were more cordial in the 1980s and 1990s when the landscape of hip hop included the voices of female MCs and deejays who, in the words of the Queen and Monie Love, “[were] the ones to give birth/To the new generation of prophets because it’s Ladies First.”1 These affirmations of black femininity, self-respect, and self-love were echoed by rap artists such as MC Lyte, Lauryn Hill, neo-soul psalmists Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, among others, who proclaim, as Hill does in “Everything is Everything”—“From the beginning/My practice extending across the atlas/ I begat this/flippin’ in the ghetto on a dirty mattress/You can’t match this [End Page 47] rapper/actress/More powerful than two Cleopatras/MCs ain’t ready to take it to the Serengeti/My rhymes is heavy like the mind of Sister Betty [Shabazz].”2 Hill’s nod to African history—her allegiance to the cultural strength and regal dignity of African women such as Cleopatra and Sister Betty Shabazz—her reference to “dirty mattresses” and “the ghetto” encapsulates in rhythmic cadence the complex and creative journey of “spitting rhymes” in unladylike spaces. More to the point, Hill—and likewise her contemporaries—draws on the strength of those who came before her to exhibit a gracefulness fashioned from challenging situations—a self-assurance that turns a negative into a positive—a self-confidence that allows a “rose” to grow from concrete.3 However, in recent years, a changeling has appeared. Instead of ladies first, it is skeezas, gold diggers, sac chasers, and chicken heads at the front of the line. The very change in the ascriptive language afforded to many a young sistah—language deemed acceptable and socially relevant in certain circles—directs attention to the politics of naming, and how rewrapping the black female body in the cloak of raunchy liberalism has caused a stutter in the very ways in which we collectively dialogue about our personhood. But, of course, these conversations aren’t new. Even in the nirvana of hip hop bliss, there were rumblings and eruptions of the nasty girl—that rapper that uses her sexual wiles and feminine flesh—her brash bravado—to gain an upper hand on her male nemesis and/or female rival. Rappers like Lil’ Kim, Trina, Foxy Brown, and Missy Elliott extol the “virtues” of “punanny power”—that unbridled capacity to, in the words of Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, “work it” standing up, lying down, or on all fours. Sex becomes, in this instance, the instrument of choice—a mechanism that unveils the Achilles heels of men who are “hard” in public, but behind closed doors, succumb to the skilled exploits of women “gifted” to perform sexual fantasies that border on the sadomasochistic and pornographic. Likewise, this same sexual power can expose the weakness of female rivals who are not willing to engage in such acts or take it to the next level in an effort to “one up” their competition. Both maneuvers are performed in an effort to “procure the capital and currency represented by the fame, power, and riches of the hip hop star,” as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points out. This currency is then “consumed, collected, and cosseted between [the] thighs and lips” of women driven to negotiate and renegotiate in the landmine of polemical and contradictory impulses.4 These reinscriptions of the identity markers that determine how “around-the-way” girls or “ghetto chicks” will be viewed and positioned in the...