Hip Hop Feminism Research Articles

Uncovering Black Girlhood(s): Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology

Uncovering Black Girlhood(s):Black Girl Pleasures as Anti-respectability Methodology Porshé R. Garner (bio), Dominique C. Hill (bio), Jessica L. Robinson (bio), and Durell M. Callier (bio) Black girlhood is a site of pleasure, often overlooked, yet visible to those committed to allowing Black girls to just be. It is through our varied work and training in Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) that we, the authors, are reminded and understand Black girls to be creators and innovators working from pleasure.1 Envisioned by Ruth Nicole Brown, SOLHOT, an intentional and intergenerational practice of Black girlhood celebration, creates space for middle-school-aged Black girls to be teachers and collaborators of freedom practices, presence, and what it requires to hold space and the weight of brilliance. Knowing how to create and hold space for Black girls is important because too often Black girls are not allowed to show up whole and with a self-awareness that magnifies their genius and ingenuity. The creation of space for Black girlhood in our research and practice necessitates an anti-respectability methodology rooted in centering Black girlhood pleasures that centers the ways we are in community with each other and what manifests from the community we create. Pleasure, as we know it to be experienced and expressed through our organizing work with SOLHOT, is produced when we dismantle systems of power that seek to infringe on our ability to be our whole selves. Black girlhood pleasure as a method of anti-respectability, then, must move us away from dominant desires to only know Black girls through deficit frames or to name Black girls' vulnerabilities due to their social locations within a society that has never cared for or about Black girls. To do so, we argue, requires a rootedness in Black girls' aesthetics of love, reliability, funk, and performance. Arriving at this mode of anti-respectability methodology required individual and collective unlearning that allowed us to hear Black girls differently. And it is through our listening to Black girls differently and generating theory and praxis based on who Black girls say they are that we have moved away from dominant and [End Page 191] simplistic ways of hearing and attempting to guide Black girls. In this essay we employ those listening practices to reverb what we know differently because of the community we have created with Black girls. Here, we do not claim to speak for all Black girls; rather, we speak to and about the Black girls we have worked with and what they have shared with us. We believe this understanding gives us and social justice advocates a starting point to better comprehend the material conditions for Black girls everywhere while attuning specifically to an often undertheorized population. To think of pleasure as inclusive of but not limited to sexuality, we turn to Jessica Robinson, who in Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader, asks a very important question: "Can we be for Black girls and against their sexuality?"2 Robinson pushes readers to consider sexuality through the lens of comprehensive education and not as demonized actions reserved for adults. We, those who love Black girls, are urged to consider that Black girls themselves have agency and possess the tools necessary to make decisions about their bodies. By understanding the autonomy that Black girls have over their bodies when they are equipped with comprehensive sex education that does not shame their bodies or situate them as receptacles for the pleasures of others, we are able to see Black girls and Black girlhood as whole and complete—emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. This is significant because it opens conversations that are typically closed off from Black girlhood or are often engaged in a way that polices the bodies and decisions of Black girls and views them as "bad," "immoral," or trauma-centered. Her work leads us far from conversations of respectability and challenges us to consider the ways that a more anti-respectability approach would allow Black girls to be central to their own experiences. Anti-respectability has been considered by fields such as Black studies3 and Black girlhood studies.4 When engaging anti-respectability as a methodology...

Divas and deviance: Hip-hop feminism and black visuality in Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006)

abstractThrough a study of Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006), touted as France’s first Hip-hop feminist novel, I argue that Hip-hop aesthetics can be used to find a language, re-negotiate the deviance and pathologies associated with black femininity as either diva-hood or deviance. Using the Hip-hop feminist theory and the critical cultural analysis of black visuality in Nicole Fleetwood’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public (2015), I frame Ekué’s portrayal of Flora D’Almeida, the novel’s heroine, as a negotiation of public images of black femininity in popular culture. I firstly read Flora’s pathological narcissism through Nicole Fleetwood’s association of racial iconicity – diva-hood – with hyperbolic consumption. I then use Hip-hop feminist theory to unpack the consumption practices of Hip-hop culture through the notion of “bling” and the “deviant” image of the video-girl. My final section then examines how denigration and veneration inform Flora’s negotiation of her sexual desire. Throughout the analysis I pay close attention to the novel’s hyperbolic narrative style, sampling of musical and literary references, as well as the re-mixing of linguistic codes to simultaneously represent the particularities of black France in relation to a globally mediated (African-American influenced) public image of blackness.

Envisioning Black Girl Futures

Black girlhood exists in a world that is constantly trying to negate it. Black vernacular traditions, too, allow girls to be considered “fast” or “womanish” based on their perceived desire or sexuality. However, Black girlhood studies presents a space where Black girls can claim their own experiences and futures. This essay engages how Nicki Minaj's “Anaconda” is fertile ground to help demystify Black girls’ possibilities for finding sexual pleasure and self-determination. Using hip-hop feminism, I argue that “Anaconda” presents a Black feminist sexual politics that encourages agency for Black girls, providing a “pinkprint” for finding pleasure in their bodies.

10 Years of Black Girlhood Celebration

Research Article| September 01 2017 10 Years of Black Girlhood Celebration: A Pedagogy of Doing Chamara Jewel Kwakye, Chamara Jewel Kwakye Chamara Jewel Kwakye is a womanist scholar–educator with interdisciplinary interests at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnography, performance, and pedagogy. She has published works on qualitative methods, hip-hop feminist pedagogy, and is currently working on a monograph that examines Black women's pedagogy and praxis of love and labor. Correspondence to: Chamara Jewel Kwakye, c/o The Galloway School, 215 W. Wieuca Road NW, Atlanta, GA 30342, USA. Email: ckwakye@gallowayschool.org. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Dominique C. Hill, Dominique C. Hill Dominique C. Hill is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at Amherst College. She is a body-lyricist, disrupter, and ethnographer committed to socially just and artistic practices. Her teaching and scholarship situates the body as a pivotal vessel and she incites questions that foreground voices, bodies, and knowledges of often disappeared and/or silenced populations. Her current project examines Black girlhood, education, and the body as entanglements. Her interdisciplinary scholarship emerges from her life work, which is dedicated to documenting and reimagining Black life with a focus on Black girls and women. Correspondence to: Dominique C. Hill, Department of Black Studies, Amherst College, 108 Cooper House, 86 College Street, Amherst, MA 01002, USA. Email: dhill@amherst.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Durell M. Callier Durell M. Callier Durell M. Callier is Assistant Professor of critical youth studies and cultural studies of education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. His current research documents, analyzes, and interrogates Black youth lived experiences as it intersects with constructions of race and queerness. In his research and creative projects, he employs feminist and queer methodologies to research how Black and queer communities broadly defined make use of art and narrative towards knowledge creation, staging critical resistance, and actualizing freedom. Correspondence to: Durell M. Callier, Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, 304 McGuffey Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA. Email: calliedm@miamioh.edu.The guest editors would like to begin by expressing their gratitude for girls, women, moments, and visions passed through and circulated in SOLHOT. Thank you to the OG Homegirls, Aisha, Candy, Grenita, Chamara, Jasmine, Christina, and Camille for your courage and commitment. To Ruth Nicole Brown, thank you for insisting Black girlhood studies be a celebration. Generations of Black girlhood celebration exist because of each of you. To the current homegirls/homeboys/homebois and to those to come, this is for you and for future Black girlhood turn-ups in all of their forms—ratchet, bougie, oldskool, analog, digital, and out of this world. Lastly, the guest editors would like to thank Stacy Holman Jones and Sohinee Roy for making such a timely issue on the importance of Black girls, their lives, and survival a possibility. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2017) 6 (3): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2017.6.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Chamara Jewel Kwakye, Dominique C. Hill, Durell M. Callier; 10 Years of Black Girlhood Celebration: A Pedagogy of Doing. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 1 September 2017; 6 (3): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2017.6.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentDepartures in Critical Qualitative Research Search People often ask, “What is Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT)?” Sometimes the answer is it's a poem, sometimes it's a dance, sometimes it's an art installation in a local gallery, sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's a rhyme, sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a lesson on theory and praxis, sometimes it's an article, sometimes it's an editorial, sometimes it's a performance, and sometimes it's a one-word answer. The answer however, no matter the form, is never simple. It's nuanced, layered, multifaceted, and ever changing. If we had to give a succinct and clear answer to the question: “SOLHOT is a space to envision Black girlhood critically among and with Black girls, who… are often the people least guaranteed to be centered as valuable in collective work and social movements.”1 Black girlhood studies, though burgeoning, continues to center the lives of Black girls in various disciplines. The... You do not currently have access to this content.

Translating Chicana Rap: Snow Tha Product

This project examines rap lyrics, interviews, and music videos by Chicana artist Snow Tha Product to show how rap has been culturally translated, performed, and appropriated by females in order to “flip the script,” or subvert the dichotomous model of female sexuality that has been imposed upon them. Weaving insights from three academic fields (cultural translation, Chican@ studies, and hip-hop feminism), this paper also aims to creatively expand the definition of translation by positioning rap music as a performative language in its own right, capable of encoding and translating complex cultural issues related to race, gender, and sexuality.

Class Formation: Beyoncé in Music Video Production

Beyonce is an image icon who presents three different identities in music videos: the singular self, the hybrid self, and the integrated self. Her representations call attention to class performances of racialized gender and sexuality by Black women. Drawing from hip-hop feminism, the author discusses how the singer's shift in representation signaled a shift in the cultural criticism produced about Beyoncé within a ten-year period.

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

Towards a transnational hip-hop feminist liberatory praxis: a view from the Americas

The author argues that hip-hop feminism has come to a point where it needs to take a transnationalist turn if it is going to realize its potential to be a twenty-first century feminist praxis. The author highlights how people speaking from a U.S. American context inadvertently become a global referent for anti-oppression movements and subjectivities. Unfortunately, by virtue of being in one of the centers of global power, becoming a global referent of anti-oppression has the potential to distort and even render invisible the realities of Black women throughout the Americas. Through taking a transnational approach to hip-hop feminism, U.S. based advocates can increase the possibilities for hip-hop feminism to function as a politic of solidarity and mutual empowerment for Black women and girls throughout the Americas. Data are drawn from participant observation and interviews conducted in Havana, Cuba (1998–2010), and São Paulo, Brazil (2008–2013).

Fabulachia: urban, black female experiences and higher education in Appalachia

This article draws on focus group conversations with black female college students attending a small, liberal arts institution in Kentucky. Based primarily on group interviews and discussions, as well as observations and analysis – a theoretical domain (referred to throughout the article as ‘Fabulachia’) emerged as a site-specific outcome of events and ideas regarding race, gender and identity experienced by the research participants. Specifically, ‘Fabulachia’ functions as a theoretical hybrid space in which urban (e.g. ‘ghetto fabulous’) black college student-voices find a sense of empowerment as they construct their own narratives of leaving ‘the hood’ to attend college in rural Appalachia. This project revises and updates previous research on race and rural identity/ies in order to situate the urban black female experience into an Appalachian context. Drawing on hip hop feminism and urban education based theoretical paradigms, the Fabulachia study seeks to give voice to black females in contemporary Appalachia, with attention to their self-proclaimed ‘ghetto fabulous’ identities honed in and through their urban upbringings. The unique experiences of (Fabulachian) black females are an important and largely absent part of larger conversations of the growing body of Urban education research that seeks to situate the black student/black youth and schooling experience in the US. In the Fabulachia study, a group of black female students shared personal narratives (part-oral history and part direct response) to prompts and queries about the role of hip hop culture, race and gender identity in their lives. They also discussed and debated what it means to be a black female in contemporary (often racist) Appalachia, and about how their families and urban surroundings influenced their processes of being and becoming in the context of higher educational achievement.

Naturalizing Male Authority and the Power of the Producer

Hip-hop videos have for some time inspired a substantial amount of academic work investigating how ethnicity and gender is represented. Much has been written about the problematic representations of African-American women in hip-hop videos and how they are reduced to props for the male star (Pough et al., Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, 2007; Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, 2008). Recently several scholars have also examined the representations of black masculinity, and the limited negative stereotypes African-American male artists are offered to embody in these videos (Forman and Neal, That’s the Joint, 2012; Perry, Prophets of the Hood, Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, 2004). A currently under-studied area is the power structures present in the relationship between a male producer and a female artist. In this article I will explore how gender and ethnicity is represented in the relationship between the male producer and the female artist in folk/rock singer Nelly Furtado’s video Promiscuous. In this video the famous Miami producer Timbaland shows up alongside Nelly Furtado. After her second album flopped, Furtado retained Timbaland to produce her third album, Loose, which became her bestselling effort; the single “Promiscuous” became her first number-one US single as well. In the video for the song, Timbaland and Furtado rap and sing a flirtatious dialogue together, and in this article I will compare their professional histories with the video’s representation of Timbaland’s masculinity. Are Furtado and Timbaland presented as equal partners here? How is their potential partnership referred to through the music, lyrics, and images, respectively? As the female star of the video, how is Furtado contrasted with her producer/co-performer? Most importantly, how is the relationship between Furtado and Timbaland presented in this video? I will supply a brief historical background for the relationship between female performers and male producers to shed light on the interaction depicted in Promiscuous. Using audiovisual analysis as my approach, I will identify several strategies in Promiscuous that appear to naturalize male authority in this particular context.

Let Me Blow Your Mind

This essay brings together key theoretical interventions in hip-hop feminism to explore the continued, but undervalued, significance of hip-hop feminism in urban education. More specifically, the essay challenges narrow conceptualizations of the hip hop subject as Black and male by using hip-hop feminist theory to incorporate the lived experiences of Black and Brown girls and women. With a particular emphasis on the realities of violence Black and Brown girls and women, trans*, and queer people confront, I argue for the incorporation of hip hop feminism as a social justice theory and praxis in urban education.

Othering Racialised Femininity in Hip-Hop Journalism

This paper investigates the gender and racial traits of female performative identity in hip-hop journalism. This is achieved through an evaluation of the editorial strategies that inform hip-hop femininity in relation to the commercial agendas of the artists and the record companies and management teams behind them. This paper demonstrates that the editorial and artistic agendas that inform the hip-hop press produce gender and race-specific discourses which Other female hip-hop artists. The methodological approach to the research utilises discourse analysis to investigate narrative texts and images in selected US hip-hop magazines, and qualitative interviews with their main editors and journalists. The analysis indicates that articulations of identity in hip-hop journalism seem rooted in the fetishisation of the Black female body – a strategy of Othering that paradoxically possesses a counter-hegemonic value in its resistant approach to normative gender and race discourses. The journalistic mediations of hip-hop womanhood present, therefore, some of the socio-cultural challenges posed by hip-hop feminism, such as the double jeopardy of the assertive reclamation of female sexuality and the compliance with race-specific sexist discourse. Moreover, this paper shows that notions of gender and race mediated by the hip-hop press are commercially driven, as they appear to be informed by interdependent financial interests of artists, press and record industries. In this context, an important insight is that female artists appear to be complicit in their own Othering through the production of mediated performative identities which undermine their position as authentic performers.

Does Anyone Care about Black Women?

Research Article| September 01 2014 Does Anyone Care about Black Women? Brittney Cooper Brittney Cooper Brittney Cooper is assistant professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers. She specializes in black feminist theory, black women's intellectual history, hip hop feminism and race and gender representations in popular culture. She is also a regular contributor to Salon.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Meridians (2014) 12 (2): 153–155. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.2.153 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Brittney Cooper; Does Anyone Care about Black Women?. Meridians 1 September 2014; 12 (2): 153–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.2.153 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsMeridians Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2014 by Smith College2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reclaiming and Defending a Legacy You do not currently have access to this content.

Hip hop feminism in Sweden: Intersectionality, feminist critique and female masculinity

Hip hop has grown into a worldwide genre in recent decades, often being associated with issues of race and class. However, as research on ‘hip hop feminism’ in the US context demonstrates, the categories of gender and sexuality are no less fundamental. In the growing body of international hip hop research, though, questions about gender have been relatively absent, and relatively little is known about how gender norms are negotiated and challenged in hip hop in Europe. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap in the literature by exploring how women negotiate the gender norms of hip hop in the case of Sweden. To this end, rap lyrics by 12 female rap artists are analysed through poststructuralist discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on intersectionality, feminism within and beyond hip hop, as well as the possibilities and limitations of female masculinity. It is shown how the masculine norms of the genre are simultaneously resisted and resignified as many female rappers incorporate some elements commonly associated with masculinity but mobilize them in their challenging of masculine norms. In this way, complying with the genre interestingly produces a hard and explicit feminism in which ‘all sexist pigs will be slaughtered”.

Developing Critical Hip Hop Feminist Literacies: Centrality and Subversion of Sexuality in the Lives of Black Girls

The present article explores discourses surrounding the bodies of Black1 women and girls as they engage the meanings of Black womanhood in (American) society in an afterschool setting. Drawing on Black and hip hop feminisms, African American literacies, and critical discourse perspectives, the author analyzes two young girls' narratives, which reveal competing and controlling discourses of Black female sexuality. Bria's2 narrative of being sexually harassed by older boys while riding the bus is favorably assessed by the community of Black female interlocutors because she projects herself as asexual. Thus, the community of Black females bestows compassion upon her. Assata's narrative shares her budding womanhood and sexuality and is evaluated negatively by the group of Black females. Although both 11-year-old girls and the community of Black female interlocutors enact critical literacies amidst dominating racist, sexist, classist, and patriarchal discourses, their resistance strategies also perpetuate the very dominance they seek to oppose. Juxtaposition and critical analyses of the differential discourses invoked by the two narratives provide insight into the lived experiences of Black women and girls in relation to dominating discourses. As Black women and girls' sexual agency, desire, and early sexualization figure prominently in larger economies of power, knowledge, and society, their embodied and societal knowledge around these issues must be mined for the purposes of self-validation and the creation of new knowledge for collective empowerment (Hill Collins, 1991). Implications for critical literacy research, pedagogy, and theory are presented.

Ruth Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel Kwakye (eds), Wish to Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader

1 The glaring dropout crisis points to the urgency of re- engaging students with learning, and a wave of educators and cultural workers, influenced by culture, technology, and globalization, has emerged in recent years and reassessed teaching methods and pedagogy. 2 Aiming to disseminate educational practices and to dispute the bias that culture is not an appropriate medium through which to engage youth in learning, Wish to Live: The Hip Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader provides essays, poems, scholarly papers, and performances to effectively incorporate culture into current educational practice. In contrast with the vast majority of education courses and programs that are meant to serve youth, especially in low-income, marginalized, and chronically violent communities, the authors of this reader, Ruth Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel Kwakye, offer a new jack (p.xi) feminist agenda and explore through a critical feminist lens. 3 Their book, which blends pedagogy, gender analysis and LGBT studies, presents diverse, inter-generational and multi-dimensional pedagogies. The contributors are varied, from women working within the sphere to on-the-ground feminists, alongside activists, students, writers, and scholars. Drawing on scholarship from Women's studies, African American studies, and education, Wish To Live joins poetry, autobiographical vignettes and observations into a wholehearted celebration of black girlhood and womanhood in a context of feminism and critical pedagogy. 4 As a Reader, Wish to Live is primarily a book for instruction and practice. It argues that hip-hop, given its importance and aura in the lives of youth, has great potential to influence their educational experiences and provides instances of how it can be used as a critical and culturally relevant pedagogical tool. It is divided into five parts (1: Miseducation; 2: Justice; 3: Performance; 4: People; 5: SOLHOT). The first part, Miseducation, lays the foundation for the rest of the Reader. Consisting of five chapters, it presents and promotes a feminist agenda from a black perspective and passionately illustrates, through inspirational essays (chapter 1) or spoken word performances (chapter 2) why the celebration of black girlhood and womanhood is to be considered essential. Just as importantly, it highlights the necessity for the recognition of present female and queer voices in (chapter 3), rejecting negative stereotypes and counterhegemonic discourse against what Ruth Nicole Brown referred to as hip-hop porn in her 2009 book Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Pedagogy.

The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay

This new directions essay traces the most recent trajectory in the field of hip-hop feminism. To that end, we map the current terrain of hip-hop feminist studies, first by identifying challenges and tensions, then by reviewing current literature and its engagement with these issues, and finally by identifying new and emergent areas for further development of the field. We argue that hip-hop feminism has effectively made space for itself in the broader fields of black and women-of-color feminisms and remains deeply invested in the intersectional approaches developed by earlier black feminists. We also insist that women and girls of color remain central to our analyses, particularly in light of the proliferation of critical masculinity studies within the broader field of hip-hop studies. Furthermore, our discussion of hip-hop feminism contends that within hip-hop feminist studies, hip-hop and feminism act as discrete but constitutive categories that share a dialogic relationship. Rather than treating feminism as though it lends a certain intellectual gravity to hip-hop, we consider how creative, intellectual hip-hop feminist work invites new questions about representation, provides additional insight about embodied experience, and offers alternative models for critical engagement.

“Maybe I’ll Be a Poet, Rapper”: Hip-Hop Feminism and Literary Aesthetics in Push

This article argues that Push is properly read within the tradition of hip-hop feminist literature and aesthetics. The novel’s invocation of hip hop as the cultural backdrop of protagonist Precious’s coming-of-age intervenes in black literary aesthetics in two ways. First, the novel is the first in the tradition of African American women’s literature to offer a protagonist whose primary self-articulation is understood through hip hop, rather than jazz or the blues. Thus I argue that this text both takes up the cultural project of making space for hip-hop music begun in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and acts as a critique of the way that Morrison invokes (or rather doesn’t invoke) hip-hop culture a decade later in Love . Second, however, I contend that this text intervenes in male-centered genealogies of hip-hop aesthetics, arguing for a different set of cultural narratives through which female hip-hop protagonists understand themselves—ultimately that history includes the hip-hop practice of sampling from black women novelists like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and soul singers like Aretha Franklin. Through the invocation of this black feminist past, Precious begins to articulate her own nascent hip-hop feminist consciousness. Thus, I argue that Push acts as a bridge text between more traditional canonical African American women’s novels by Walker and Morrison and more recent hip-hop, urban, or street novels like those by Sistah Souljah, Nikki Turner, Wahida Clark, and others.

If You Look in My Life: Love, Hip-Hop Soul, and Contemporary African American Womanhood

This essay reflects upon Mary J. Blige’s lyrical content as an entry point for delving into the relationship between hip-hop soul and contemporary African American womanhood. Hip hop is often viewed as a music-scape predominated by assertions of African American male identities. Hip-hop soul artists such as Blige created a distinct space for explorations of African American womanhood through their crafting and performing of women-centered hip-hop-era narratives. Mary J. Blige’s discography captures a contemporary African American working-class women’s ethos that pivots around the desire for love. Hip hop soul affords a narrative window into the lives, thoughts, and aspirations, of African American women of the hip hop generation. Moving from close readings of Blige’s lyrics from her debut and sophomore albums to critical considerations of Blige’s collaborations with African American male emcees, I situate this hip hop era songstress’s discography within black feminist oral and narrative traditions. Describing Blige’s lyrics as black feminist narratives further expands the parameters of hip-hop feminism and illuminates a viable and dynamic site for contesting both the primacy of masculinist narratives and the limited visibility of women-authored narratives within hip hop.

Hip hop's inheritance: from the Harlem Renaissance to the hip hop feminist movement

Hip hop's inheritance: from the Harlem Renaissance to the hip hop feminist movement