I'm A Hip Hop Cheerleader - . - Screaming From The Sidelines of A Stage I Built. - Jessica Care Moore ð2002, 145Þ

Aisha Durham
Brittney C. Cooper
Susana M. Morris
The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay
I’m a hip hop cheerleader . . . screaming from the sidelines of a stage I built.
—Jessica Care Moore ð2002, 145Þ
T he year 1999 constituted a watershed moment in what Joan Morgan has

called “hip-hop feminism.”1 Invigorated by the 1997 Million Woman
March in Philadelphia that rapper Lauryn Hill referenced a year later in
her critically acclaimed and commercially successful studio album The Mis-
education of Lauryn Hill, the emergence of a generation of young women
calling themselves hip-hop feminists appeared to signal something new and
exciting in contemporary black feminism. Alongside the release of Morgan’s
memoir/manifesta, which laid out what it meant to be a hip-hop feminist,
filmmaker Rachel Raimist produced the first feature-length documentary
about women in hip-hop, and rapper Sistah Souljah, formerly of the group
Public Enemy, published her first novel, The Coldest Winter Ever, thought
by many to be the inaugural text in hip-hop or street fiction.2 The precipi-
tous engagements of women in hip-hop culture across various genres of lit-
1
For a detailed discussion of hip-hop feminism, see “Under Construction” by Whitney
Peoples ð2008Þ. In this essay, we use “hip-hop feminism” as an umbrella term to encompass
creative, intellectual work regarding girls and women in hip-hop culture and/or as part of the
hip-hop generation. Drawing from Joan Morgan ð2006Þ and Patricia Hill Collins, Aisha
Durham ð2007Þ defines hip-hop feminism as a cultural, intellectual, and political movement
grounded in the situated knowledge of women of color from the post–civil rights or hip-hop
generation who recognize culture as a pivotal site for political intervention to challenge, re-
sist, and mobilize collectives to dismantle systems of exploitation. In “Hip Hop Feminist Me-
dia Studies,” Zenzele Isoke suggests “hip-hop feminism effectively challenges and transforms
power structures, social order, and widespread cultural practices, and is proving to be an ef-
ficacious intersectional strategy for understanding complex identities and difference in Wom-
en’s Studies and across academic disciplines. Simultaneously, hip-hop feminism engages effec-
tive grassroots community-based social justice movements across transnational frameworks”
ðIsoke in Durham 2010, 134 n. 1Þ. Throughout this essay, we use “hip-hop feminism” to
reference a broad movement, “hip-hop” to refer to a generational marker and cultural art
form, and “hip-hop feminist studies” to address academic scholarship.
2
See Morgan ð1999Þ, Nobody Knows My Name ð1999Þ, and Sister Souljah ð1999Þ.
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722 y Durham, Cooper, and Morris
erature, film, and music created a robust cultural space for a new generation
of feminist theorizing.
“Womanifesto”: An introduction3
Nearly fifteen years after this new turn, hip-hop feminism has effectively
made space for itself in the broader fields of black and women-of-color
feminisms. Hip-hop feminism remains deeply invested in the intersectional
approaches developed by earlier black feminists. We insist that women and
girls of color remain central to our analyses, particularly in light of critical
gender approaches that treat black women as an addendum to intersectional
approaches we have honed, effectively relegating us to the sidelines of a stage
we built.4 Within hip-hop feminist studies, hip-hop and feminism act as dis-
crete but constitutive categories that share a dialogic relationship. In this es-
say, rather than treating feminism as though it lends a certain intellectual
gravity to hip-hop, we consider how the creative, intellectual work of hip-
hop feminism invites new questions about representation, provides addi-
tional insights about embodied experience, and offers alternative models for
critical engagement. We map the current terrain of hip-hop feminist studies,
first by identifying challenges and tensions, then by reviewing current liter-
ature and its engagement with these issues, and finally by identifying new
and emergent areas for the further development of the field.
We see hip-hop feminism as a generationally specific articulation of fem-
inist consciousness, epistemology, and politics rooted in the pioneering
work of multiple generations of black feminists based in the United States
and elsewhere in the diaspora but focused on questions and issues that grow
out of the aesthetic and political prerogatives of hip-hop culture. Thus, hip-
hop feminism is concerned with the ways the conservative backlash of the
1980s and 1990s, deindustrialization, the slashing of the welfare state, and
the attendant gutting of social programs and affirmative action, along with
3
Each of the section titles in this essay refers to a song by a current female artist. These sec-
tion titles serve both as kind of hip-hop feminist mixtape and as an homage to a hip-hop aes-
thetic that embeds cultural references that require broad cultural literacy for understanding.
These references, which come from the work of Jill Scott, Janelle Monáe, TheeSatisfaction,
and Erykah Badu, respectively, also serve as our implicit acknowledgment that hip-hop music
is not confined to rap but also encompasses the work of neosoul and R&B artists.
4
Even when male-centered hip-hop studies embraces a critical masculinity lens, an ap-
proach made possible by black feminism’s critique of gender, the work often recenters hip-hop
studies and black studies on the issues of black men to the detriment and exclusion of black
women. Feminist studies of the third wave also treat women of color in an ancillary manner.
For more on the race politics of the third wave, see Snyder ð2008Þ.

S I G N S Spring 2013 y 723
the increasing racial wealth gap, have affected the lifeworlds and worldviews
of the hip-hop generation.5 These political realities have created a difficult
and historically unprecedented terrain in terms of gender politics within
communities of color. For example, the global circulation of hypersexual
images of black women and men; the global AIDS epidemic, which dispro-
portionately affects women ðin the United States, Africa, and across the Af-
rican diasporaÞ; and the increasing numbers of nonnuclear families and non-
traditional parenting arrangements are phenomena unique to folks born
after 1965.6 Moreover, hip-hop generation feminists demand, in Morgan’s
words, “a feminism brave enough to fuck with the grays” ð1999, 59Þ, and
in so doing they refuse easy and essentialist political stances about what is
right or wrong and who or what gets to be called feminist.
Hip-hop feminists’ refusal to conform to a feminism that draws lines in
the sand should be seen as an affirmation of a kind of feminist theorizing
that seeks to create rather than merely to deconstruct or critique. Although
third-wave feminism and hip-hop feminism share some intellectual terrain
around the posture of critique, hip-hop feminism rejects the staunch poli-
tics of generational disavowal so prevalent in most third-wave work and is
much more measured in its critique of second-wave black feminists.7 More-
over, hip-hop feminists insist on living with contradictions, because failure
to do so relegates feminism to an academic project that is not politically sus-
tainable beyond the ivory tower.
The Crunk Feminist Collective ðCFCÞ, a group of hip-hop-generation
feminist scholars and activists of which we are a part, have extended Mor-
gan’s formulation of hip-hop’s gray areas by calling for a kind of “percus-
sive” feminism, a term drawn from the definition of percussion, which is
“the striking of one body with or against another with some degree of force,
5
The racial wealth gap grew between 1984 and 2007. See Shapiro, Meschede, and Sullivan
ð2010Þ.
6
In place of the media-celebrated white, middle-class Generation X, Bakari Kitwana
ð2002Þ uses the term “hip-hop generation” to highlight issues affecting persons of color born
between 1965 and 1984. Increased state surveillance and divestment in public programs are
two of these issues. We acknowledge, however, that “generations are fictions” ðChang
2005, 1Þ. There are also different iterations of the hip-hop generation as global ðsee Fernandes
2011Þ. Molefi K. Asante Jr. ð2008Þ describes the post-hip-hop generation as consisting of
youth born after 1984 who disown misogynist, violent, white-owned commercial hip-hop to
reimagine hip-hop as political art connected to larger social movements.
7
Peoples ð2008Þ rightly contests the discourse of lack emerging from the antagonistic
white mother-daughter wave model by arguing that the so-called generational divide between
second-wave black feminists and third-wave hip-hop feminists is premature, if not inaccurate,
especially as it pertains to ongoing interrogations of the hypervisibility and invisibility of black
women.

so as to give a shock; impact; a stroke, blow, knock,” and from the affinity
for percussion in Southern rap music.8 The CFC argues that the tension be-
tween competing and often contradictory political and cultural projects like
hip-hop and feminism is percussive in that it is both disruptive and gener-
ative.9 Percussive feminism allows for the creativity that ensues from placing
modes or objects of inquiry together that might not traditionally fit, hip-
hop and feminism being only the most obvious example.
“Tippin’ on a tightrope”: Tensions and elevations

Percussive tensions abound in contemporary hip-hop feminism and femi-
nist studies. First, the persistence of respectability politics often impedes
hip-hop feminism’s attempts to formulate an unapologetic pro-sex stance
among black and Latina women. Second, while hip-hop feminist studies
continues to make inroads in the academy, the need for new gender-sensitive
theoretical frameworks in the study of hip-hop aesthetics signals certain
intellectual challenges.
Thus, another percussive tension is the battle over the need for a clearly
articulated pro-sex framework, despite the enduring cultural legacy of re-
spectability politics. This framework involves coming up with language to
talk about both the pleasure and pain of sex and sexuality outside a singular
heteropatriarchal lens while also looking at the nexus of hierarchal struc-
tures that shape our sexual selves. Respectability politics frequently fore-
closes such discussions, however. Coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
ð1993, 185Þ, “the politics of respectability” describes a range of strategies,
largely regarding notions of honor, self-respect, piety, and propriety, de-
ployed by progressive black women to promote racial uplift and women’s
rights and to secure broader access to the public sphere. The politics of re-
spectability also provided a platform from which these progressive black
women could indict the de jure and de facto racist and misogynist practices
they experienced daily. Respectability politics has been a somewhat useful
strategy for improving conditions for blacks. However, because it also em-
ploys tactics such as surveillance, control, and repression—largely directed
toward black women—its political gains are largely undercut, and it ulti-
8
Oxford English Dictionary, rev. ed. 1970, s.v. “percussion.”
9
“Combining terms like Crunk and Feminism, and the cultural, gendered, and racial his-
tories signified in each, is a percussive moment, one that signals the kind of productive dis-
sonance that occurs as we work at the edges of disciplines, on the margins of social life, and in
the vexed spaces between academic and non-academic communities” ðCrunk Feminist Col-
lective n.d.Þ.

mately succeeds in reinscribing dominant systems of power, namely, white

capitalist heteropatriarchy. Because black and brown bodies have been his-
torically configured as excessive, with unrestrained desires, this narrative of
excess and pathology has seriously limited how black and brown sexualities
can be made intelligible in popular culture and academic discourse, both of
which tend to represent women of color either as ladies and queens or as
bitches and whores. That being said, challenging respectability politics is
far from a simple enterprise. There are often serious reprisals for people of
color, and women of color in particular, when we freely express sexual agency
and desire. Engagement with respectability politics, then, continues to be vi-
tally important to hip-hop feminism.
A continuing investment in the politics of respectability has the potential
to reify the heteronormative institutions that hip-hop feminism seeks to
challenge and that silence queer and “freakish” bodies of color unless they
can be commodified. For example, when singer Frank Ocean admitted that
he had fallen in love with a man, that admission was embraced by key figures
in hip-hop, including women such as dream hampton and Beyoncé.10 The
popular rapper and queen of the underground mixtape, Nicki Minaj, did
not receive the same love, however, when she commented on her own bi-
sexuality. In fact, Minaj received such a backlash that she retracted her ini-
tial expressions of bisexuality by using one of her personas to recite the
homophobic hip-hop slur “no homo” and by marketing herself as the hy-
perfeminine Barbie to reinforce her “strictly dickly” stance ðsee Whitney
2012Þ.11 Frequent and hostile speculation about the sexuality of female rap-
pers such as Queen Latifah and Minaj amounts to a kind of policing that
suggests the culture is still not hospitable to queer-presenting black women.
This is reiterated in the development of the undesirable sexual scripts of
“dyke” and “bitch” in hip-hop culture that are used to keep all women in
check ðStephens and Phillips 2003; Carney 2012; Clay 2012Þ.
Given recent hate crimes involving Sakia Gunn and CeCe McDonald,
the inability of the culture to embrace trans-identified and gender-
nonconforming women suggests that there are some limits to the embrace
of fluidity in terms of gender and sexuality ðIsoke 2012Þ.12 The persistent
10
See Ocean’s post to his Tumblr account, a screen capture of a typed note, at http://
frankocean.tumblr.com/image/26473798723; hampton’s “Thank You, Frank Ocean” ð2012Þ;
and Beyoncé’s post at her website, an image of Ocean with messages of support written on it,
at http://www.beyonce.com/news/frank-ocean.
11
“Strictly dickly” is a hip-hop slang term made popular in the film Set It Off ð1996Þ when
Frankie ðVivica A. FoxÞ affirms her heterosexuality to her lesbian friend Cleo ðQueen LatifahÞ.
12
See the Support CeCe McDonald blog at http://supportcece.wordpress.com/ for more
information on McDonald’s case.

investment in respectability politics works to mitigate the radical potential

of these queer-affirming stances. Hip-hop feminism’s professed goal of giv-
ing us a more elastic way of talking about gender relations can provide a use-
ful lens with which to view this continuing reliance on normative notions of
respectability as the primary way to understand gender and sexual politics in
the public sphere.
Another percussive tension within the field is the battle over the status of
hip-hop feminism inside and outside the academy. As Morgan said in 1999,
sisters are “not exactly checkin’ for the f-word” ð1999, 52Þ, and this re-
mains true today. Ironically enough, when Beyoncé identified herself as
“feminist in a way” ðThomas 2010Þ, this led to extensive debate online and
in academic spaces about whether she was qualified to use the term.13 Such
academic gatekeeping bespeaks a broader devaluing of the cultural pro-
duction of women in hip-hop precisely because of their alleged lack of
progressive gender politics. The debates over the burgeoning field of hip-
hop literature, which is largely written and published by young black
women, serves as a prime example. At issue is how these texts fare alongside
canonical works of African American literature by black women.14 There is
broad skepticism about their general literary value, and their literary output
is frequently viewed as taking up undeserved space on store bookshelves.
Although Angela Y. Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism ð1998Þ,
provided a critical model for how to consider black women’s radical and
subversive cultural production as important in forging a black feminist con-
sciousness, the battle persists for women in hip-hop. However, the fervency
with which contemporary black women writers insist upon turning to the
novel to articulate their fears, pain, hopes, and dreams can only be under-
stood within a long historical trajectory, dating to the nineteenth century,
of black women’s storytelling in prose form.
“Sweat thru your cardigan”: New works in hip-hop feminist studies

In line with the productive tensions that continue to animate hip-hop fem-
inism, there has been a proliferation of academic studies that explore various
aspects of gender politics within hip-hop culture. A decade after Kimberly
Springer ð2002Þ reviewed trade books by Morgan ð1999Þ and Lisa Jones
13
Beyoncé’s identification complicates our ideas about what feminism might look like in
the hip-hop generation. Erykah Badu, on the other hand, eschews “feminist” in favor of “hu-
manist” ðsee Yates 2010Þ. Even among self-identified “hip-hop feminists,” there is tension
over that term. Among the authors of this essay, some of us identify as hip-hop feminists,
others as hip-hop generation feminists. See also Morgan’s chapter “The F-Word” ð1999Þ.
14
See Mansbach ð2006Þ, Smith ð2006Þ, and Cooper ðforthcomingÞ.

ð1995Þ to explore the possibility of third-wave black feminism, activists, ar-

tists, and academics alike have mined the personal, crafted a gender politics
specific to the “post” generation, and used the ubiquity of urban American
youth culture to develop a framework that could address the lived reality of
girls and women of color under hip-hop feminism ðPough et al. 2007Þ. While
early studies by Nancy Guevara ð1996Þ, Cheryl Keyes ð1993Þ, and Tricia
Rose ð1994Þ examined women and hip-hop culture and more recent research
employed hip-hop feminist pedagogy to describe black girlhood, the new-
est literature in hip-hop feminism is concerned with regimes of racialized
representation that shape social identity and gender relations and with
how these regimes structure the ways black women and other women of
color are made intelligible.15 As such, there are no seismic shifts altering the
overall landscape of hip-hop feminist studies to date; however, the popular
terrain that Springer previewed has expanded across the academy and di-
verse communities to accommodate alternate points of entry. A survey of
the literature published since 2008 shows a renewed interest in earlier
forms of advocacy-oriented ethnographic work; at the same time, new stud-
ies in iconicity push the field beyond the heterosexual African American
performer ðsee, e.g., Weems 2009; Smalls 2011; Whitney 2012Þ.
Newer studies in hip-hop feminism focus not only on text-based cultural
criticism but also increasingly on performative, ethnographic accounts that
describe hip-hop as embodied, lived culture. For instance, language, in its
broadest sense, is one way researchers suggest that hip-hop functions as an
ordinary, everyday practice. For Ruth Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel
Kwakye, the organizers of the group Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths
ðSOLHOTÞ, hip-hop happens through the body when they dance, walk
down the street, or recite their favorite rhymes ðBrown and Kwakye 2012,
8–9Þ.16 It happens during the everyday performances of girls’ game-songs
15
The development of hip-hop feminist studies can be mapped through the work of Rose
ð1994Þ, Morgan ð1999, 2006Þ, and Gwendolyn Pough ð2003Þ. Rose acknowledges women as
both practitioners and active consumers equipped with an oppositional consciousness consistent
in black feminist thought, and she effectively challenges the phallocentric construction of hip-
hop culture. Through personal narrative, Morgan grapples with the privileges her generation
has gained from earlier feminist and civil rights movements and the subsequent backlash in the
1990s. Morgan outlines sexual politics for young women and announces a hip-hop feminist
subjectivity, the latter of which is visible in most hip-hop feminist scholarship. Pough brings
both the hip-hop arts from Rose and the subjectivity from Morgan to describe hip-hop femi-
nism within and against the third wave. Pough also introduces hip-hop feminist pedagogy,
which is an active area in new hip-hop feminist studies.
16
SOLHOT is an intergenerational community initiative based in Urbana-Champaign, Il-
linois. SOLHOT uses hip-hop feminist pedagogy to produce performance-based cultural crit-
icism.

where girls move in conversation with black culture and people ðGaunt
2010, 163–68Þ. Likewise, in Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy
Reader ðBrown and Kwakye 2012Þ, The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back:
Youth, Activism, and Post–Civil Rights Politics ðClay 2012Þ, The Real Hip
Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground
ðMorgan 2009Þ, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Genera-
tion ðFernandes 2011Þ, Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance
ðIsoke 2012Þ, and Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Identities and
Politics in the New South ðLove 2012Þ, hip-hop feminism also happens at
the schools, homes, community centers, and performance facilities where
the authors witness how homegirls use the self-critiquing “keeping it real”
language from hip-hop culture to challenge misogyny, engage in social ac-
tivism, and call attention to issues such as sexual violence ðsee Fernandes
2011, 96–97Þ, gender stereotypes, body image, and love ðUtley and Men-
zies 2009Þ.
Poets and female MCs, in both underground and commercial perfor-
mance venues, amplify the teen girls’ stories. Discussing the ways queer
black feminist MC Medusa rescripts masculine metaphors to talk about
black womanhood, Marcyliena H. Morgan adds: “Female MCs can devour
and set to rhyme the black women’s history, social life, and dreams of being
treated with respect as women in America. The stories that they tell in their
rhymes generally focus on the importance of love and care for themselves
and the future of their community, children, family, lovers, and so forth.
They tend to address these areas through five archetypal themes: their
passionðsÞ; what all women share as mothers and as caretakers; women in
relationships with men; black women’s relationship to white men; and black
women’s relationship to white women” ð2009, 134Þ. Along similar lines,
rapera Magia López of the Cuban hip-hop group Obsesión contends that
women come to hip-hop “with their things to say, with their pain and hap-
piness, with their knowledge, their softness, with their prejudice they suffer
for being women, with their limitations, with their weakness and their
strength” ðin Fernandes 2011, 186Þ. Similarly, Marcyliena Morgan ð2009Þ
and Sujatha Fernandes ð2011Þ recount a shared experience of black woman-
hood within the African diaspora. They recall how the same oppositional
consciousness developed to critique race and class hegemony is used to
challenge heterosexism in hip-hop as well. While neither author writes ex-
clusively about women, and neither identifies hip-hop feminism as a theo-
retical framework, they do situate themselves within hip-hop culture and
identify as feminists from the hip-hop generation, and they provide a fem-
inist analysis throughout their texts, allowing us to imagine how hip-hop

can engender community by providing homegirls with skills—lyrical and

consciousness-raising—to transform how we see and talk about black women
in hip-hop.
Consciousness-raising in popular culture serves as a form of “public ped-
agogy” ðPough 2003, 238Þ. New research taking up hip-hop as pedagogy
is less concerned with identifying culturally relevant teaching tools for out-
of-touch educators and more concerned with extending the hip-hop fem-
inist tradition of producing democratizing forms of knowledge that enable
all of us to better understand the ways racialized sexuality is represented,
performed, and policed in the United States and abroad ðLove 2012Þ. Mar-
garet Hunter suggests that the pornification of culture, economic restruc-
turing, and new racism that the hip-hop generation faces also define new
gender relations rooted in conspicuous consumption and sexual commod-
ification ðHunter 2011, 18; see also Balaji 2010Þ. Hunter adds that popular
make-it-rain dances taken from the strip-club scene reenact the commercial
exchange in which men throw dollars at women who simulate sex. For
Hunter and other researchers, the instructional dance provides hip-hop-
specific scripts that teach young people how to perform sexuality and imag-
ine desire ðsee, e.g., Muñoz-Laboy, Weinstein, and Parker 2007, 622, 624;
Ross and Coleman 2011Þ. These sexual scripts activate controlling images
or power-laden stereotypes. Jasmine Ross and Nicole Coleman ð2011Þ up-
date the decade-old sexual scripts outlined by Dionne Stephens and Layli
Phillips ð2003Þ by adding the figure of the video girl, who invests in her
appearance and lures industry men in order to gain fame or entrée into the
music business ðRoss and Coleman 2011, 166Þ. The two suggest that this
new script closely relates to the gold digger, a circumstance that reflects the
persistent policing of black women’s expressions of sexuality ðStephens and
Phillips 2003, 17–19Þ.
Along with identifying new scripts and gender relations, new research
conducted outside of the United States addresses sexual politics not rooted
in respectability. Lisa Weems, for example, notes how rapper M.I.A. gives a
nod to a fellow Sri Lankan woman who accepts a marriage invitation from
a white British man in order to secure a visa to leave home and who later
leaves that dial-a-bride-wanting husband ð2009, 56–57Þ. Moreover, Cuban
rappers Magia López and Las Krudas destigmatize jineterismo, or sex work,
by performing songs that describe the plight of poor women ðand menÞ
who hustle in the sex trade in Cuba. These songs perform a dual role: they
humanize sex workers who are erased or demonized in academic literature
and culture writ large, and they place the plight of poor black, Latina, and
Asian women within a larger geopolitical context in which economically

vulnerable countries hustle to get by under a global capitalism defined by

postcolonial relations ðArmstead 2007, 114–15; Fernandes 2011, 45–52Þ.
These artists and researchers infuse transnational feminism into hip-hop
feminist studies and thereby map an alternative genealogy emerging from
the Spanish-speaking Caribbean ðQueen of Myself 2011Þ and the South Asian
diaspora ðSharma 2010, 138–89Þ. Here, sexual politics can intersect with
notions of the state, ethnicity, language, and class that are inscribed on the
brown body within and against the black American one hypervisible in hip-
hop culture ðsee Maira 2002Þ. These “glocal” iterations move us beyond
the queen-subject/ho-object framework replicated in hip-hop debates,
and they stage how we can discuss sexual politics today.
“Jump up in the air and stay there”: In search of new horizons

Over the past five years, hip-hop feminist studies has demonstrated the cen-
trality of hip-hop’s aesthetics and epistemologies in the everyday, lived ex-
periences of young women. We want to suggest that hip-hop feminism’s
deliberate and differential engagements with its past, present, and future
represent some of its most exciting new directions. On the one hand, per-
formative and ethnographic work is very much concerned with what hip-
hop looks like as an everyday, present entity. This work could be expanded
through very intentional engagements with the ways that hip-hop epis-
temologies and feminist epistemologies inform each other in terms of both
theory and praxis. However, hip-hop feminism is also deeply invested in its
cultural and feminist roots.
Hip-hop feminist studies continues to tackle black sexual politics by dis-
cussing and challenging the persistence and prevalence of hip-hop “misog-
ynoir” ðthe hatred of black women and girlsÞ, respectability politics, and
compulsory heterosexuality within the music and the culture at large.17 In
“Free the Girls,” dream hampton attempts to reconcile her adoration for
hip-hop with her daughter’s disdain for a beat that hurts: “I want to tell
her all the ways hip hop has made me feel powerful. How it gave my gen-
eration a voice, a context, how we shifted the pop culture paradigm. How
sometimes it’s a good thing to appear brave and fearless, even if it’s just
posturing. I want to suggest that maybe these rhymes about licking each
other’s asses are liberating. But I can’t” ðhampton 2001, 3Þ. She reconsid-
ers raunchy rap lyrics and hip-hop’s complicated sexual history as alter-
nately liberating and constraining. Her sense of ambivalence is reflected in
a field that asks how we make sense of the simultaneous desire and revul-
17
The term “misogynoir” was coined by CFC member Moya Bailey ð2010Þ.

sion incited by some aspects of the culture without simply dismissing hip-
hop altogether.18
Acknowledging that hip-hop and contemporary ðsecond-waveÞ black
feminism developed in the same cultural moment, new work, like that of
Reiland Rabaka ð2011Þ that takes seriously the development of hip-hop
feminism within the broader cultural and intellectual histories of both
hip-hop and black and women-of-color feminisms, would be a welcome
addition to a movement that seeks to historicize its contributions beyond
a facile identification with the third wave. Additionally, hip-hop feminism
has found a home in new media, a move that signals both its engagement
in the hyperpresence of cyberspace and its futuristic aims. Considering
that hip-hop feminist cultural criticism was established by young journal-
ists who were writing about the aesthetics emerging from the “post” gen-
eration, hip-hop feminism’s growth in the age of new media seems like a
logical trajectory. Moreover, hip-hop feminism’s continued investment in
being in but not of the academy has made social media attractive because
it provides an opportunity to practice public pedagogy among nonaca-
demic audiences.
Today, the blogosphere has become the digital public forum for feminist
consciousness-raising, and social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and
Facebook have morphed into virtual command centers to mobilize coali-
tions for grassroots activism. Take the We Are the 44% coalition, for in-
stance.19 This group of hip-hop-identified feminists launched an effective
campaign using Facebook and Twitter to pressure a major hip-hop maga-
zine to fire the editor and demand a public apology for publishing a video
interview by popular pimp rapper Too $hort, who advised adolescent boys
on how to sexually assault girls. The swift response to misogynoir not only
resulted in a retraction by the rapper but also provided an opportunity for
serious dialogue about sexual violence in communities across the country.
This campaign, along with the popular commentary by bloggers supporting
it, reflects the broader activism within hip-hop feminism aiming to interro-
18
Shanara R. Reid-Brinkley notes, “the broader debate that surrounds hip-hop within the
discourse of mainstream culture has been of grave concern to scholars interested in hip-hop
culture and rap music. Expectations that women should remain loyal to men within the black
community often prevent community members from speaking publicly against successful
community members. Thus, black women simultaneously grapple with their disgust at black
female representation in black popular culture and their fear of the possible ramifications for
publicly attacking black men” ð2007, 249Þ.
19
The group uses the language of Occupy Wall Street to call attention to the 44 percent of
sexual assault survivors in the United States who are under eighteen years old. See http://
www.facebook.com/WeAreThe44.

gate the sexual lifeworlds of women of color; it also reflects how hip-hop
feminists have adapted the ethos of minimalist, do-it-yourself technologies
from masculinist hip-hop and the white-centered third wave to generate
new political insights about feminist social activism in order to make com-
munities safer.
Hip-hop feminism, as a type of radical inquiry, is particularly flourishing
in the blogosphere and within online communities. The Crunk Feminist
Collective blog that we publish has been heralded as one of the most suc-
cessful feminist blogs ðNussbaum 2011Þ. The blogs Racialicious and Wom-
anist Musings also use feminism to critique hip-hop popular culture.20 Rap-
per MC Lyte’s online community, Hip Hop Sisters, showcases the work of
female MCs, DJs, and other hip-hop practitioners.21 In addition to blogs
and online communities, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl is a
successful web video series that privileges a black woman’s perspective that
is absent in dominant media outlets.22 These virtual spaces, both indepen-
dent and mainstream ðe.g., Ebony.com and YouTubeÞ, are all examples of
hip-hop feminism flourishing in the public arena.
Like the adoption of new media, the massive proliferation of black wom-
en’s hip-hop novels demands a new set of literary critical frameworks that
take into account the hip-hop aesthetic and its relevance to the debate over
what constitutes hip-hop literature. While rap music’s status as a subject of
legitimate academic inquiry has been cemented by the publication of the
Yale Anthology of Rap ðBradley and DuBois 2010Þ, urban literature, which is
largely produced by women, does not enjoy the same status among liter-
ary critics. Hip-hop novelist Adam Mansbach approaches novels “like a mix
board,” an instrument critical to hip-hop music’s multiple layers of sam-
pled musical texts. For Mansbach, novels can be written in the same way,
by “build½ing layers of reference and meaning and plot and dialogue and
character ½and tweak½ing the levels of the mix for smooth reading” while
still allowing the reader to dissect and analyze individual elements ð2006,
94Þ. Jelani Cobb argues that the storytelling tradition within hip-hop
grows out of the blues and pivots upon a kind of “asphalt naturalism, a
literary landscape where characters are motivated by hunger—both physical
and metaphorical—and shaped by the unyielding forces of the surround-
ing world” ð2007, 109Þ. Although Mansbach cites both male and female
authors in his manifesto “On Lit Hop,” Cobb’s examples of figures who in-
voke or pave the way for hip-hop’s literary impulses are taken from an entirely
20
See http://www.racialicious.com and http://www.womanist-musings.com.
21
See http://www.hiphopsisters.com.
22
See http://awkwardblackgirl.com. J, the protagonist, has an ironic love for penning mi-
sogynistic raps to express her midtwenties angst.

male cast of characters. Both formulations of the hip-hop aesthetic would

benefit from a more explicit engagement with the ways women in hip-
hop culture invoke their own blueswomen predecessors, embrace or con-
versely eschew the dictates of asphalt naturalism, or use the mix-board ap-
proach to create multilayered and multigenre samples in their works.23 For
instance, in her hip-hop romance novel Sweet Sensation, Gwyneth Bolton
ð2007Þ uses chapter titles with references to classic and popular hip-hop
songs to create a mixtape that adds another layer of meaning to her prose.
Just as Barbara Smith’s groundbreaking essay “Toward a Black Feminist
Criticism” ð½1977 1998Þ invited us to think about the existence of a black
women’s literary tradition, texts by hip-hop’s women authors invite us to
ask these questions yet again and to forge a hip-hop feminist literary crit-
icism that can adequately explicate the potential and importance of this cul-
tural work.
Furthermore, the increased presence of stories that imagine new worlds
where the experiences of women of color are centered could be seen as a
type of Afrofuturism, especially as this imaginative work converges with
digital technologies. Afrofuturism “describes African-American culture’s ap-
propriation of technology and ½science fiction imagery” and can be under-
stood as an epistemology that both examines the current problems faced by
blacks ðand people of color more generallyÞ and critiques interpretations of
the past and the future ðDery 2008, 6Þ. Contemporary examples of Afro-
futurism include a diverse range of cultural products, including literature
by the likes of Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colson Whitehead; mu-
sic by Outkast, Janelle Monáe, and Erykah Badu; and art by Jean-Michel
Basquiat and Nettrice Gaskins. What connects the work of these artists with
the previous examples from digital media is a commitment to portraying
complicated ðand sometimes vexedÞ histories of people of color and visions
of the future with people of color at the center while simultaneously cri-
tiquing dominant systems of power and subjugation and offering futurist
solutions based on a transgressive ethos. Thus, reframing hip-hop feminism
as part of this larger framework of Afrofuturism allows us to see the vibrant
range of places where hip-hop feminism is enacted outside the academy.
Hip-hop feminism’s evolving digital presence is not only evidence of the
movement’s relevance and strength but also reflects its continued interest
in democratizing the creation and dissemination of knowledge as well as
promoting open dialogues about issues important to communities of color.
23
For more on the connection between hip-hop’s women and blueswomen, see Rabaka
ð2012Þ.

It is hip-hop feminism that is uniquely able to move women from the side-
lines of the stages we built, and from the cheering section of audiences that
our public pedagogies have made space for, to claim an unapologetic place
at the center as knowledge makers and culture creators.
Department of Communication
University of South Florida ðDurhamÞ
Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies

Rutgers University ðCooperÞ
Department of English
Auburn University ðMorrisÞ
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Aisha Durham

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

T he year 1999 constituted a watershed moment in what Joan Morgan has

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“Tippin’ on a tightrope”: Tensions and elevations

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mately succeeds in reinscribing dominant systems of power, namely, white

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investment in respectability politics works to mitigate the radical potential

“Sweat thru your cardigan”: New works in hip-hop feminist studies

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ð1995Þ to explore the possibility of third-wave black feminism, activists, ar-

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can engender community by providing homegirls with skills—lyrical and

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vulnerable countries hustle to get by under a global capitalism defined by

“Jump up in the air and stay there”: In search of new horizons

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male cast of characters. Both formulations of the hip-hop aesthetic would

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Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies

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