Hello global feminists,
Hope you had a wonderful weekend! Below are some international feminsit links from this past week for you to check out.
What have you been reading/writing this week? Self-promote your blog in the comments!
Sincerely,
the editors of GAB
From the blogs
Anti-abortion group targets black women from the New Black Woman
Study Links Title IX and Health Benefits in Women from Title IX Blog
Black History Month- In Honor of Angela Davis (1944-) from SexGenderBody
Don’t ask, don’t use cannon fodder from my My 3,000 Loving Arms
Male in the Philippines, but Female in Germany: The curious case of Jenny T. Ramsey from Questioning Transphobia read more…
Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Situation Report: Proposed Anti-Gay Legislation in Uganda
The Sexual and Reproductive Rights Situation Report is a monthly column exploring policy and political issues around the world. This month, we’re focusing on a recently floated anti-gay law in Uganda which has ties to ultra-fundamentalists in the U.S.
- A “trans-man” in Uganda. Image: NY Times
The extreme anti-gay legislation was introduced in Uganda by the ruling party in the Parliament, and goes beyond the current criminalization of homosexuality in the country to impose extreme penalties for so-called “homosexual behavior.” The original language of the bill included life imprisonment for anyone who even touches someone of the same sex with “homosexual intent,” punishment ranging from life in prison to death penalty for those who have homosexual sex, and imprisonment even for those who are aware of “homosexual activity” and fail to report it. A Washington Post editorial has called it “outrageous,” even without the death penalty. read more…
Fair trade symbol
Hesitant to support the stereotype of women’s fanatical, insatiable obsession with chocolate, I am nonetheless posting this because we have incredible power as consumers to promote sustainable economic growth for women (men and children) who need it. As V-Day nears, many of us might be contemplating showing our love through chocolate. Even if you don’t buy into the holiday or Eve’s movement, chocolate is a pretty surefire way to show someone you care.
While in “Around the Way Girl,” the woman’s erotic power manifests in all facets of her identity, in Nicki Minaj’s remix, “Who’s Ya Best M.C.?” this erotic power is restricted to the realm of sex and sexuality.
Like Marilyn Monroe…
They say I’m too pretty to be spitting 16
I should be on the screen posing for Maybelline…
Hood star broad, Black Barbie doll
Lil white tee and some air max on
Sum Dolce Gabban[a] pretty panties on…
Neva give out my number
Only the email
Cherrythong.com
Drawing parallels between herself and the late American sex symbol and former Playboy Magazine centerfold Marilyn Monroe, the sexual aspect(s) of Minaj’s version of the around the way girl are clearly augmented. “Broad” is a slang term with less than respectful connotations with definitions ranging from: “a woman who is very difficult to respect” to “a derogatory meaning for female i. e. bitch, woman, lady, trick, chick, hoe” to “female, usually referring to a prostitute or easy lay.” (Urban Dictionary.com) The term “Barbie” has similarly negative connotations: “The word Barbie has come to be used as a derogatory slang term for a girl or woman who is considered shallow, most notably in the 1997 pop song Barbie Girl [by dance-pop group Aqua],” “a plastic whore,” “a symbol of bimboism” and “a limited and unrealistic [portrayal]of women.” (Urban Dictionary.com)
A Black Barbie doll, Minaj depicts the around the way girl as a commodity, an object to be possessed and played with, disempowering because it connotes a perpetual state of commodification and objectification. In its disrespectful and implicitly sexually promiscuous undertones, the hood star broad is no different. Directing attention to her sexual faculties via her undergarments, “cherrythong.com” serves as a metaphoric domain for Minaj’s version of the around the way girl.
“Girl from around way without the L Cool J”
-Nicki Minaj, “Who’s Ya Best M.C.?,” from Suckafree
As the female protégé of a misogynistic rapper, the female version of Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj undoubtedly conforms to certain dichotomized gendered norms. She at times operates in sync with dominant (patriarchal) discourse while at other times resists against the status quo. In her book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Hip Hop scholar Tricia Rose theorizes that, as voices who are sometimes in affirmation of the status quo of the dominant society (patriarchy) and at other times in opposition with it, female rappers’ relationship to male rappers must be understood as dialogic in nature.
The two parties, constantly engage one another in dialogue and thus, as Rose terms it, “push and pull” discourse. Rose says: “The concept of dialogue, exchange, and multidirectional communication is a useful way to understand the contradictory aspects and partiality of means of communication [in rap music]” (Rose 1994:148). This dialogue with the male narrative lends itself heavily to the manner in which female rappers fashion their pseudo-masculine personas. In her revisions of the male narrative, via her constant remixes of male rappers’ songs, the complexity and controversial nature of Minaj’s voice as a female rapper lies in the inherent contradictions at work in her remixes.
Implicit in Nicki Minaj’s Signification onto the male narrative is a strategic process of identity construction, relying primarily on the male narrative and male voice to help shape her public image as a hardcore female rapper. In a freestyle titled “Who’s Ya Best M.C.?” Minaj Signifies on male rapper LL Cool J’s “Around The Way Girl,” revising a key trope of Black womanhood within Hip Hop. While there is nothing problematic about Minaj’s decision to engage a male rapper (by remixing his song) and simultaneously disassociate herself from him, her reasons for doing so are nothing short of devastating, as I will explain.
When Nicki’s “Who’s Ya Best M.C.?” is read in relation to LL Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl,” one observes that the differences between the two are vast and distinct; what is notable are the ways in which the around the way girl’s identity is revised and reconstructed (or perhaps “deconstructed” is more fitting).
In comparison to comparable songs which laud the average girl from the ‘hood,’ (which is essentially who the around the way girl is) by objectifying her and citing her sexual capacities as testament to her magnitude-a faulty mode of empowerment often replicated by hardcore female rappers- “Around the Way Girl” is a breath of fresh air. It subjectifies the female subject by honoring her not for her sexual satiation abilities, but for her mental capacities.
In as much as Hip Hop as a culture and rap as a musical genre are highly misogynistic, the term “Hip Hop Feminism” may seem more a paradox than anything else. In his article “Re: Definitions: The Name and Game of Hip Hop Feminism,” Hip Hop feminist Michael Jeffries begins his attempt to conceptualize a Hip Hop feminism and a Hip Hop feminist agenda with the following preface: “In hip hop culture, women’s collective and individual performance or criticism is not feminist by nature; only if performers act with the goal of challenging male domination are they practicing feminism” (Jeffries, 215) [emphasis added].
What does it mean to “challenge” male dominance? How do these challenges take shape in a rap genre where the women act like men in order to grant themselves agency as women? In light of the intense focus on sexual politics, where does one draw the line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation?
As Hip Hop scholar Gwendolyn D. Pough theorizes, Black women participants in Hip-Hop culture “bring wreck to the patriarchy” and “disrupt dominant masculine discourses” in part by remixing (male) rap(pers’) songs. As a rhetorical practice, the remix is a convention of rap music which allows rappers to Signify on, or revise one another’s songs.* Typically, unsigned artists (or artists at the outset of their career), such as Nicki Minaj, make their musical debut by releasing mixtapes. Unlike official albums, mixtapes often consist of remixes of other artists’ songs. Essentially, a remix is a recreation or remake (get it, “re-mix?”) of an original song and a mixtape is a compilation of these remixes.
By remixing male rappers’ songs, female rappers are able to inject and inflect feminine discourse into dominant masculine discourse. However, as Jeffries states, there is a distinct difference between feminine discourse and feminist discourse.
Hip hop, you da love of my life.
If talking about loves and hip hop was my primary partner, (un)fortunately, it has all the complexity that a human being has as a primary partner. This is especially true for someone like me, who is a self-defined hip hop feminist.
Despite aspirations and claims otherwise, hip hop started as party music. The expulsion of inner city youth (read: poor youth of colour) in New York in the 1970’s, as a result of a lack of physical and financial access to disco clubs, resulted in these same youth creating their own spaces to party/enjoy/express/ themselves. This allowed them to have the fortitude and ingenuity to create spaces to party in their own communities, which can very much be codified as revolutionary; but this was a bi-product of these youths’ social survival.
I came of age when hip hop’s face was transitioning from the party to the political. My earliest memories are of “Ladies First” (Queen Latifah), “It Takes Two” (Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock), “Push It” (Salt ‘n’ Pepa), Jamaican Funk (Michie Mee) and “Buffalo Stance” (Neneh Cherry). What drew me and keeps me near to hip hop is its storytelling capabilities, even within simple instrumental beats.
I acknowledge that I am from a lineage and culture of storytelling. Although my ancestral connection to the continent of Afrika and more recently Trinidad is less tangible, the stories that have been weaved through my parents, books and calypsos have allowed me to build upon my experience as an Afrikan-Canadian. This multi-layered experience growing up means that stories were recounted from various community members about immigrant experiences to my mother — recapturing what took place on the television drama the night previous. For the former it was about joy in the struggle. From these stories and networking with other women, I have developed my sense of self as a womanist. The expansion from womanist to hip hop feminist is not a large leap, as the latter with the two words combined signifies for me music+community+oppresshun awareness (as defined by Tomee Sojourner). read more…
When it was first conceived, hip-hop was a form of resistance by people of color to their oppression: not only a way of life, but also a route to social change. Yet artists who continue this tradition of challenging the intersections of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy are a minority in the U.S. today, where the music industry’s steady consolidation has effectively channeled multiple routes to commercial success into the hands of a few. Consequently, artists whose politics and motivations differ too radically from the projected norm are generally excluded from the spotlight. And despite a surplus of online avenues to fame in the Information Age, many rising artists aim to imitate the work coming out of the mainstream.
When I was a teacher at Seattle public schools, a majority of the inner-city students I worked with had little to no knowledge of the revolutionary origins of hip-hop culture. Although the messages conveyed by modern hip-hop on TV and in music affected them, influencing their aspirations to become models or singers or basketball stars, they were unaware of its history of resistance to oppression and so did not think to question what had become of it in the modern context.
A prominent example is mainstream hip-hop’s portrayal of young women of color as highly sexualized appendages to high-rolling male MCs. This is not an accident. Leading TV and Internet content providers, their positions of power affirmed by government and backed by the global banking industry, in cooperation with the individual artists themselves, have managed to paint women of color as an erotic, exotic, and available multitude, the predominant narrative fed back to audiences who become convinced of its reality. This, one may argue, is a source of such trends as women of color around the world displaying their bodies for a chance at the limelight on the Internet, while evident in the comments left on their videos is the rampant homophobia of the typical young fan.
Long-standing critiques of selective, biased news reporting and the health- and self-esteem-threatening fashion and entertainment industries, affecting both women and men, can now legitimately be applied to much of the music industry. Exposure to this type of message without a critical framework fertilizes many of society’s racist, heterosexist, and misogynistic beliefs; in this case, that being rich and using many women sexually is makes a “real man”, or that it is reasonable to aspire to be a “video ho” to capitalize on your youthful body or good looks. read more…
In Mali, they graffiti “50 Cent” on red-brown walls of concrete and tan-yellow huts of mud. Children battle dance in court yards between water wells and wire-woven chairs, popping and locking, and walking in circles on their hands. Markets sell t-shirts and pants with emblazoned faces of Biggie and ‘Pac. Many Malians listen to American rap on cell phones and boom boxes and in glitzy dance clubs. This is, for the most part, Hot 97, BET Countdown-type rap music. The songs with the beats that make you wanna shake it. Shaking it is fairly is universal. But there is Malian rap too.
In my three months living in Mali in 2008, I heard as much homegrown rap (and rap from neighboring West African countries) as I heard of the former kind. Malian rap tends to be more political. It discusses homelessness, youth issues, government, AIDS, unemployment, and cultural pride. Rappers call it an instrument for information. Education. A weapon to fight injustice.
And this is hip-hop in its truest form. The best way to determine (or prove, some might argue) the essence of hip-hop, is to examine the ways in which it manifests in other countries. Consistently, it works as a tool for change, just as it originally did for marginalized youth in New York City’s South Bronx. It emerges from a need for said change. And although this motivation for rap music may have relatively faded in the US, we can see it when we look at just about any other country with a bourgeoning hip-hop scene.
In France, immigrant rappers protest le racisme.
In Senegal, corrupt elections.
In Palestine, occupation.
In Morocco, rappers write songs to preserve their cultural history and to speak out against poverty and social ills.
In Brazil, hip-hoppers unite to combat racism, poverty, and street violence.
Welcome to the Gender Across Borders series on hip hop, resistance, and feminism. This series focuses on hip hop and its interactions with patriarchy, racism, and other forms of oppression — both within and outside the mainstream pop world. From Nicki Minaj and gender-bending to resistance movements in Mali, this series reveals the varying faces and voices of hip hop. While the authors focus on different moments and methods of resistance, they all unite around a common belief in hip hop as a revolutionary form of communication — one that has the power to carry messages of resistance against occupation, poverty, and structural violence. While some voices enforce the status quo, others “bring wreck to the patriarchy,” opening up the possibility of a more just world.
The series will run today and tomorrow (February 5 and 6). Enjoy!
Go to the Gender Across Borders main page to see the series, or click on the following posts:
- It’s Worldwide, Y’all, by Heather Day
- This is Our World: Hip-Hop’s Historical Resistance to Systems of Oppression, by Angela Martinez Dy
- My Definition: Hip Hop Feminism, by Kemba King
- Part 1/3: Nicki Minaj and the Paradox of Hip Hop Feminism, by Menda Francois
- Part 2/3: LL Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl,” by Menda Francois
- Part 3/3: Nicki Minaj Responds to LL Cool J’s “Around the Way Girl,” by Menda Francois
Video: Sabreena Da Witch (Abeer Alzinaty), Palestinian hip hop artist
