The energy is clearly hyperfeminine and defiantly sexual in a world that still wants to police and confine female sexuality to a cis-heteronormative family dynamic.Ĭardi B and Meg twerking against right-wing conservatives, against women-hating chauvinists, against violent men is a triumph of the joys and freedoms of sensual pleasure that so many have unsuccessfully tried to police.Ĭardi B often proudly owns her identity as a married wife and mother, as shown in her shared behind-the-scenes photos of her “ work wife” partner Meg Thee Stallion interacting with her children however, her sexualized performances push back against notions that she has been “redeemed” for respectability. The “Bongos” video provides close-up shots of twerking bodies while Cardi B fans herself with a Playboy magazine-a nod to her role as the platform’s creative director, who also flips the scripts of once male-dominated spaces like hip-hop and the once-reigning sex magazine. The artists are creating legible spaces for pleasure, joy and sisterhood. That is what makes the videos for “Bongos” and “You Wish” so much fun to watch. … This is not to discount in any way the structural issues of sexism and violence as they are reproduced constantly in hip-hop and pornography it is to propose that we take seriously how and why are finding their own legibility in these forms, and how they self-fashion themselves through and against hypersexuality.”

“If we concentrate on how some representations are injurious and damaging to our sense of progress or integrity, we might miss reading the unreliability, unknowability, and ambiguity of women’s complex sexual desires, fantasies, and pleasures. The throughline is easy to follow from this spectacle circa 1997 to 21st-century artists like Nicki Minaj, City Girls, Cardi B, Meg Thee Stallion, Latto, Sexxy Red and Ice Spice.Īnd yet, as Black feminist porn studies scholar Mireille Miller-Young once argued, Black joy and pleasure should mobilize our communities to resist and fight for freedom just as much as our movements based in Black pain and death. This week, my students engaged in a discussion about this legacy of hip-hop and even marveled that a label run by an alleged sexual predator that chased away the talented Drew Dixon would go on to create the raunchy album cover Hardcore featuring rapper Lil’ Kim-which essentially became the blueprint for depicting and marketing women rappers through a hypersexual framework.

This is the irony of celebrating hip-hop’s milestone year: It represents the beats and the voices of pleasure and joy, just as much as it captures so much pain. Blige) and “A Rose is Still a Rose” (Aretha Franklin and Lauryn Hill).īoth women were driven out of the culture due to violence, and this legacy is still a hallmark of too many songs and videos in mainstream rap music. This continued with other women, featured in the “Turning 50” series: Dee Barnes, the first woman to host a hip-hop show, Pump It Up!, on network television from 1989 to 1991, and Drew Dixon, who as an executive working at labels like Def Jam and Arista, integrated hip-hop with soul and R&B, with songs like “ You’re All I Need to Get By” (Method Man featuring Mary J. Women specifically created the social and sonic spaces for hip-hop to thrive: from Cindy Campbell, hosting and sending out the invites to her brother Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell’s party that fateful August night in the Bronx, to producer Sylvia Robinson releasing the first commercially successful rap song and signing the rap group Funky 4 + 1 More (featuring the first female rapper MC Sha-Rock). Despite the male-oriented and masculine bravado of hip-hop, women played integral roles in amplifying the music in the wider community.

on “ Turning 50,” highlighting women’s roles in hip-hop over the decades.

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