The category 'woman' has long existed as a symptom of male fantasy Lacan, , taking particular forms depending on the historical conditions and the technological means of representation. Lacan argues that, under patriarchy, men obviously only those who have power and are able to put their ideas into distribution and circulation create as their object not women as they really are, but fantasies of what men both desire and fear in the Other.
Walkerdine argues that women, then, become the repositories of such fantasies. But women can see through these mythical displays: the history of female Black music charts a long course of disparagement of displays of male performance not dissimilar to that of white working class women. Historically, because of the systems of slavery and colonialism which, enforced separation, Black women have not been able to rely on Black men for economic support.
The Black Power movement, as Michelle Wallace points out, only served to increase the divisions between Black women and men: Black macho allowed for only the most primitive notion of women-women as possessions, women as spoils of war, leaving black women with no resale value. As a possession the black woman was a symbol of defeat, and therefore of little use to the revolution except as the performer of drudgery.
Wallace, , p. Wallace argues, however, that the number of fatherless Black households did not become significantly large until Black people began to be more successful economically in American society. She quotes Jacqueline Jackson, who shows that the number of fatherless families is directly related to the Black sex-ratio. Women are placed in a difficult position.
Whilst they are the site for the battleground of competing masculinities and the repositories of fantasy definitions of femininity and passivity, they are also the ultimate judges of male performance. This is one way in which women are able to have cultural power over men; they can make comparisons[11]. Women have the personal power to expose mythical masculine displays of power as fraudulent, although rarely do they have the representational space or the power to put their exposes into public circulation.
They are thus to be feared. If women can be discredited, they need not be taken seriously; they will no longer constitute a threat.
Music is just one form in which discreditation occurs: the Geto Boys made lots of money by selling virulent hatred, expressed through slasher fantasies, to both white and Black men[12]; NWA's 'To kill a hooker' takes great delight in the destruction of dangerous women; Ice T's track 'Some of you Niggas is Bitches too' is very similar to Paul Willis's English working class 'Lads' comments about girls being the lowest form of life.
The magazine Hip Hop Connection recognizes that misogyny is the easiest way to sell records to the largest audience[13]. Ice T has been able to capitalize on misogyny whilst also distancing himself from it through the use of parody[14]. However, unlike white male music, within rap there is a whole section publicly and directly opposed to rap misogyny e. It is not only fear of judgement and performance exposure by women that worries men. If men are heterosexual, their desire may mean that women have the power to make them lose control in a culture in which men are motivated to resist their own feelings of vulnerability Hollway, This is demonstrated in an interview with Ice Cube an LA rapper, now associated with the Nation of Islam, who articulates the street experiences of gangsta life as a response to institutional racism, but who is also notoriously misogynist.
Tricia Rose points to the profound fear of female sexuality: Interviewer: Do you think rap is hostile towards women? Ice Cube: The whole damn world is hostile towards women. Interviewer: What do you mean by that? Ice Cube: I mean the power of sex is more powerful than the motherfuckers in Saudi Arabia.
A girl that you want to get with can make you do damn near anything if she knows how to do her shit right. The fear of women's judgement and fear of exposing male vulnerabilities is articulated by many male rappers: EPMD warn other men about 'Goldiggers', i. The pornographic images that accompany these warnings, Williams argues, are male confessions of insecurity which create the desire for knowledge and control.
Segal argues that men are least sure of their power over women, and most fearful of women's self-sufficiency and autonomy. She quotes Soble who argues that: "Pornography is not a means for men to achieve power over women, but proof that men lack power over women. Whilst challenging racism, Black male rap repeats the general masculine anxieties, fears and discomfort about women alongside the attempt to control them.
This fear of women, Hope Scott notes, was also articulated through the literature of the Black power movement of the s and 70s[15]. Misogynist representations may be one way in which Black men can make their displays of power seem real. Unfortunately, this continues to place Black women in positions of subordination to them. So, continuing in a long tradition, they fight back. This time rap is the form they use.
Female rappers talk Black, talk back Female rappers do a double take on the defiant speech of 'talking back, talking Black'. If rap is the response to the racist 'call' of white society, then female rappers not only speak to this, but also to the sexist 'call' within the male response. In fact, one characteristic that pervades these records is the irony, parody and humour upon which they draw.
Unlike most of the male rappers these women are less inclined to take themselves that seriously. It is in this struggle between male attempts to define women as objects and female attempts to resist or subvert these definitions that feminist challenges are articulated. Davis and hooks argue that Black women's musical legacy is a way to understand history and contemporary Black women's consciousness.
In an interview with Tricia Rose she maintains: I wanted to show the strength of Black women in history. Strong Black women I wanted to show what we've done. We've done a lot; it's just that people don't know it. Rose, , p. She also includes other female rappers in the video. Practically every female rapper has written and produced songs about autonomy and independence: Roxanne Shante's year old debut 'Independent Woman' is a classic of its time.
Sandy Denton Pepa of Salt 'n' Pepa talks about their single 'Independence': To me it's about independence for a women, not being dependent on a man for the financial stability.
It's like 'go for your own, do your own'. It's just a strong song. Many suggest they are better off by themselves. They also refer to the importance of relationships with other women; 'sisters' are a frequent point of reference. And they just come by and are like, that's nice.
And then you spend days wondering, 'Was it my hair? Am I getting fat? But why? So they can walk all over you again? Fuck 'em. I don't need them.
For many female rappers, their Iyrics suggest that investments both financial and emotional in men have not paid off. Numerous female rappers refer to the fraudulent nature of masculinity; men are not to be taken seriously but to be laughed at.
This also has quite a long history in blues music. For instance, Esther Phillips deals with what she considers to be the three worst addictions that capitalist social relations have encouraged in Black women: surrender to men, religion and hard drugs Russell, In one group of songs, she announces that she, too, is fed up with men and the terms of heterosexual relationships as they exist in s American society. In 'Black-Eyed Blues' Esther blends feminism with nationalism to make a strong statement of personal independence: 'I'm just gonna be me' and 'I can do bad by myself are recurring themes.
Irma Thomas recorded a world-weary, man- weary rap in 'Coming from Behind' which articulated men's incapacity to love and charted men's sexual inferiority Toop, , p.
Ma Rainey was able to celebrate the power of lesbian sexuality in the blues song 'Prove it on me Blues'. There is a very long Black female tradition of autonomy Mirza, which involves criticism of male behaviour and male performance not dissimilar to that of white working class women.
No wonder Ice Cube etc. They are also probably worried by the fact that for some female rappers, such as HWA and BWP, 'dissing' other women has now been superseded by collective Black sisterhood. When one women has a tough time, we all do. As Gaines notes, Afro-American women have historically formulated identity and political allegiance, in terms of 'race' rather than gender or class. This should not be surprising as Stack found all the African- Americans that she interviewed acutely aware of racism and economic injustice.
By the age of 13 women were that racist and sexual harassment were part of the work experience. Most express a specific commitment towards challenging oppression, but use different musical forms such as the political lecturing rap of Sister Souljah against the fun-pop stance of Salt 'n' Pepa.
Sandy Denton Pepa maintains: "Give 'em a little bit of knowledge, lessons on Black awareness, the cultural things and also give 'em a good time. They wanted to use them in a pop video to give a global airing to what was actually happening to Black people in the USA. As it happened, the jury did this job for them. In this sense the female rappers' responses are a product, not only of the economic conditions that engender racism, but also of the wider system of heterosexuality and the social discourses that position all women in relation to men.
The Black female rappers don't just talk back to Black misogynist rappers, they talk back to the colonialist male history by which the Black man was positioned[24]. They speak against the power of white men who try to fit femininity to its fantasies.
They speak against the objectification of women's bodies. They speak against the silencing of women's sexuality. They speak against the misogyny that is a ubiquitous part of everyday life for most women. In this way they can be seen to be speaking for all women. Talking back actually produces a social reality, rather than reproducing the given power relationships; it is part of the dialogic process of naming, claiming and recontextualizing that provides us with different meanings for the subject positions that we occupy.
The female rappers are filling a social void identified by numerous Black writers who identify the silencing of Black cultural responses Fanon, ; hooks, ; Spillers, , in particular those of Black women. Wallace notes the structural silencing of women of colour within the sphere of production of knowledge worldwide; Angela Davis maintains that the marginal representation of Black women in the documentation of African-American cultural developments does not reflect women's participation adequately.
Female rappers are filling this silence with music. The term civilization has always been loaded with racist connotations. Bourdieu argues that civilization is an ideological category that operates to maintain and legitimate social distinctions and the allocation of power in the name of 'taste'. In this process issues of access to knowledge and cultural capital are obfuscated: The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile-in a word, natural, enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures for ever closed to the profane.
Bourdieu, , p. Civilization is constructed against otherness, of Blackness as otherness, and measured by the distance from the explicitly sexual. The civilizing system can hold no worth to Black women, for as Lola Young notes, Blackness itself connotes 'difference'; when the subject is also a Black woman the difference is reinforced.
Gilman notes how black female sexuality became equated with prostitution in the 19th century. This equation established a legacy in antithesis to notions of white civilization and also to white femininity.
Femininity came to be defined against the sexual Ware, Some Black female rappers make a point of distancing themselves from any civilizing system. They refuse to succumb to the civilizing discourses of femininity that contain and silence women's sexuality, labelling it and condemning it as vulgar. Racism, Angela Davis argues, has always drawn strength from its ability to encourage sexual coercion. The female rappers celebrate the power, of their sexuality and refuse to be morally evaluated and censured.
They refuse to be civilized. In this sense they are dangerous. They embody a threat to moral and social order and they encompass a threat to the forms of masculinity that would wish to control them.
Mercer and Julien note how definitions of sexuality are deeply linked to racism because sex is regarded as that thing which par excellence is a threat to the moral order of Western civilisation.
Hence one is civilised at the expense of sexuality, and sexual at the expense of civilisation. Moral order, they argue, has always been set against the 'chaos' of sexual abandon, which constitutes a threat to the social order. Mercer Julien, , p. By using what Audre Lorde defines as the 'master's tools', i.
They use all the discursive resources available to them to create a discursive shift by disempowering the male meaning. For instance, they draw on and subvert the Black musical traditions of slackness, rudeness, toasting and boasting[27] by using the strategies of the trickster, who inverts the universe of the master because the master fails to understand the words on the tongues of the oppressed can become tools that initiate a reversal of roles and subversion of the system which he the master has so carefully crafted.
Hope-Scott, , p. Rather than defining female sexuality as 'lack', 'invisible', 'subjective annihilation', 'objectification' or by 'eroticizing their own degradation' as some feminist theorists would have it , they are defining themselves by defiantly speaking their own sexuality. BWP use explicit sexual language to demand the fulfilment of their sexual desire in a straightforward statement of want. It would be very difficult to think that any men could have control over them; they are more of a male nightmare than a male fantasy.
This demand discourse does not sit neatly alongside the feminine and maternal discourses of caring, duty, obligation and responsibility. This is quite different from the young white working class women that I studied Skeggs, who, in a similar way, had a great deal of knowledge about masculinity and were able to undermine and challenge male power, yet were unable to express their own sexuality.
Because of their investments in the duty and responsibility discourses of caring, they were unable to place themselves into a demand discourse. They were condemnatory of those who could. BWP refuse to take emotional responsibility for the management of the male ego and relationships. In so doing, Carby argues, they are challenging the racist process that displaces female desire onto female duty: Black female sexuality was frequently displaced onto the terrain of the political responsibility of the Black woman.
The displacement of female desire onto female duty enabled the negotiation of racist constructions of Black female sexuality but denied Carby, , p. They refuse to see their sexuality as a duty. Notions of duty and caring are also part of the ideological package of civilization from which, by virtue of their black and working class positioning, they would always be distanced.
Statements of sexual desire framed as demand do not fit into the romantic framework of relationships. In fact, most female rappers dismiss romance as a scam. Nikki D maintains that it is a male conspiracy to trick women into giving up their bodies to false promises. Some theorists argue that, when women speak of sexuality using sexually explicit language, they are just colluding in the male pornographic position.
In fact, for Black and white working class women, sexuality is one of the few cultural resources that they can use for the construction of embodied self-worth. Speaking of sexuality is not a privilege, as some theorists have suggested, but a means of collapsing the dichotomy between public and private spheres and exposing the power relationships that control women. The political consciousness of women of colour, she argues, stems from an awareness that the public is personally political.
Speaking of sexuality directly exposes the distinctions that exist between women. Only those who are economically safe with enough cultural investments to enable them not to address sexuality can ignore it.
The women who are continually defined as the embodiment of sexuality e. Black and working class women , whether they want to be or not, have to find a way to deal with this continual categorization.
Directly confronting categorization may be one way, for sexuality is a component of subjective construction. To deny or to denigrate it leads to wilful ignorance of a class-defined cultural and economic resource.
Because women have been exploited through their sexuality this does not necessarily mean that they cannot experience it as something positive and controllable.
The fact that Black and working class women's sexuality has been labelled, historically, as dangerous and threatening only highlights the on-going hegemonic attempt to contain its power.
These Black female rappers are well aware that, in a racist and sexist society divided by class, sexual relationships are underpinned by power, control and objectification. They want to have power and control over their own sexual relationships, as did the blues singers who used it to construct themselves as sexual subjects: The 'Classic Blues' of the 20s and 30s is a discourse that articulates a cultural and political struggle over sexual relations: a struggle that is directed against the objectification of female sexuality Bessie Smith, for instance: With her Black women in American culture could no longer just be regarded as sexual objects.
She made us sexual subjects, the first step in taking control. She transformed our collective shame at being rape victims, treated like dogs, or worse, the meat dogs eat by emphasising the value of our allure. In so doing she humanised sexuality for Black women.
The importance of this is often lost. Russell, , p. They are challenging the dominant representations of Black women in music, such as those identified by Steward and Garratt who reveal the long tradition of exoticizing and taming the Black woman singer, of coding her as animalistic. They refer to Tina Turner's tour poster which had her rushing towards the camera, in a skirt made from animal fur, with tails hanging from her waist.
The caption reads: 'Captured live'. Grace Jones was similarly portrayed on all-fours, caged and snarling at the viewer. In doing so they assert a sexuality that is not framed by the traditional racist mythology. The assertion of sexuality is also constructed with irreverence and humour. These female rappers are young women enjoying themselves, taking pleasure from their inability to be controlled; and pleasure from the disturbance they cause. Female rappers make a distinction between overtly expressing sexuality and being available for sexual usage.
This equation between usage and expression has been particularly effective in silencing the expression of women's sexuality Lees, All the female rappers make it abundantly clear that they are not available for use; their expression of sexuality, and how and when they choose to use it, is solely a matter for themselves. In 'Shake Your Thang' Salt 'n' Pepa force a wedge between overt female sexual expression and the presumption that such expressions are intended to attract men.
In order to be seen as civilized, distance has to be drawn from the sexual but also from the popular and the artificial. Ironically, Queen Latifah located in the popular music industry, and even using samples from Madonna on her last album disassociates herself from the frivolity of pop music.
She wants her music to be seen as serious. Many rappers draw distinctions between their authenticity and the more obviously pop music of MC Hammer. Now the Nationalists want to impose distinctions within popular music itself[28]. Rose cites Nelson George, a music critic, who claims that the popularizing of rap will lead to its 'cultural emasculation'.
To claim serious intent and authenticity the artificial, vulgar and frivolous must be dismissed. They embrace the popular and, by doing so, insert social class as a feature of distinction. They recognize that their positioning in the popular locates them in an anti-pretentious, anti-intellectual and irreverent medium; to claim authenticity is to misunderstand the operations of the; popular.
It is also racist because it reproduces the association of Blackness with nature and authenticity Gilroy, Authenticity is itself commodified. It is just packaged differently, in a distinctive rather than popular form. By not condemning, but rather using, the popular, Salt 'n' Pepa aim to speak to the largest female market possible. They argue that a form of entertainment has to be used which can reach as wide an audience as possible, in a style which will speak to the largest audience possible.
A belief in authenticity restricts the audience that could be addressed what would be the point of speaking to white people?
It limits the forms that could be used to articulate Black experience. It also assumes a pure, singular, homogeneous Black expression[29]. Thankfully, Reid notes how, in Britain, there has been a shift in Black cultural politics in the name of diversity. Popular music can never be authentic because it draws upon a bricolage of sounds from varying different sources, histories and associations.
It was postmodern long before the term was invented. West argues that rap is a cultural form of moral guidance. For BWP and others, rap is a challenge to the traditional moral discourses that contain women. For the female rappers associated with the Nation of Islam, an alternative civilizing system is established which proscribes a traditional position for women: as reproducers and upholders of the Black Nation, heterosexual and supportive of men.
In this sense, rap can be seen as the site for competing moralities. The Poor Righteous Teacher's track 'Shakilya' illustrates the not-so alternative civilizing system. She's mine, mine, mine, Wake up the Black Queen's mine , 12" mix, Profile Records This track creates distance from the sexual by condemning those women who are directly associated with it, asserts the civilizing duty of women, and claims the power of ownership.
It is a message of discipline and righteousness for Black women very similar to that of male- dominated Western capitalist-Christian societies.
This may be because early Black nationalism in the States from the mid- to the late 19th century was 'absolutist, civilizationist, elitist and based on Christian humanism.
Black women, Hope-Scott argues, played an important and leading role, historically, in the Black nationalist struggle, but this was always dependent on their acceptance of the 'alternative' moral order.
Interestingly, Queen Latifah locates herself within this alternative civilizing system, taking care to distance herself from the vulgarity of BWP: I like some of what BWP does. That one song 'Coming Back Strapped' where some guy is beating up this woman and she comes back with a gun and blows him away I like that. I tend towards more subtle, let's talk it out, way of doing things, but sometimes direct action- abrupt and nasty-that's the best way. BWP are just saying 'stand up for yourself and don't be bullied by any man'.
I just have some problems on the vulgar way they say certain things. Hip-Hop Connection, Feb , p. So the choice for female rappers is either the acceptance of an alternative civilizing system, or the complete rejection of any moralizing discourses used to contain women and the expression of their sexuality.
Talking back against The female rappers speak in a way that is unlikely to be associated with feminism. Firstly, this is because the use of pop music rap is just one variety is associated with entertainment and with the frivolous. Secondly, as Ngcobo notes, only a few Black women are feminists in the sense understood by white middle-class women. In the interviews with Tricia Rose, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte and Salt were all reluctant to define themselves as feminist, although they admitted to supporting feminist political struggles and ideals.
The rappers are speaking their feminism to Black men as well as women, encouraging dialogue that challenges sexism. This will involve broadening the scope of investigations in our search for Black women's voices. Barbara Christian argues that people of colour have always theorized, often in narrative forms, riddles and proverbs, and through play with language.
Rap is just one example of that theorizing. In the last 10 years, under the influence of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, there has been an increasing feminization see Lister, and racialization of poverty In Britain, Wilson argues, Black women have been hit hardest by Thatcherism.
This also needs to be seen alongside the increasing number of racist attacks, and the increasing legitimation of racism Barker, It also needs to be set against what Fine defines as the "missing discourse of desire".
She charts the way in which women learn to suppress any articulations of sexual desire; how the language we have for articulations of desire is inadequate, leading to the promotion of female sexual victimization rather than autonomous expression; and how we learn to frame sexual expression through institutionalized heterosexuality e. Thompson b suggests that it is rare for young women to embark on sexual encounters feeling in possession of their sexuality.
Rather they feel that sex is something that is done to them. The female rappers directly challenge this suppression of female sexuality. Start the wiki.
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