Divas and deviance Hip-hop feminism and black visuality in Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006) (original) (raw)
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Humanities, 2019
16 June 2018. London Stadium. Beyoncé and Jay-Z revealed the premiere of the music video Apeshit. Filmed inside the Louvre Museum in Paris, Beyoncé's sexual desirability powerfully dialogues with Western canons of high art that have dehumanized or erased the black female body. Dominant tropes have historically associated the black female body with the realm of nature saddled with an animalistic hypersexuality. With this timely release, Apeshit engages with the growing current debate about the ethic of representation of the black subject in European museums. Here, I argue that Beyoncé transcends the tension between nature and culture into a syncretic language to subvert a dominant imperialistic gaze. Drawing on black feminist theories and art history, a formal analysis traces the genealogy and stylistic expression of this vocabulary to understand its political implications. Findings pinpoint how Beyoncé laces past and present, the regal nakedness of her African heritage and Western conventions of the nude to convey the complexity, sensuality, and humanity of black women-thus drawing a critical reimagining of museal practices and enriching the collective imaginary at large.
'She Ugly': Black Girls, Women in Hiphop and Activism--Hiphop Feminist Literacies Perspectives
Community Literacy Journal, 2021
This work draws upon Hiphop feminism, studies of Black girlhood, and Black women and girls' literacies to illuminate the layered and violent narratives that shape society's treatment of Black women and girls, what these narratives look like in everyday life, how they are taken up and negotiated in different social spheres, such as an after school club for Black middle school girls and the platforms and artistry of women Hiphop artists and creatives. Richardson considers what activism is possible through juxtaposing Black girls as emerging creatives, celebrity corporate artist activists Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, independent activist artists such as Noname and dream hampton. Given the far-reaching representations of Black women and girls in popular culture, the art, lives and platforms of women in Hiphop are critical sites to understanding complexities, strategies and possibilities for social change.
QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2017
This essay highlights the construction of black bodies as valuable in the fashion system as a mark of difference and evidence of diversity. Here, I also render the high fashion industry as a site of conflicting elements concerning the deployment and meaning of the black female body. To do so, I use a combined analysis of activism in the fashion industry, which calls for the representation of black models through the visible inclusion of more black bodies on the runway and in magazines, and a textual/image analysis of the July 2008 issue of Vogue Italia, “A Black Issue.” I argue that representations of the black models in the Vogue Italia Black Issue present the “glamorous” black model’s body as unthreatening, alluring, and integrated into dominant discourses of feminine attractiveness. I draw from the presentation of images in the high fashion industry to highlight instances when blackness is asked to prove a post-race and post-racist reality. In an industry in which models are cele...
Shayne Lee: Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture
Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture, by Shayne Lee, is a groundbreaking and ambitious book by one of America's youngest and brightest sociologists. It is a highly original work that has bearing on a variety of intellectual disciplines including cultural studies, sexuality studies, African American studies, and religious studies. A work in race, gender, sexuality, and culture, Erotic Revolutionaries will spawn much debate and instigate new visions of intellectual work where these important matters are concerned. Lee's book offers a provocative approach to the study of American popular culture, particularly African American popular culture. In profoundly compelling ways, it engages the taboo topic of female sexuality, particularly the sexuality of African American women, and interprets it through the lens of pro-sex feminism. With a pro-sex approach to feminism and the sexuality of African American women, Lee, as a self-identified male feminist, enters into sexual terrain with respect to female sexuality that invites intense feminist and nonfeminist criticism. He undertakes an unprecedented examination of African American female sexuality which challenges normative assumptions regarding the relationship between feminism and men, black men in particular. Through a pro-sex or an erotic reading of contemporary African American female artists and cultural image makers, Lee seeks to take feminism, women's studies, gender studies, and the study of African American women to new heights.
2019
Throughout history, fictitious constructions of black womanhood have been inherently contradictory and antithetical. Practicing what Gilroy (1993: 100-102) calls an “anti-anti- essentialism”, I argue that while Rihanna and Beyoncé’s “mullatticity” has allowed them to navigate and negotiate a “series of positionalities” (Tate, 2015: 132; Hall, 1993: 112) throughout their careers within popular culture, contemporary media discourses have juxtaposed and dichotomized them along the trajectories nationality, sexuality and class. The constructed Beyoncé/Rihanna juxtaposition serves to recuperate control of their black female identities via rhetorical devices in popular media discourses when they exercise retrievals of personhood — e.g. Rihanna rejecting objectified victim status in the “Bitch Better Have My Money” music video and Beyoncé using her voice to “vindicate her southern black womanhood” in “Bow Down/I Been On” (Bradley, 2013). Neoliberal and postfeminist discourses must re-engineer their narratives along familiar cultural scripts (e.g. virgin/whore dichotomy) in order to recuperate control, in which Beyoncé, Rihanna and their fans are ‘put to work’ through frames of competition which deregulates and dehistoricizes diasporic controlling images of black women (Collins, 2000). Through Critical Discourse Analysis of contemporary media discourses, I analyse this technique of juxtaposition used by media discourses which reproduce antithetical and contradictory constructions of black womanhood.
Beyoncé: Disrupting the Erotic Space within the “Queen-Ho” binary
This paper was submitted as part of a Ideas & Exposition Module - Risk and Popular Culture, at Tembusu College, NUS. The paper deploys concepts of risk through an exploration of African-American pop superstar, Beyoncé’s, visual album released in 2013 - " Beyoncé". Specifically, I examine the deployment of risqué content in the music videos for “Yoncé/Partition”, “Blow”, “Mine” and “Grown Woman” ,Beyoncé. These songs explore different facets of sexual experiences in its corporeality as well as psychosexuality. The paper argues that the performer utilises bodily notions of excess and control through her physical body ie. booty ,and acts of performance ie. posturing. Drawing from popular discourses on Beyoncé and women in hip-hop, the paper aims to offer an alternate perspective on notions of performativity and emancipatory possibilities of the performer’s hypervisuality through visual representations and strategies.Unlike commercialized ideals of (white, Eurocentric) beauty and femininity which objectify the female figure (and sexuality) as either Madonna or whore , the visual album utilisies provocative sexual politics to denote contesting and lived female experiences that refuse easy categorization. While some praised Beyonce's risqué lyrics and images as a ‘feminist manifesto’ , others critique the implicit reinscription of historical sexual violence against (and objectification of) black women through a hypervisualised medium.
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2008
In the late fall of 2004, following the media spectacle created by Spelman College's protest of the misogyny and sexism in the music and videos of rapper Nelly, Essence, a popular black women's magazine, began a campaign to raise awareness. Arguing that a more public discussion by black women of the issue of misogyny in rap's portrayal of black women is long overdue, the magazine published a year-long series of articles as part of its "Take Back the Music" campaign. More interesting than the series of articles produced by the magazine is the overwhelming response generated on its internet-based scribble boards, which offered their readers the opportunity to participate in a communal dialogue. Arguing that the scribble boards became a black women's temporary "safe space," this essay interrogates the manner in which black women construct subject positions around the performance of race, class, and gender as a means to resist dominant representations of black women, while simultaneously engaging in disciplinary practices that constrain black femininity.
" My Crown Too Heavy Like the Queen Nefertiti " : A Black Feminist Analysis of
With the “controlling images” of the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Sapphire constantly reiterated in movies, television shows, and popular culture, serving the interests of what bell hooks has identified as white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, a consumer has to wonder if there is any way for Black women performers to thrive and empower other Black women while working within these constricting institutions. Although pop culture is the predominant cultural space where these controlling images and stereotypes have been reproduced there are many Black female entertainers who attempt to challenge and undermine such representations. Scholars such as hooks and Patricia Hill Collins introduce us to the diverse forms of black feminists and black feminism by showing how black women from all walks of life produce and engage black feminist practice. In common cultural discourse, however artists such as Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Meshell Ndeogeocello are upheld as leading black feminist entertainers of our contemporary period while artists Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are denounced as disempowering to black women and merely reproducing dominant racist, sexist, and hetero-normative stereotypes of black women. Much Black Feminist scholarship has focused on Black women’s resistance to the patriarchal, racist structures that continue to police and attempt to restrain Black women’s bodies and freedom within material social and political realms, but less scholarship focuses on the ways in which Black female entertainers produce Black feminist knowledge and empowerment within the realms of pop culture. The purpose of this study is not to show how Badu and Monae are the best examples of “true” Black feminism in the entertainment industry and how artists like Minaj and Knowles are tools of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy. The purpose is to take the expansions of Black feminism that Collins, Davis, hooks, and several other Black feminist intellectuals, have articulated in order to reflect the broad ways in which Black feminism plays out in the popular music industry and to argue against the grain of critiques of popular culture to demonstrate how, despite its limitations, this realm of cultural representation and performance can be emancipatory for black women.