Hip-Hop/Rap

Hip-Hop and Gender Studies

The nascent scholarship in rap music arose primarily from the interdisciplinary field of black studies in the early 1990s. Houston Baker, Tricia Rose, Michael Dyson, and Robin Kelley as well as journalists such as Nelson George provided largely textual and cultural analyses of the genesis, themes, images, and cultural politics of rap music. These foundational works revealed hip-hop as a social and cultural movement deeply embedded with power relations of race, class, group identity, and representation, yet, with the exception of Rose's work, scholarship on rap music has primarily focused on men and their artistry, performance, and subjectivity. One of the early interventions in the gender politics of rap music focused on the inclusion of women as active agents and performers. Cultural workers, filmmakers, and scholars have inserted women into rap history by exploring the sociohistori-cal role of women rappers, textual analyses of their lyrics, biographical sketches, and backgrounds of famous female rappers, and the role of hip-hop culture in the everyday expressive practices of women in the culture. Scholars such as Christina Veran and Nancy Guevara posit women rappers such as Salt-N-Pepa, Monie Love, Queen Latifah, and M. C. Lyte as key players in the development of the genre. The everyday practices of female DJs, b-girls, producers, and rappers in hip-hop are explored in a 1993 documentary by Rachel Raimist titled Nobody Knows My Name, and the popular urban hip-hop magazine Vibe published a book titled Hip-Hop Divas in 2000 that focuses exclusively on the herstories of hip-hop.

The privileging of men in the study of hip-hop reflects the gendered ways in which mass culture is framed in society generally. In this schema, women associated with popular culture are perceived as consumers rather than as producers and are viewed as engaging with the culture in more passive (feminine) ways. In contrast, men are associated with high culture, production, and the ability to sustain the intellectual and creative work needed as artists. Subsequently, women's labor, creative presence, and innovations are neglected, ignored, or deemed less distinguished than is that of their male counterparts. Similarly, the history of hip-hop writ large is about black men, and the inclusion of women artists' challenges the myth of their absence and the hegemonic construction of rap as a masculinized public sphere and performance.

Gwendolyn D. Pough, a third-wave black feminist, argues that hip-hop culture and rap music allows black women's experiences to be publicly heard and provides a platform and voice for renegotiating the ways in which they are represented in the world of hip-hop. In her seminal book titled Black Noise, Rose [Page 423]provides a textual analysis of the dialogical qualities of rap music as a public script in which black women “talk back” to men. Yet, the presence of female rappers may subvert but does not necessarily reconstruct gendered division of labor or overcome dominant gender ideologies in the culture. Recording studios are male-dominated spaces with bonding rituals and practices that continue to exclude women. Sexist notions of success and authenticity have meant that over the years female rappers have had to deploy a variety of strategies to earn respect and sell records in the male-dominated world of hip-hop where authenticity (“keeping it real” in rap parlance) is constructed in the hypermasculine terms of aggression, domination, competition, heterosexism, and the ability to exert control over others. During hip-hop's first decade, female rappers, graffiti artists, and DJs in hip-hop culture frequently subdued their sexuality because displays of femininity would undermine their talent or create the strong possibility of sexually “soiling” their reputation.

...