Hip-hop feminism

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Hip-hop feminism is loosely defined as young feminists born after 1964 who approach the political with a mixture of feminist and hip-hop sensibilities. It shares many similarities with black feminism and third wave feminism, but is a distinct self-identification that carries its own weight and creates its own political spaces.

Hip-hop feminism was created by feminists who felt that black feminism was not equipped to consider the issues of women belonging to the hip-hop generation. The term Hip Hop Feminism was coined by the provocative cultural critic Joan Morgan in 1999 when she published the book "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks it Down."

Hip hop feminism is based in a tradition of black feminism, which emphasizes that the personal is political because our race, class, gender, and sexuality determine how we are treated. An important idea that came out of early black feminism is that of intersectionality, which T. Hasan Johnson describes in his book You Must Learn! A Primer in the Study of Hip Hop Culture as “a term that argues that race, gender, sexuality, and class are interlinked and used to shape hierarchical relationships in American society”. Hip hop feminism is a different kind of feminism than “traditional” feminism; it is a way of thinking and living that is grounded in different lived experiences than the “traditional” feminism of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which was a mostly white movement and was more interested in advancing women’s rights than civil rights. Many female rappers, such as Queen Latifah, embody and convey feminism, yet she does not identify as a feminist because “it is considered too white, too middle class, and too hostile to black men. Some writers locate Latifah’s story in “Third Wave” feminism, as representing a race-conscious, sexually open feminism that rejects Second Wave white feminist elitism and racism, and also black sexism and homophobia”. As many women and men involved in hip hop culture are not white, they will have a different way of viewing the world; a desire for intersectional change in the spheres of how both women and non-white people are treated in America.

In the book Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement Reiland Rabaka explains, "women in the hip hop generation have consistently deconstructed and reconstructed feminism and womanism to speak to the special needs of their life-worlds and life-struggles, their unique lived-experiences and lived-endurances. In the process they have produced an unprecedented form of feminism—a “functional feminism,” according to Morgan (1999), that is ‘committed to “keeping it real”’ with respect to the critique of interlocking and overlapping nature of sexism, racism, and capitalism in the lives of black and other nonwhite women’ (pp. 61–62). Seeming to simultaneously embrace and reject the fundamentals of feminism, the women of the hip hop generation, like the hip hop generation in general, have blurred the lines between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ by critically dialoguing with a culture that commonly renders them invisible or grossly misrepresents them when and where they are visible".

Later in the chapter, Rabaka explains the connection between media, hip hop, feminism, and intersectionality: "Hip hop feminists critically comprehend that mass media interpretations of hip hop, as well as the mass media’s widely disseminated distorted stories about hip hop, are actually part and parcel of the ongoing social construction and maintenance of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and other identities. All of this is to say, hip hop feminism is much more than feminism, and it focuses on more than feminist issues, misogyny, and patriarchy. Hip hop feminists use hip hop culture as one of their primary points of departure to highlight serious social issues and the need for political activism aimed at racism, sexism, capitalism, and heterosexism as overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression [...] hip hop feminists are simultaneously expanding the range and uses of intersectional theory and complicating what it means to be both a hip hopper and a feminist".

Defining hip-hop feminism

In "Using [Living Hip-Hop] Feminism: Redefining an Answer (to) Rap," Aisha Durham defines hip-hop feminism as "a socio-cultural, intellectual and political movement grounded in the situated knowledge of women of color from the post civil rights generation who recognize culture as a pivotal site for political intervention to challenge, resist, and mobilize collectives to dismantle systems of exploitation."

She goes on to further expand on hip-hop feminism as a distinct movement aimed at examining and engaging with the effect culture has on shaping black female identity, sexuality, and feminisms.

According to Durham, hip-hop feminism "acknowledges the way black womanhood is policed in popular culture . . ." and "recognize culture as a space for feminist intervention—especially when we do not wield power in traditional politics."

"Hip-hop feminism is not a novelty act surfing atop the third wave of difference in the academy. It is not a pinup for postfeminism put forth by duped daughters who dig misogynistic rap music and the girl-power pussy politic of empowerment. Hip-hop gains its popularity from its oppositionality and from its complicity in reproducing dominant representations of black womanhood."

Hip-hop feminism acknowledges the problematic, misogynist nature of culture and its formative effects on women (especially young black women) and empowers them by enabling participation, response, and owning self-identification.

"For some, the term “hip-hop feminism” offers up quite the enigma. Critics position misogyny as hip-hop’s cardinal sin, which raises the obvious question: How do women actively participate in a culture that seems to hate them so vehemently? For self-described hip-hop feminists, attempting to answer that question is not their only task, since understanding what hip-hop feminism is and isn’t goes far beyond responding to women-bashing sentiment."

Hip Hop as a Medium for Social Change

The mediums for initiating social change are growing, and hip hop is one of those mediums. Rabaka observes that “the majority of hip hop feminist mobilization at the present moment seems to emerge from cyber-social networks, mass media, and popular culture, rather than nationally networked women’s organizations based in government, academic, or male-dominated leftist bureaucracies”; as a result, music videos, which appeal to popular culture, can be disseminated as mass media through cyber-social networks, making them a perfect platform for motivating change. Abiola Abrams, an author and inspirational speaker who has appeared on BET and MTV represents a more mainstream voice in hip hop feminism. Her hip hop feminist play "Goddess City" produced at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and 2007 debut novel Dare, a love story retelling of Faust set in the hip hop world, are key works fusing hip hop culture with women's empowerment.

T. Hasan Johnson believes hip hop can work as an intersectional platform: “Hip-Hop can be the site whereby such meditations and re-evaluations can occur, offering participants the opportunity to re-imagine masculinities and femininities in a multitude of ways to suit a variety of contexts”. Rabaka explains out the way in which creative mediums such as hip hop can be used to wreck the interlocking systems of oppression in America: "The point is to offer the women of the hip hop generation feminist and womanist alternatives to the patriarchal (mis)representations of womanhood spewing out of the US. culture industries. As Gwendolyn Pough (2004) pointed out, because hip hop’s sexism is so prevalent, and because there is only so long that the women of the hip hop generation can embrace either the super-strong black woman or video vixen identities, hip hop feminists have “found ways to deal with these issues within the larger public sphere and the counter-public sphere of hip hop by bringing wreck to stereotyped images through their continued use of expressive culture’". Whether they meant to or not, “the women of the hip hop generation have created a body of work that offers up feminist or womanist answers to many of the hip hop generation’s most urgent interpersonal, cultural, social, and political issues” and “recent feminist scholarship suggests that in its own controversial and/or contradictory way the hip-hop feminist movement may very well be the most politically polyvocal and socially visible manifestation of the ongoing evolution of the Women’s Liberation movement prevalent in contemporary US society”.

Hip Hop Feminism and Music Videos

Imani Perry references Cade Bambara who “asks us to consider the use of metaphors, themes, and other ritualized structures to create meaning in American film”. She quotes, There is the conventional cinema that masks its ideological imperatives as entertainment and normalizes the hegemony with the term “convention,” that is to say the cinematic practices — of editing, particular uses of narrative structure, the development of genres, the language of spatial relationships, particular performatory styles of acting — are called conventions because they are represented somehow to be transcendent or universal, when in fact these practices are based on a history of imperialism and violence.

Perry notes that “when it comes to feminist messages, often the words and language of a hip hop song may have feminist content, but the visual image may be implicated in the subjugation of black women” and points out “the tensions between text and visual image in women’s hip hop”. Hip Hop feminism and the objectification of the black female body in music videos has also become a subject of visual art, exemplified in artist Michelle Marie Charles's 2012 video Explicit and Deleted, which was included in the 2013 exhibition at the Cue Art Foundation Goddess Clap Back: Hip Hop Feminism in Art, curated by Katie Cercone and featuring artists such as Damali Abrams, Kalup Linzy, Narcissister, Rashaad Newsome, Noelle Lorraine Williams and Hank Willis Thomas.