Girl in the Locker Room! has some cool stuff on it today, including a nod to essence magazine who's launching a 12-month long campaign to 'take back the music' - wrenching hip hop away from the whole pimps/ho's paradigm.
already the discussion on the essence board is lively, most women agreeing that the representation of black women in hip hop has to change. there are some who think it's a matter of free speech and 'artistic expression.'
i'm always hesitant to automatically oppose the image of the 'ho' with the 'lady' considering the history of black female sexuality in this country. while the reaction to emancipation for writers like pauline hopkins may have been to promote a model of black female sexuality based on white middle class mores, i think that black women (artists, writers or whatever) have recognized very keenly its limits.
for me, the matter is agency, not image. a couple of the rappers essence interviews say that the women choose to be on the videos - not thinking about the economic barrel they have these women over, not thinking about the crass commercialization they're encouraging these women to particpate in. yes, it is their choice (e.g., no one is dragging these women kicking and screaming into the studios to shoot a video) but that's a very limited and narrow definition of choice: are these women choosing from a position of agency/control or are they making a choice based on the allure of star-fucking and cash?
4 comments:
Agency.
I seem to remember you having a minor braingasm at the word "agency" during a viewing at your place of the movie "Stargate."
Don't forget, a lot of women and girls think it's awesome and fabulous to dress and act like ho's because get to experiment with their 'sex power' and they don't believe there will be consequenses (i.e., violence, reputation, etc). Context: I'm speaking as a high school teacher.
it's black women saying to the music industry, 'you know? enough.'
the difference between self-aware sex workers and these girls is that the self-aware sex workers are in control - they are establishing the rules of how they are represented and how far they'll go. what are these dancers in control of? absolutely nothing. they serve no purpose in these videos except as accessories to black masculinity and materialism. it's the objectivization of women in its purest form.
but it's not just about images in videos (and the 'it's their job, they chose it' doesn't fly here when it matters how we see these women. it's offensive.) it's about the lyrics, it's about how rap and hip-hop position women. if these dancers don't care that most of the world sees them as whores, cool for them. but it bothers me and it bothers most other black women.
the fact that hip hop is a phallocentric genre doesn't help any. in fact, that's the problem.
we aren't talking morality here, either. (i think i was pretty clear saying that i don't want to use the whole lady/ho binary.) no one is saying these guys are immoral for representing black women like this. we're saying it's bullshit misogyny and we're sick of it.
jp,
exactly. if my own agency is wobbly and issue-laden (and i'm a feminist) then what's up with these girls?
we know better.
i think about how these artists talk about women and how women like lil' kim talk about themselves and i just think, we should know better.
we've come from a place where our bodies were literally commodified and now we're doing it to ourselves.
Post a Comment