User:KrisWander

 Hip hop as a medium for social change 

Hip hop is a growing medium for initiating social change. 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.

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." Gwendolyn Pough (2004) argues that hip hop feminists have “found ways to deal with these issues [of sexism and tropes of the video vixen and strong black woman] 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”.

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.

In the world of hip-hop feminism, women are the catalyst. In 1992, Mary J. Blige released “What’s The 411?” under Uptown Records and was considered the pioneer of hip-hop feminism. Women such as em-cee Missy Elliot and Queen Latifah followed suit. In 1995, Queen Latifah broke the glass ceiling of black women in hip-hop by winning a Grammy for her song “U.N.I.T.Y.” which revolutionized hip-hop feminism’s ideal of sexual empowerment and the autonomy and ownership of the female black body. Behind Queen Latifah came hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill became the best example of hip-hop feminism with record-breaking worldwide sales of her album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and by winning five Grammy awards in 1998 (Hobson and Bartlow, 5). They mimicked the rap rhetoric of males in the scene and generated a massive amount of attention. Missy Elliot was often seen dressed similar to male hip-hop artists and utilized the same body language and aggressive delivery of her lyrics as a means of protest while still preserving her femininity.

According to Katherine Cheairs, these artists were connecting the link between hip-hop music and the feminist movement. From these revolutionaries stemmed current popular artists like Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Azealia Banks and so on that have been made relevant by popular culture. For example, in the early 2000s, Ciara and Beyoncé followed Missy Elliot’s style of male mimicry with hit songs such as “Like A Boy” and “If I Were A Boy” to highlight the lack of respect black women were given as well as to show the juxtaposition of black men and black women in society.

Fast-forward to today, and hip-hop feminists have moved passed the male rhetoric and doused the genre in feminine prose. For example, many modern hip-hop feminists utilize their voluptuous figures in a commanding manner rather than adopting male rapper outfitting and lyric style. Aisha Durham writes that hip-hop aided in creating a style icon out of the female black body. Additionally, Nicki Minaj utilizes the female black body as a power symbol. In fact, in the 2011 issue of Ebony magazine, Minaj asserted her place in the hip-hop world that she can stand on her own in the male-dominated genre and use her body in an empowering manner rather than an oppressive one. Rihanna is another mainstream hip-hop feminist. In her most recent album “Anti,” her lyrics assert black female independence. Given Rihanna’s past, the hip-hop feminist scene looked to her as a role model to stand up for domestic violence against the black female body.