Written by Kay Sambate 

Hip-hop feminism, coined by Dr. Joan Morgan in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost in 1999, opened the door to critiques that allow for scholars and Black feminists to understand and examine the representations and images of Black women in the media (This is not to say that hip-hop feminism is not also a lived, daily practice). Morgan believes that a feminism where Black women assume responsibility and hold space must exist. Hip-hop feminism is about processing through hip-hop’s problematic and liberatory spaces and images to find liberation and identity for Black women and all others who live at the intersections of gender-based oppression. Misogyny has not changed in the last fourteen years. The ways that people choose to vocalize their misogyny and, specifically, misogynoir—the oppression of Black women—has only evolved. A lot of explicit misogyny that involves vocal subjugation of women through demeaning statements is no longer seen as socially acceptable, yet we see the ways that misogyny functions together with systems like colorism to terrorize and silence Black women—ranging from hypersexualization and ungendering to disenfranchising of folks identities and personhood. There will be no eradication of misogyny in hip-hop until hip-hop is committed to unraveling and breaking down the patriarchal foundation that keeps lots of hip-hop and hip-hop culture alive. Just as racism exists infiltrating all systems and institutions, misogyny functions in the same way that it will always be present in hip-hop as long as misogyny is present in our society. 

Whether or not credit is given or exploitation and commodification of their agency is actively perpetuated—women and other marginalized identities have also crafted what we call hip-hop culture. Questions in hip-hop that aren’t continually asked include: How do women and Queer people exist outside and inside of hip-hop masculinity? How is sexuality reclaimed by woman and Queer people in hip-hop? How does the reclaiming of sexuality disturb the hypersexualization of women—and delegitmization of Queer people—that hip-hop culture imposes on them? These questions would allow us to understand the juxtapositions and

“gray-areas” (as Joan Morgan writes in her hip-hop feminist scholarship) in hip-hop sexuality, femininity, and masculinity that shape our represenations of people who exist at the margins. In the current media, the hip-hop that is presented to us is an imagined hip-hop where Black, white, Asian, and Latinx communities can have playful competitions and integration in hip-hop with all of us sharing a community that brings safety. Even then, this imagined hip-hop leaves out Black women or only includes Black women that fit the media’s mold for a hip-hop woman. The reality of hip-hop is that it is an urban, Black heterosexual male space traditionally where Black women, along with LGBQT+ people are excluded. Black men’s desire to be seen in society outside of the uncivilized and wild imagery that is stamped on them is often reliant on the justification of other’s mistreatment because of difference. Black men have used terms such as chickenhead, bitch, and hoe to keep Black women below Black men. When Black women are no longer bound by the restrictive and oppressive gender expectations of shameful opinions of Black men in hip-hop, we are allowed to experience joy and obtain power that cannot be taken from us. 

However, as Joan Morgan addresses in her work Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure, hip-hop society does not see this as “fruitful” or “beneficial” to the movement. Some may not like the way that artists like Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, Mia X, and Gangsta Boo move through the world and in the hip-hop industry because of arguments that they are overly sexual, instead of allowing these women to be seen as people who own and claim their own agency. Dr. Nikki Lane’s work in Black Women Queering the Mic: Missy Elliott Disturbing the Boundaries of Racialized Sexuality and Gender extends on these conversations of Black women and forms a narrative that includes queerness and queerness existing as Black always. Black women’s bodies are framed as being possessions for Black men in hip-hop, yet artists such as Missy Elliot reclaim Black women’s sexuality from men in her work. Missy Elliott, questioned gender norms and used a style that attempted to include her as “one of the boys”.

On a personal level hip-hop feminism is a field that allows Black students, and particularly Black women and Black Queer folk to find a sense of self-identity. It is a field where the dynamics of our identities and the ways we choose to present and express ourselves is affirmed and not denied by the gaslighting of whiteness and Black patriarchy and seen as a place where liberation can exist and is found. With liberation comes selfhood, especially when you are constantly robbed of it or denied of it. To reclaim and hold space for Black women’s and other marginalized identities history in hip-hop would be to tell the history of hip-hop itself—anything short of this is only telling a partial, false history.