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AYANA BYRD womar
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whobAyana Byrd is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. She is an entertain
Tootiement journalist whose work has appeared in Vibe, Rolling Stone, Honey, TV Guide, and
Dijf'mPaper magazines. She is the coauthor of Hair Story:'Untanzling the Roots ofBlack Hair in
HuxtalAmerica (2001).
a near
womer
A
ll it used to take was one "bitch" reference in a song, one gratuitous and to
ass shake in a video and I was on a roll, criticizing the sexism of skyroc
lack men, denouncing the misogynistic societal structures set up sion w'
y white men who supported it from their music industry corner offices, few pc
lamenting the misrepresented ways that black female bodies were on dis saved I
play. It didn't take much to get me back on my soapbox. But that, appar As
ently, was a long time ago. Because today, allowed a receptive audience and as tele'
the opportunity to wax passionately and even philosophically about the spectn
state of women in hip-hop-the art form that I once believed most defined coals 1:
me--I draw a big blank, barely able to muster up a half-hearted "You won't atrocit
elieve what I just heard ..." togeth
What happened since my rankled ire over Snoop Doggy Dogg's 1993 gram t
Doggystyle album cover of a black female behind wiggling, naked, out of a eratior
doghouse? Things haven't gotten any better. The "feminist rapper" Queen episoc
Latifah now uses the once taboo B word in her lyrics. Alongside Chaka Khan, until h
who sings the hook for " It's All Good," the onetime"conscious" group De La bothf
Soul had a video complete with a Jacuzzi overflowing with near-naked intere~
women. Since the debut of rap videos, outfits in videos are skimpier, the A~
sexual references lewder, and the complicity by women in their own were c
exploitation more widespread. Yet all I generally feel is an apathy. lingeri
I can now listen to a song with the hook "Hoes/I've got hoes/in differ Patricl
ent area codes" and instead of cringing at thoughts of debasement, chuckle It asse
ily, an,
in the
idea 0
Ayana Byrd, "Claiming Jezebel: Black Female Subjectivity and Sexual Expression in norm.Hip-Hop" from The Fire This Time: Youth Activists and the New Feminism, edited by
projecVivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin (New York: Anchor, XXXXXXXXXXCopyright © 2004
y Ayana Byrd. Reprinted with the permission of the author. off WE
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Expression ill
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at the artist Ludacris's witty delivery. Maybe it's that I've defined my own
sexuality and know for sure what I only suspected in the past-that these
men aren't talking about me. The problem is, they don't know they're not
talking about me. Further, a lot of women, particularly girls and young
adults, aren't sure that they don't want to be talked about in this way. These
songs, and the videos that illustrate them, offer the most
oadly distributed
examples of seemingly independent black women that many young and sex
ually pubescent girls see. And unfortunately few girls transitioning into
womanhood understand that the representation of female bodies in rap
videos is not an empowering power-of-the-pussy but a fleeting one.
Because I grew up in the 1970s and '80s, I find it easy to list all the people
who looked like me that were on television. There was Penny on Good Times,
i~
F
Tootie from The Facts of Life, and the occasional appearance of Charlene on
Diff'rent Strokes. In the mid-eighties, there were as well the wholesome
Huxtable daughters of The Cosby Show. Those of us who came of age then had
a near void of images upon which to draw for representations of black
women our age, negative or positive. It was a decade devoted both to saving
and to condemning the "Endangered Black Male." But teen pregnancy was
skyrocketing, and often the predominant young black female faces on televi
sion were in public service spots against babies having babies. Yet there were
few policies or social organizations that were addressing their need to be
saved or uplifted.
As the eighties progressed, things didn't get much better. In film as well
as television, portrayals of black women were at either extreme of the sexual
spectrum. In Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, which has been raked over the
coals by feminists since its release, the lead, Nola Darling, was, among other
atrocities, raped by one of her lovers (the supposed nice one) and got back
together with him for a short time. On The Cosby Show, the television pro
gram that perhaps came closest to engaging and entertaining an entire gen
eration of black kids, the female characters were completely desexed. On one
episode we learn that Denise, the" wild child" of the family, was a virgin
until her wedding night. Though their cousin Pam and her friend Charmaine
oth flirt with the idea of "giving it up" to their boyfriends, they seem less
interested in actually having sex than in keeping their mates happy.
As popular culture weighed in on young black female sexuality, there
were also deeply embedded societal stereotypes with which to contend. The
lingering effects of the Moynihan Report, the controversial paper by Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a U.S. Senator, were still being felt.
It asserted that black social immobility was caused by a crisis in the black fam
ily, and that Black Superwomen had emasculated black men, causing a fissure
in the nonnal family setting. l President Reagan had effectively constructed the
idea of the Welfare Mother: a black woman who refused to get a job and be a
normal contributor to society but instead sat at home all day (most likely in the
projects), maybe hitting the crack pipe, having babies by a host Qf men, living
off welfare checks that came out of the pockets of decent, hardworking (white)
250 Communication r'
Americans. Outside of academic conferences, few observers pointed out that
the majority of women in the country on welfare were white, and that most
women stayed on public assistance for two years or less.
By the early nineties there were other messages in which black women
were made into villains. While the media highlighted the Tawana Brawley
case, in which the fifteen-year-old black girl alleged a racist attack by white
police officers but was foune,i by a grand jury to be lying,2 they virtually
ignored the 1990 case of five white student athletes who were charged with
sodomy and sexual abuse for repeatedly sexually assaulting a Jamaican
woman in a fraternity house at St. John's University. In the latter case, there
was more than enough evidence to convict, but according to one juror, the
acquittal was based on the jury's desire to save the boys' lives from "ruin./I
Together the cases colluded in delegitimizing claims of rape by black
women.·There was also Mike Tyson's 1991 conviction for raping Desiree
Washington. As vehemently as the white press sought to tum Tyson into a
east, many blacks cried foul to the champ's imprisonment. "What was she
doing in his room anyway?" "That bitch set him up!" "How was she laugh
ing and smiling at the show if just the night before he had raped her?" There
was often more talk about how he had been framed than about the fact that
Tyson had a history of physical abuse toward women. Around the same
time, Clarence Thomas's self-declared "high-tech lynching" was played out
on television screens across the nation, although it was women-Anita Hill
and black women in particular-who were left feeling like the ones hanging
from the tree of political, if not necessarily public, opinion.
So what does any of this have to do with hip-hop? It is telling that the
women-whether they're the rappers topping the charts or the dancers in the
video&-formed their own identities at a time when black female sexuality in
the cultural marketplace was not at all positive. The way black women expe
ience and interpret the world has indeed been determined by our having to
wage constant battles in order to determine our subjectivity-to say that we
are not whores a la Desiree Washington, tricksters and liars a la Tawana
Brawley, or disgruntled spinsters a la Anita Hill. In Black Looks the cultural
theorist bell hooks writes, "The extent in which Black women feel devalued,
objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of
their looking relations. Those Black women whose identities were con
structed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most
inclined to develop an oppositional gaze."3 Yet those women whose identities
were instead constructed in compliance with the status quo were most in
clined to abso
these images and make these representations and stereotypes
of heterosexual black female sexuality their own.
Today, through the music video, there are so many black female bodies
on view on any given day of watching television that it is impossible to list
them. In many ways that is probably the point. Through the constant ba
age
of hypersexualized images, the young, black female has ceased to be an
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