Article

Black feminist theory and

the politics of irreverence:
The case of womens rap

Feminist Theory
2015, Vol. 16(2) 207226
! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700115585705
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Valerie Chepp
Hamline University, Saint Paul, USA

Abstract
Black feminist theory has shown how respectability politics shape cultural discourses
about African American womens sexuality. Responding to silent depictions resulting
from racial uplift strategies among turn-of-the-century middle-class black women, subsequent work theorises alternative discourses that portray a desiring and agentic black
female sexual subject. Locating these alternative discourses in a politics of irreverence,
I argue that respectability/irreverence oppositional logic narrowly frames theorising of
black female sexuality. Although recent work emphasises dialectical rather than
oppositional dynamics, this analytic approach is unevenly applied. Binary frameworks
continue to shape analyses of womens rap. Drawing upon lyrics of rappers Lil Kim and
Foxy Brown, I highlight three discursive strategies whereby women rappers render the
respectability/irreverence binary problematic: (1) using irreverence to claim respectability, (2) claiming both or, embracing contradiction, and (3) beating to the punch. This
analysis shows how dialectical approaches account for potential third spaces where
more complex representational politics are possible.
Keywords
Black feminism, irreverence, representation, respectability, sexuality, womens rap

Introduction
Issues surrounding representations of and discourses about African American
womens sexuality have long been a central feature and concern of black feminist
theory in the United States (Taylor, 1998b). Black feminist scholars have pointed to
various strategies that African American women, facing subjugation on multiple
fronts, have employed in order to confront the intersecting oppressions they

Corresponding author:
Valerie Chepp, Department of Sociology, Hamline University, 1536 Hewitt Avenue, Saint Paul,
MN 55104-1284, USA.
Email: vchepp01@hamline.edu

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encounter in their everyday lives (Beale, 1970; King, 1988). Specically, scholars
have highlighted the strategic ways black women have deployed a politics of
respectability in their eorts to combat a racist and sexist America (Giddings,
1984; Higginbotham, 1993; White, 2001). Appeals to respectability entailed the
privileging of bourgeois, white, patriarchal, and heteronormative ideals and aspirations such as sexual purity, domesticity, and Puritan morality rooted in the
Protestant ethic as an attempt to lay claims to respectable citizenship, demonstrating the unjustiability of racist behaviours, institutions, and laws.
While African American women deployed respectability as a viable avenue to
racial uplift, black feminist work also showed how this strategy resulted in an
unintended and problematic silence, leading black women to lose the ability to
express knowledge about their own sexuality, on their own terms (Hammonds,
1997). This silence led to missing representations of black womens sexual identity, desire, pleasure, and agency in public discourses, including feminist
theory (Spillers, 1984). Subsequent scholarship sought to address this silence by
locating alternative depictions of an agentic, desiring, and vocal black female
sexuality; this work turned to representations in black womens popular music,
specically classic blues (Carby, 1986; Davis, 1998) and rap (Forman, 1994; Rose,
1994; Skeggs, 1994; Perry, 1995). Compared to prevailing respectability
discourses, these alternative representations were thoroughly irreverent in their
unapologetic, vocalised, playful, and often raunchy approach to black female
sexuality.
In this article, I survey black feminist scholarship that draws upon black
womens irreverence in popular culture as a site to theorise alternative sexual
discourses to respectability. However, I argue that a mutually exclusive binary
logic around sexual respectability and irreverence has served as a limiting theoretical framework, as scholars have historically understood respectability and
irreverence as opposing concepts when, in actuality, respectability and irreverence
are always engaged in a recursive relationship, each continuously shaping the
meaning of the other. Theoretical frameworks that fail to account for this dialectical relationship overlook a potential third space where alternative and more
complex representational politics for marginalised communities are possible
(Miranda, 2003). While recent scholarship has begun to theorise this third
space, the binary persists in much of the black feminist literature on womens
rap music. Drawing upon the lyrics of rappers Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, I show
the limits of such frameworks by highlighting how women rappers employ
dichotomous Western logic around respectability and irreverence, yet reappropriate this logic to create space for alternative representations of black
female sexuality.

Binary cultural logics

Oppositional analytic frameworks are not unique to black feminist theory, but are
products of Western thought structures that correspond to systems of privilege

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(Bourdieu, 1984, 1990). This binary logic organises and assigns value to
cultural products, which map onto understandings of high and low culture
(Brottman, 2005). Intersecting systems of power are tethered to this process, and
those who meet standards that correspond with high culture (e.g. bourgeois,
white, Western, male, heterosexual) are better able to leverage claims to cultural
legitimacy. Producers and consumers of cultural products draw upon Western
oppositional logic structures of high and low culture so as to gain and subvert
legitimacy within a cultural eld.
One prominent theme emerging from these routine, albeit power-laden, understandings of high and low culture is the oppositional structural logic of respectability and irreverence. Respectability refers to the privileging of bourgeois,
white, patriarchal, and heteronormative ideals and aspirations, which draw
upon Protestant ethics as well as Victorian sexual morals. In contrast, irreverence
connotes a critique or subversion of these hegemonic ideals, behaviours, and
aspirations. In this sense, irreverence relates to Stuart Halls understanding of
popular culture, which he links with Mikhail Bakhtins concept of the vulgar and
carnivalesque, suggesting that some cultural actors operate in the underbelly of
elite culture a site of alternative traditions (Hall, 1996: 469). Cultural subjects
create this alternative space in part by rejecting culturally imposed hegemonic
norms around what constitutes respectable culture; I suggest they do this by
strategically appealing to a politics of irreverence. Here, irreverence functions
as a political category in the same way that, for turn-of-the-century middle-class
black women in America, respectability took on political signicance. My theorisation of irreverence is inuenced by Evelyn Brooks Higginbothams (1993) concept of respectability politics and Gwendolyn Poughs (2004) notion of bringing
wreck, as both draw upon Nancy Frasers work to highlight how discourses
become politicised when they are contested across multiple discursive publics
and counterpublics.
Yet, despite the deployment of a respectability/irreverence oppositional
logic by cultural actors to legitimate and subvert social privilege, dichotomous logics are unable to map pristinely onto social realities (Bourdieu,
1990). That is, social phenomena are not cleanly divided into mutually exclusive
understandings of all things respectable and irreverent an immense, messy,
grey area falls in between this dichotomy. Nevertheless, these paired oppositions
often appear in the analytic concepts scholars use to study the social world
(Jakobson, 1990). To consider implications of using binary frameworks to
make sense of non-binary realities, I turn my attention to African American
cultural politics, where ideas about respectability and irreverence have had particular signicance. Specically, black feminist scholarship on cultural representations of black female sexuality provides a useful lens through which to examine
strengths and limitations of an oppositional respectability/irreverence analytic
framework, as well as productive theoretical innovations that point to dialectical
alternatives.

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Respectability, irreverence, and African American

cultural politics
African Americans relationship with respectability and irreverence has had profound social and political implications, tied rmly to social conditions emerging
out of racial oppression. Respectability and irreverence or, as Imani Perry (2004:
4) calls it, the funky stu has shaped African American art and culture in
general, and black Americans strategically deployed this oppositional logic as a
political tool during civil rights struggles against racism. Yet, dichotomous thinking around respectability and irreverence has also functioned to silence dierences
within African American communities. E. Frances White (2001) argues that,
although the ideology of respectability is one way African Americans have created
a sense of unity to mobilise political responses to racism, it has too often resulted in
a demonisation of community members who do not or cannot meet standards
of respectability, such as those who are poor or queer. Focusing on popular artistic
texts, Herman Gray shows how black playwrights, directors, and producers draw
upon the critical power of irreverence and satire to critique monolithic expressions
of blackness grounded in a politics of respectability (1995: 51). Pointing to classic
works by Charles Fuller, Ntozake Shange, and August Wilson, and more recent
productions such as School Daze, Im Gonna Git You Sucka, and In Living Color,
Gray illustrates how hegemonic and homogenised representations of blackness are
destabilised through irreverent depictions of gender, sexuality, and African
American vernacular culture. Kara Keeling describes cultural critiques such as
the ones analysed by Gray (1995) as a cultural strategy predicated on the criticism
of existing representations of blackness, including, importantly, even those
positive images produced as counters to stereotypical and negative images
of blackness (Keeling, 2005: 214).
While this cultural strategy criticises narrow representations of blackness both
positive and negative an implicit dichotomous understanding of respectability
and irreverence provides the analytic framework often used to make meaning of
these representations. Such analytic attempts to understand cultural portrayals
of blackness as an expression of dierence by appealing to either respectability
or irreverence mask representations that fall outside respectable or irreverent possibilities. Hall writes:
By denition, black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic
contestation. But it can never be simplied or explained in terms of the simple binary
oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low; resistance versus
incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition
versus homogenisation. (Hall, 1996: 470)

Following Halls insight, a more dialectical understanding of the relationship

between respectability and irreverence can provide the analytic space needed to
make sucient sense of cultural representations of blackness not to mention lived
realities that do not t neatly into a binary framework. Dialectic modes of logic

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stress the recursive (rather than unidirectional) causal relationships that shape
social phenomena, as well as the overlapping and blending nature of these phenomena. Dialecticians are also attuned to the power structures embedded in these
relationships and the potentially productive role of conict and contradiction they
entail, meaning that the coming together of distinct social parts has the ability to
result in something new (Ritzer, 2000: 150156; for more on relational analysis, see
Emirbayer, 1997; Lamont and Molnar, 2002).1
A dialectical understanding of respectability and irreverence shows how these
thought structures are always in conversation with one another, continuously
drawing upon the other for meaning; they are necessarily interrelated and coconstitutive. Further, a dialectical approach to respectability and irreverence may
reveal new representations of blackness previously obscured in dominant cultural
analyses. For example, the scholarly attention on how respectability politics shaped
representations of black female sexuality in the African American womens club
movement tended to omit queer experiences from the historical record
(Richardson, 2003). A more dialectical understanding of respectability and irreverence politics might have led scholars to consider the ways in which womens club
environments also presented an opportunity for women to meet each other, form
strong friendships, close working relationships and engage in romantic liaisons,
torrid love aairs, and jealous feuds (Richardson, 2003: 67). J. Jack Halberstam
also attends to queer omissions by highlighting a history of black female masculinity dating back to the blues women of the 1920s and 1930s, and asks:
But I also wonder whether the claims about an apparent lack of a lesbian drag culture
depend on the historical sources available to us. Could it be that while white lesbian
communities produced no drag culture, black lesbian communities have housed and
nurtured drag performances that remain hidden from the historical record?
(Halberstam, 1997: 117)

Such work raises questions around traditional approaches to theorising sexual

politics, black female sexuality in particular, and the historical oversights that
may have resulted as a consequence of prevailing analytic frameworks.

Dialectics, sexual politics, and black feminist theory

Perhaps nowhere within African American social thought have questions of
respectability and irreverence, and their relationship to intersecting power systems
organised around sexuality, gender, race, and class, been more evident than in
black feminist theory. Black feminist scholars have insightfully documented the
ways African American women have strategically deployed a respectability/irreverence oppositional logic to confront racial violence, break racial barriers (such as
educational and employment barriers), and tackle racist and sexist ideologies. In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discourses around black female
sexuality were shaped by racist, sexist stereotypes about the primitive, exotic, and

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animalistic hyper-sexuality of African Americans (Higginbotham, 1992). The justication for lynching and other forms of terrorising black people at this time was
intricately tied to racial and patriarchal systems of domination, predicated on the
idea that white womanhood required protection from sexually predatory black
men. As such, assumptions connecting respectability, docility, sexual vulnerability,
and white womanhood abound: to be positioned outside the protection of
womanhood was to be labeled unrespectable (White, 2001: 33).
Given that black women were, by denition, located outside the parameters of
protection and therefore deemed unrespectable, appeals for respectability became
strategically interwoven into black womens eorts to ght racial and sexual oppression at the turn of the twentieth century. Middle-class black women who saw
their relatively privileged economic position as an opportunity and obligation to
uplift the black race couched their political, religious, and civic reform eorts
squarely within a politics of respectability framework (Giddings, 1984;
Higginbotham, 1993). This philosophy around sexual purity and female respectability not only inuenced discourses around black female sexuality in the early twentieth centurys middle-class reform movement; twentieth century African American
womens literature reected a similar respectability politics (Carby, 1986).
Although scholars looked to the work of early women reformers and writers as a
foundation for black feminist theorising, subsequent research argued that a reliance
on these middle-class discourses resulted in a problematic sexual silence in black
feminist thought (Spillers, 1984; Hammonds, 1997). To contest this silence, ensuing
scholarship nuanced and enriched the historiography around cultural depictions
of black female sexuality by drawing attention to discourses of irreverence. This
work highlighted cultural texts that articulated a sexual discourse not through a
respectability framework but rather through an irreverent framework of sexual
agency and desire. Scholars pointed to womens blues music of the 1920s and
early 1930s as a site where sentiments of black female sexual subjectivity and
longing are expressed. Since womens blues discourses were uniquely rooted in
working-class logics and aesthetics, expressions of black female sexuality were
not beholden to a middle-class politics of respectability (Carby, 1986; Davis, 1998).
Womens blues music portrays a desiring black female sexual subject, overt in
her sexual demands. In these lyrics, blues artists draw attention to female sexual
autonomy, the importance of female sexual satisfaction, instances of lesbian desire,
and myths surrounding phallic power, often using comedic strategies to highlight
the absurdity embedded in such myths (Carby, 1986). Rather than attempting to
prove their respectability as sexually pure women (dened, at its core, as white),
women artists used blues discourses to embrace the sexually explicit, the profane,
and the debaucherous. Here, black feminist analyses suggest that it is the rejection
of white male heterosexual bourgeois notions of respectability that enabled women
blues singers to engage in playful and impudent discussions around sex, unapologetic in their indecency.
Recent black feminist scholarship has continued to theorise the political signicance of irreverence, pointing to subversive cultural strategies such as deviance

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(Cohen, 2004), illicit eroticism (Miller-Young, 2008), and bringing wreck

(Pough, 2004), as well as subversive cultural actors such as erotic revolutionaries
(Lee, 2010) and trickster gures (Stallings, 2007). Scholars have also begun to
underscore the relational dynamics characterising respectability and irreverence in
an eort to generate a more robust representational politics. This work has called
upon black feminist theory to attend to the dialectic between pleasure and danger
(Nash, 2008) and the sacred/profane bricoleur of the trickster gure (Stallings,
2007). It has advocated for cultural representations that go beyond the black lady,
a cultural trope steeped in rigid gender, race, class, and sexuality frameworks
informed by respectability (Thompson, 2009). And it has shown how selffetishisation or counter-fetishisation allows black sexual subjects in the public
sphere to create a dialectical tension with the historical politics of respectability
(Miller-Young, 2008: 286; emphasis mine). Insisting upon the complexity of representation, this work highlights the consequences that result when cultural critics
perpetuate overly-simplistic binary models:
[R]epresentation is an encounter with history and power that unleashes pain and
horror as well as recognition and seduction. If we concentrate on how some representations are injurious and damaging to our sense of progress or integrity, we might
miss reading the unreliability, unknowability, and ambiguity of black womens complex sexual desires, fantasies, and pleasures. (Miller-Young, 2008: 278)

In this dialectical approach to theorising cultural representations of black female

sexuality, irreverent and respectable representations blend together, overlap, and
bricoleur, often resulting in new representations that go beyond existing tropes
and stereotypes, or address potential misreadings of black womens sexualities.
Moreover, respectability, irreverence, and the relationship between them have a
long history that is embedded in power structures, simultaneously rooted in pain,
pleasure, injury, desire, danger, horror, and seduction.
To be sure, dialectical thinking is not new to black feminist theory. On the
contrary, relational theorising has been a cornerstone of modern black feminist
thought, prominently evidenced by black feminisms pivotal contribution to the
highly successful feminist project known as intersectionality (Davis, 2008).
Although not uniquely a black feminist endeavour (Nash, 2011), intersectionality
has greatly beneted from black feminisms insight on the complexity, relatedness,
and co-constructed nature of various systems of power (Collins and Chepp, 2013).
Other black feminist traditions, including third wave black feminism (Springer,
2002), hip-hop feminism (Morgan, 1999; Pough et al., 2007), and black queer
studies (Johnson and Henderson, 2005) have also advocated for more nuanced
approaches to theorising black female sexuality in order to account for representations and practices that reside in the complex, messy, and ambiguous third
spaces located beyond two mutually exclusive binary endpoints.
However, dialectical theorising of black sexual politics has been unevenly
applied across contemporary black feminist theory; specically, binary frameworks

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continue to shape discussions about black female sexuality in womens rap. These
binary approaches inadequately account for and may overlook representations in
womens rap that are located outside, in between, and occupy both respectable and
irreverent possibilities.

The case of womens rap

In addition to womens classic blues, black feminist scholars have also looked to
womens rap for representations of black female sexuality that subvert hegemonic
respectability through a discourse of irreverence. It is not surprising that intellectuals have turned to musical traditions to locate this counter-discourse, as music
has long served as a cultural site of black resistance against white American bourgeois hegemony (Werner, 1998). As the cultural, political, and social signicance of
rap gained academic attention in the early 1990s, scholars began to highlight the
subversive power of irreverence and to characterise womens rap as an empowering
discourse about black womanhood and female sexuality. This work underscored
discursive strategies early women rappers employed in order to position themselves
as active and desiring sexual subjects, thereby creating a liberating cultural space
(Forman, 1994; Perry, 1995) that resisted colonising forms of racial and sexual
objectication (Skeggs, 1994). Women rappers undermined traditional phallic
authority (Foreman, 1994: 53), often through humour (Skeggs, 1994; Perry,
1995), and used their music as a space to create new conceptions of black womanhood that challenged traditional models rooted in racist and sexist stereotypes
(Rose, 1994; Perry, 1995). Importantly, much of this work drew parallels to the
irreverence politics expressed in the classic womens blues (Rose, 1994; Skeggs,
1994; Perry, 1995). Similar to the blues women, women rappers deployed irreverence as a strategy to break a sexual silence and articulate, through their own voices,
alternative representations of black female sexuality.
In the late 1990s, however, pop cultural and academic critics began to express
uncertainty around the genres black feminist potential (Morgan, 1997; Zook,
2000; Cole and Guy-Sheftall, 2003; Perry, 2003, 2004; Byrd and Solomon, 2005;
Collins, 2005; Muhammad, 2007), and literature linking womens rap to subversive
irreverence essentially disappeared. Notably, in 1996, female rappers Foxy Brown
and Lil Kim debuted solo albums. Both Foxy and Kim represented a new type or
third wave of womens rap, one that was even more sexually explicit, provocative,
irreverent, and raunchy (Sharpley-Whiting, 2007). In response to this new wave of
women rappers, cultural commentators argued that the music had taken a turn for
the worse, moving away from its gender-conscious and sexually empowering rap
predecessors (Morgan, 1997; Britton, 2000; Zook, 2000). In 2005, the popular
African American womens magazine Essence launched its Take Back the
Music campaign, a protest against the predominance of degrading and sexist
lyrics and images in rap songs and videos. While much of the campaign targeted
the depictions of black women in mens hip-hop, it also expressed concern over
perceived changes taking place in womens rap. In the campaigns kicko issue,

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Essence editors compared early women rappers to their third wave counterparts,
noting that weve emulated the sexy condence of Salt-N-Pepa and the toughness
of MC Lyte, yet today, when we nally get our ve minutes at the mic, too many
of us waste it on hypersexual braggadocio and profane one-upmanship (Byrd and
Solomon, 2005: 82). While some scholars still identied womens rap as a useful
cultural site for examining constructions of gender, sexuality, and feminist discourse (Emerson, 2002; Haugen, 2003; Perry, 2003, 2004; Pough, 2004; Collins,
2005; Morgan, 2005; Phillips et al., 2005), the subversive potential of irreverence
had garnered doubt within many black feminist analyses (Emerson, 2002; Cole and
Guy-Sheftall, 2003; Perry, 2003, 2004; Collins, 2005). Irreverent discourses in
womens rap were no longer assigned an anti-hegemonic status; instead, women
rappers raunchy, debaucherous, and sexually explicit discourses were understood
to maintain rather than challenge the status quo.
In their critiques of the genre, many scholars highlighted the contradictions
ubiquitous throughout third wave womens rap (Emerson, 2002; Perry, 2004;
Sharpley-Whiting, 2007; Oware, 2009); here, potentially feminist messages
around womens empowerment, autonomy, and independence were perceived to
be in contradiction to sexist and misogynist tropes that present women as hypersexual beings (Oware, 2009: 797). While Hazel Carby (1986) characterised contradictory representations in womens blues as a productive challenge to hegemonic
denitions of black womanhood, uncertainty and discomfort accompanied the
contradictions identied in third wave rap (for an exception, see Morgan, 2005).
This stemmed, in part, from the binary analytic framework organised around
respectability and irreverence that scholars used to make sense of these representations. Jennifer Nash underscores this point specically in the context of black
feminist approaches to theorising representations of black female sexuality, quoting Michele Mitchells warning that it remains crucial to consider how analytic
frameworks can obscure as well as reveal (Nash, 2008: 59). In the case of third
wave womens rap, a respectability/irreverence binary framework is unable to
account for the complex and nuanced representations of sexuality articulated in
the music. A dialectical understanding, on the other hand, creates the analytic
space necessary to accommodate for and critically engage sexual complexity, not
only as it is represented in the music, but also as it is practised in everyday experiences (Miller-Young, 2008).

Lil Kim and Foxy Brown

This discussion draws upon the lyrics of two American women rappers, Lil Kim
and Foxy Brown, both of whom represent the emergence of the contentiously
irreverent woman rapper (Sharpley-Whiting, 2007). My analysis explores how
Foxy and Kim blur, overlap, and blend discourses of respectability and irreverence.
The resultant discourse creates a productive space of anxiety and contradiction in
which alternative representations are depicted and a more robust analysis of black
female sexuality is possible. Specically, I highlight three discursive strategies

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whereby these two artists frame their discussions of black female sexuality in simultaneously respectable and irreverent ways: (1) using irreverence to claim respectability, (2) claiming both or, embracing contradiction, and (3) beating to the
punch.

Using irreverence to claim respectability

Unlike previous eorts among black women who used a discourse of respectability
to demonstrate they were deserving of respectable treatment, Lil Kim and Foxy
Brown use a discourse of irreverence to claim respectability. The ubiquitous presence of irreverent language throughout Foxys and Kims music is indisputable.
Essentially every song contains profanity and sexually explicit language. Yet,
demands for respect are equally as pervasive. Foxy and Kim repeatedly demand
respect as women, as artists, and as sexual subjects. Their use of irreverent discourses to claim sexual respectability is visible in their discussions about the black
female sexual body and heterosexual relationships.
Black women rappers dedicate a signicant amount of lyrical space to the black
female sexual body, often challenging white beauty ideals by highlighting black
womens breasts, behinds, hips, thighs, and genitalia as desirable. Tricia Rose
places black women rappers discussions about the black female body in a larger
socio-historical context, arguing that they contest the aesthetic hierarchy organised around race and gender:
[E]xplicit focus on the protruding behind in black popular culture counters mainstream white denitions of what constitutes a sexually attractive female body.
It also serves as a rejection of the aesthetic hierarchy in American culture that marginalises black women. American culture, in dening its female sex symbols, places a
high premium on long thin legs, narrow hips, and relatively small behinds. The vast
majority of white female television and lm actresses, musicians, and the highest paid
black models t this description. The aesthetic hierarchy of the female body in mainstream American culture, with particular reference to the behind and hips, positions
many black women somewhere near the bottom. (Rose, 1994: 168)

Mirroring their rap predecessors, Foxy and Kim also challenge this aesthetic
hierarchy. This is visible, for example, when Foxy describes the perfection of her
own sexual body, despite its departure from mainstream white ideals: Ass fat,
thighs thick, titties perfect.2 Repeatedly, Kim and Foxy employ profanity and
crass terminology such as ass, titties, and pussy when referring to the black
female sexual body. Yet, despite this discourse of irreverence, Foxy and Kim consistently describe the black womans sexual body as beautiful, desirable, valuable,
and worthy of respect. For example, Lil Kim raps, Call me Sunshine, pussy
spread like the rainbow / Spectaculous, miraculous,3 and she highlights the
value of her sexual body when she raps: Designer pussy, my shit come in avors
/ High-class taste niggas got to spend paper / Lick it right the rst time or you gotta

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do it over / Like its rehearsal for a Tootsie commercial.4 Evoking imagery rooted
in the divine (miraculous) and high-status capitalistic commodities (designer),
Kim suggests her sexual body is praiseworthy and valuable; she is high status and
to be revered. Similar descriptors were used to characterise Victorian middle-class
white womanhood, and thus suggest that a similar respect should be granted. At
the same time, Kim irreverently asserts that her designer pussy is deserving of
sexual pleasure, and she demands good cunnilingus from her male partner, comically and irreverently likening the sex act to eating a lollipop. Assigning value and
reverence to the black female sexual body, albeit in sexually explicit and profane
ways, blurs the boundaries between respectability and irreverence and intervenes in
patriarchal and racist discourses that traditionally refer to black womens bodies as
unattractive, undesirable, and unworthy of respect. Similar to previous women
rappers, Foxy and Kim disempower the masculine language that ascribes derogatory connotations to words such as pussy (Skeggs, 1994); drawing upon a discourse of irreverence, they invest this language with dierent meaning and
re-appropriate it within a context of respectability.
Foxy Brown and Lil Kim also use irreverence to claim respectability in their
representations of heterosexual relationships. Their portrayals of heterosexual
encounters consistently centre on irreverent discussions about an active and desiring female libido. Positioning themselves as irreverent sexual subjects, this heterosexual discourse draws attention to their sexual needs, cravings, and expertise all
aspects of black womens sexuality that have long been absent from respectability
discourses. For example, Kim makes sexual demands when she tells her partner to
Lick it right the rst time or you gotta do it over. She articulates her sexual
prociency and desire, including her own sexual climax, when she raps: Aint
a bitch alive can make a nigga cum quicker / Baby girls pussy get wetter than a
shower cap.5 Kim also brags that Niggas mention me for a sexual reference / Lil
Kims everybodys sexual preference6 and Foxy Brown declares: In fact, my sex
games, all that / Cause when I do my thing, no turnin back.7 By drawing attention
to their extensive sexual skill sets and lively libidos, Foxy and Kim portray an
irreverently active and experienced heterosexual subject. Angela Davis observes a
similar discourse present in womens blues, in which bragging about the accumulation of sexual partners in various cities and states was a posture often borrowed
from male blues and adopted by the classic blues women. It attested to their extensive travels, and was a sign of their determination to redene black womanhood as
active, assertive, independent, and sexual (1998: 75).
Yet, in these irreverent representations of heterosexuality, Kim and Foxy claim
a sexual respectability in that they normalise heterosexuality and demonise queer
alternatives. This is evident in the discourses allegiance to heterosexism, heteronormativity, and homophobia. Assertions such as Aye bitch needs some dick in
they life8 and This is how the rap game is supposed to be / One king, one queen
things supposed to be9 naturalise a compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1986), one
in which acceptable forms of female sexual satisfaction are exclusively organised
around self-stimulation or the phallus. Further, non-heterosexual desires,

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behaviours, and identities are policed through derogatory labels like faggot, and
performances of gender and sexual non-conformity, specically among men, are
scorned. For example, Kim polices mens queer performances of masculinity when
she asks, What the deal on that Prince cat? Referring to the Grammy Awardwinning artist who routinely wears high-heeled shoes and eyeliner, Kim follows up:
He be lookin kind of fruity.10 Mens sexual and gender non-conformity is held up
for scrutiny again on Foxys album Chyna Doll when guest rapper Beanie Sigel
refers to the Bitch ass niggas wearin thongs and skirts / Catch em early in the
mornin while they goin to work.11 Such critiques of queerness are consistent with
respectability discourses that frame heterosexuality as normative and ostracise
those who deviate from this norm.
Thus, Kim and Foxy project representations of black female sexuality that are
not exclusively rooted in irreverence or respectability. Analytic frameworks organised around a respectability/irreverence binary are unable to account for how
the blurring of logics functions to challenge and expand cultural discourses, as is
evident with women rappers discussions about the black female sexual body,
and re-legitimate cultural discourses, as is the case with discussions about
heterosexuality.

Claiming both or, embracing contradiction

Women rappers have employed various discursive strategies to broaden notions of
American womanhood (Morgan, 2005). Lil Kim and Foxy Brown contribute to
this eort when they articulate models of black womanhood that simultaneously
claim to be respectable and irreverent. While the previous strategy centres on
claiming respectability, albeit using a discourse of irreverence, claiming both
involves the ultimate rejection of the binary all together. Although this strategy
results in a discourse that scholars tend to characterise as contradictory and therefore problematic, it can also expand and open up new possibilities for portraying
black womanhood and black female sexuality. One alternative portrayal emerging
from claiming both may involve new representations of black female masculinity.
Claiming to be both irreverent and respectable, Foxy declares herself nasty
what, classy still,12 asserts that Niggas say Im too pretty to spit rhymes this
gritty,13 and asks, Who could stay so hood femininely?14 Similarly, Kim describes
herself and female rap partner Lil Shanice as sophisticated bad girls.15 Declaring
themselves (irreverently) nasty, gritty, hood, and bad, and (respectably) classy,
pretty, feminine, and sophisticated, Kim and Foxy disrupt respectability/irreverence oppositional logics. In doing so, they create a space for themselves within rap
discourses that have traditionally marginalised and delegitimised women rappers as
inauthentic. Murray Forman addresses issues of authenticity, gender, and rap,
arguing that:
The masculine bias of social activities which often either ignore women or objectify
and exploit them were, and in many cases still are widely regarded as being

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219

fundamental to the persona of some rappers and to the authenticity of the music.
It might be argued that Raps reputation as street music initially had particular implications for young women who sought to enter the ranks as MCs, for the traditional
and constraining divisions of male/female social realms which tend to locate men in
public spaces such as the street corner also banish good or decent women to the
private domain of the home. This complex social division rendered more problematic
the capacity for early female rappers to claim authenticity or legitimacy without also
being labeled as tramps and whores according to the terms of the Rap scene and
society in general. (Forman, 1994: 47)

Drawing simultaneously upon the dual logic of irreverence and respectability,

Kim and Foxy oer an alternative model of womanhood that enables them to
maintain their identity as women while, at the same time, claim authenticity
within the rap scene.16 Given that hip-hop authenticity is rooted in masculinity,
Kim and Foxy acquire professional and artistic credibility by discursively embodying cultural markers of hegemonic masculinity, including various character traits
(e.g. being hood, gangsta, bad, and nasty) and behaviours (e.g. engaging in excessive drinking, casual sex with numerous partners, and violence) (Connell, 1987).
Part of this strategy includes their discursive adoption of the phallus to assert
power over others, such as when Kim claims her hip-hop authority: Its a new
day, Lil Kims in charge / Got a big dick, Ill bone you out.17 Foxy and Kim also
claim the phallus to assert power in heterosexual encounters, describing their prociency at busting nuts,18 getting head,19 and being sucked o.20
Yet, these appeals toward masculinity appear alongside an embrace of femininity. Kim raps: I got that bomb ass cock, a good ass shot / With hardcore ows to
keep a nigga dick rock / Sippin Zinfandel, up in Chippendales / Shop in
Bloomingdales for Prada bags / Female Don Dada has / No problems splittin
cream with my team.21 Kim claims masculinity, and specically the phallus, to
demonstrate her lyrical skill and hip-hop authenticity. Notably she uses a heterosexual metaphor (giving a man an erection) to illustrate her artistic ability to be
lyrically stimulating. However, despite claiming masculinity, Kim keeps her femininity front and centre by also asserting markers of emphasised femininity, such
as excessive shopping and extravagant feminine accessories (Connell, 1987); indeed,
she explicitly embraces femininity, referring to herself as the female Don Dada.
By claiming both, Foxy and Kim open up the possibility of new representations
of black womanhood, which may include new portrayals of black female masculinity. Halberstam (1998) explores alternatives to male masculinity by pointing to
examples of masculine women who represent a spectrum of gender expressions.
Given that Western masculinity inevitably conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege (Halberstam, 1998: 2), female masculinity involves, in part,
women leveraging cultural privilege through masculine performativity. Foxy and
Kim deploy this discursive strategy when demonstrating their reigning power over
other rappers through such self-professed titles as the King Bitch22 and the rst
female king.23

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However, unlike Halberstams (1998) tomboys, butches, and drag kings, Foxy
and Kim deviate from traditional models of female masculinity in that, in addition
to performing an authentic hip-hop masculinity, they also perform a black hyperfemininity. In part, this hyper-femininity protects Foxys and Kims gender
bending from the condemnation that accompanies mens queer performances.
Hyper-femininity, paired with heteronormativity, grants some semblance of
respectability that guards these non-traditional gender performances from scrutiny.
Yet, at the same time, this insistence on hyper-femininity by black women is signicant, as it challenges second wave white feminist discourses that discussed
womens oppression in too narrow of terms. Ula Taylor writes:
Prior to the modern civil rights movement, enslaved black women were written about
by historians as if they were androgynous. Sojourner Truths feminism acknowledged
that slavery denied black women feminine qualities, and in particular their right to be
mothers. But by the second wave, white feminists located their oppression in female
roles, and the womens libbers connected exterior female attire (bras, high heel
shoes) to their oppression. But for many black women, attire and the home were
not the principal sites of their oppression. In fact, the denial of black womens femininity has been the main vehicle used to exploit their labor power and womanhood.
(Taylor, 1998a: 27)

Claiming both hyper-femininity and hip-hop masculinity, Kim and Foxy open
up possibilities for dierent models of black womanhood and, specically, black
female masculinity. While women rappers of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s performed masculinity in ways that more closely resembled Halberstams masculine
women, Foxy and Kim oer a potentially new discursive form of black female
masculinity. Dialectical, rather than binary, analytic frameworks are better
equipped to consider such alternative representations of black womanhood,
accounting for performances of respectable femininity and irreverent masculinity
that may overlap, blend, and innovate, resulting in new representational forms.

Beating to the punch

Although Lil Kim and Foxy Brown repeatedly draw attention to their active and
often promiscuous sexualities, they are also quick to deny someone else the power
to challenge their respectability based upon this active sexuality. Kim raps about
her magic clit, asserting that I know if I get licked once, I get licked twice, and
invites any disbelievers to follow her home for conrmation, but goes on to clarify
that Lil Kim not a whore / But I sex a nigga so good, he gotta tell his boys / When
it come to sex dont test my skills / Cause my head game have you head over
heels.24 Kims lyrics exemplify the two previously discussed strategies: she articulates a model of black womanhood rooted in a discourse of respectability and
irreverence (articulating sexual prociency and desire while simultaneously claiming respectability in that shes not a whore) and she uses sexually irreverent slang

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(i.e. clit) to refer to her genitalia while making assertions about her respectable
(i.e. magic) sexual body. Yet, Kims lyrics exhibit a third strategy in that, by
characterising an active female (hetero)sexuality and desire for pleasure as
normative, women rappers beat others to the punch in being able to label them
a whore, slut, prostitute, or other similar derogatory and unrespectable terms that
characterise sexually active, desiring, and non-monogamous women as deviant.
Lil Kim and Foxy Brown deploy this strategy in their eorts to set the record
straight, which can be understood within a larger discourse that attempts to regulate black female sexuality through public accusations of unrespectability
(Thompson, 2009: 2142). For example, Kim sets the record straight when she
says that, just because shes raps sex symbol and has even bigger titties than
the lakes, shes still a sophisticated lady with millions in the safe.25 She deploys
this strategy again when she raps: I be, irtin for certain, wearin short skirts and /
But aint no dicks insertin see, thats the dierence / Between me and other bitches,
they fuck to get they riches / I fuck to bust a nut, Lil Kim not a slut / I got a
reputation to look out for.26 Kim beats others to the punch, denying them the
opportunity to publicly label her unrespectable (i.e. unsophisticated or a slut) despite her being a irtatious sex symbol with large breasts who wears short skirts and
has sex for the sole pursuit of pleasure. Similarly, Foxy Brown confronts critics
who claim shes all about sex, quickly setting the record straight: pard-on, check
your facts / And the track record, Im all about plaques / Shaking my ass half
naked, lovin this life.27 Like Kim, Foxy is clear that, despite her sexually explicit
behaviour and reputation (which she claims to love), she is focused on her career
and professional success a respectable bourgeois pursuit. By beating others to
the punch, Kim and Foxy strategically deny others the power to control their
sexual subjectivity including their right to sexual pleasure and fun by publicly
calling their respectability into question. In doing so, Kim and Foxy complicate
discourses organised around dichotomous understandings of sexually explicit
i.e. irreverent women and respectable women.

Looking ahead: Asking new questions

Black feminist discussions concerning representations of black female sexuality in
popular culture contribute to a broader set of debates in feminist theory that
interrogate the utility of binaries in gender-based analyses of pleasure, objectication, liberation, and domination. In her critique of feminist scholarship on beauty
culture, Maxine Leeds Craig argues that scholars have been asking the wrong
questions, resulting in a feminist stalemate between two competing analyses of
beauty. One frames beauty as part of a structure of oppression. The other describes
beauty as a potentially pleasurable instrument of female agency (Craig, 2006: 159).
Instead, Craig recommends asking questions that situate beauty within a larger
socio-historical structural context shaped by intersecting power relations, which
recognises the potentially productive contradictions that can emerge from these
relations. Such questions can enable a more holistic analysis of the pleasures and

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penalties produced by beauty culture. In short, Craig advocates for a dialectical

approach, arguing that, If we take this approach, oppression and the production
of pleasure, domination and resistance no longer exclude each other. Our dichotomies collapse (2006: 160).
In this article, I suggest that black feminist scholarship on black female sexuality
has been similarly shaped by misguided questions. While recent work has
approached respectability and irreverence from a more dialectical perspective,
binary models continue to inform discussions about representations of black
female sexuality in womens rap, casting these complex representations as either
good or bad for feminist politics. Such conclusions, however, result from scholars asking narrow questions about whether these representations constitute
evidence of domination or resistance. As the lyrics of Lil Kim and Foxy Brown
reveal, a much more complicated cultural portrayal of black female sexuality is at
play. New engagements that understand domination and resistance as dialectically
related can lead to potentially new readings of these and other cultural representations, and oer alternative theoretical frameworks that account for the messy,
contradictory, and in between spaces that reside amid and outside of respectable and irreverent possibilities.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Patricia Hill Collins, Jerey McCune, and Cathy Cohen for critical
support and feedback at various stages of this project. Many thanks also to Lester Andrist
and Michelle Smirnova for their helpful reviews of early drafts. I am also extremely grateful
to the editors at Feminist Theory. This article especially beneted from Carolyn Pedwells
insightful and detailed editorial guidance, and from the thoughtful and thorough comments
provided by the anonymous reviewers.

Notes
1. Dialectic as an analytic approach was famously employed by Karl Marx to explain
various social relationships related to the individual and society. By depicting these
relationships as dynamic and recursive, Marx sought to show how one social component
shaped another, and how these parts came together to transform into something new.
Marx was specifically interested in how the internal contradictions of capitalism stemming from the relationship between the bourgeoisie and proletariats would result in a
new mode of production, namely communism.
2. Foxy Brown, 1998, Ride (Down South).
3. Lil Kim, 1996, Spend a Little Doe.
4. Lil Kim, 2000, How Many Licks?
5. Lil Kim, 2003, Tha Beehive.
6. Lil Kim, 2000, Off The Wall.
7. Foxy Brown, 1996, Fox Boogie.
8. Foxy Brown, 1998, Dog & a Fox.
9. Lil Kim, 2000, Off The Wall.
10. Lil Kim, 1996, Dreams.
11. Foxy Brown, 1998, 4-5-6.

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Chepp

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.

223

Foxy Brown, 1996, Ill Be.

Foxy Brown, 2001, Oh Yeah.
Foxy Brown, 2001, Bout My Paper.
Lil Kim, 2003, Shake Ya Bum Bum.
This relates to Rana Emersons finding that, in womens hip-hop videos, a sexualized
image often occurs simultaneously with themes of independence, strength, a streetwise
nature, toughness, and agency (2002: 129).
Lil Kim, 2003, (When Kim Say) Can You Hear Me Now?
See, e.g.: We Dont Need It and Dreams (Lil Kim, 1996).
See, e.g.: Dreams (Lil Kim, 1996); Tramp (Foxy Brown, 1998); Suck My Dick
(Lil Kim, 2000).
Lil Kim, 2000, How Many Licks?
Lil Kim, 1996, Queen Bitch.
Foxy Brown, 2001, Gangsta Boogie.
Lil Kim, 2000, Lil Drummer Boy.
Lil Kim, 2003, Magic Stick.
Lil Kim, 2003, This Is Who I Am.
Lil Kim, 1996, Fuck You.
Foxy Brown, 1996, Ill Na Na.

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