Discourses of Consumption: The Rhetorical Construction of the Black Female Body as Food in Hip Hop and R&B Music

Abstract

This paper examines the use of food to corporealize Black women’s subjectivity. Looking primarily at the lyrical content of select songs, the paper argues that the recurring use of the food motif as a metaphor for the Black female body represents an engagement in a politics of control through an act of consumption. This consumption is two-fold. First, at the macro level, it is mired in the ethos of capitalism where the female body in general is packaged for consumption and second, at the micro level, it is a form of dis-membering or silencing Black women’s voices.

Keywords:

• Black feminism
• Black women and representation
• CDA
• Hip-Hop & R&B

Notes

1 Rhythm and Blues will hereafter be referred to as R&B

2 Lorde further elaborates on this mentality when she suggests that for survival purposes, black men have had to “become watchers, become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor”. But as feminist scholarship has tried to point out, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house will not yield liberation but rather a further imprisonment of self.

3 See Mary Daly in The Flesh Made Word (p.p. 142-43).

4 There is a historical legacy of Black women in the Americas using their bodies as sites of resistance to counter the oppression of slavery. As their bodies were the location of oppression and exploitation, it also became the place of rebellion and resistance.