The Power of Black Girl Magic Anthems: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, and “Feeling Myself” as Political Empowerment

Abstract

Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are two of the most successful Black women artists in today’s popular culture. They occupy a hypervisible and invisible position in Black and mainstream popular culture, and therefore exist as a crucial discursive site to understand Black girls’ self-articulation as “blackgirlmagic” at this moment. Faced with the rise of public feminist and postracial discourses presented in new digital media forms, Minaj and Beyoncé’s representations of sexualized Black femininity reimagined popular notions of race, gender, sexuality, and representation. Both women navigate sexuality and play, which allows them to promote claims to sexual autonomy, consent, and empowerment for girls. Together, they articulated blackness as arrogance, femininity as sexual confidence, and friendship as powerfully seductive in the song “Feeling Myself” (2015). We argue that the song became a #blackgirlmagic anthem for Black girls and women because of the ways Black girls and women engaged with the song on social media. They created a visual language to articulate the political stakes of #blackgirlmagic in an age of police brutality, anti-blackness, and misogyny. Through the use of focus group data with young Black women, we assess how this particular brand of “blackgirlmagic” impacts the political behavior and empowerment of Black college aged women.

Keywords:

• Beyoncé
• Black Girl Magic
• Nicki Minaj
• political empowerment
• social media

Notes

Notes

1 We use this term to refer to the generational cohort born between 1982 and 2004. This is the cohort that directly follows Generation X. The women in our focus group were all attending college during the span of our discussions.

2 Whitney A. Peoples, “‘Under Construction’: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second-Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms,” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2008): 19–52, 21.

3 Link to music video: https://rutube.ru/video/e67fc2c639352a9d373f1441307d8a47/ (accessed August 25, 2018).

4 Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 23.

5 Regina N. Bradley, “Barbz and Kings: Explorations of Gender and Sexuality in Hip-Hop,” in Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, edited by Justin A. Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 181.

6 Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 22–25.

7 Nadia E. Brown, Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 24–45; Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, and Joan C. Tronto, Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990); Ruth Feldstein, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Quill/W. Morrow, 1996); Ann Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas, African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Duchess Harris, Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Cindy Hooper, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012); Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011); Sheila Radford-Hill, Further to Fly: Black Women and the Politics of Empowerment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

8 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 1987).

9 Danielle McGuire details the ways that Black women during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements used their particular experiences to challenge racism and sex discrimination; McGuire, Dark End of the Street.

10 Kimberly Springer, Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women’s Contemporary Activism (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 4.

11 Pew Research Center, “Social Networking Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/ (accessed August 25, 2018).

12 Kelly Macias, “Tweeting Away Our Blues: An Interpretative Phenomenological Approach to Exploring Black Women’s Use of Social Media to Combat Misogynoir,” Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations, January 1, 2015, 12, http://nsuworks.nova.edu/shss_dcar_etd/25 (accessed August 1, 2017).

13 Moya Bailey and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” Ms (Winter 2010), 42.

14 Dexter Thomas, “Why Everyone’s Saying ‘Black Girls Are Magic,’” Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-everyones-saying-black-girls-are-magic-20150909-htmlstory.html (accessed July 1, 2017).

15 Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Linda Chavers, “Here’s My Problem With #BlackGirlMagic,” ELLE, January 13, 2016, http://www.elle.com/life-love/a33180/why-i-dont-love-blackgirlmagic/ (accessed July 1, 2017); Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, 1978).

16 Lakeyta Bonnette, Pulse of the People: Political Rap Music and Black Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Shana Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2013).

17 Julee Wilson, “The Meaning Of #BlackGirlMagic, And How You Can Get Some Of It,” The Huffington Post, January 12, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-is-black-girl-magic-video_us_5694dad4e4b086bc1cd517f4 (accessed July 1, 2017).

18 We received Institutional Review Board approval to conduct focus groups with this particular population. See the Appendix for a guideline for all questions asked.

19 Dee Burrows and Sally Kendall, “Focus Groups: What Are They and How Can They Be Used in Nursing and Health Care Research?” Social Sciences in Health 3 (1997): 244–53.

20 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen.

21 L. Thomas, J. MacMillian, E. McColl, C. Hale, and S. Bond, “Comparison of Focus Group and Individual Interview Methodology in Examining Patient Satisfaction with Nursing Care,” Social Sciences in Heath 1 (1995): 206–19.

22 Fatemeh Rabiee, “Evidence Based Practice: Its Relevance to Nutritional Intervention Programmes,” Proceedings of Nutrition Society 58 (1999): 50A.

23 Burrows and Kendall, “Focus Groups”.

24 Richard A. Krueger, Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994).

25 One of the co-authors of this study facilitated discussions with participants.

26 As Black women researchers on the campus, both co-authors have relationships with Black-identified organizations and communities.

27 Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

28 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 60.

29 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

30 Joan Morgan, “Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure,” The Black Scholar 4, no. 36 (2015): 40.

31 Aisha Durham, Brittney C. Cooper, and Susana M. Morris. “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay,” Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 721–37.

32 Aria Halliday, “Envisioning Black Girl Futures: Nicki Minaj's Anaconda Feminism and New Understandings of Black Girl Sexuality in Popular Culture,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (2017): 65–77.

33 All of the participants were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. Tracey and Leah participated in the first group, while Tiana, Aaliyah, and Khadijah were together in the second group.

34 We define the term “bad bitch” by blending the scripts of the Diva and Gangster Bitch into a hybrid term that embodies present day colloquialisms. We take direction from Stephens and Phillips’s influential research on African American adolescents’ sexual scripts as well as Cheryl Keyes’s four archetypes of Black women rappers: “Queen Mother,” “Fly Girl,” “Sista with Attitude,” and “Lesbian.” In some ways, “bad bitch” or what Regina Bradley calls “badwomen” encompasses all of these performance archetypes. Dionne P. Stephens and Layli D. Phillips, “Freaks, Gold Diggers, Divas, and Dykes: The Sociohistorical Development of Adolescent African American Women’s Sexual Scripts,” Sexuality and Culture 7, no. 1 (2003): 3–49; Cheryl L. Keyes, “Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance,” The Journal of American Folklore 113, no. 449 (2000): 255–89; Bradley, “Barbz and Kings.”

35 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 35.

36 Ibid., 38.

37 Ibid., 46.

38 Laura M. Bernhard, “‘Nowhere for Me to Go’: Black Female Student-Athlete Experiences on a Predominantly White Campus,” Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education 8, no. 2 (August 1, 2014): 67–76. doi:10.1179/1935739714Z.00000000019; Erica M. Morales, “Intersectional Impact: Black Students and Race, Gender and Class Microaggressions in Higher Education,” Race, Gender & Class 21, no. 3/4 (2014): 48–66.

39 Rosalyn Baxandall, “Re-Visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 225–45. doi:10.2307/3178460; Wallace, Black Macho; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995).

40 Angie-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Abby Kiesa, Alexander P. Orlowski, Peter Levine, Deborah Both, Emily Hoban Kirby, Mark Hugo Lopez, and Karlo Barrios Marcelo, “Millennials Are Involved Locally with Others but Are Ambivalent about Formal Politics,” in Engaging Youth in Politics: Debating Democracy's Future, edited by Russell J. Dalton (New York: International Debate Education Association Press, 2011): 132–147.

41 Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): S14–S32.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aria S. Halliday

Aria S. Halliday is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Halliday’s research explores contemporary U.S. and Caribbean representations of Black women and girls in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work is featured in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research and Journal of African American History and forthcoming in Girlhood Studies, Palimpsest, and an edited volume, Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).

Nadia E. Brown

Nadia E. Brown is a University Scholar and Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University. Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women's studies. Brown’s Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2014) has been awarded the National Conference of Black Political Scientists’ 2015 W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award, 2015 Anna Julia Cooper Award from the Association for the Study of Black Women and Politics, and the 2015 Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion at Purdue University Faculty Research Award.