Planet B-Girl: Community Building and Feminism in Hip-Hop

Abstract

Hip-hop originated as an artistic form of protest among disenfranchised African Americans and is now a global vehicle of communication. A core of devotees known as b-boys and b-girls have dedicated themselves to using hip-hop as a political vehicle toward a better future. B-girls help build the networks of support upon which hip-hop artists rely. However, despite its challenge to racial and economic hegemonies, much of hip-hop culture excludes women. How do b-girls use hip-hop to mobilize for a socially just future under such conditions? This article suggests that women who become aware of their marginalized status within hip-hip use its capacity for creating political messages and generating audience responses to call attention to the gendering of hip-hop spaces. In demanding a right to participate, women create a “Planet B-Girl” for women to sustain themselves as independent artists and use hip-hop's representation of itself as a voice of the street to mobilize people who are not recognized as participants in political processes to agitate for change.

Notes

¹ Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 10.

² President Obama's appeal to young voters has been widely discussed in news media. For commentaries on the connection between these young voters and hip-hop activism, see LaToya Peterson, “Barack Obama, Hip-Hop Candidate,” The American Prospect, February 4, 2008, < http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article = barack_obama_hip_hop_candidate>, and R.M. Schneiderman and Ray LeMoine, “Hip-Hop and the Obama Effect,” NY Press, February 2, 2009, < http://www.nypress.com/article-19351-hip-hop-and-the-obama-effect.html>.

³ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983, rev. ed. 1991), p. 6.

⁴ Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 25.

⁵ See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Richie Colon and Israel, The Freshest Kids: A History of the B-Boy (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002); and Toni Silver, Style Wars (Public Art Films Inc., 1983) for discussions of hip-hop's foundational arts, growth as a music genre, and evolution into a culture lifestyle.

⁶ Interview by the author, February 14, 2010. Seattle, WA. Interview transcript on file with author. Also see < http://www.206zulu.com> for details on the Universal Zulu Nation and the Seattle chapter.

⁷ Interview by the author, February 5, 2010, Seattle, WA. Interview transcript on file with author.

⁸ This is precisely what Seattle organizers of a national grassroots campaign to widen access to the Internet did in February 2010 when they organized a community Reclaim the Media project. A coalition of hip-hop artists, feminists, community developers, and advocates for social justice organized as the Hidmo Community Enrichment Project distributed an invitation to participants on their mailing list to come to a meeting and share their stories about how they relied upon the Internet to carry out their daily work.

⁹ See Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004); and Tricia Rose, The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-Hop Culture and Why It Matters (New York: BasicCivitas, 2008).

¹⁰ Many feminist scholars have addressed this absence. See, among others, Rose, Black Noise; Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Pough, Check It While I Wreck It; Alesha Dominek Washington, “Not the Average Girl from the Videos: B-Girls Defining Their Space in Hip-Hop Culture,” in Aisha Durham, Gwendolyn Pough, Rachel Raimist, and Elaine Richardson (eds), Home Girls Make Some Noise!: Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology (Mira Loma, CA: Parker Publishing, 2007), pp. 80–91; Layli Phillips, Kerri Reddick-Morgan, and Dionne Patricia Stephens, “Oppositional Consciousness Within an Oppositional Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip-Hop, 1976–2004,” The Journal of African American History 90:3 (2005); and the essays in a special issue on women in hip-hop in Janell Hobson and R. Dianne Bartlow (eds), Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 8:1 (2008).

¹¹ Interview by the author, March 19, 2010, Seattle, WA. Interview transcript on file with author.

¹² Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 72.

¹³ Phillips, Reddick-Morgan, and Stephens, “Oppositional Consciousness within an Oppositional Realm,” p. 253.

¹⁴ Seattle hip-hop advocate and middle college teacher Alonzo Ybarra described hip-hop's history in this manner at a youth educational summit sponsored by 206 Zulu on February 12, 2010.

¹⁵ Interview by the author, February 5, 2010, Seattle, WA. Interview transcript on file with author.

¹⁶ Interview by the author, March 19, 2010, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

¹⁸ Quoted with permission.

¹⁷ Interviews by the author, July 19, 2009, Minneapolis, MN, and March 6, 2010, Seattle, WA. Transcripts on file with author.

¹⁹ See Phillips, Reddick-Morgan, and Stephens, “Oppositional Consciousness within an Oppositional Realm”; Pough, Check It While I Wreck It; and Whitney A. Peoples, “‘Under Construction’: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second Wave and Hip-Hop Feminism,” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8:1 (2008), pp. 19–52.

²⁰ Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip-Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 129.

²¹ Phillips, Reddick-Morgan, and Stephens, “Oppositional Consciousness within an Oppositional Realm,” pp. 255–258.

²² The balance between the allure of hip-hop and the limiting of space for women is explored by Pough, Check It While I Wreck It; Rose, Hip-Hop Wars; Washington, “Not the Average Girl from the Videos”; Ruth Nicole Brown, Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009).

²³ I discuss the role of women as agents of cultural transmission generally in “‘Everybody Has a Right to Prayer and Well, We Live Here: The 2003 National Day of Prayer Controversy and the Limits of Tolerance,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33:4 (2008), p. 921. For discussions of how women fill this role within hip-hop culture, see Collins, From Black Power to Hip-Hop, pp. 124, 133; and Raeshem Chopra Nijhon, “Making Brown Like Dat: South Asians and Hip-Hop,” in Ajay Nair and Murali Balaji (eds), Desi Rap: Hip-Hop and South Asian America (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 81, 85.

²⁴ Peoples, Under Construction, p. 26.

²⁵ Interview by the author, February 14, 2010, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

²⁶ Personal communication, July 31, 2010, Seattle, WA.

²⁷ Interview by the author, February 1, 2010, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

²⁸ Interview by the author, April 18, 2008, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

²⁹ Interview by the author, February 20, 2009, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

³⁰ Interview by the author, February 10, 2009, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

³¹ Interview by the author, April 18, 2008, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.

³² Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 73–74

³³ Young, Inclusion and Democracy

³⁴ Pough, Check It While I Wreck It, pp. 41–42.

³⁵ Statements made by b-girls at B-Girl Be: A Celebration of Women in Hip-Hop, Minneapolis, MN, September 19, 2009.

³⁶ Interview by author, February 10, 2009, Seattle, WA. Transcript on file with author.