CONTEXTS
24
Princess Nokia, Cupcakke, and Female Empowerment through Hip-Hop Katerina Fong Abstract The paper examines female rappers of color whose work challenges dominant male discourses in Hip-Hop to empower contemporary young women. The text focuses on contemporary rap artists Princess Nokia and Cupcakke, drawing upon a close reading of lyrical subject matter and artist interviews and contextualizing these artists within the male-dominated history of the genre and the Hip-Hop feminism movement. Based on this analysis, the text claims that Princess Nokia and Cupcakke are subversive in dismantling patriarchal norms in rap and renegotiating the terms on which women are allowed to exist, both in Hip-Hop and in society. Their rap anthems offer up a vision of womanhood which is intersectional, self-determining, and bursting with confidence.
Introduction Since its inception in New York’s South Bronx in the 1970s, hip-hop music has served as a self-proclaimed movement for the “empowerment of urban Black and Latino youth.”1 Materializing out of the Black Power movement, rap represented a new artistic framework through which historically-vilified, marginalized, and oppressed voices could articulate their experiences, thoughts, and desires. However, while rap inherited from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras the self-determination, empowering potential, and moxie of decades of activism, it too fell victim to a problem: a systematic abuse of women. As a genre dominated by male artists, the “Hip-Hop Boy’s Club”2 glorifies values of sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy through a “lyrical and visual assault on women of color.”3 The institutionalized hypersexualization and commodification of Brown and Black women are cornerstones of rap rhetoric and imagery; within rap’s racialized fantasy world, women are allowed to manifest as “bitches, whores, baby mamas, or Madonnas,” but almost always as passive subjects or objects of desire. There is extensive evidence of women of color taking issue with the patriarchal tendencies of rap music. dream hampton, prominent feminist African-American cultural critic, describes the painful dissonance between “all the ways hip hop has made [her] feel powerful” and provided her generation “a voice, a context” to appear “brave and fearless,” and dream’s daughter’s disdain for the rhymes that abuse and a beat that hurts.4 In the 1970s, the intellectual, political, and creative work of post-civil rights generation women grew into hip-hop feminism, a movement engaged in
1 Bettina L. Love, “Hip Hop, Context, and Black Girlhood,” in Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South, vol. 399, Counterpoints (Peter Lang AG, 2012), 20. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 dream hampton, “free the girls,” in Hip Hop Divas (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), accessed May 30, 2018, http://dreamhampton.com/free-the-girls/.
