According toByrd, how arewomen complicitin their representation in rap music? Cite evidence from the reading
- Briefly outlineNarayan'smain point as you understand it.
- Explain howNarayandefines the terms "westernization" and "totalization" in her article.
In your answers, be sure toquote from thearticleandinclude your analysis/discussion of those quotes.
=ommunication 28 at the a sexuali1 men ar, talkingCLAIMING JEZEBEL: adults, Black Female Subjeotivity and Sexual songs, i Expression in Hip-Hop exampl ually p AYANA BYRD womar videos Bee whobAyana Byrd is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. She is an entertain Tootiement journalist whose work has appeared in Vibe, Rolling Stone, Honey, TV Guide, and Dijf'mPaper magazines. She is the coauthor of Hair Story:'Untanzling the Roots ofBlack Hair in HuxtalAmerica (2001). a near womer A ll it used to take was one "bitch" reference in a song, one gratuitous and to ass shake in a video and I was on a roll, criticizing the sexism of skyroc black men, denouncing the misogynistic societal structures set up sion w' by white men who supported it from their music industry corner offices, few pc lamenting the misrepresented ways that black female bodies were on dis saved I play. It didn't take much to get me back on my soapbox. But that, appar As ently, was a long time ago. Because today, allowed a receptive audience and as tele' the opportunity to wax passionately and even philosophically about the spectn state of women in hip-hop-the art form that I once believed most defined coals 1: me--I draw a big blank, barely able to muster up a half-hearted "You won't atrocit believe what I just heard ..." togeth What happened since my rankled ire over Snoop Doggy Dogg's 1993 gram t Doggystyle album cover of a black female behind wiggling, naked, out of a eratior doghouse? Things haven't gotten any better. The "feminist rapper" Queen episoc Latifah now uses the once taboo B word in her lyrics. Alongside Chaka Khan, until h who sings the hook for " It's All Good," the onetime"conscious" group De La bothf Soul had a video complete with a Jacuzzi overflowing with near-naked intere~ women. Since the debut of rap videos, outfits in videos are skimpier, the A~ sexual references lewder, and the complicity by women in their own were c exploitation more widespread. Yet all I generally feel is an apathy. lingeri I can now listen to a song with the hook "Hoes/I've got hoes/in differ Patricl ent area codes" and instead of cringing at thoughts of debasement, chuckle It asse ily, an, in the idea 0 Ayana Byrd, "Claiming Jezebel: Black Female Subjectivity and Sexual Expression in norm.Hip-Hop" from The Fire This Time: Youth Activists and the New Feminism, edited by projecVivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin (New York: Anchor, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Ayana Byrd. Reprinted with the permission of the author. off WE :in entertain V Guide, and 'Black Hair in ~ gratuitous e sexism of :ures set up :ner offices, ,ere on dis that, appar ~dience and y about the lOst defined "You won't Jogg's 1993 ~ed, out of a lper" Queen =hakaKhan, group De La near-naked kimpier, the 1. their own lY· les/in differ- lent, chuckle Expression ill ism, edited by pyright © 2004 at the artist Ludacris's witty delivery. Maybe it's that I've defined my own sexuality and know for sure what I only suspected in the past-that these men aren't talking about me. The problem is, they don't know they're not talking about me. Further, a lot of women, particularly girls and young adults, aren't sure that they don't want to be talked about in this way. These songs, and the videos that illustrate them, offer the most broadly distributed examples of seemingly independent black women that many young and sex ually pubescent girls see. And unfortunately few girls transitioning into womanhood understand that the representation of female bodies in rap videos is not an empowering power-of-the-pussy but a fleeting one. Because I grew up in the 1970s and '80s, I find it easy to list all the people who looked like me that were on television. There was Penny on Good Times, i~ F Tootie from The Facts of Life, and the occasional appearance of Charlene on Diff'rent Strokes. In the mid-eighties, there were as well the wholesome Huxtable daughters of The Cosby Show. Those of us who came of age then had a near void of images upon which to draw for representations of black women our age, negative or positive. It was a decade devoted both to saving and to condemning the "Endangered Black Male." But teen pregnancy was skyrocketing, and often the predominant young black female faces on televi sion were in public service spots against babies having babies. Yet there were few policies or social organizations that were addressing their need to be saved or uplifted. As the eighties progressed, things didn't get much better. In film as well as television, portrayals of black women were at either extreme of the sexual spectrum. In Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, which has been raked over the coals by feminists since its release, the lead, Nola Darling, was, among other atrocities, raped by one of her lovers (the supposed nice one) and got back together with him for a short time. On The Cosby Show, the television pro gram that perhaps came closest to engaging and entertaining an entire gen eration of black kids, the female characters were completely desexed. On one episode we learn that Denise, the" wild child" of the family, was a virgin until her wedding night. Though their cousin Pam and her friend Charmaine both flirt with the idea of "giving it up" to their boyfriends, they seem less interested in actually having sex than in keeping their mates happy. As popular culture weighed in on young black female sexuality, there were also deeply embedded societal stereotypes with which to contend. The lingering effects of the Moynihan Report, the controversial paper by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would later become a U.S. Senator, were still being felt. It asserted that black social immobility was caused by a crisis in the black fam ily, and that Black Superwomen had emasculated black men, causing a fissure in the nonnal family setting. l President Reagan had effectively constructed the idea of the Welfare Mother: a black woman who refused to get a job and be a normal contributor to society but instead sat at home all day (most likely in the projects), maybe hitting the crack pipe, having babies by a host Qf men, living off welfare checks that came out of the pockets of decent, hardworking (white) 250 Communication r' Americans. Outside of academic conferences, few observers pointed out that the majority of women in the country on welfare were white, and that most women stayed on public assistance for two years or less. By the early nineties there were other messages in which black women were made into villains. While the media highlighted the Tawana Brawley case, in which the fifteen-year-old black girl alleged a racist attack by white police officers but was foune,i by a grand jury to be lying,2 they virtually ignored the 1990 case of five white student athletes who were charged with sodomy and sexual abuse for repeatedly sexually assaulting a Jamaican woman in a fraternity house at St. John's University. In the latter case, there was more than enough evidence to convict, but according to one juror, the acquittal was based on the jury's desire to save the boys' lives from "ruin./I Together the cases colluded in delegitimizing claims of rape by black women.·There was also Mike Tyson's 1991 conviction for raping Desiree Washington. As vehemently as the white press sought to tum Tyson into a beast, many blacks cried foul to the champ's imprisonment. "What was she doing in his room anyway?" "That bitch set him up!" "How was she laugh ing and smiling at the show if just the night before he had raped her?" There was often more talk about how he had been framed than about the fact that Tyson had a history of physical abuse toward women. Around the same time, Clarence Thomas's self-declared "high-tech lynching" was played out on television screens across the nation, although it was women-Anita Hill and black women in particular-who were left feeling like the ones hanging from the tree of political, if not necessarily public, opinion. So what does any of this have to do with hip-hop? It is telling that the women-whether they're the rappers topping the charts or the dancers in the video&-formed their own identities at a time when black female sexuality in the cultural marketplace was not at all positive. The way black women expe rience and interpret the world has indeed been determined by our having to wage constant battles in order to determine our subjectivity-to say that we are not whores a la Desiree Washington, tricksters and liars a la Tawana Brawley, or disgruntled spinsters a la Anita Hill. In Black Looks the cultural theorist bell hooks writes, "The extent in which Black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those Black women whose identities were con structed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze."3 Yet those women whose identities were instead constructed in compliance with the status quo were most in clined to absorb these images and make these representations and stereotypes of heterosexual black female sexuality their own. Today, through the music video, there are so many black female bodies on view on any given day of watching television that it is impossible to list them. In many ways that is probably the point. Through the constant barrage of hypersexualized images, the young, black female has ceased to be an o>nmn"h, in thp marketvlace and is now back in the slave era position of anonymous c: nineteenth-ce emphaSize th those created hop video ha! the house par low-budget aJ running hip-t collided with changing hip- Before Lu ages of scanti Motley Crne I rappers. The I not being dep revolutionary. Black Noise, "} voices from tt administratiol use, and poli, medium for tl