Hip Hop Congress

I was going to include this in the TWOMP Newsletter, but I think its so important it deserves its own space…Even though this is piece is a response to Davey D’s article and Breakdown FM segment “Women Hold Up More Than Half the Sky within Hip Hop,” (which you can find on www.daveyd.com) and it spotlights the voices of Seattle women in Hip Hop such as Dr. Mako Fitts, E.Mandisa, Piece, Kitty Wu and Onion, it reflects a critical and controversial perspective that is well-needed in the broader discourse of women in Hip Hop.. I have abbreviated her response to accommodate the newsletter, but to see the full text including transcriptions, check the Twomp Blog

–Julie C

I have a lot of respect for the women Davy D mentions in his article on Women in Hip Hop. Many of the women he shouts out to in the NW are artists who have made my life more beautiful through their music. Piece’s voice has been a part of the West Coast for years, and I personally know younger cats whose lives she changed through her work in juvies. Davy D writes a lot of important articles on hip hop. The women’s nights he also gives props to really have rocked Seattle. Though he doesn’t mention SoKo (you can really feel the hood in her flow), he does shout out to others like Julie C who always kills it when she’s on stage.

Most of the panel discussion from the 206 Zulu anniversary seems to privilege women as nurturers over all else. I have a great deal of respect for mothers in our community, but I think it’s important to recognize that woman as foremost a nurturer/mother is a social construct. Some women are amazing mothers, while others choose to walk a different path. The split between la Maria and la Malinche is prevalent in our walk, the shake of our hips, and the way we choose to love. The archetypes of Madonna versus Mary Magdalena are very present in the way our society privileges some roles over others; the dichotomy of woman as the whore, the harlot versus the mother, the daughter, the nurturer is present. Most women are both in some sense of being. Some of us reject the role of mother as instinctual, but respect the mothers who surround us. Some of us choose to femme out, to own our sexuality, and are shunned within the hip hop community when our sexuality does not conform to standards of conventional deportment. Some women privilege their own style of mother/nurturer/feminist over what other women are doing. I think this actually excludes a whole school of potential revolutionaries and activists.

This split between Madonna and Whore is even apparent in the piece that Davy D writes about the 206 Zulu panel. While there was discussion around women’s sexuality, he focuses primarily on women as nurturers, when he writes “Instead of entertaining the usual banter about men in Hip Hop calling women bitches, these sisters who are doing big things up north, focused on the topics like the importance of creating spaces for

Women to nurture and heal, holding down multiple roles, overcoming obstacles and most important motherhood within Hip Hop.” I didn’t attend the panel. Instead I listened to the audio link on Davy D’s article, though it was edited, so I wasn’t privy to the entire discussion. I listened intently because I wanted to know if the women on the panel were really privileging motherhood as the most important topic in hip hop. While motherhood was a topic they shared as important in their roles in the community, one of the other issues I found when I listened to the recording was the question of whether or not women in the hip hop community are free to fully express their sexuality. Davy D does not mention this in his article, a topic that is very important, because we need to end sexual oppression. Right now sexual oppression is a battle we fight as women artists within the community in very aggressive ways.

We should be free to choose whether we want to be sexual or not, yet as one of the panelists Ms Kitty Wu discusses there are major inequalities between men and women in the hip hop community in our abilities to be free from sexual oppression. I transcribed this part of the interview since Davy D doesn’t mention it in written form.

Ms Kitty Wu brings up a very real experience that occurs when women who are sexually active within the community are then disrespected by the very men who are also their lovers. Women should be free to be their own woman, to love freely. Free love is not about being a sexual object; free love does not imply you should have sex with those who desire you if you do not also desire them, rather free love is about being free from sexual oppression, about being free to make your choices, and about being respected within the community as you make those choices. When E.Mandisa says that women “carry themselves like that and act that way” she is privileging one form of sexual deportment over another. I thought it was interesting she used Elaine Brown to open her statement about sexuality, because I recently listened to a radio interview with Elaine Brown about women in hip hop. Brown challenges us to overcome our class issues, to overcome our ideas of how women should or shouldn’t dress or behave, and to recognize each other as sisters.

Elaine brings the importance of not judging or dismissing our sisters who dress sexy or lap dance or move in the hip hop videos to the forefront of this topic. We must bring our sisters along with us in revolution, or really let our sisters bring us along too. This is a time when it is important to challenge our notions of feminism, to tear down white colonial feminist constructions and create something new that speaks to all of the women in our community. Part of this new-feminism is re-interpolating our sexual freedom. Free love is about ending sexual oppression; it’s not about being sexual objects or an obligation to fulfill desires of projected heterosexism. It is about being respected for the choices we make, whether that is celibacy, monogamy, non-monogamy or however we want to drop or not drop our knickers.

In part of the panel discussion Piece talks about how she used to have to dress more b-girl in style to be respected by other boys in the cyphers, to make them more comfortable so she could fit in. She says that now she is freer to be a woman. I think we need to extend this even further, so we are not judging our sisters who are shaking their booties (because they are doing what they need to do to pay their own rent, as Elaine refers to the women in the clubs in Atlanta) and spend more time working towards ending sexual oppression and poverty so we can be free as women to make choices for ourselves that aren’t based off of economic need. And furthermore, when we are making choices we need not only the brothers, but also the sisters to respect those individual choices.

At the end of the interview Piece and Onion discuss how important it is to build women spaces so that we can support each other. These spaces need to include women who live and represent many different choices. Queer hip hop artists still battle homophobia daily, and women in the community, straight or queer are faced with heterosexism. Right now, it feels like it’s difficult to be respected as an artist in the hip hop community unless you follow certain rules of deportment from old-school feminism. The discussion in the hip hop panel shows how short we fall as a community in how we think about women’s sexuality, and furthermore how we define ourselves as artists within the community. I have faith though, that we can come through and create brilliance in the times to come