In preparation for my talk today, I asked a number of my graduate students, particularly those who are African American women, what they thought of Margaret Mead, and I was quite surprised that they responded that she is an absolutely liberating force to them. My surprise was mainly because I was not aware, at least in my department, that Margaret Mead was taught in any focused way. They agreed that she is rarely taught, but one student said that “when you read the canon of anthropology and investigate her work it is very clear, when Margaret Mead is introduced, you are talking about change, opening doors; and you are talking about representation.” So I think it’s important for me to discuss the ways in which Margaret Mead has influenced me, my students and the young people I work with, especially as I continue to do more work on women in general and hip-hop culture in particular.
In a sense, what my students suggest is that Mead’s work created a space to discuss women of color, and once they noticed that this space existed at all, they collectively wedged it open, realizing that it might not be permanent and had to be guarded and protected. Once entered, it invited discussions about the intersections of race, gender, class, migration and home. But, of course, we must acknowledge that a break with tradition is not necessarily a commitment to change. Still, the space created was not a linear, unitary space, nor was it that “great white light” signaling a transformation or revision, the answer and the reason for it all – the real deal. Rather, it was a space that exposed popular and persistent paradigms that excluded and marginalized women of color, compelling us to move forward, often into the unknown.
The space Margaret Mead created was at once the embrace and exposure of a complexity of cultural practices, especially those involving women. It represented an awareness of the impact of the anthropologist on ethnocentrism and the dominance of the Western point of view. It also suggested that reflexive anthropology, as discussed today, should not really be “about us” and our considerable defenses when challenged, but it is also about our hosts and how our hosts understand our roles, positions, perspectives, places and our relation to them, as native anthropology is also teaching us. The Mead space also introduces the anthropologist’s role in the public sphere and in popular culture, not as a self-promoting role but as a role with the power to include an everyday discourse about the world and throughout America the ways in which people are both the same and different. It is a role that suggests that there may be hope in the wake of such revelations, and that people might be quite satisfied with who they are and how they are connected to each other.
In that regard, coming of age is not simply something that happens along a linear road, through various forms of socialization. It is about gender, sexuality, values, beliefs, and social and institutional practices. For many young women today who live in urban areas, it is about power and representation, race and racism, gender and sexuality. This all emerges within and from socialization, in stable and sometimes fractured support networks, as well as the socialization that we all go through and endure from the media. It also highlights the dangers of re-inscribing racist and sexist stereotypes and reproducing hegemonic ideologies. So in the end, what has happened is a dialogic mode that is both liberating and troubling.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this, where there is a liberating yet unstable space, is the role of women in hip-hop culture. Hip-hop culture’s lifeline is deeply embedded in the concepts of representation, recognition and “comin’ correct.” Representation means that through body, language, attitude and action, women may characterize whatever persona is embodied in their proclaimed identity as long as it is based on their reality. Recognition means that one must acknowledge influences that incorporate persons, events, and communities. Finally, the expression “come correct” means that both representation and recognition must occur in ways that acknowledge and incorporate an artist’s local knowledge about her culture, community and generation.
These concepts are played out in hip-hop where young women may be referred to as hard core, sexually aware, or African Queen among others. These descriptions refer to what audiences view as the most consistent characterization of an artist in terms of social and cultural symbols and shared norms. Thus the hardcore rapper represents the uncensored and brutal truth, the sexually aware woman focuses on heterosexual desire while the African Queen represents purity of culture unaffected by European values. She evinces a general respect for women, family and culture. Yet each popular characterization alone is one-dimensional and does not represent the full range of the artist’s purview. The brutal truth of hardcore exists within the complexity of despair, justification, intention and redemption while the objectification of women among sexually aware rappers is not simply about desire, but power and control over the female body and mind. Similarly, the demand of respect for women, a persistent theme among the African Queens, escapes simple-minded idealism because it includes community, empowerment, responsibility and sexuality.
It is clear that women of hip-hop devour symbols of desire, strength, power and resistance. In terms of recognizing, they give respect or props to the main influences in their lives – their heroes and heroines – and as might be expected, recognition – while important – is often problematic as well. In terms of “comin’ correct,” one has to deal with “the reality”; the reality of women, the reality of young African American women in America. Whether we like it or not; whether it hurts or not; whether we can stand to hear it or not: this is the public space and the popular culture that is very much involved in socializing young, African American women. What becomes painful and compelling when we look at what happens to these young women, is that they must make hard choices about their identity while dealing with public and stereotypical ways of viewing and understanding women’s bodies in general – and black woman’s bodies in particular.
I am focusing here on hip-hop with the understanding that it is not only a focus on the daily lives of youth. Hip-hop is a cultural coming-of-age product of the world. It is a set of fractured mirrors. It mirrors the rite of passage, and as it mirrors the rite of passage, it reveals to us both the good and the bad, the difficulties, the progress, the movement backwards and forwards – and the lies. I’d like to introduce two particular cases to think about as we work through these concepts of both visual anthropology – video and its effect on our society – and ways in which we publicly stereotype women’s bodies, in particular black women’s bodies.
In hip-hop there are two terms that are used that I think best describe what the women who are performing now are trying to produce. One is “female” and the other is “bitch.” The use of the term “female” is basically the result of feminist resistance to men’s use of “bitch” in hip-hop. So now, both men and women use “bitch” and “female” to refer to women, though often with very different cultural and political agendas. “Female” has become gender neutral while the term “bitch” represents gender, sexuality and self-empowerment. Two particular performers (from New Jersey and New York) who I think represent these distinctions in important ways are “Rah Digga” and “Lil’ Kim.” These women have created a space for us to seriously consider both the complexity of representation and how we might contribute to a self-empowering depiction of young women. These artists have clear notions of their own identities as young women, what they say (or believe they’re doing and saying), who they consider to be their audience and how they construct the problem of representation for themselves.
“Rah Digga” is from a middle-class family, college-educated, and considers herself to be very much associated with and inspired by Harriet Tubman. She explains the title of her album “Dirty Harriet,” which many people believe is derivative of Dirty Harry as being, instead, homage to her revolutionary idol. She explains, “The reason I named it that is because Harriet Tubman basically led people to freedom.” Hip-hop artist Busta Rhymes continues, “I don’t believe there’s a female out there now who can touch her. While every clique has their token female member, Rah Digga has established herself as a true leader among MCs.” She describes herself as a true hip-hop leader, “taking gender out of the game and
. . . paving the way and leading a new species of female MCs to just feel confident enough to come with raw rhymes and not have to worry about exploiting themselves sexually to succeed.”
Yet by “taking gender out of the game” Rah Digga reflects a very common belief that to be an artist with consciousness, pride and sexual dignity, a woman must downplay the fact that she is a woman. “Female,” then, becomes an empty social category – one necessary to highlight the artist’s lyrical skills. But in truth, Rah Digga does not downplay her gendered body and heterosexuality in terms of dress or lyrics. She boasts:
Many different players, only one hold the ball
Ghetto fabulous chick, go against the protocol
With the grittiest lingo, still such a little sweetheart
Book educated with a whole lotta’ street smarts
In contrast to down-playing gender in the performance of lyrical skills, “Lil’ Kim“, who flamboyantly represents a working class and street-wise sensibility, refers to herself as a bitch – the Queen bitch – sexually assertive, empowered and lyrically fit. She considers the term to represent femininity, feminism, sexuality – and lyrical skills.
Lyrically, I dust em’, off like Pledge
Hit hard like sledge-hammers,
Bitch with that platinum grammar
I am a diamond cluster hustler
Queen bitch, supreme bitch
Rah Digga and Lil’ Kim are both involved in the struggle to represent a type of multidimensional womanhood that not only encompasses their lives, but assumes that its complexity is customary and true. While Lil’ Kim embraces the title of bitch, she redefines it as representing lyrical skill, feistiness and defiance. Rah Digga enters the lyrical terrain absent of gender – almost as a plea that it be ignored – though she dresses in ways that highlight her physical beauty. Though these artists differ, they also complement each other in that they both recognize that their verbal skills may be ignored because they may be objectified. These performers’ dialogue and willingness to engage a complex and often contradictory world that is their life in turn encourages members of their audience to negotiate and critique their own lives as well. They do not embrace restrictive definitions of what it means to be a young woman today. Nor do they accept the norms of behavior placed on young women. In many ways, Rah Digga and Lil’ Kim are not in the same struggle with us. They are leading it. Unfortunately, many women in the academy refrain and recoil from such direct and frank interactions with the complexities of the lives of urban young women and refuse to either participate with them or follow. Margaret Mead created a model of public intellectualism that is urgently needed by all of us today. As my students would say, her discursive model is a means to represent, to recognize, to respect, to “come correct” on this particular issue. Through the power of women in hip-hop we can also learn to do what we need to do to live rich and empowered lives.
