When Joan Morgan boldly put the terms “hip hop” and “feminist” together in her 1999 book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, she created a cultural and political revolution for a generation of Black girls raised up both on hip hop and in the aftermath of the Black feminist movement of the 1970s. Black feminism taught us to love ourselves, to fight for our revolution, and to prioritize our own freedom. Hip hop gave us something to bob our heads and shake our hips to. Both were essential parts of the constructions of our Blackgirl selves and lives, and we refused to give up either.
The insistence that we had the right to retain both our radical political heritage and maintain our stake in the greatest global youth arts movement the world has ever seen seemed at times impossible. How dare we come along and place crunk and feminism together? Southern booty-shake music seemed to traffic in some of the worst kinds of misogyny, sexism, and objectification of Black women’s and girls’ bodies. How dare we insist on keeping something that didn’t seem particularly interested in keeping us?
The interesting thing about that question is that we could be asking it of hip hop or we could be asking it of 1970s-style Black feminism. Neither one seemed invested in keeping late twentieth-century Black women, Gen Xers, and millennials, on our own terms. Both seemed to try to dictate to us a future not of our own making.
And we weren’t having it. When a group of us declared ourselves “crunk feminists” circa 2004, we gave ourselves permission to own the varied, competing, contradictory, and complementary parts of ourselves as Black women coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. When we undertook this project to theorize another iteration of Morgan’s “hip hop feminism,” we were attempting to make space for ourselves.
Remixing Joan, we added the word “generation” to our hip hop feminism because sometimes we don’t love hip hop enough to declare unqualified allegiance to it. But still, we are children of hip hop. It has been the sound track to our childhoods, girlhoods, and adolescent years for multiple generations. So we wanted to locate our post-soul, Gen-X, and millennial selves, under the banner of the hip hop generation.
Crunk feminism, our particular brand of hip hop generation feminism (for we imagine there can be many) is, as we have said many times in many places, a percussive feminism that finds its way, its mode, its articulation in the spaces of noises, cacophony, and controversy. Ours is not an easily contrived feminism. Our feminism throws down best when it stands up to deal with hard shit.
The lives of women and femmes of color are summarily hard in these twenty-first-century streets. We need music, culture, art, and politics that speaks to all of it. And our Black mothers and Black feminist forebears taught us that the only thing standing between where we wanted to be and where we were was our willingness to make a way where none had existed before.
Crunk feminism is a kind of way-making.
Crunk feminism gives us the nerve to make our way off the dance floor, where we were shaking our asses just a moment ago, when a song comes on that dares to suggest that ass-shaking constitutes desire and consent. Ass-shaking is whatever we say it is, and our hip hop feminism means you will either respect that or you will learn today.
Crunk feminism has helped some of us to make our way through the tenure process in academe. It has reminded us that all that we are and all that we hope to be is not tethered to the university. Like hip hop, academe on our best day is a well-crafted hustle.
And crunk feminism is helping us all make a way through grief, stress, challenge, loss, and growth, in the healthiest way possible. Because we, the hip hop generation, helped build a global movement from two turntables and a microphone. We come from people who painted breathtaking murals from the contents of a spray can. We come from people who, in the bomb-ass way that they twerk, wine, and pop, lock, and drop it, recognize what is high and holy in the low art of grinding.
Crunk feminism helps us to see possibility in living out an unapologetic disrespectability politic. It takes pleasure in the dis, sees fleeting freedom in the rejection of decorum, and recognizes that Black women and Latinxs never quite get to occupy the space of American respectability.
Hip hop generation feminism does not justify bad behavior. It works from the proposition that Black women and girls get to be authors of their own lives, be they good, bad, or ugly. And hip hop feminism respects that authority, and the importance of being able to articulate and live one’s life on one’s own terms.
Because hip hop culture has fundamentally transformed even the way that Americans speak, we see it as a place that generates language and concepts that help us to fruitfully explain our lives under late capitalism and neoliberal state governance. Hip hop gifted us crunkness, ratchetness, the ability to dis and dismiss, the option to get buck, and the willingness to wreck shop when necessary.
This crunk, ratchet, profanely sacred posture of hip hop generation feminism insists on creatively reconstructing Black life each and every day from the ruins handed to us by the structural violence done to Black life under US neoliberal state formation. We might have to cuss somebody out every now and again so that we don’t carry the weight of structural toxicity in our own bodies, letting it poison and kill us slowly.
Sometimes our hip hop feminism means we step to rappers, even the conscious ones, and tell them that they didn’t love us right. Sometimes we have to call bullshit on homegirls who want feminist benefits but not the feminist title. And that isn’t so much about being overly invested in labels as it is about calling a spade a spade. Is you is or is you ain’t a feminist? Cuz that right there, what you just did, was some feminist shit. Own it.
Hip hop generation feminism does not mandate that we have it all together. Who does? But it does ask us to come correct in the way we do our scholarship, in the nuanced and complicated ways we approach the culture, in the level of self-reflexivity and criticality that we offer in the stories that we tell.
Hip hop reshapes the terrain of Black feminism, making it responsive to the political and cultural realities of women and girls born in the late twentieth century. And Black feminism reshapes the landscape of hip hop, pushing it to realize and elevate its political promise and possibility. So, with our oars of love, generosity, and respect for both these parts of ourselves, we row and wade our way through the choppy waters, knowing that we were made for this journey.