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A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and theblack femmecee

Savannah Shange

To cite this article: Savannah Shange (2014) A king named Nicki: strategic queerness andthe black femmecee, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 24:1, 29-45, DOI:10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602

Published online: 14 May 2014.

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A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee

Savannah Shange*

Department of Africana Studies and the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia, PA, United States

This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme genderperformance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The authorargues that Minaj’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of“bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as“straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legibleas either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, theauthor proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapperwhose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linkedto the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair ofmusic video releases that reflect the range of Minaj’s gender performances ascinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from herfemmecee stance. King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusalto cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common sensesthat seek to produce her as a compliant subject.

Keywords: gender performance; femme; hip hop; blackness; queer theory;homonormativity

On her breakthrough mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty, Nicki Minaj rapped about her penchantfor “bad bitches,” piquing the interest of queer hip hop heads when she bragged: “I onlystop for pedestrians/ or a real, real bad lesbian” (Maraj 2009). In the three years sinceher debut, Minaj has shot to stardom as the reigning hip hop and now pop diva. Her sexu-ality has remained at the center of her public persona, propelled by both the spectaculariza-tion of her body as a target of sexual desire and her piecemeal lyrical expressions ofqueerness. In the blogrolls and YouTube comment chains that track Minaj’s1 popular recep-tion, a current of disdain runs beneath the critical props and teenybopper adulation. Inaddition to the familiar chorus of “put your clothes back on” nostalgia, there is also anongoing critique of her professed-and-then-not-professed bisexuality as being just agimmick. This suspicion of her same-sex desire in online discursive spaces is part of a criti-cal consensus that foregrounds capital as the “true” engine of Minaj’s strategic queerness.

If Minaj’s selectively “gay”maneuvering is indeed an attempt at material gain, does thatautomatically dismiss her potential to upset heteronormative scripts in hip hop? Or, more

© 2014 Women & Performance Project Inc.

*Email: savannah@upenn.edu

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2014Vol. 24, No. 1, 29–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602

bluntly, how much pussy does one have to talk about eating for it to “count” as queer? Iinvoke Nicki in these pages as a thinking partner to help me examine the distancebetween provocation and transgression, and how queer practice and commodification inter-act in the discursive flows of black popular culture. In these flows we find currents that areboth strategic and static, essentialist and ambiguous, coerced and agentic, coursing throughthe same narrative. This article traces how Nicki creatively navigates these crosscurrents,particularly when marked as black, female, and famous.

While recent scholarship has noted Minaj’s nimble sexuality play, most has not recog-nized or marked her performance of gender as femme (Whitney 2012; Butler 2013; Smith2013). In this analysis, I foreground femmehood, building on the presumption that “tooperate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations ofdomination. It offers the possibility of the repetition of a law that is not its consolidation,but its replacement” (Butler 1990, 40). Thus, I argue that Nicki’s complex assemblage ofpublic personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity,where she appears to perform “straight” or “queer,” but upon closer examination, sherefuses both. It is this refusal of legibility, of any parochial rendition of black sexuality,that fuels derisive dismissals of Nicki’s black femme subjectivity as yet another Top 40 titil-lation, particularly within the user-generated content of mainstream gay and feminist onlinespaces like Autostraddle and Clutch. If a stable, transparent, performance of queer identityhas such currency, might femme subjects be perceived to fall a few cents short in their (mis)recognition as conforming to and benefiting from heteropatriarchal gender norms? Further,how do we as queers perpetuate our own enclosure by enforcing homonorms on our femmekin, judging them as inadequate? Where does Nicki Minaj fit in our attempts to map thepopular contours of black feminism over the past generation? And finally, what forms ofqueer black subjecthood might we misrecognize in our pursuit of legible queer genealogiesin hip hop, in our pursuit of kinship? Making ourselves visible to each other as queer familyis a strategy of black life in the face of social death, an effort at liberatory rupture in a world“sutured by anti-Black solidarity” (Wilderson 2010, 59). I am guided particularly by filmtheorist Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight as a compass towards these ends, which thusfar is the only book-length work on black femme cultural representation. Before engagingMinaj’s musical oeuvre, I take a step back to sketch the contours of tactical queerness inrelationship to homonormativity, both in its dominant and nondominant permutations. Ithen briefly situate Nicki in the historical context of contemporary commercially successfulwomen in rap, before finally turning to her contingent performances of black femmehoodon wax, on film, and in print.

Sincerely, strategically queer

At the heart of this inquiry is what we might call strategic queerness and its encounters witha homonormative impulse that distinguishes the legitimate from the illegitimate queer. Stra-tegic queerness unfurls as a heuristic from Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 13) argument for the“strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.”Having witnessed the widespread misuse of her concept, Spivak sought to distanceherself from the term, but not necessarily its project, lamenting that “my notion justsimply became the union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one

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wondered about that” (Darius, Jonsson, and Spivak 1993, 35). While this piece circulatesSpivak’s notion as academic currency, it also seeks to centralize the “strategies” used byqueer(ed) subjects within the constraints of late capitalism. As sketched here, strategicqueerness is a situation-specific performance of nonheteronormativity enacted in theservice of a subject’s material, political, erotic, or discursive interest(s). In this frame,Nicki’s penchant for “real big ol’ ghetto booty” can be understood as a strategicallyqueer assertion of self that provides her with a financially lucrative buffer against heteronor-mative demands, even as it provides the tender homecoming of another woman’s blackfemme flesh (Raymond and Maraj 2010). Diverging from Spivak’s conception, strategicqueerness in this sense does not necessarily denote an exclusively scrupulous visibility.She demonstrates the ethical dimension of strategy through the example of a diverse setof subaltern groups articulating a collective identity that denies difference in order tomake a claim on the state. By contrast, a strategically queer individual may be interpretedas inauthentic, cowardly, or even immoral – the inverse of the “good gay subject” producedand regulated through regimes of homonormativity. We see this dynamic when Nicki fanswere chided on mainstream white lesbian website AfterEllen.com that “if you buy heralbum, you are buying into fauxmosexuality,” and reminded that “the last thing we needis another straight woman pretending to identify with our culture just to lure us as custo-mers” (Bendix 2010).

As articulated powerfully in recent years, homonormativity often dovetails into homo-nationalism, which we might sketch as a hegemonic patriotism that hinges on the queerliberal subject’s investment in the Western state apparatus (Puar 2005, 2007; Agathangelou,Bassichis, and Spira 2008). Homonationalism’s “good gay subject” is not only white andbourgeois, but is also monogamously partnered, normatively gendered, and as committedto the flag as he or she is to the nuclear family. In Puar’s (2005, 122) frame, “queernessis proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rheto-ric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobicand perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, andgendered normal.” In this context, the War on Terror and the Islamophobic strains of homo-national discourse serve to legitimate imperial aggression overseas. The same queer“imperialist center” also serves to “other” communities within the United States becausetheir race, class, gender deviance, politics, and/or affect fall outside the boundaries ofideal queer liberal subjectivity. The mainstream gay lobby’s two policy priorities overthe past decade demonstrate this dynamic: repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and securingthe right to gay marriage. Petitioning the state on behalf of queer people who want to par-ticipate in the imperial war machine is a homonationalist politic in the sense that it usesqueer identity as a tool to expand rather than interrupt the most lethal elements of the Amer-ican way. While less obviously bloody, the gay marriage movement is premised on theconceit that “we are just like you,” and that gay marriage is about equality. Of course,that only works if “you” are a heteronormative middle-class couple who reap the materialbenefits of being married. For queer people of color and poor queer folks, issues of econ-omic marginalization, mass incarceration, and police brutality are often far higher on the listof priorities, as seen in a recent protest sign that demanded accountability from the HumanRights Campaign, “Sleeping in the Streets or Walking Down the Aisle?!”2 Despite its

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pretensions to the contrary, bourgeois homonationalism is not the only expressive field ofhomonormative regulation.

Nondominant queer communities can also employ the technologies of normativity tomaintain social coherence, even if their homonorms are wholly different, or counter to,those of Puar’s “imperial center.” One instantiation of this normative technology is“butch” or “stud” – femme sociality. Multiply distanced from queer liberalism, black andworking-class inflected stud–femme3 sociality is a common sense of gendered normingwithin queer women of color communities that

contains nodes of consent to dominant hegemonies, and it often enforces a rather rigid behav-ioral and aesthetic code that may have outlived its usefulness for some. At the same time,however, butch-femme also is a malleable form of sociality that still functions as a vehiclefor the survival of forms of black lesbian community and as an expression and organizationof erotic desire. (Keeling 2007, 133)

Even though terms like “lesbian” or even “woman” may not fit comfortably for everyoneoperating in these communities, folks still have to navigate and engage a binary pair of con-structed masculine and feminine gender roles. Distinct from the sex-positive, campy“butch-femme as play” strain of white queer theory, stud-femme is a citational field thatextends far beyond the bedroom to sketch the boundaries of fair play for legible selves.In this social field, homonormative discourse surveys those very boundaries to legitimizecompliant queer subjects and discipline those who stray. The homonorms of stud-femmesociality include etiquettes surrounding gender presentation, partner choice, and the levelof disclosure or “outness” expected of community members. Along these lines, membersof black queer women’s communities4 are expected to present a coherent gender,whether that is masculine or feminine of center; we are also expected to partner withsomeone who has a different gender presentation than ourselves. While Nicki’s self-fash-ioning is compliant with femme norms, her lyrical and visual displays of desire for otherfemme-presenting women are not. Based on these established (and contested) boundariesof authenticity, homonormativity dictates how to be gay and throws shade upon those,like Minaj, who dare to defy.

Strategic queerness appears ever shady in this regime of authenticity – “strategy” slipseasily into “manipulation,” a bedfellow of inauthenticity. However, rather than consolidatehomonorms as uniformly negative in their disciplining function, and conflate strategy withimpersonation, it is important to recognize the productive and humanizing role they can alsoplay in queer communities. What, then, might we find at the crossroads of strategic and nor-mative sexualities? Perhaps more pertinently, if the authenticity of individual black queersubjects is predicated on the logic of stud-femme, how does the singular femme comeinto the field of recognition? How can we see Nicki, even as her image is ubiquitous?

An heir to what throne?

Over the past four decades there has been a steady stream of women rocking mics and air-waves who follow in the footsteps of early women rappers like Lady B and RoxanneShanté, as a well as a rich tradition of women hip hop scholars who probe the confluences

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of gender, race, and power within and beyond hip hop (Rose 1994; Morgan 1999; Keyes2002; Perry 2004; Pough 2004; Gaunt 2006; Peoples 2007; Pough et al. 2007; Brown2009; Love 2011; Brown and Kwakye 2012; Durham, Cooper, and Morris 2013).5

However, women continue to be so underrepresented as mainstream hip hop artists (but cer-tainly not as hip hop heads), that the introduction of every new female rapper is heralded asa sign of the rise of women in hip hop. Indeed, even the term “femcee,” a contraction of“female emcee,” signals the alterity of women to hip hop as the unmarked “emcee” isassumed to be male. Problematic as it is, “femcee” continues to circulate rather heavilyin both in print and online hip hop criticism, often in ciphers of purists or rap classicistswho differentiate between the skilled title of “emcee” and the far more common“rapper.” Jean Grae, who has been on most folks’ “top 10 femcees” list for the betterpart of a decade, has built an impressive canon of rhymes that battle the patriarchal baseof heteronormative hip hop (Smalls 2011). Along the way, she has also dedicated thousandsof characters on her Twitter account to abolishing the term: “Unless we agree on callingdudes ‘mancee’ (which actually makes me feel awful) stop saying ‘femcee.’ EMCEE isfine, thanks” (Grae 2010).6 Beyond the concern Grae and others hold that “womenemcees” should just be respected and evaluated as emcees, rather than by gender, thereis also the misleading aural prominence given to “fem”-ness in the term “femcee,” eventhough as we will see, femme gender is by no means universal to women who rap.

Over the past two decades, two broad archetypes of commercially successful womenrappers have emerged, which I designate roughly as the Righteous Queen, whose lyricsfocus on community empowerment and positivity, and the Gangsta Boo, who oftenenters the scene as the protégé of a prominent male rapper, whose rhymes spin talltales of crime laced with sex. In the pantheon of Righteous Queens, we might find the“conscious” manifestos of Lauryn Hill, MC Lyte’s cautionary tales, Ladybug Mecca’shomages to black liberation, Mystic’s elegies for our fallen, and, perhaps definitionally,Queen Latifah’s party jams oriented toward unity and self-pride. Among the GangstaBoos, we have the lyrical arsenal and sexual prowess of Lil Kim, Foxy Brown’shusky-voiced drug raps, Remy Ma’s streetwise independence, the original ride-or-diechick Eve, and of course the intimate exploits of the category’s eponym, GangstaBoo. While it may seem like a facetious title, each of these “Gangsta Boos” havebeen arrested after the inception of their professional music careers, reminding us ofthe continued vulnerability of gendered black bodies to the penal state. Significantly, pat-terns of gender performance differ across these archetypes, with both Lyte and Latifahsometimes being read as masculine presenting and some shade of gay. Neither has under-gone a public “coming out” ritual, but Latifah’s purchase of a home in 2010 with per-sonal trainer Jeannette Jenkins coupled with refusals to discuss her “personal life” inmedia interviews have been widely read as a discreet acknowledgement of her queer-ness. Just as is true with every identificatory formation, these rough consolidations ofRighteous Queens and Gangsta Boos are porous and subject to negotiation and subver-sion, as evidenced the many “symbolic remainders” (Jackson 2005, 59) produced by“femcee” math.

Perhaps most prominent in their exception to this loose heuristic are commercially suc-cessful women emcees whose gender presentation is consistently non-normative. Here wemight find multi-platinum Dirty South representer Missy, Jermaine Dupree’s masculine-of-

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center protégé Da Brat, and Detroit’s Bo$$, who was arguably the first stud to rap on amajor label. Missy’s embodiment of gender at once prevented her from playing the roleof a Queen or a Boo, and at the same time allowed her to carve an unprecedented spacefor herself as a headlining artist in her own right. With trademark short hair and chocolateskin darker than any of the 10 women rappers listed in the above paragraph, Missy is notimmediately legible as any brand of black leading lady. Further, her relationship to herample size early in her career was the inverse of socially mandated shame; in the videofor her 1997 single “I Can’t Stand the Rain” video, she plays with her size using visualeffects, flipping fatness into an asset for a sexy, bodycentric emcee. While Missy hasbeen the subject of gay rumor mills for these and other reasons, her lyrics generally refer-ence heterosexual scenes, even if not normatively so. Da Brat and Bo$$ both present them-selves as less ambiguous queer subjects – with the exception of Da Brat’s dissonant Frenchmanicure in her post-prison video shoot – and aligned drug- and crime-oriented rhymeswith their masculine presentation. Distinct from these gender defiant emcees, anotherslice of musicians also resist identification as Righteous Queens or Gangsta Boos. Theyare a renegade collection of women artists aptly described by Nas’s turn of phrase: “therapper’s rapper,” including Jean Grae, Bahamadia, and Rah Digga (Jones 2002). Signifi-cantly, these female “rapper’s rappers,” whose supreme lyrical skills and nonsexualcontent make them direct threats to male mic domination, are also the least supported bythe recording industry. None of the three aforementioned have a major-label record deal,or the backing of the publicity machines that facilitate chart toppers. Minaj, who cameinto the game independently and was soon picked up by the Young Money crew, alsoworks outside of these generic conventions for women rappers.

Sidestepping categorization as a Gangsta Boo or a Righteous Queen, Minaj’s verbose,hyperbolic braggadocios rhyme style qualifies as rap for rappers. However, since she alsosings pop tunes and engages Lady Gaga-style wardrobe antics, Minaj’s work simul-taneously challenges the boundaries of the very category “rapper.” In order to index themultiple moves Minaj makes in terms of gender, sexuality, and the generic conventionsof hip hop, it may be useful to think of Minaj as a femmecee. Unlike the dismissive“femcee,” whose gender assignment at birth modifies their right to the “emcee” title, afemmecee is a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextric-ably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes.

Femmecee on film: same-sex desire in Minaj’s music videos

Visuality has been key to Nicki’s strategic deployment of queerness. By tracing the mani-festations of same-sex desire in Minaj’s music videos, I seek to reveal both the transgres-sions and the concessions that are built into Nicki’s femmecee stance. For a few yearsafter her first underground mixtape Sucka Free was released (Spring 2008), Minaj almostexclusively recorded and performed on other artists’ songs through cameos or guest appear-ances. Her piecemeal approach garnered unprecedented commercial success even beforeher major label debut. At one point in Fall 2010, Minaj was featured on seven of Billboard’sHot 100 songs at the same time, setting a new record for most singles on the chart at once –allowing her to brag that she earns “$50 K for a verse/ no album out” (Maraj 2010). Indeed,

34 S. Shange

the hype paid off for the record sales of her first studio album, Pink Friday, released laterthat season.

This variegated set of guest recording appearances has allowed Minaj opportunities tostrategically deploy a range of lyrical, ethnic, and sexual personae. In Nicki’s case, shedeploys black femme gender performance as part of her public persona, particularly in hermusic videos. These performances remind us of the difficulty of enacting a black femmesubject on the screen, partly because her very presence threatens to “dislodge the racist,sexist, and homophobic conceptions” that structure our domination (Keeling 2007, 9).Thus, it seems Nicki’s appearance has the potential to recall the black femme from her/ourcinematic, and therefore discursive, exile. Her rendition of black femmehood positions ussomewhere between Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) unthinkable and Saidiya Hartman’sunthought (Hartman and Wilderson 2003), and regales black femmes in an optimistic,even celebratory way. But if recognizing black femmehood always already disrupts hegemo-nic scripts, what does it mean to recognize a black femme inmainstream hip hop, particularlyif she disavows any queer “identity” even while referencing queer practice?

When examined chronologically, we find that while Nicki consistently peppers sexualinnuendoes and scenarios into her rhymes, the tone of her verbal engagements with same-sex desire has shifted over the course of her career. Whereas earlier lyrical offerings oftencentered on Nicki’s interest in threesomes with a man and a woman, in her more recentwork, she rhymes separately about potential male and female sex partners rather than con-flating them into a queered heterosexual scene. This shift reflects in part the changing powerdynamics in Nicki’s artistic career; on almost all of her early tracks, she was a featured gueston a male rapper’s song, in keeping with the “male sponsorship” model of black women inpopular music (Emerson 2002). More recently the tables have turned, with Nicki insteadplaying host to male rappers jockeying for cameos on her tracks. As a lens into this chan-ging dynamic, I now look to a pair of music video releases that loosely bookend this tran-sition: Usher’s 2010 release “Lil Freak,” which features Nicki, and Nicki’s 2012 “Beez inthe Trap,” which features 2 Chainz.

In her guest appearance on R&B superstar Usher’s “Lil Freak,” Nicki made an assertionof queerness that appeared quite different across visual and verbal platforms. When thelyrics of “Lil Freak” are examined in tandem with the images presented in the musicvideo, we are able to better apprehend Minaj’s strategically queer maneuverings. In thevideo, Nicki is positioned ambiguously as the wingwoman for Usher’s exploits and apotent homoerotic seductress in her own right. Set in an eerily silent, cavernous warehousespace, “Lil Freak” opens with the timid steps of a fair-skinned ingénue who reads as almost-if-not-quite white. Looking around nervously, the ingénue enters an industrial elevator andis followed by Nicki and an entourage of black women, all dressed to the nines in scantyclub gear. Nicki’s trademark over-the-top wig is split-dyed down the middle, with onehalf platinum blonde and the other black. The wig is a suggestive visual accompanimentto her dual role in the narrative as a queer femme initiator on the one hand, and aminion of Usher’s patriarchal sexuality on the other. After Nicki’s crew disembarks intoUsher’s party, the ingénue tries to push the button to get to her own floor, but to noavail; she is stuck on the floor of the party and ventures out of the elevator apprehensively.

Usher’s verse foreshadows Nicki’s seduction of the ingénue, instructing Nicki to makeout with her in anticipation of a ménage a trois. Usher narrates homosex as a prelude to his

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own satisfaction, and positions himself as the “true” target of female desire, because to himit is obvious that they are on the prowl for a celebrity. By making Nicki’s loyalty to himcontingent on both the recruitment of and sexual engagement with women he will laterhave sex with, Usher deploys a classic formula of intimate coercion: “if you really lovedme, then you would x.” Usher’s instruction to acquire his sexual partners at least partiallybrackets off Minaj’s sexual autonomy, a move she echoes later in her own verse when shedescribes herself as Usher’s employee. By goading the imagined erotic interest to have sexwith Minaj, Usher’s lyrics attempt to further de-queer homosexual contact by dragging itunder the rubric of male desire and control. Further, because Usher has already narratedNicki and the ingénue’s kiss before it actually happens, he appears as the auteur of thequeer sex scene, which then could be seen to unfold as a manifestation of his fantasy.However, Minaj’s verse steps assertively away from subordination to male desire as sheaddresses her erotic interest.

Shot in profile, the women’s faces are just inches away from each other when Minajreverses the terms of Usher’s demand. Minaj stays in a decidedly transactional, non-roman-tic register with: “I really like your kitty cat, and if you let me touch her/ . . . I’ll take you togo see Usher.” Instead of serving as just a conduit for Usher’s desire to see the erotic interestturn into his “lil freak,”Minaj layers on her own desire to “touch” the soon-to-be freak, andpositions herself as the gatekeeper to Usher’s hypermasculine sex symbol. Minaj assumesthat the ingénue has her own agentic reasons to “go see Usher” and offers a femme-femmesexual encounter as currency to get her in the door. Building on her sexual proposition ofthe Lil Freak, the rest of Minaj’s verse reinforces her position as perpetually, and patriarch-ally, queer. Nicki goes on to boast “I keep a couple hoes,” as she likens herself to Santa witha stable of women in lieu of reindeer.

Visually, Minaj advertises her sexual prowess in relation to the remarkably light com-plexioned, nervous girl – in the video she seems to tease her viewing public with the specterof homoerotic intimacy, bringing her lips close to the ingénue’s face, leaning forward sug-gestively as she raps to the woman. While still certainly playing fast and loose with thearchetypes of heteronormativity, the cinematic imagery plays much straighter thanMinaj’s lyrics. Textually, Minaj brags not only about the women she partners with, buteven jokes about nabbing Cassie, the R&B singer and sometime girlfriend of rap mogulSean “P Diddy” Combs. Still, Minaj’s queer voyage ultimately remains tethered to theanchor of Usher as both the headlining artist on the track that opens and closes the song,and as the narrative’s protagonist – both Nicki and her love interest are his lil freaks starringin the video shot at his party.

While also set in a dark club atmosphere full of dark flesh and deep bass, the video forMinaj’s 2012 single “Beez in the Trap” is an almost complete inversion of the genderedpower dynamics at work in “Lil Freak.” Minaj is the center of the narrative, with shotsof her flanked by black women in bikinis and bustiers interposing footage of her rappingdirectly to the camera in an abstract grey space. In both frames, Minaj appears in Techni-color; in her solo shots, she crouches on a wooden pedestal in a neon pink leotard and limestilettos to spit rhymes behind a nest of barbed wire in the foreground. In the club, sheappears in a Day-Glo green wig, outsized gold chains nestled in her bare cleavage. In adeparture from “Lil Freak,” Nicki begins the song herself, establishing that she “Beez inthe Trap.” The opening chorus recalls Dr. Dre’s 20-year-old misogynist classic, “Bitches

36 S. Shange

Ain’t Shit,” from the multiplatinum 1992 album The Chronic, revived recently by Tyga andYG’s single of the same name in 2011. Of course, when Nicki spits the lyric as someonewho is putatively a “bitch” herself, the phrase becomes palimpsestic – her attempts atresignification layer messily over patriarchal norms. In a belligerent, cocky tone, Nickiraps the whole song without a trace of the teenybopper girliness that animates her poptunes, instead staying in “battle rap” mode for the duration. Her verses paint a familiarpicture of misogynist desire-cum-degradation, where the black female body is subject to“thingification” (Césaire 1955, 42) as “that,” and sex is the only currency accepted inexchange for affection.

Nicki’s delivery hits each plosive gutturally so that the repeated “bitch” lands hard onthe ear. No longer offering to “touch your kitty cat,” Nicki instead invokes penetrationaggressively, demanding “bitch, bust that open.” In keeping with the tendency of emceesin the Young Money orbit to celebrate, rather than denigrate, sex work, Nicki suggeststhat she is also in the market as a potential john who will “spend a couple thou[sand]” tohave sex with a woman of her choice. These lines are further contextualized by thevideo, which conjures a strip club atmosphere in which Nicki holds a huge stack of$100 bills as two women lean their breasts in towards her.

Just as Nicki busted a guest verse on “Lil Freak,” rising star 2 Chainz does the honors on“Beez in the Trap,” spitting lyrics about money rather than sex, rehearsing a rags to richestale that starts in the projects and ends in a mansion. More significant to the discussion ofNicki’s shifting sexuality is the on-screen depiction of the two rappers. While 2 Chainz raps,he and Nicki are shot together in an unadorned grey photo studio, removing their interactionfrom the diegetic arc of the club narrative. Fierce in a backless leopard print unitard, Nickidances alongside 2 Chainz during the verse, but never with him. Unlike a strikingly similarscene from the video for Ciara’s 2010 “Ride,” in which Ciara becomes a sexual object forLudacris during his guest verse on her song, Nicki never touches 2 Chainz, maintaininginstead her own space and interaction with the camera. This distance between them isunderscored at the end of the video, when Nicki poses standing, giving much attitudeand facing away from 2 Chainz. Similar to the kind of hijinks a student might playbehind a teacher’s back, he comes up behind her and playfully “air-grinds” maybe 10inches away from her body. Untouched and unperturbed, Nicki doesn’t respond at allduring his dance. It is not until he stops dancing and shifts into a back-to-back pose withher that she moves, turning her head toward the camera as he does, establishing them asplatonic peers.

Indeed, the only sexual contact Nicki has in the “Beez in the Trap” is during the closingbridge, when Nicki questions in a husky sing-song, “damn, damn what they say about me?”She follows with “if I get hit/ swinging on a big bitch,” and appears flanked by two womenin stripper gear that are a full head taller than her. Nicki raps with her rear end pressed upagainst one woman, while holding the other woman’s shoulder and caressing her back andrear end. The query, “what they say about me?” obliquely references the rumor mill debatesabout Nicki’s queer sexuality, and paired with her refusal to engage 2 Chainz as sexualinterest points to Minaj’s deployment of queer femme autonomy as a public stance.However, Nicki consistently denies recognition as “gay,” even as she dodges identificationas “straight.”

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Evasion or defiance? Strategies of disavowal

When interviewed by the magazine Black Men, which is a cross between soft porn and avideo vixen directory, Minaj asserted quite unequivocally: “I don’t date women, and Idon’t have sex with women” (Blassingame 2010, 14). However, equivocation came laterwhen she appeared on the October 2010 cover of Out magazine, a mainstream gay publi-cation in the United States. Nicki claimed to be using the outlet to thank her gay fans, ratherthan to out herself as a queer person. When the Out journalist pressed Minaj about her pre-viously published denials of bisexuality, Minaj quipped: “But I don’t date men either”(Ganz 2010, 2). Minaj’s contradictory disclosure does not necessarily signal surrender tohegemonic norms. Recalling Butler, we can understand Nicki’s evasion to be an effort toreplace rather than reenact scripts of sexual belonging. At the same time, Minaj’s femmegender presentation underwrites her access to even cursorily heteronormative spaces,even though her elaborate wigs and hyperbelle personae immediately recall drag queen aes-thetics to the queer gaze.

While Minaj disavows queerness several times, she also significantly and strategicallyskirts heteronormativity, as in a 2009 interview on the video magazine VladTV. Titled“Nicki Minaj – How to Get At Her,” hosted by DJ Vlad who Minaj calls “the crazywhite boy.” He invites her to perform her straightness by asking her for instructions toguide her male suitors. I quote the interview at length because Minaj dodges the questionnot once, but three times.

DJ Vlad: What does it take for a guy to walk up to you, start a conversation with you, and reallyget your attention?

Nicki Minaj: Pull your penis out! Psych I’m just kidding – that’s what you thought I was gonnasay, you so nasty!

DJV: No, I’m tryna clean it up for you girl, you comin’ at me with this mature shit, I’m trynakeep it mature!

NM: Haha, tricked you!! Aaah! Um, a guy can approach me… actually, he can’t because I bewith a lotta people. I be with big dudes [laughs]

DJV: Security’s back there, yamean?

NM: Yeah, they don’t really let me out of their sight, but I like girls to approach me.

DJV: You like girls to approach you?

NM: Yeah, you know how I do.

DJV: Well, how can a girl approach you?

NM: Just be cute and be themselves, you know how I love you girls. Um, kisses and hugs to allmy bad bitches. And, shout out to the guys too, but the guys… they’re just dudes. They don’thave any [changes voice] fun parts that I can squeeze! Psych, I’m just kidding. Um, um, yeah.(VladTV 2009)

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Instead of complying with the male interviewer’s request for access, Nicki deflects andopens the door onto what might be called “bisexuality,” even though in this clip she’s unin-terested in dating men, and a year later she is uninterested in dating women.

Tracing my own affective experience as a black femme watching the interview, I findsomething supremely, and perhaps problematically, unsatisfying about this oscillation.When Nicki infers her queerness to DJ Vlad with “you know how I do,” I am instantlyhailed. I remix her words into “you know how we do” and annex Nicki into my own orbitas another black femme. I want her kisses and hugs, less as a sexual encounter, and moreas a ritual of recognition – I want the relief of seeing myself seen in hip hop after twodecades of listening to my own absence over and over on boomboxes and Walkmen, onCD players, Minidiscs, and iPods. Even when Nicki flips from her Queens brogue to thehigh pitched squeal of “fun parts that I can squeeze,” I still perk at the notion of being agame to be toyed with, of playing at objectification. It’s not until the “psych” that I deflate,disappointed, particularly given that there is no disavowal of the disavowal, no “I’m justkidding” after she says she is straight. Of course, this raises several questions: What respon-sibility does Nicki Minaj have to stave off my black femme disappointment, to satisfy mylonging for recognition in the first place? Further, does the recounting of any one individualaffective experience effectively lower the stakes of this effort to recalibrate our engagementswith queerness in hip hop? Given the always already embodied nature of both blackness andfemmeness, a robust analysis of Nicki requires us to account for the constant evaluation andassessment of the authenticity of femme sexuality, particularly when it resists legibility.

Out gay male rapper Cazwell’s commentary on Minaj brings attention to the ways inwhich her sexual persona (dis)articulates with the homonorms of stud-femme sociality.When asked about Minaj’s star potential given her queer lyrical content, he opined: “Ifshe was a butch and dressed like a guy, people would be turned off, but people like apretty girl no matter who she sleeps with” (Ganz 2010, 6). In much of queer theory andqueer living, “femme” is not only exclusively lesbian, but also is thought of as – femme,where the dangling hyphen signals an irreducible attachment to a masculine counterpart.Even in more racially and regionally complex portraits of femme subjecthood, femme sexu-ality is still consummated in partnership with someone who has a “complementary genderdisplay” (Moore 2011, 82). Evading that familiar dyad, Nicki’s ostensibly femme-femmeeroticism pierces “lesbian” and renders it an open set because her sexual desire is nolonger congruent with stud-femme sociality. Minaj’s femme subject withholds the affectivelabor that reproduces stud masculinity. In her discussion of the liberatory possibilitiessuggested by black femme figures in the cinematic gaze, Keeling (2007, 143) argues that“with one foot in an aporia and one foot in the set of what appears, the black femme cur-rently is a reminder that the set of what appears is never perfectly closed and that somethingdifferent might appear therein at any-instant-whatever.” That “something different” inNicki’s case is often Roman Zolansky, who she describes as the “crazy boy who lives inme and says the things I don’t wanna say,” (Warren 2010) appearing on many of hermore rhyme-heavy songs. While Nicki’s femme gender isn’t verified as queer by the pres-ence of a butch partner, it does at times stand in contrast to the “crazy” British boy insideher, who takes risks unavailable to “Barbie,” Nicki’s primary persona. Indeed, Roman’sstaccato rhyme delivery and caricatured vocal shifts mark off his verses as that “somethingdifferent” that haunts the recognizable.

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However, Nicki’s second album release, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, begins toexplore gender beyond a bifurcation between masculine Roman and feminine Barbie. Sheis not only the “heavyweight champ,” as she proclaims on her duet single with Drake, butthe video for that song opens with an animated storybook page that reads: “Once upon atime there lived a king named Nicki. One day, while sitting on her throne…” With thismale monarch title echoed again on her most recent Vibe cover, King Nicki spits more expli-citly queer lyrics on Roman Reloaded than she did on the teenybop-inflected Pink Friday.Nicki’s kingliness is complemented by an emergent phallic theme. On “Stupid Hoe,” sheuses a Roman-esque voice to tell Lil Kim to “suck my diznick,” an insult congruent withthe battle rap framing. Nicki’s gender performance in the song takes a turn when in her“own” voice, or what she calls “Nicki” in her interviews, she belts out in a sugar-sweet alto melody: “Oooh, dick in yo face, I put my dick in yo face, I put my dick in yoface, yeah!” (Maraj 2012). Because she sings in a very different register than the no-nonsensebattle rapper who spits bars on “Beez in the Trap” and the rest of “Stupid Hoe,” the “dick-in-yo-face” serenade emphasizes the juxtaposition between her polished, coy, femme presen-tation and hip hop’s long-established discourse of fellatio as a tool of denigration, from the“deez nuts” era onward. Especially with such an extended, passionate riff, Nicki gives ustime to imagine not only her having a dick, but putting it in our faces, thereby conjuringthe queered queer scene of a black femme topwhose sexual aggression belies the pillow prin-cess archetype. She takes it a step further when she sings a rendition of that lyric for a videointerviewwithComplexmagazine inwhichMinaj cites thatmoment as themost liberatory forher during the making of Roman Reloaded. “That’s when it was like explosion! RomanReloaded is here!” (Frederick 2012). Before saying “explosion,” Minaj makes a [chick-pow] onomatopoetic bomb sound with her mouth, and illustrates the explosion with herhands, constructing an unavoidably ejaculatory narrative of the album.

The phallic turn in Nicki’s work extends beyond the realm of the lyrical. Still images ofMinaj with a strap-on dildo during the 2011 I am Music tour also put the “drag” in KingNicki.7 In the first picture, taken at the Buffalo show that also featured rappers Lil Wayneand Rick Ross, Nicki holds a blindingly white penis in her hand, complete with veins, apink glans, and testes beneath (Figure 1). Stooping comically, Nicki holds the strap so thatit droops down lasciviously, and sneers in a transparently campy, Roman-esque fashion.This is King Nicki at play, performing the contrast between her skin-tight Afrofuturist getup and the wiggly white dick. A second image taken at the show is more opaque. Caughtbetween poses, Nicki pauses with her mouth slightly agape, eyes fixed on the empty spacebefore her (Figure 2). This time the strap is erect, and just a foot or two away from the crouch-ing back-up dancer whose hips are angled up toward Nicki’s figure. Nicki stands in thought,shaping the moment, shaping her relation to it as she enacts the scene of queer sex for theaudience. It is in this awkward moment that we witness Nicki present to her interiority, herown white dick in her hand, the dissonance of which signals her outsiderness to what wemight imagine to be a legible queer black subject. Her hesitation recalls the inassimilabilityof harder-to-recognize figures, including studs, femmes, those who fly no rainbow flags, andperhaps even those that disavow queerness as “ambivalent, destabilizing, and unstable forcesof desire and community [that] cohere as a collective expression of a multifarious ‘we’ thatcomplicates any innocent notion of ‘the one’who says, ‘I am a black lesbian’” (Keeling 2007,224), even if we understand the innocence of queer normativity to be itself a ruse.

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Figure 1. Nicki Minaj at a 2011 performance in Buffalo, New York.Source: Michael K. (2011)

Figure 2. Nicki Minaj at a 2011 performance in Providence, Rhode Island.Source: Necole Bitchie (2011).

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Nicki stands as a member of that multifarious collective in her ambivalence, her unsatisfy-ingness, her syncopated two step between “maybe” and “no” that dances away from the “yes”that would proclaim, that would say “I am a black lesbian,” “I am a black queer,” “I am one ofyou.” Instead, she challenges us to acknowledge her dick and her throne without demandingreconcilability. She teaches me as a black femme to question satiety as the engine of my listen-ing. She lets me down exactly in the tender spots where I am still invested in the liberal fantasyof recognition, even as I imagine myself to be radically over it. Her queerness denies legibility,and instead is revealed to be yet another strategy for black female survivance8 that bends therules of neoliberal capital without breaking them. Just as we might understand the blackfemme’s haunting of the cinematic to gesture toward the “Open” afforded by her (in)visibility,King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and her refusal to cede to any regime of rec-ognition confound the multiple common senses – hip hop/patriarchy/ homonormativity – thatseek to produce her as a compliant subject.

AcknowledgementsI am deeply indebted to Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Sam Seidel for their sustained critical engage-ment with my work, and for their fine-tuned feedback on this piece throughout its developmentfrom a conference talk to an article. Many thanks are also due to Scott Poulson Bryant andC. Riley Snorton for the opportunity to first share this work as part of the Queerness of Hip Hop/Hip Hop of Queerness symposium at Harvard University in September 2012. Finally, I offer gratitudeto all the women who have stood at the centers and margins of hip hop for the last three decades,whether they are rocking mics and bruising themselves on linoleum, or standing right next to mein the crowd, bobbing our heads and making the cipher complete.

Notes on contributorSavannah Shange is a joint doctoral candidate in Africana Studies and Education at the University ofPennsylvania. She studies circulated and lived forms of blackness using the tools of anthropology,Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of blacknessand multiracial progressive organizing in San Francisco.

Notes1. Because this article takes up the public maneuverings of the rapper “Nicki Minaj,” rather than

assuming any overlap with the life of her auteur, Onika Maraj, I do not follow academic conven-tion and refer to her as “Maraj.” Instead, I toggle between the more familiar “Nicki” and the moreformal “Minaj” in an attempt to convey both my respect for Nicki Minaj as a knowledge produ-cer, as well as my imagined intimacy with her as a co-conspirator in race, gender, and hip hop.

2. Str-Crssed, “Sleeping on the Streets or Walking Down the Aisle?” Real/Love (blog). Tumblr,December 2012. http://str-crssd.tumblr.com/post/37023786275/sleeping-on-the-streets-or-walking-down-the.

3. Stud is a term used primarily in communities of color to describe people assigned female at birthwho embody a masculine-of-center gender presentation, or are on the transmasculine spectrum.Other terms to describe the same demographic include aggressive, AG, and dom. While “butch”could be seen as an analogous term, stud/dom/AG/aggressive specifically invokes a black/ened“female masculinity.” Regional differences account for much of the variation in people’s termof choice – I will use ‘stud’ here, both in respect to my West Coast queer socialization, and toavoid the potentially confounded connotations of “aggressive.”

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4. While there are a significant number of trans-identified, gender nonconforming, and genderdefiant folks who are central participants in this social network, I use the term “black queerwomen’s communities” to distinguish this cultural sphere from the related, but distinct, gayand queer black men’s social world. I find that even when folks do not identify as women, thelocally hegemonic norms of gender presentation and partner choice are still central to howthey are read by others in the same space.

5. For an intellectual history and theoretical rendering of hip hop feminist scholarship, see particu-larly Peoples (2007), Durham (2010), and Durham, Cooper, and Morris (2013).

6. Other examples include: Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy). “Y’all just gotta call me SOMETHING, huh.Femcee, MILF, cougar, ANYTHING. They’re all wrong. It’s hilarious though. Also, sad. Singletsk.” Twitter, November 29, 2012. Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy). “… and for those of you still sep-arating female and male emcees and/or using the term ‘femcee’ please stop. Grow up. Enjoymusic.” Twitter, March 27, 2012. Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy).

7. While Minaj’s use of a dildo can also be read as non-sexual and symbolic of social power (Smith2013), I use the tools of queer of color critique (Ferguson 2003) to center the possibility of bothblack queer sex and black queer subjects.

8. Here, I build on the work of indigenous scholars who have articulates survivance as a centuries-long quotidian and aesthetic counterpractice to domination and genocide (Vizenor 1999, 2008)that moves beyond the bare life of “survival” to include generative, dynamic processes of con-tinuing to be. While facing a different façade of the settler/slave estate, black women havealso engaged some of these generative practices, including ritual, memory, art, war, and ofcourse, self-preservation in the face of social death.

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