A King Named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of Pennsylvania] On: 15 May 2014, At : 19: 10 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Women & Performance: a j ournal of feminist theory Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rwap20 A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee Savannah Shange a a Depart ment of Af ricana St udies and t he Graduat e School of Educat ion, Universit y of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, Unit ed St at es Published online: 14 May 2014. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602 A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee Savannah Shange* Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 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 gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues 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 legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj’s gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that 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 penchant for “bad bitches,” piquing the interest of queer hip hop heads when she bragged: “I only stop for pedestrians/ or a real, real bad lesbian” (Maraj 2009). In the three years since her debut, Minaj has shot to stardom as the reigning hip hop and now pop diva. Her sexuality has remained at the center of her public persona, propelled by both the spectacularization of her body as a target of sexual desire and her piecemeal lyrical expressions of queerness. In the blogrolls and YouTube comment chains that track Minaj’s1 popular reception, a current of disdain runs beneath the critical props and teenybopper adulation. In addition to the familiar chorus of “put your clothes back on” nostalgia, there is also an ongoing critique of her professed-and-then-not-professed bisexuality as being just a gimmick. This suspicion of her same-sex desire in online discursive spaces is part of a critical 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 that automatically dismiss her potential to upset heteronormative scripts in hip hop? Or, more *Email: savannah@upenn.edu © 2014 Women & Performance Project Inc. Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 2 S. Shange bluntly, how much pussy does one have to talk about eating for it to “count” as queer? I invoke Nicki in these pages as a thinking partner to help me examine the distance between provocation and transgression, and how queer practice and commodification interact in the discursive flows of black popular culture. In these flows we find currents that are both strategic and static, essentialist and ambiguous, coerced and agentic, coursing through the 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 recognized or marked her performance of gender as femme (Whitney 2012; Butler 2013; Smith 2013). In this analysis, I foreground femmehood, building on the presumption that “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. 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 of public 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, she refuses 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 titillation, particularly within the user-generated content of mainstream gay and feminist online spaces like Autostraddle and Clutch. If a stable, transparent, performance of queer identity has 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 femme kin, judging them as inadequate? Where does Nicki Minaj fit in our attempts to map the popular contours of black feminism over the past generation? And finally, what forms of queer black subjecthood might we misrecognize in our pursuit of legible queer genealogies in hip hop, in our pursuit of kinship? Making ourselves visible to each other as queer family is 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 film theorist Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight as a compass towards these ends, which thus far is the only book-length work on black femme cultural representation. Before engaging Minaj’s musical oeuvre, I take a step back to sketch the contours of tactical queerness in relationship to homonormativity, both in its dominant and nondominant permutations. I then briefly situate Nicki in the historical context of contemporary commercially successful women in rap, before finally turning to her contingent performances of black femmehood on 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 with a homonormative impulse that distinguishes the legitimate from the illegitimate queer. Strategic 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 distance herself from the term, but not necessarily its project, lamenting that “my notion just simply became the union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 3 wondered about that” (Darius, Jonsson, and Spivak 1993, 35). While this piece circulates Spivak’s notion as academic currency, it also seeks to centralize the “strategies” used by queer(ed) subjects within the constraints of late capitalism. As sketched here, strategic queerness is a situation-specific performance of nonheteronormativity enacted in the service 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 strategically queer assertion of self that provides her with a financially lucrative buffer against heteronormative demands, even as it provides the tender homecoming of another woman’s black femme flesh (Raymond and Maraj 2010). Diverging from Spivak’s conception, strategic queerness in this sense does not necessarily denote an exclusively scrupulous visibility. She demonstrates the ethical dimension of strategy through the example of a diverse set of subaltern groups articulating a collective identity that denies difference in order to make a claim on the state. By contrast, a strategically queer individual may be interpreted as inauthentic, cowardly, or even immoral – the inverse of the “good gay subject” produced and regulated through regimes of homonormativity. We see this dynamic when Nicki fans were chided on mainstream white lesbian website AfterEllen.com that “if you buy her album, you are buying into fauxmosexuality,” and reminded that “the last thing we need is another straight woman pretending to identify with our culture just to lure us as customers” (Bendix 2010). As articulated powerfully in recent years, homonormativity often dovetails into homonationalism, which we might sketch as a hegemonic patriotism that hinges on the queer liberal 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 and bourgeois, but is also monogamously partnered, normatively gendered, and as committed to the flag as he or she is to the nuclear family. In Puar’s (2005, 122) frame, “queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rhetoric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” In this context, the War on Terror and the Islamophobic strains of homonational discourse serve to legitimate imperial aggression overseas. The same queer “imperialist center” also serves to “other” communities within the United States because their race, class, gender deviance, politics, and/or affect fall outside the boundaries of ideal queer liberal subjectivity. The mainstream gay lobby’s two policy priorities over the past decade demonstrate this dynamic: repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and securing the right to gay marriage. Petitioning the state on behalf of queer people who want to participate in the imperial war machine is a homonationalist politic in the sense that it uses queer identity as a tool to expand rather than interrupt the most lethal elements of the American way. While less obviously bloody, the gay marriage movement is premised on the conceit 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 material benefits of being married. For queer people of color and poor queer folks, issues of economic marginalization, mass incarceration, and police brutality are often far higher on the list of priorities, as seen in a recent protest sign that demanded accountability from the Human Rights Campaign, “Sleeping in the Streets or Walking Down the Aisle?!”2 Despite its 4 S. Shange Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 pretensions to the contrary, bourgeois homonationalism is not the only expressive field of homonormative regulation. Nondominant queer communities can also employ the technologies of normativity to maintain 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 and working-class inflected stud–femme3 sociality is a common sense of gendered norming within queer women of color communities that contains nodes of consent to dominant hegemonies, and it often enforces a rather rigid behavioral 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 vehicle for the survival of forms of black lesbian community and as an expression and organization of erotic desire. (Keeling 2007, 133) Even though terms like “lesbian” or even “woman” may not fit comfortably for everyone operating in these communities, folks still have to navigate and engage a binary pair of constructed 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 that extends 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 legitimize compliant queer subjects and discipline those who stray. The homonorms of stud-femme sociality include etiquettes surrounding gender presentation, partner choice, and the level of disclosure or “outness” expected of community members. Along these lines, members of 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 with someone who has a different gender presentation than ourselves. While Nicki’s self-fashioning is compliant with femme norms, her lyrical and visual displays of desire for other femme-presenting women are not. Based on these established (and contested) boundaries of 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” slips easily into “manipulation,” a bedfellow of inauthenticity. However, rather than consolidate homonorms as uniformly negative in their disciplining function, and conflate strategy with impersonation, it is important to recognize the productive and humanizing role they can also play in queer communities. What, then, might we find at the crossroads of strategic and normative sexualities? Perhaps more pertinently, if the authenticity of individual black queer subjects is predicated on the logic of stud-femme, how does the singular femme come into 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 airwaves who follow in the footsteps of early women rappers like Lady B and Roxanne Shanté, as a well as a rich tradition of women hip hop scholars who probe the confluences Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 5 of gender, race, and power within and beyond hip hop (Rose 1994; Morgan 1999; Keyes 2002; Perry 2004; Pough 2004; Gaunt 2006; Peoples 2007; Pough et al. 2007; Brown 2009; 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 certainly not as hip hop heads), that the introduction of every new female rapper is heralded as a 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” is assumed to be male. Problematic as it is, “femcee” continues to circulate rather heavily in both in print and online hip hop criticism, often in ciphers of purists or rap classicists who 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 better part of a decade, has built an impressive canon of rhymes that battle the patriarchal base of heteronormative hip hop (Smalls 2011). Along the way, she has also dedicated thousands of characters on her Twitter account to abolishing the term: “Unless we agree on calling dudes ‘mancee’ (which actually makes me feel awful) stop saying ‘femcee.’ EMCEE is fine, thanks” (Grae 2010).6 Beyond the concern Grae and others hold that “women emcees” should just be respected and evaluated as emcees, rather than by gender, there is also the misleading aural prominence given to “fem”-ness in the term “femcee,” even though 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 women rappers have emerged, which I designate roughly as the Righteous Queen, whose lyrics focus on community empowerment and positivity, and the Gangsta Boo, who often enters the scene as the protégé of a prominent male rapper, whose rhymes spin tall tales 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’s homages 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 Gangsta Boos, we have the lyrical arsenal and sexual prowess of Lil Kim, Foxy Brown’s husky-voiced drug raps, Remy Ma’s streetwise independence, the original ride-or-die chick Eve, and of course the intimate exploits of the category’s eponym, Gangsta Boo. While it may seem like a facetious title, each of these “Gangsta Boos” have been arrested after the inception of their professional music careers, reminding us of the continued vulnerability of gendered black bodies to the penal state. Significantly, patterns of gender performance differ across these archetypes, with both Lyte and Latifah sometimes being read as masculine presenting and some shade of gay. Neither has undergone a public “coming out” ritual, but Latifah’s purchase of a home in 2010 with personal trainer Jeannette Jenkins coupled with refusals to discuss her “personal life” in media interviews have been widely read as a discreet acknowledgement of her queerness. Just as is true with every identificatory formation, these rough consolidations of Righteous Queens and Gangsta Boos are porous and subject to negotiation and subversion, 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 successful women emcees whose gender presentation is consistently non-normative. Here we might find multi-platinum Dirty South representer Missy, Jermaine Dupree’s masculine-of- Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 6 S. Shange center protégé Da Brat, and Detroit’s Bo$$, who was arguably the first stud to rap on a major label. Missy’s embodiment of gender at once prevented her from playing the role of a Queen or a Boo, and at the same time allowed her to carve an unprecedented space for herself as a headlining artist in her own right. With trademark short hair and chocolate skin darker than any of the 10 women rappers listed in the above paragraph, Missy is not immediately legible as any brand of black leading lady. Further, her relationship to her ample size early in her career was the inverse of socially mandated shame; in the video for her 1997 single “I Can’t Stand the Rain” video, she plays with her size using visual effects, flipping fatness into an asset for a sexy, bodycentric emcee. While Missy has been the subject of gay rumor mills for these and other reasons, her lyrics generally reference heterosexual scenes, even if not normatively so. Da Brat and Bo$$ both present themselves as less ambiguous queer subjects – with the exception of Da Brat’s dissonant French manicure in her post-prison video shoot – and aligned drug- and crime-oriented rhymes with their masculine presentation. Distinct from these gender defiant emcees, another slice of musicians also resist identification as Righteous Queens or Gangsta Boos. They are a renegade collection of women artists aptly described by Nas’s turn of phrase: “the rapper’s rapper,” including Jean Grae, Bahamadia, and Rah Digga (Jones 2002). Significantly, these female “rapper’s rappers,” whose supreme lyrical skills and nonsexual content make them direct threats to male mic domination, are also the least supported by the 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 came into the game independently and was soon picked up by the Young Money crew, also works 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 also sings pop tunes and engages Lady Gaga-style wardrobe antics, Minaj’s work simultaneously challenges the boundaries of the very category “rapper.” In order to index the multiple moves Minaj makes in terms of gender, sexuality, and the generic conventions of 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, a femmecee is a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably 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 manifestations of same-sex desire in Minaj’s music videos, I seek to reveal both the transgressions and the concessions that are built into Nicki’s femmecee stance. For a few years after her first underground mixtape Sucka Free was released (Spring 2008), Minaj almost exclusively recorded and performed on other artists’ songs through cameos or guest appearances. Her piecemeal approach garnered unprecedented commercial success even before her major label debut. At one point in Fall 2010, Minaj was featured on seven of Billboard’s Hot 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, Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 7 the hype paid off for the record sales of her first studio album, Pink Friday, released later that season. This variegated set of guest recording appearances has allowed Minaj opportunities to strategically deploy a range of lyrical, ethnic, and sexual personae. In Nicki’s case, she deploys black femme gender performance as part of her public persona, particularly in her music videos. These performances remind us of the difficulty of enacting a black femme subject 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/our cinematic, and therefore discursive, exile. Her rendition of black femmehood positions us somewhere between Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) unthinkable and Saidiya Hartman’s unthought (Hartman and Wilderson 2003), and regales black femmes in an optimistic, even celebratory way. But if recognizing black femmehood always already disrupts hegemonic scripts, what does it mean to recognize a black femme in mainstream hip hop, particularly if she disavows any queer “identity” even while referencing queer practice? When examined chronologically, we find that while Nicki consistently peppers sexual innuendoes and scenarios into her rhymes, the tone of her verbal engagements with samesex desire has shifted over the course of her career. Whereas earlier lyrical offerings often centered on Nicki’s interest in threesomes with a man and a woman, in her more recent work, she rhymes separately about potential male and female sex partners rather than conflating them into a queered heterosexual scene. This shift reflects in part the changing power dynamics in Nicki’s artistic career; on almost all of her early tracks, she was a featured guest on a male rapper’s song, in keeping with the “male sponsorship” model of black women in popular music (Emerson 2002). More recently the tables have turned, with Nicki instead playing host to male rappers jockeying for cameos on her tracks. As a lens into this changing dynamic, I now look to a pair of music video releases that loosely bookend this transition: Usher’s 2010 release “Lil Freak,” which features Nicki, and Nicki’s 2012 “Beez in the Trap,” which features 2 Chainz. In her guest appearance on R&B superstar Usher’s “Lil Freak,” Nicki made an assertion of queerness that appeared quite different across visual and verbal platforms. When the lyrics of “Lil Freak” are examined in tandem with the images presented in the music video, we are able to better apprehend Minaj’s strategically queer maneuverings. In the video, Nicki is positioned ambiguously as the wingwoman for Usher’s exploits and a potent homoerotic seductress in her own right. Set in an eerily silent, cavernous warehouse space, “Lil Freak” opens with the timid steps of a fair-skinned ingénue who reads as almostif-not-quite white. Looking around nervously, the ingénue enters an industrial elevator and is followed by Nicki and an entourage of black women, all dressed to the nines in scanty club gear. Nicki’s trademark over-the-top wig is split-dyed down the middle, with one half platinum blonde and the other black. The wig is a suggestive visual accompaniment to her dual role in the narrative as a queer femme initiator on the one hand, and a minion of Usher’s patriarchal sexuality on the other. After Nicki’s crew disembarks into Usher’s party, the ingénue tries to push the button to get to her own floor, but to no avail; 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 make out with her in anticipation of a ménage a trois. Usher narrates homosex as a prelude to his Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 8 S. Shange own satisfaction, and positions himself as the “true” target of female desire, because to him it is obvious that they are on the prowl for a celebrity. By making Nicki’s loyalty to him contingent on both the recruitment of and sexual engagement with women he will later have sex with, Usher deploys a classic formula of intimate coercion: “if you really loved me, then you would x.” Usher’s instruction to acquire his sexual partners at least partially brackets off Minaj’s sexual autonomy, a move she echoes later in her own verse when she describes herself as Usher’s employee. By goading the imagined erotic interest to have sex with Minaj, Usher’s lyrics attempt to further de-queer homosexual contact by dragging it under the rubric of male desire and control. Further, because Usher has already narrated Nicki and the ingénue’s kiss before it actually happens, he appears as the auteur of the queer 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 she addresses her erotic interest. Shot in profile, the women’s faces are just inches away from each other when Minaj reverses the terms of Usher’s demand. Minaj stays in a decidedly transactional, non-romantic register with: “I really like your kitty cat, and if you let me touch her/ . . . I’ll take you to go see Usher.” Instead of serving as just a conduit for Usher’s desire to see the erotic interest turn into his “lil freak,” Minaj layers on her own desire to “touch” the soon-to-be freak, and positions herself as the gatekeeper to Usher’s hypermasculine sex symbol. Minaj assumes that the ingénue has her own agentic reasons to “go see Usher” and offers a femme-femme sexual encounter as currency to get her in the door. Building on her sexual proposition of the Lil Freak, the rest of Minaj’s verse reinforces her position as perpetually, and patriarchally, queer. Nicki goes on to boast “I keep a couple hoes,” as she likens herself to Santa with a stable of women in lieu of reindeer. Visually, Minaj advertises her sexual prowess in relation to the remarkably light complexioned, nervous girl – in the video she seems to tease her viewing public with the specter of homoerotic intimacy, bringing her lips close to the ingénue’s face, leaning forward suggestively as she raps to the woman. While still certainly playing fast and loose with the archetypes of heteronormativity, the cinematic imagery plays much straighter than Minaj’s lyrics. Textually, Minaj brags not only about the women she partners with, but even jokes about nabbing Cassie, the R&B singer and sometime girlfriend of rap mogul Sean “P Diddy” Combs. Still, Minaj’s queer voyage ultimately remains tethered to the anchor 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 starring in the video shot at his party. While also set in a dark club atmosphere full of dark flesh and deep bass, the video for Minaj’s 2012 single “Beez in the Trap” is an almost complete inversion of the gendered power dynamics at work in “Lil Freak.” Minaj is the center of the narrative, with shots of her flanked by black women in bikinis and bustiers interposing footage of her rapping directly to the camera in an abstract grey space. In both frames, Minaj appears in Technicolor; in her solo shots, she crouches on a wooden pedestal in a neon pink leotard and lime stilettos to spit rhymes behind a nest of barbed wire in the foreground. In the club, she appears in a Day-Glo green wig, outsized gold chains nestled in her bare cleavage. In a departure from “Lil Freak,” Nicki begins the song herself, establishing that she “Beez in the Trap.” The opening chorus recalls Dr. Dre’s 20-year-old misogynist classic, “Bitches Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 9 Ain’t Shit,” from the multiplatinum 1992 album The Chronic, revived recently by Tyga and YG’s single of the same name in 2011. Of course, when Nicki spits the lyric as someone who is putatively a “bitch” herself, the phrase becomes palimpsestic – her attempts at resignification layer messily over patriarchal norms. In a belligerent, cocky tone, Nicki raps the whole song without a trace of the teenybopper girliness that animates her pop tunes, instead staying in “battle rap” mode for the duration. Her verses paint a familiar picture 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 in exchange for affection. Nicki’s delivery hits each plosive gutturally so that the repeated “bitch” lands hard on the ear. No longer offering to “touch your kitty cat,” Nicki instead invokes penetration aggressively, demanding “bitch, bust that open.” In keeping with the tendency of emcees in the Young Money orbit to celebrate, rather than denigrate, sex work, Nicki suggests that she is also in the market as a potential john who will “spend a couple thou[sand]” to have sex with a woman of her choice. These lines are further contextualized by the video, 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 riches tale that starts in the projects and ends in a mansion. More significant to the discussion of Nicki’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 interaction from the diegetic arc of the club narrative. Fierce in a backless leopard print unitard, Nicki dances alongside 2 Chainz during the verse, but never with him. Unlike a strikingly similar scene from the video for Ciara’s 2010 “Ride,” in which Ciara becomes a sexual object for Ludacris during his guest verse on her song, Nicki never touches 2 Chainz, maintaining instead her own space and interaction with the camera. This distance between them is underscored at the end of the video, when Nicki poses standing, giving much attitude and facing away from 2 Chainz. Similar to the kind of hijinks a student might play behind a teacher’s back, he comes up behind her and playfully “air-grinds” maybe 10 inches away from her body. Untouched and unperturbed, Nicki doesn’t respond at all during his dance. It is not until he stops dancing and shifts into a back-to-back pose with her that she moves, turning her head toward the camera as he does, establishing them as platonic peers. Indeed, the only sexual contact Nicki has in the “Beez in the Trap” is during the closing bridge, 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 women in stripper gear that are a full head taller than her. Nicki raps with her rear end pressed up against one woman, while holding the other woman’s shoulder and caressing her back and rear end. The query, “what they say about me?” obliquely references the rumor mill debates about Nicki’s queer sexuality, and paired with her refusal to engage 2 Chainz as sexual interest points to Minaj’s deployment of queer femme autonomy as a public stance. However, Nicki consistently denies recognition as “gay,” even as she dodges identification as “straight.” 10 S. Shange Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Evasion or defiance? Strategies of disavowal When interviewed by the magazine Black Men, which is a cross between soft porn and a video vixen directory, Minaj asserted quite unequivocally: “I don’t date women, and I don’t have sex with women” (Blassingame 2010, 14). However, equivocation came later when she appeared on the October 2010 cover of Out magazine, a mainstream gay publication in the United States. Nicki claimed to be using the outlet to thank her gay fans, rather than to out herself as a queer person. When the Out journalist pressed Minaj about her previously 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 to hegemonic norms. Recalling Butler, we can understand Nicki’s evasion to be an effort to replace rather than reenact scripts of sexual belonging. At the same time, Minaj’s femme gender presentation underwrites her access to even cursorily heteronormative spaces, even though her elaborate wigs and hyperbelle personae immediately recall drag queen aesthetics to the queer gaze. While Minaj disavows queerness several times, she also significantly and strategically skirts 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 crazy white boy.” He invites her to perform her straightness by asking her for instructions to guide her male suitors. I quote the interview at length because Minaj dodges the question not once, but three times. DJ Vlad: What does it take for a guy to walk up to you, start a conversation with you, and really get your attention? Nicki Minaj: Pull your penis out! Psych I’m just kidding – that’s what you thought I was gonna say, you so nasty! DJV: No, I’m tryna clean it up for you girl, you comin’ at me with this mature shit, I’m tryna keep it mature! NM: Haha, tricked you!! Aaah! Um, a guy can approach me … actually, he can’t because I be with 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 all my bad bitches. And, shout out to the guys too, but the guys … they’re just dudes. They don’t have any [changes voice] fun parts that I can squeeze! Psych, I’m just kidding. Um, um, yeah. (VladTV 2009) Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 11 Instead of complying with the male interviewer’s request for access, Nicki deflects and opens the door onto what might be called “bisexuality,” even though in this clip she’s uninterested 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 find something supremely, and perhaps problematically, unsatisfying about this oscillation. When Nicki infers her queerness to DJ Vlad with “you know how I do,” I am instantly hailed. I remix her words into “you know how we do” and annex Nicki into my own orbit as another black femme. I want her kisses and hugs, less as a sexual encounter, and more as a ritual of recognition – I want the relief of seeing myself seen in hip hop after two decades of listening to my own absence over and over on boomboxes and Walkmen, on CD players, Minidiscs, and iPods. Even when Nicki flips from her Queens brogue to the high pitched squeal of “fun parts that I can squeeze,” I still perk at the notion of being a game 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 just kidding” after she says she is straight. Of course, this raises several questions: What responsibility does Nicki Minaj have to stave off my black femme disappointment, to satisfy my longing for recognition in the first place? Further, does the recounting of any one individual affective experience effectively lower the stakes of this effort to recalibrate our engagements with queerness in hip hop? Given the always already embodied nature of both blackness and femmeness, a robust analysis of Nicki requires us to account for the constant evaluation and assessment 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 in which 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: “If she was a butch and dressed like a guy, people would be turned off, but people like a pretty girl no matter who she sleeps with” (Ganz 2010, 6). In much of queer theory and queer 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 sexuality is still consummated in partnership with someone who has a “complementary gender display” (Moore 2011, 82). Evading that familiar dyad, Nicki’s ostensibly femme-femme eroticism pierces “lesbian” and renders it an open set because her sexual desire is no longer congruent with stud-femme sociality. Minaj’s femme subject withholds the affective labor that reproduces stud masculinity. In her discussion of the liberatory possibilities suggested 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 currently is a reminder that the set of what appears is never perfectly closed and that something different might appear therein at any-instant-whatever.” That “something different” in Nicki’s case is often Roman Zolansky, who she describes as the “crazy boy who lives in me and says the things I don’t wanna say,” (Warren 2010) appearing on many of her more rhyme-heavy songs. While Nicki’s femme gender isn’t verified as queer by the presence of a butch partner, it does at times stand in contrast to the “crazy” British boy inside her, who takes risks unavailable to “Barbie,” Nicki’s primary persona. Indeed, Roman’s staccato rhyme delivery and caricatured vocal shifts mark off his verses as that “something different” that haunts the recognizable. Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 12 S. Shange However, Nicki’s second album release, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, begins to explore gender beyond a bifurcation between masculine Roman and feminine Barbie. She is not only the “heavyweight champ,” as she proclaims on her duet single with Drake, but the video for that song opens with an animated storybook page that reads: “Once upon a time there lived a king named Nicki. One day, while sitting on her throne … ” With this male monarch title echoed again on her most recent Vibe cover, King Nicki spits more explicitly 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,” she uses a Roman-esque voice to tell Lil Kim to “suck my diznick,” an insult congruent with the 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 sugarsweet alto melody: “Oooh, dick in yo face, I put my dick in yo face, I put my dick in yo face, yeah!” (Maraj 2012). Because she sings in a very different register than the no-nonsense battle rapper who spits bars on “Beez in the Trap” and the rest of “Stupid Hoe,” the “dick-inyo-face” serenade emphasizes the juxtaposition between her polished, coy, femme presentation 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 us time to imagine not only her having a dick, but putting it in our faces, thereby conjuring the queered queer scene of a black femme top whose sexual aggression belies the pillow princess archetype. She takes it a step further when she sings a rendition of that lyric for a video interview with Complex magazine in which Minaj cites that moment as the most liberatory for her during the making of Roman Reloaded. “That’s when it was like explosion! Roman Reloaded is here!” (Frederick 2012). Before saying “explosion,” Minaj makes a [chickpow] onomatopoetic bomb sound with her mouth, and illustrates the explosion with her hands, constructing an unavoidably ejaculatory narrative of the album. The phallic turn in Nicki’s work extends beyond the realm of the lyrical. Still images of Minaj with a strap-on dildo during the 2011 I am Music tour also put the “drag” in King Nicki.7 In the first picture, taken at the Buffalo show that also featured rappers Lil Wayne and Rick Ross, Nicki holds a blindingly white penis in her hand, complete with veins, a pink glans, and testes beneath (Figure 1). Stooping comically, Nicki holds the strap so that it 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 get up and the wiggly white dick. A second image taken at the show is more opaque. Caught between poses, Nicki pauses with her mouth slightly agape, eyes fixed on the empty space before her (Figure 2). This time the strap is erect, and just a foot or two away from the crouching 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 the audience. It is in this awkward moment that we witness Nicki present to her interiority, her own white dick in her hand, the dissonance of which signals her outsiderness to what we might imagine to be a legible queer black subject. Her hesitation recalls the inassimilability of harder-to-recognize figures, including studs, femmes, those who fly no rainbow flags, and perhaps even those that disavow queerness as “ambivalent, destabilizing, and unstable forces of desire and community [that] cohere as a collective expression of a multifarious ‘we’ that complicates 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. Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 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). 13 Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 14 S. Shange Nicki stands as a member of that multifarious collective in her ambivalence, her unsatisfyingness, 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 of you.” Instead, she challenges us to acknowledge her dick and her throne without demanding reconcilability. She teaches me as a black femme to question satiety as the engine of my listening. She lets me down exactly in the tender spots where I am still invested in the liberal fantasy of 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 the rules of neoliberal capital without breaking them. Just as we might understand the black femme’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 recognition confound the multiple common senses – hip hop/patriarchy/ homonormativity – that seek to produce her as a compliant subject. Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Sam Seidel for their sustained critical engagement with my work, and for their fine-tuned feedback on this piece throughout its development from a conference talk to an article. Many thanks are also due to Scott Poulson Bryant and C. 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 gratitude to 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 me in the crowd, bobbing our heads and making the cipher complete. Notes on contributor Savannah Shange is a joint doctoral candidate in Africana Studies and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 blackness and multiracial progressive organizing in San Francisco. Notes 1. 2. 3. 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 convention and refer to her as “Maraj.” Instead, I toggle between the more familiar “Nicki” and the more formal “Minaj” in an attempt to convey both my respect for Nicki Minaj as a knowledge producer, as well as my imagined intimacy with her as a co-conspirator in race, gender, and hip hop. 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-orwalking-down-the. Stud is a term used primarily in communities of color to describe people assigned female at birth who 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 term of choice – I will use ‘stud’ here, both in respect to my West Coast queer socialization, and to avoid the potentially confounded connotations of “aggressive.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 4. 5. 6. Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 19:10 15 May 2014 7. 8. 15 While there are a significant number of trans-identified, gender nonconforming, and gender defiant folks who are central participants in this social network, I use the term “black queer women’s communities” to distinguish this cultural sphere from the related, but distinct, gay and queer black men’s social world. I find that even when folks do not identify as women, the locally hegemonic norms of gender presentation and partner choice are still central to how they are read by others in the same space. For an intellectual history and theoretical rendering of hip hop feminist scholarship, see particularly Peoples (2007), Durham (2010), and Durham, Cooper, and Morris (2013). 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. Single tsk.” Twitter, November 29, 2012. Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy). “ … and for those of you still separating female and male emcees and/or using the term ‘femcee’ please stop. Grow up. Enjoy music.” Twitter, March 27, 2012. Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy). While Minaj’s use of a dildo can also be read as non-sexual and symbolic of social power (Smith 2013), I use the tools of queer of color critique (Ferguson 2003) to center the possibility of both black queer sex and black queer subjects. Here, I build on the work of indigenous scholars who have articulates survivance as a centurieslong 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 continuing to be. While facing a different façade of the settler/slave estate, black women have also engaged some of these generative practices, including ritual, memory, art, war, and of course, self-preservation in the face of social death. References Agathangelou, Anne M., M. Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara L. Spira. 2008. “Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire.” Radical History Review 100: 120–143. 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