Prospects for a Progressive Critique of Self-Sexualizing Rap Music: The Challenge of Oppressive Double Binds

Abstract

Self-sexualizing Black women rappers have been criticized as being agents in their own oppression. However, criticism of self-sexualizing rap is just one evaluative response to it. Another response lauds self-sexualizing rap for its empowering effects. In this article, I introduce a framework for understanding these competing evaluative responses to self-sexualizing rap by using Sukaina Hirji’s analysis of oppressive double binds. I argue that self-sexualizing rappers are caught in oppressive double binds, and this framework helps us to understand the dialectical stalemates that emerge in evaluating Black women rappers’ self-sexualization by offering new insights into the complexities involved when Black women rappers self-sexualize. Trapped between the norms of respectability and stereotypes of hypersexuality, it is impossible under conditions of oppression for self-sexualizing rappers to fully realize their sexual autonomy and agency. Articulating this helps to focus our progressive critiques on these constraining norms and on the media that perpetuates them rather than on individual rappers who engage in self-expression.