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Where my Girls at?: The Interpellation of Women in Gangsta Hip-Hop

This thesis interrogates gangsta hip-hop for the unique attention it plays to the drug trade. I read theories of hypervisibility/invisibility and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation alongside hip-hop feminist theory to examine the Black female criminal subjectivity that operates within hip-hop. Using methods of discourse analysis, I question the constructions of gangster femininity in rap lyrics as well as the absences of girlhood on Season 4 of HBO’s television drama The Wire. In doing so, I argue that the discursive construction of Black female subjectivity within gangsta hip-hop provides a hypervisibility that portrays Black women as violent while simultaneously erasing the broader social processes that impact the lives of Black women and girls. Hip-hop feminism allows the cultural formations of hip-hop to be read against the politics that structure the lives of women of color in order to provide a lens for analyzing how their criminality is constructed through media.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:digitalarchive.gsu.edu:wsi_theses-1019
Date01 August 2010
CreatorsCraft, Chanel R
PublisherDigital Archive @ GSU
Source SetsGeorgia State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceWomen's Studies Theses

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