This research project sets out to investigate the gender and racial traits of female performative identity in hip-hop journalism, having identified this as a gap in hip-hop scholarship. This study aims to evaluate the editorial strategies that inform hip-hop femininity in relation to the commercial agendas of the artists, their record companies and management teams. Additionally, the research aims to address the potential feminist value of hip-hop journalism, and to identify the ways in which female performers relate to each other in this context. Through an investigation of femininities in hip-hop journalism, the objective of the research is to demonstrate that editorial and artistic agendas produce specific discourses regarding gender and race. The research approach is based on discourse analysis of narrative texts and images in relevant US and UK-based hip-hop magazines, as well as of qualitative interviews with their main editors. The evidence demonstrates that articulations of identity in hip-hop journalism seem rooted in the fetishisation of the Black female body – a strategy that paradoxically possesses a counter-hegemonic value in its resistant approach to normative gender and race discourses. From this perspective, the research finds that the journalistic mediation of hip-hop womanhood presents some of the socio-cultural challenges posed by hip-hop feminism, such as the double jeopardy of the assertive reclamation of female sexuality and the compliance with race-specific sexist discourse. In addition, the evidence demonstrates that editorial strategies perpetuate commercially driven notions of gender and race, which are co-opted by mutually dependent financial interests of press and record companies – a finding that extends the current debates regarding hip-hop journalism. In this context, an important insight is that female artists appear to be complicit in the production of mediated performative identities that undermine their position as authentic rap artists. Hereby, new knowledge is contributed to feminist hip-hop scholarship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:631741 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Panuzzo, Barbara Anna |
| Publisher | London South Bank University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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