The Limits of Liberation From the 1990s Through the Present Day: Race, Rebellion and Raunchy Musical Reimaginings of the Politics of Black Women’s Bodies

Abstract

Is our conception of a liberated, bodily Black feminism always going to be situated in the realm of the imagined? This thesis cites 1990s, post-Civil Rights Era America, in a larger context of Clinton-era race-blind politics. I argue that sexually liberated Black female rappers give voice to the silenced narratives of the poor Black women of this era, whose bodies were being brutally manipulated, policed, and forcibly sterilized through public policies and welfare measures. I aim to elucidate the fact that state violence and bodily harm imposed upon poor Black women is never quite addressed in any substantive way, other than when it is repelled against in the subversive, imaginative realm of Black female artistic production. Black feminism lays the groundwork for political and musical liberation.