Topic > Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture - 641

These lyrics from one of the first female hip hop bands in the United States clearly introduce our topic. Usually when people think of women in Hip Hop culture, they think of sex, they think of half-naked women in music videos, we only have to remember Nelly's controversial music video for her song Tip Drill (2003). Women's Studies students protest misogyny in this video that shows women as sex objects simulating sexual acts and men throwing money at women's breasts. This case is common in Hip Hop culture, especially in Gangsta Rap in the videos of 2pac, Notorious Big, 50 Cents, etc. Patricia Hill Collins, Tricia Rose and bell hooks (Hill Collins Patricia: 1991, Rose Tricia: 1994, hell hooks: 2003) spoke about the perverse effect of female nudity in Hip Hop culture and compared Hip Hop to pronography. They all agree that Hip Hop culture is a masculine and macho world, where women are used to reinforce the apparent masculinity of rappers. These authors study rap music across gender and race in the United States, because women in video music are always black, almost the same happens in France not really with rap but with R&B which is part of hip hop culture. All French R&B singers have Arab origins, while American R&B is more diverse. The question is: why are all women black in American rap video music? And why are all French R&B singers Arab? Can we see a postlonial and exclavagist legacy? These two images, the black woman seen as a "bitch" and the Arab woman called "beurette" in France, show two different femininities, but how do these "myths" participate in the development of a group identity? And what do they reveal about society? To answer these questions, we... halfway through the article... use our body as a "corporeal capital" (Waicquant: 2000, p. 125) and make use of bodily techniques (Mauss: 1934) to be accepted in this world controlled by men. Stepahnie Birnet, following the “video girls”, noted that hip hop culture has invented a new norm, the norm of the new “black female”, which is completely different from the world of mannequins. Women who want to act in music videos must not be too thin, in other words they must have very evident feminine attributes (Birnet Stéphanie: 2007). Tricia Rose in her book Black Noise. Black music and black culture in contemporary America asks why black men so often display the femininity of black women? She gives several answers, the first is to oppose the femininity of whiteness: slim body, long legs, small lips. And to fight the stereotype of the vigorous slave. Rose says it: “The boogeyman secured the