Hip-Hop Feminism and the Media

Catalog description

This course examines feminism, rap music, and hip-hop culture. We will explore the work of actual women in hip-hop, images of women, and feminist critiques of rap music and hip-hop culture. We will also work on locating a space of praxis - where theory meets practice - that uses hip-hop, rap and feminism to propose ways of addressing social inequalities. With this in mind, one goal of this course is to move beyond discussion to a space of critique linked to change. Taking current controversies and rap music's dominant presence in US media and memory into consideration, we will use rap as a springboard into a consideration of pressing social, cultural, and political issues such as sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism, and heterosexism. Given hip-hop's media influence both in the US and globally, and the current growth of Hip-Hop Studies as a field, this course will also examine knowledge-making and the role that gender plays in what constitutes knowledge in the field of Hip-Hop Studies.