‘Troublesome’ Voices: Representations of Black Womanhood in Street Literature and Hip-Hop Music

Abstract

This dissertation draws upon literary and cultural studies, hip-hop studies, and hip-hop feminism to explore Black women’s critical engagement with the boundaries of Black womanhood in the cultural productions of street literature and hip-hop music. The term “troublesome” motivates my analysis as I argue that the works of writers Teri Woods and Sister Souljah and of rapper Lil’ Kim create narratives that alternately highlight, reproduce, and challenge racist, classist, and sexist discourse on Black womanhood. Such narratives reveal hip-hop to be a site for critical reflection on Black womanhood and offer context-specific examples of the intersectionality of hip-hop generation women’s experiences. This project also incorporates ethnographic methods to document and validate the experiential knowledge of street literature readers. In the growing body of scholarship on street literature (sometimes called hip-hop fiction), there is limited work on the intertextuality of hip-hop music and street literature, and the dialogic nature of their listening and reading publics. This project offers an analysis of the discursive contributions of street literature texts, hip-hop music, and consumers and participants of hip-hop culture by reading the texts and sites of the culture as constitutive of a Black public sphere. By using the framework of hip-hop feminism to analyze street literature and hip-hop music, this dissertation argues that these women’s works demonstrate the possibilities in and through both popular mediums to trouble understandings of what Black feminism for the hip-hop generation is or can become.