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Introduction: This is For My Ratchet Bitches
This special issue is dedicated to the bad bitches. The ratchet women. The classy women. The hood feminists. The "feminism isn't for everybody" feminists. Those women, femmes, and girls who continuously (re)present and (re)construct Black girl/ womanhood. The creatives, the innovators, the women that are "often imitated, but never duplicated." This issue is dedicated to you and the ways in which you challenge us to (re)define what it means to be Black girls/women in this world and what it means to reclaim power over your own representation and images. This issue is for you, defined by you, and inspired by you.
The Hip Hop Feminist Journey
Fashioned from the work, tenacity, creativity, and strength of women in Hip Hop and the generation of women born from Hip Hop, Hip Hop feminism celebrates women's love for the culture and their battle for identity, representation, and respect. While women have been continuously breaking barriers in Hip Hop since its inception in the 1970s, scholarship at the nexus of Hip Hop and feminism can be traced back to Tricia Rose's Black Noise (1994) and Joan Morgan's When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost (1999), who both note the contradictory and complicated space Black women occupy within 1990's Hip Hop culture. 1 While some scholars may differentiate between scholarship that studies Hip Hop through a feminist lens and Hip Hop feminism scholarship, we contend that both authors represent the foundations of what we call today, Hip Hop feminism. Both authors remarked on the influence of Black feminist foremothers on the changes in women's relationships with themselves and the everchanging culture, while pushing for the need to craft a feminism that represents the women of the Hip Hop generation. Rose began her examination of feminism in Hip Hop with a discussion of Black women rappers' themes of sexual politics, racism, and sexism. Rose argues that Black women rappers revolutionized Black women's representation by challenging white hegemonic and male-centered dominance in Hip Hop culture, Western beauty aesthetics, sexual objectification, and cultural invisibility. Through a visual and lyrical analysis of MC Lyte and Salt-N-Pepa music videos, Rose ultimately finds that "the presence of black female rappers and the urban, working-class, black hairstyles, clothes, expressions, and subject...