Writin’, Breakin’, Beatboxin’: Strategically Performing “Women” in Hip-Hop

Do spaces where women are the empowered majority stimulate sociocultural shifts in hip-hop culture? In this essay, I examine three hip-hop events ranging in size, genre, and frequency that were US-based but drew an international crowd: B-Girl Be: A Celebration of Women in Hip Hop, the Women of the 5th Element Beatboxing Festival, and the Few and Far graffiti crew at Art Basel Miami. I focus on hip-hop’s subcultural practices not to reaffirm a too-simple divide between “underground” and “commercial” but to analyze the dynamics of gender performance in less mediatized, less commercial forms. These event spaces are voluntary, mostly grassroots, sometimes sponsored, but never populated by megastars tied to the “bling” of international hip-hop business. At these events, participants strategically utilize the masterword “woman” in a Spivakian sense, to activate the transformative and pedagogical potential in asserting a collective presence. They mobilize under the word “woman” as a minoritarian method for visibility and empowerment consciously and critically; their performances are based not only on how they identify but also on how they experience their subjectivity in hip-hop. They rely on the pedagogical promise of performance to make their differences visible—to do the work of complicating what it means to perform “woman” in hip-hop. By demonstrating the effects of this strategic performance for women in hip-hop, I call upon readers to acknowledge the continued necessity of such spaces.