Sesali Bowen is an American author and feminist known for being the founder of trap feminism.
She is known for her book, Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes From a Trap Feminist. [1] [2] [3] Her work defines trap feminism which discusses how black female and queer people express themselves and protect themselves, especially through rapping and trap music, which has historically had problems with misogyny. [1] [3] Trap feminism attempts to explain contradictions of "how people attempt to celebrate Black women without talking about their lived experiences" and creates new ways for underrepresented people to self-express. [4] Bowen has described trap feminism as a "messy feminism" and often includes messages of body-acceptance and sexual liberation in her works. [3] [5] Bowen also helps run the Purse First podcast, which is considered the first platform specifically for female and queer hip-hop artists. [1]
She has criticized misappropriation of the term trap feminism, especially when a white professor of theology attempted to publish her own book on the topic. [4]
Bowen identifies as queer. [5]
Bowen has a Masters in Gender Studies from Georgia State University. [4] She has worked previously at Planned Parenthood and Oxygen. [5]
Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, media studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, home economics, literature, education, and philosophy.
Feminist sociology is an interdisciplinary exploration of gender and power throughout society. Here, it uses conflict theory and theoretical perspectives to observe gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within social structures at large. Focuses include sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality.
Black feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism philosophy centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because of our need as human persons for autonomy."
A video vixen is a woman who models and appears in hip hop-oriented music videos. From the 1990s to the early 2010s, the video vixen image was a staple in popular music, particularly within the genre of hip hop. First appearing in the late 1980s, when hip-hop culture began to gain popularity. It was most popular in American pop culture during the 1990s and 2000s. Video vixens are aspiring actors, singers, dancers, or professional models. Artists and vixens have been criticized for allegedly contributing to the social degradation of black women and Latinas.
Fat feminism, often associated with "body-positivity", is a social movement that incorporates feminist themes of equality, social justice, and cultural analysis based on the weight of a woman or a non-binary feminine person. This branch of feminism intersects misogyny and sexism with anti-fat bias. Fat feminists advocate body-positive acceptance for all bodies, regardless of their weight, as well as eliminating biases experienced directly or indirectly by fat people. Fat feminists originated during third-wave feminism and is aligned with the fat acceptance movement. A significant portion of body positivity in the third-wave focused on embracing and reclaiming femininity, such as wearing makeup and high heels, even though the second-wave fought against these things. Contemporary western fat feminism works to dismantle oppressive power structures which disproportionately affect fat, queer, non-white, disabled, and other non-hegemonic bodies. It covers a wide range of topics such as diet culture, fat-phobia, representation in media, ableism, and employment discrimination.
Lee Marrs is an American cartoonist and animator, and one of the first female underground comix creators. She is best known for her comic book series The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, which lasted from 1973 to 1977.
From Black Power to Hip-Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism is a 2006 book by Patricia Hill Collins. Published by Temple University Press, the book is centered around Patricia Hill and her experiences with racism in America. The book also includes experiences from other Black men and women and their responses to it. In the end she offers her take on Black youth and how its changing along with how Black nationalism works today.
LGBTQ representation in hip hop music has existed since the birth of the genre even while enduring blatant discrimination. Due to its adjacency to disco, the earliest days of hip hop had a close relation to LGBT subcultures, and multiple LGBT DJs have played a role in popularizing hip hop. Since the early 2000s there has been a flourishing community of LGBTQ+ hip hop artists, activists, and performers breaking barriers in the mainstream music industry. Despite this early involvement, hip hop has long been portrayed as one of the least LGBT-friendly genres of music, with a significant body of the genre containing homophobic views and anti-gay lyrics, with mainstream artists such as Eminem and Tyler, the Creator having used casual homophobia in their lyrics, including usages of the word faggot. Attitudes towards homosexuality in hip hop culture have historically been negative, with slang that uses homosexuality as a punchline such as "sus", "no homo", and "pause" being heard in hip hop lyrics from some of the industry's biggest artists.
Hip hop feminism is a sub-set of black feminism that centers on intersectional subject positions involving race and gender in a way that acknowledges the contradictions in being a black feminist, such as black women's enjoyment in hip hop music and culture, rather than simply focusing on the victimization of black women in hip hop culture due to interlocking systems of oppressions involving race, class, and gender.
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Allyson Mitchell is a Toronto-based maximalist artist, working predominantly in sculpture, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to trouble contemporary representations of women, sexuality and the body largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Throughout her career, Mitchell has critiqued socio-historical phobias of femininity, feminine bodies and colonial histories, as well as ventured into topics of consumption under capitalism, queer feelings, queer love, fat being, fatphobia, genital fears and cultural practices. Her work is rooted in a Deep Lez methodology, which merges lesbian feminism with contemporary queer politics.
Misogynoir is a term referring to the combined force of anti-Black racism and misogyny directed towards black women. The term was coined by black feminist writer Moya Bailey in 2008 to address misogyny directed toward black transgender and cisgender women in American visual and popular culture. The concept of misogynoir is grounded in the theory of intersectionality, which analyzes how various social identities such as race, gender, class, age, ability, and sexual orientation interrelate in systems of oppression.
Joan Morgan is a Jamaican-American author and journalist. She was born in Jamaica and raised in the South Bronx. Morgan coined the term "hip hop feminist".
Feminist activism in hip hop is a feminist movement based by hip hop artists. The activism movement involves doing work in graffiti, break dancing, and hip hop music. Hip hop has a history of being a genre that sexually objectifies and disrespects women ranging from the usage of video vixens to explicit rap lyrics. Within the subcultures of graffiti and breakdancing, sexism is more evident through the lack of representation of women participants. In a genre notorious for its sexualization of women, feminist groups and individual artists who identify as feminists have sought to change the perception and commodification of women in hip hop. This is also rooted in cultural implications of misogyny in rap music.
Brittney Cooper is a tenured professor of Women and Gender Studies, author, professor, activist, and cultural critic. Cooper is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies, and the Principal Investigator and Founding Director of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab at Rutgers. Her areas of research and work include black women organizations, black women intellectuals, and hip-hop feminism. In 2013 and 2014, she was named to the Root.com's Root 100, an annual list of top Black influencers.
Ratchet feminism emerged in the United States from hip hop culture in the early 2000s, largely as a critique of, and a response to, respectability politics. It is distinct from black feminism, womanism, and hip hop feminism. Ratchet feminism coopts the derogatory term (ratchet). Other terms used to describe this concept include ratchet womanism as used by Georgia Tech professor Joycelyn Wilson or ratchet radicalism used by Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper. Ratchet is an identity embraced by many millennials and Gen Z black women and girls. The idea of ratchetness as empowering, or of ratchet feminism, has been articulated by artists and celebrities like Nicki Minaj, City Girls, Amber Rose, and Junglepussy, scholars like Brittney Cooper and Mikki Kendall, and through events like Amber Rose's SlutWalk. Many view ratchet feminism as a form of female empowerment that doesn't adhere to respectability politics.
Dr. Gwendolyn D. Pough (1970s) is an American academic and scholar in rhetoric and composition studies. She is a post-Civil Rights African-American academic who developed as a writer during the rise of hip-hop culture.
Donna Allegra Simms was an American writer, dancer and electrician. She wrote poetry, short stories, and essays. Twelve of her stories were collected as Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers (2001).