Joan Morgan (American author)

Transcription

>> DR. TREVA LINDSEY: Good evening again everybody. Good evening again everybody. >> AUDIENCE: Good evening. >> DR. TREVA LINDSEY: All right that was better. Welcome to the last session of the 2014 Hip Hop Literacies Conference. We are so thrilled, thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to end this conference with a wonderful conversation between, first whom absolutely inspire me and are so important to this field of work that we've all been talking about the last two days and it's truly our pleasure to have them here and to close this with a conversation. To my immediate right we have Dr. Brittney Cooper, Professor of Women's Gender Studies and African Studies at Rutgers University and cofounder of Crunk Feminist Collective. [APPLAUSE] A contributor to everything and a voice everywhere is one of the leading Hip Hop scholars in the country and I'm so thrilled that she agreed to have a conversation with our other esteemed panelist who is to my far right, Joan Morgan. [APPLAUSE] Cultural Critic, soon to be minted DR. Morgan. Obviously for us, so many of us with she coined the term Hip Hop Feminism in her groundbreaking book, 'When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost'. And we wanted to have this conversation end this conference, for one: we noticed- we were talking on the phone today, actually I have the privilege to work with these women but they're also honestly my friends- and I wanted to honor the fact that 'Chickenheads' came out fifteen years ago this year. [CROWD CHEERS] And as we've noticed over the course of the conference today, and over the work that we do, that so much of us do, it continues to resonate as though that book was written today and has the kind of power and presence that we only hope to have as working scholars. Work that lasts, that has sustained, that is timeless but so timely in terms of what it can do and what it continues to do for us, and to bridge that in a conversation with someone who does so much work, that is in that space as well in hip hop feminism, 'Hip Hop Generation Feminism: A Manifesto' that was published by the Crunk Feminism Collective and the work that they do in terms of responding to and engaging and truly existing in that grey, complicated, messy, dynamic area of feminism in our generation. So, this is going to be really a conversation between two people who just wing it, who are bringing it back, who are bringing brilliance, who are bringing a flawless way of thinking about a lot of really flawed things. They also go like this too. So, it's my pleasure and honor to get this started. We'll have time for questions and everything, you guys enjoy your food and we just hope that this will just flow and really be a vision of the state of interest in hip hop. Thank you. >>JOAN MORGAN: Yeah, we can speak pretty loudly but can you guys hear us if we talk like- mic check 1, 2, 1, 2, you can hear me? Alright. >> DR. BRITTNEY MORGAN: Excellent, so what I want to do is actually begin by reading a little bit of the Hip Hop generation feminist manifesto that was our very first post at the Crunk Feminist Collective blog because it explicitly seeks to link the work we aim to do there with the kind of space Joan created in "When Chicken Heads Come Home To Roost." "We are Hip Hop Generation Feminist. We unapologetically refer to ourselves as Feminist because we believe that gender and its construction through a white patriarchal capitalist power structure fundamentally shapes our lives and life possibilities as Women of Color across a range of Sexual Identities. We are members of the Hip Hop Generation because we came of age in one of the decades the 1990s that can be considered post- soul and post- civil rights. Our political realities have been profoundly shaped by a systematic rollback of the gains of the Civil Rights era with regard to Affirmative Action Policies, Reproductive Justice Policies, the mass Industrialization of Urban Areas, the rise and ravages of drug economy within urban - semi urban and rural communities of color and the full scale assault on Woman's lives through the AIDS epidemic. We have come of age in the era to witness a past and present assault on our identities of women of color, one that harkens back to earlier assaults on our virtues and values during enslavement and imperialism. Our era has been likewise marked by insidious reimagining of earlier forms of violence to include the peripheral of stereotypes both from the public sphere and from our communities, which have now named us Welfare Queens, Quota Queens, Baby Mamas, Hoochies, Gold Diggers, Wifeies, Bitches, Hoes, and Tricks along with a range of uncreative rhetorical permutations. We identify with Hip Hop because the music, the culture, the fashion, and the figure provide the soundtrack to our girlhood and our young womanhood. Our coming of age happened in the linguistically and rhetorically rich culture miler and transformation that was the 1990s. The decade of the woman but also the decade of the female MC, Queen Latifah, MC Lite, The Rat, Left Eye and TLC, Foxy Brown, Lil' Kim, and Lauren Hill. We not only jam to new Jacks Wing, we rebelled in the beats of New Joe Sween too because we understood what Queen meant when she, "sang in a 90s kind of world, I'm glad I got my girls." We witnessed Puffy "invent the remix," Mary J. Blige pioneer Hip Hop Soul as she looked for a "real love," and FUBU start a global black fashion trend that was for us by us. We were captured by Darius and Nina falling in love, breaking up, and falling in love again, even as we observed that the art of Boyz in the Hood and Jason's Lyric imitated a side of life and death seen too often in our communities. We grooved to sounds of the G-Funk era and wept at the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. We are Hip Hop's middle children, folks who fell in love with Hip Hop at the tale end of the "Golden Age," came of age during the "Modern Era" and find ourselves increasingly concerned with the gender and race politics of Hip Hop in the "Industrial Era." We unapologetically blend the terms Hip Hop and Feminism like our Hip Hop feminist big sister Joan Morgan did more than a decade ago when she invited us to "fill in the breaks, provide the remixes, and rework the chorus." So we call ourselves Hip Hop Generation Feminists, because while many of us appreciate the culture and the music, we do not have a blind allegiance to it, nor is our feminism solely or in many cases even primarily defined by Hip Hop. Yet our connection to Hip Hop links us to a set of generational concerns, and a community of women, locally, nationally, and globally. [APPLAUSE] So earlier, I was talking with Joan and this question emerged for me :When you created this concept, this formulation, this frame, all the things that hip hop feminism has come to mean to us, has it become in these 15 years what you imagined or hoped it would be? >>JOAN MORGAN: You guys can hear me right? Before I answer that Brittney, I should say- what probably most people in this room don't know- when I first read that, the Crunk Feminist Manifesto, I read it and I was home and I broke down into tears. Not like a little tear upwell, but like an ugly cry, like a [ugly crying noises], because you sit in your house and you write this thing called the book and you have- what I now know as a grad student- is a theory or an intervention, and it makes complete sense to you, right? But you really don't know what the impact of that will be on the world, and honestly I wrote 'Chickenheads' to be the swan song. I was like, "I'm going write about my connection to hip hop and my connection to feminism one time, and then I'm not talking about this anymore." [Laughs] So that was delusional. Part of the reason I felt that I wasn't going to talk about it anymore is because I wanted to have that swan song be an opening and a voice for a generation of women who would be coming behind me, who I felt would be much more capable of having this conversation, basically because I wanted 'Chickenheads' to give them permission to have it. I felt for a very long time that I had to keep doing the work because that hadn't quite happened. It was happening but I wasn't in a position where I felt like, "I really don't need to talk about this anymore." As in, someone can call me up and say, "Can you do this talk on hip hop and feminism?" "I could but why don't you call this person, or why don't you give that person a call?" I wanted to be able to just refer it out and know that work was going to be done, not just competently, but better than I could at this point. When I read the Crunk Feminist Manifesto, I went, "Jesus, it's time." I really felt like I could take that hat off and switch up the dissertation projects [laughs], "We're good. Hip hop feminism is good, it's in good hands." So, in ways it did more than I ever could've imagined. I never imagined I would meet people and they would say, "I'm doing my dissertation on hip hop feminism." Particularly because I wrote the book strictly to not to be used in academic spaces, because I felt like while I got a lot from the feminism that I was introduced to in college, I felt that it existed very much in the space of an ivory tower, and all of the work that I was doing, in a very real way, on hip hop journalism was- you know, this was not distant work. I was truly in clubs, in a boys club, hands-on, with artists until 3 o'clock in the morning doing dumb shit, like that kind of thing. I wanted to speak from the cultural space, and not an academic space. So, the book was really written like- at the time everyone was reading Tara McMillan. I was like, "How long does it take people to get through a Tara McMillan novel and get really into it? Like 3 days?" You got to be able to read 'Chickenheads' in 3 days if you want. I want you to curl up with it like that. And so, for it to become occupied within a space in academia was very weird. But I really, really feel like this is the moment where what I wanted to do was produce an understanding of feminism that made sense for a generation of young women who came up on hip hop culture, with all of its beauty and all of its contradictions, that deliberately placed it's lens of interrogation in a space that was grey and messy. Like that line, "I need a feminism brave enough to fuck with the greys." I feel like hip hop feminism does that, so now I can go be grey someplace else. [LAUGHS] >> DR. BRITTNEY MORGAN: Yeah, but you know, hip hop is a really different kind of thing than it was at the end of the 20th century, right? I mean we're the 2nd decade into the 21st century, so it's a really different project. You could sort of make this argument about how hip hop can help us win. And I've listened to a lot of stuff and I don't feel like I'm winning, you know. So I wonder about- so, with ATLC for us, it's like how can we set this up as a set of resources to help us to resist? Because you know when you're a child, you know, we're bobbing our heads to the beat and then you listen to the words and you're like, "Oh my god! I have to stop right now!" You know what I mean? So, can it still help us win? >>JOAN MORGAN: I think it is helping us win, because, you know, in 1999 or 199- whatever, to say to someone, "I'm going to do a book on hip hop", people didn't think you could be as into hip hop as I was, I won't say as I am, and be a feminist. Like, those two things, people could not imagine them together. Mostly because, one, they couldn't imagine young black women embracing feminism, and two, they just couldn't imagine a feminism that was messy. I think we've come to a point where we understand that feminism can be messy, almost as like, "Of course feminism can be messy." Those of us who aren't comfortable with the fact that it's messy, but we understand that our lives are complicated. And so I think greyness is something that we accept as part of something that has to be worked through to get nuanced answers. In that sense I believe we're winning. When I understand that hip hop is the thing that brought me to that place I absolutely think that hip hop could help us win. Do I think I feel like I'm winning when I try to listen to Lil' Wayne? No. [LAUGHS] I don't. For me this has never been about- you know, the intervention was a temporal one. In many ways it was about what does it mean to embrace hip hop as a young black women at this particular time with the pervasiveness of hip hop culture, and still love the music, and still feel the need to critique the music, but really do it from a place of love. Really do it from an understanding of, and not just a love of hip-hop, but a love of black people, a love of community, a love that just didn't feel that black men were dispensable, a feminism that had to reach them also because it needs to make us all better. What did that mean and still have to work through the messiness of hip hop culture. Sometimes people make the mistake of feeling like hip hop feminism is only about studying lyrics, or making commentary on artists, or feeling, "I'm a hip hop feminist, so I can only talk about hip hop in terms of misogyny." I came to hip hop long before I came to feminism. I grew up literally on hip hop's left breast. Feminism was something I could give or take for a long time. To me it was like I could sign on to this feminism thing, but I'm not giving up hip hop. It's asking me to draw the line between where are you black and where are you a woman. So, yeah I do feel like, if I look at it in the long view, that hip hop helped us win or is helping us win. >> DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: It's the courage of putting those terms together, hip hop and feminism, in a way that people said could never be possible, that made us think about that when we were thinking about crunk feminism, right? So, for us crunk feminism was a type of hip hop feminism deeply rooted in the south. We were still living in Atlanta at the time. 'Getting crunk' was a way of life, it was a thing you did in the club, it was getting hyped in the club, but it was also like, "You say some racist shit in this class, so we're about to turn it out." It's going to be an issue. And so, for us we thought of that and used the term percussive, as a way to say- this is the thing I love about 'Chickenheads', I have this vivid memory of walking through the new Howard University bookstore- not the old Howard bookstore, terrible- so, I'm walking through the new Howard University bookstore- and I still have the copy I bought in the year 2000, as a college student- and I was like, "What are chickenheads? What now?" And then coming home and voraciously reading this book, and feeling understood. I don't even know if I took feminism away from your book initially. I think I felt like what you had done was articulated how a real black girl would've done. That's how it seemed articulated. And what you gave us was permission to say that we don't have it all figured out. So I wondered what the space of that is for movement building within our work. That sort of tension. I feel like we're sort of at a moment in feminism where we really - we want - your book - I really want to retrain my oldest [indistinguishable] problems with this book, because she really seems to like patriarchy and we were like "naw." But she said you know, like so you see all the young women of the world were going "what? That's not what we got from it." right? So I wonder about those tensions and how we're negotiating it when we talk about somebody like Beyoncé, right? Because I feel like we still - we don't - I'm wondering if we actually do make space for contradiction, well. I feel like that's what [indistinguishable] was trying to do, I feel like that's what we try to do at CFC, but I feel like we also still have these tensions in the culture that we're giving up something vital if we acknowledge that we're still struggling with it. >>JOAN MORGAN: You know, I always say, Beyoncé is less interesting to me as a feminist than what she prompts in feminist conversation. She's like this black feminist Rorschach test. She's this ink blot, and people will be looking at the same thing and they'll end up at absolutely different... which is interesting. It's an interesting tension. But I do think one of the things she challenges that speaks to the particular moment where we are, which is a challenge in feminism across the board, not just black feminism, is this need for homogeneity, and this need for 'sisterhood' to do this work for, "We're all the same, we think the same, we're all on the same page." How do you constructively work through difference? We have language for how we want to understand and recognize difference when we're talking about black and white, when we're talking about racial differences, or even ethnic differences in some ways, right? But when we have to say, as women, that our points of entry are very different-that there are class differences, ethnic differences, generational differences-that don't necessarily mean that at the end of the day we don't think that patriarchy is a good thing, that we think that cissism and sexism, and structures of sexism, have to be dismantled. But there's a lot under that about how I walk and live and breath in the world. And some of us do that kind of... you know, Rosa always says that she is a radical feminist, right, and her work is particularly about dismantling those structures. I'm a feminist who really feels it is important to work and theorize a feminism that allows women to figure out how to be in this world, how to exist with a fullness of humanity, even in the face of patriarchy. I have to recognize that Rosa and I are both feminists, but our projects are very different. And it also means that we're friends, but we're going to butt heads. You know what I mean? You can talk about being and capitalism all you want, I'm really happy about how this 12-year-old is over here getting crunk and feeling empowered. And those are both necessary conversations, but I think that feminism in some ways is still very comfortable with certain binaries, like it has to be either/or. And I wanted to ask you... I feel like the diversity of opinions in the Crunk Feminist Collective really do the work of what I'm talking about, so how do you create that climate amongst yourselves that really allows for highly divergent opinions sometimes. >> DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: I mean, we really talk a lot about what we mean when we say, 'collective.' We don't mean that we all think in the same way, and we think that part of what it means to work together is that we have each other as a community to actually play off of, to share ideas and to hold each other accountable. I mean, look, my blog name is 'Crunktastic', and there's a reason for that. Usually I'm the person that's like, let's go take everyone down, all the time. So if I had my way you would just see takedown pieces all the time. So there are other sisters in the collective who are like, what are we trying to build? What is our end goal, and is this really going to help us get the world that we're trying to produce. So we need Crunk as, "Yeah, we'll check you," but we also need it in terms of productivity. But part of the thing is the actual relationships with each other, and a certain trust so we actually can be accountable. And we fundamentally respect each other, and respect each others' work and give each other the benefit of the doubt, that even when we disagree it isn't a bad thing, that it's a real desire to see the world go forth in ways that are fundamentally more just. But also I think the other thing to say is that sometimes we talk to each other like, "This is sort of being in the music... is this going to be like New Additions, like Destiny's Child..." You know, which model? Sometimes we want the, like, New Addition that could split off and have multiple acts and then come back for a great show. [Indistinguishable.] So we sort of joke the about that. But yeah, we see each other as resources, and also we recognize at the end of the day we realize that relationships matter more than the labor matters. And that's really hard, sometimes, to think. So, the CFC is a bunch of badass women, all very ambitious, highly educated, really smart. And we essentially said that we could take the male model, which is all about sort of big-upping the next superstar dude, the next second coming of Jesus, which is sort of our leadership model culturally, right? Or we could say that in the end we don't think that model is particularly sustainable, so instead of competing with each other.... The collective model is more sustainable, so it may mean that you don't have any one superstar rising out of that group, but what you do have is a superstar product all the time. A really good product. And frankly it's just more fun that way. Its more fun to be able to do it with people that you respect and that have your back. And actually we spend a lot of time thinking about how hip hop has got this right and has not got this right, in terms of the models how they produce work. And I think we would say that there's a kind of minimalist...like two turntables and a mic. It's like us, and a blog, and we don't have a lot of visual training, so sometimes things look a little interesting, but the content is always pretty solid. You know, I wonder what kind of resources, if we're forming a hip hop feminism, for somebody coming into feminism today, do you think hop hop feminism is a sort of entry point for, like, a young woman. Could it speak to her moment in the same way that it spoke to yours? And, if not, what is that thing in this moment that is that nice blend of the cultural context and the politicization. >>JOAN MORGAN: You know, Brittney, I think the way to look at that, at least for me, is that hip hop was a viable point of entry. So I also understood that my feminism wouldn't always be rooted in having to talk about hip hop. You know, it's like this moment where people get really upset that Beyoncé calls herself a feminist. And I'm like, it's very possible that a 14-year-old can look at flawless, hear Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, make her way to Chickenheads, then find her way to Bell Hooks, then find her way to Patricia Hill Collins, and that's kind of how it works. To me, it's like, you embrace the place where people find openings and spaces, because the formulation of your feminism is ultimately going to be something very personal. So, the work that I'm doing now around the work that we're doing now.... I should say that one of the most incredible experiences for me speaking about negating that sort of second coming of Jesus model the dudes kind of do in hip-hop is - I don't know if people really understand how reciprocal the relationship is and how cross- generational I guess jesus, okay. I'm not quite old enough to be their mother but I am significantly older. We've spent a lot of time talking to each other. Some of those things are about feminism some of them are things that should never ever go on record but one of the things that has been really critical for me is how circular and how beautiful that model is - because while I might have been their point of entry, when I entered the academy - the academy is by nature a really, like I don't do well in structures like that. You know, I'm a hip hop feminist. I believe in blowing shit up. Going into this place where I absolutely created a book that was meant not to function in that place. Then, to be like "Okay I'm going to do this work and I want you all to give me a PhD." I still had to find a model in that - that could work. And my model became this generation of scholars who read my work and embraced feminism. Then I turned to them and - this dissertation proposal y'all? Like what is she really asking me for? I really don't, like a lot of the conversation aren't like that with a lot of expletives and to kind of have them remind me why my work matters in the context of academia which I don't always see because I'm busy trying to blow the model up and try to understand that the work is situated there for a reason. So, my work becomes enriched in a different scholarly way because of my consistent engagement with these younger scholars who may have decided that Hip-hop was their point of entry but their scholarship is just bad. I'm often sitting here, I tweeted as I was listening to Treva's presentation. Like I know people say she's like me and Mark Anthony Neal's intellectual love child. But all I ever want to do is be in Treva's class. I'm just sitting there like "Why can't I take your class though?" You know? And I think that that's one of the ways that a model in feminism works really well, when you understand that it's about the reciprocity, and not this kind of what I feel like I had to come up against in many ways, which is a very stringent kind of keeping of the guard. You know, of older black female feminist who were just like, "I don't know what this is, I don't want a part of it, I don't want this in my classroom, if it's going to be in my classroom, I'm going to rip it apart because there's no theory." And I basically wrote it like, "Fuck you and your theory." I don't live theory. My feminism exists not in a tower but on these streets. So what does that mean? Then having to come to Brittney and go, OK, so this affect theory that I said I wasn't going to go near, that might actually work really well in chapter blah-blah-blah. So I think it does mean this understanding of a fluidity and an openness, and a model that is really much more circular than linear. And it's important. >> DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: Look. I've used your book many valuable days in my classes, right? Because I knew that what hip hop feminism, hip hop generation feminism does is give us permission to bring our whole selves to the spaces that we're in. So it becomes an invitation to say, "I'm not leaving anything at the door, and I'm not going to give you the opportunity to define what this means for me. So one of the things that I say to Joan, which is sort of my approach to the academy is to say, "Look, you just have to win the arguments. You just have to win the arguments, right? It's not that you're wrong. Just read all the shit they tell you, and then be like, here are the reasons why those arguments don't work and these arguments work better. And for us, that is also this thing about.... It's so funny, right, that Chickenheads is supposed to be an academic book, because, the thing is, I think one of the things to remember is, it didn't start out for me as an academic text, but when I got to the academy, and when I was in a space that didn't speak to who I was, fully, it was the book that I ran to to make space for us. So we took some of those same kinds of things when we think about the CFC. Because people say [indistinguishable]. People say, "Oh, this is elitist," or "How do you deal with the fact that you're academics writing this kind of work." And the thing that we sort of say is that, look, we haven't been academics all of our lives, and most of us are first generation. Most of the CF's are first generation academics. I'm a first generation college grad, and a first generation PhD. Right? And that's true for my wonder twin, Crunkadelic, and some other folks in the collective as well. So we're writing ourselves.... So that means that there's a way in which you're in the academy, but not of the academy, right? And you sort of have this foot in the door, but you never feel like you fully fit, because you're always thinking about the communities that aren't there and don't have that kind of access, and how you move among those folks too. So when we write, we're always thinking of them. If a person never gets exposed to this in the classroom, can she come to the CFC and find some of this that will help her think about a situation that she's been going through. So, for me, that's the way that we try to take up the ethos. This thing you said about how we don't always have to talk about hip hop-I don't think we're talking about hip hope a whole lot at the blog these days at all. But we talk about things in a hip hop sort of way, which is to say that it's irreverent, it blows shit up, it says that all kinds of things can exist together in the same space and be productive. And those are hallmarks of the sort of hip hop epistemology, if you had to say that. >>JOAN MORGAN: I want to just jump on that for a second and just talk about how, when I was writing about a hip hop feminism as a 28, 29 year old, and now I'll be 49, this year. So, for me, it was also really not so much about the music all the time, but really about how that particular group of writers that I came up with, like Jeff Chang, Kevin Powell, Scott Poulson-Bryant. Because we were hip hop, we just didn't ask for permission to do things. You had to just do it. You know what I mean? I had never taken a journalism class. But when the Voice was like, "You want to write a story?" I was like, "Sure, I'll just figure it out." You know - this form is not really how other journalists do their things. But to me it made sense - because the writing was very informed also by the rhythm and the music - and so . . . Okay. Then it became hip-hop journalism, you know what I mean? And I think for this generation, it's not so much for me that they become hip-hop feminists or even that they become like "Crunk Feminists" - I want them not to ask permission to do their own intervention and their own formulation. You know it's like I wrote, "Every generation of feminists is handed a bolt of cloth and it's up to you to cut out the clothes and fashion it to your own liking. So - you know - I don't want people waiting around for permission to do that: you have to just do it. You know? And my model was a very hip-hop one you know - don't ask, just do it. No one is going to say, "Hey can I be one of the five journalists - female hip-hop journalists in the country?" No one's going to allow you to do that - no one gave us that space in hip-hop. You had to be like, "I have the right to be here". And now you all gotta get used to what that means to have a woman in the locker room. So I think that those things are still very relevant - you know. I don't think you can ask permission to . . . claim Beyoncé. If you want to claim Beyoncé - then claim her but understand that people are going to challenge you every step of the way and like you said - then you say you have to win the argument. You have to figure it out - all right. And then you have to be willing to also win the argument and challenge Beyoncé at the same time. You have to be willing to challenge what you love and call it to the mat and understand that you're doing it from a space of love. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: Yeah. I mean our goal is never for anyone to come across feminist - I mean. You know I said this term to some high-school kids a couple days ago and they were like, "What's Crunk?" and I was like, (indistinguishable) I know like they were born after Crunk was like a thing. Anyways - part of what it is and what we're saying is . . . this is what I love about when hip-hop meets feminism is that it gives feminism . . . a lot of times when we . . . what I don't like and it happens sometimes is we talk about the feminism as though it gives meaning to hip-hop, right? As though it gives political consciousness to hip- hop. And I think what we're saying is, "Here are all the ways that hip-hop made feminism a viable space for us to begin," right? Made it a viable sort of entry point for us that was generationally relevant. So there's a way in which hip-hop has sort of transformed the American body politic - and to me that's one of the best things about what hip-hop does as an analytic, as a cultural frame, as a epistemology it sort of says, "Things can't go on the way the were before. We are here - we demand to be seen and heard and dealt with on our own terms - no matter what the other analytic frame is, right? And so that might give birth to Chickenheads or that might give birth to Crunk or it might give birth to any number of things, right? And so - it's not sort of a prescriptive like, "Here is the best way to do hip-hop feminism" but it is an attention to sensibility. And you know - now one of the more exciting things that I'm glad that you're doing - which I think is actually really important in this moment of hip-hop is talking about pleasure politics. Like actually talking about . . . what hip-hop generation feminists so . . . like what does post-hip- hop feminist pleasure politic kind of look like. In a moment in hip-hop, we're being largely told what should be pleasurable to us and not asked what is pleasurable to us. So I don't know. I mean I think that's... it's not something that I had anticipated. So when I saw that you were doing it, I was like she's doing it again, always wanting something to do. Enforcing the conversation in a way that I think we've been, you know moving along but I remember being in grad school, which I started 10 years ago, and trying to have these conversations about sensibility and people being like but no first we were exploited, and then these controlled images, and then Sarah Markman, and politics of respectability and by the time we get to that I'm totally turned off you know. Like I don't know if I'm upset. How? >>JOAN MORGAN: Definitely . . . so when I started to do this work. First of all you should know that I went to graduate school saying I was definitely not going to do two things. That my project would not be about hip-hop and would not be about feminism. And one of those things ended up being a boldfaced lie because I'm doing pleasure politics - but I also live my feminism. It's not just a thing that lives in my head - so in a way, I don't know why I was delusional in thinking that I was going to do a project that wasn't about feminism. But - I did realize that there was a way in like - hip-hop feminism in terms of the analytic that I had created - still stopped me from getting into and talking about pleasure the way I wanted to. Even though I think hip-hop feminism has always held the erotic deadset you know like . . . why doesn't anyone admit that listening to all of this in your face testosterone also makes my nipples hard. I think I've always been really . . . honest about that. But what I wanted was a way to talk about women's pleasure that didn't have to go through men or misogyny. So I wanted to get straight to hard nipples basically, you know? [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] >>JOAN MORGAN: But then I realized that there was nothing - there was nothing in the way that we are taught black feminist thought that made a space for pleasure as part of the analytic - from the very beginning. So even the way that we theorize - we being to theorize sexuality out of the context of slavery - dismisses agency or at least see's it as problematic or troubling enough that it will get turned into an argument about black women's hyper-sexualization. Any my argument was - and this is also coming as someone who had to really study African American studies because I wasn't born here - I'm a Caribbean . . . I'm Jamaican born and consider myself Caribbean-American. So African American history was something that - everybody in my household had to like learn. Like we had to like pull some books in and really learn. And my question always on some fundamental level was, "There's a reason that the African American experience is so inspiring to political liberation to other countries." And part of that to me is that - you survived it. And the survival cannot just be about trauma. The survival cannot just be about a people defined by pain. To me there had to be pleasure even in the horror of the middle passage - or you simply would not have survived the experience. And so my work on pleasure is really about going back through those spaces in black feminist thought and inserting pleasure back into the conversation. What does that change about how we think about black women, black female sexuality? Our relationships with each other are male-female relationships with each other . . . once we say that pleasure is a legitimate and necessary part of the conversation. And I think that I had started to practice doing that in hip-hop feminism, but I also needed to get past hip-hop to be able to articulate a pleasure politic. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: And that's definitely been a part of our work at CSC/CFC. We don't worry about it as much now because one - it only affects some of us - and two . . . it's also hard writing about love and sex and relationships in a really public venue. And for us, we've always held sort of absent like that . . . there is no revolution right - no justice right - no Crunkness without pleasure. That part of what we meant when we said when we wanted to hold onto Crunk was that there was something about the bodily pleasure of going to the club and shaking your ass that just can't be captured. For all the academic theorizing that we might do, that we kept on doing it not because we were sort of speaking in false consciousness or didn't know better or sought to live in that concrete-free way - but because there was actual joy and actual pleasure in the ability to move one's body and be in one's body in particular ways. And we too said," We kind of want to defy this thinking that black women never talk about sex. And you know some of us really did engage in some conversations about sex and relationships and dating in the blog space as a way to kind of make it clear that we want that to be part of whatever the next generation or iteration of feminism goes forward. That it's a conversation that we really need to have, in all the ways that we can have it. One of the things that it spawned was in our comment section, there was a Tumblr called, the "bettacomecorrect" Tumblr, which you should check out. It's got some good stuff on there. It's not heteronormative. >>JOAN MORGAN: And then #black feminist sex is the best sex ever. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: It's a true story. So, do you want to tell them? >>JOAN MORGAN: So, part of our goal was also to have a conversation with you guys. So I think this is a good point in the conversation to do that. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: Yeah. >>JOAN MORGAN: Yes? >>AUDIENCE MEMBER: I feel everything that you are saying. But I guess my question is... I go to Ohio State. I'm in class with a bunch of white people who haven't necessarily had to struggle. How do you get them to understand that this is important, because they're kind of the ones that control our classes. If you're black and WGSS, you don't have a voice like, you don't have a representative. How do we get other people to understand how this is important. >>JOAN MORGAN: I think different people answer that in different ways. I am, at this point, as an almost 50-year-old black feminist who is deeply invested in black women-I'm really not that concerned. Like, white people's gaze...I just don't give a shit about it. I don't. I really don't. You don't really factor into my theorizing, I don't really care about making you understand. If you do understand, that's wonderful and that's love. I'm not going to spend 3 hours making you understand when I could be pushing what I have to say further for those 3 hours that I have someone in a class. So, I think that, even in my classroom, there's a certain kind of understanding about the kind of work that you need to do to catch up in the conversation. So, even as I'm teaching, I'm not going to present this material as, "Is it legitimate, and does it deserve to be studied?" It isn't a question. You know what I mean? I have sat through.... I pretty much went through predominantly white schools my entire life. And I had to sit through a bunch of shit just to get out of the door that I thought was absolutely irrelevant to my life growing up in the South Bronx. But I had to study it. I just think we need that kind of arrogance and that kind of swagger. So, I don't necessarily know that, for you, the most productive goal is necessarily to get them to see. It's to get you to see, and then take it to the community that you want to reach the most. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: You know, you're not there to make white folks more comfortable. If you feel like some shit is not being said... I mean, I was the kid, in college, who was going along, like, "I just need to get out of school." Right? I was in predominantly white school up until college. And I didn't blow shit up, because it just wasn't the space. Once I had a different set of resources, I said, "Hell no, I'm not going to be in a room where you are never talking about me, and you're assuming your experiences are normative." So the thing that you have to balance is that sometimes it's appropriate for you to disrupt shit, and be like, "You can talk about you, but be clear that you're not talking about me." At the same time, sometimes there's a cost for that, and you have to decide if you want to pay the cost-the sort of exhaustion that happens when white lady tears flow forth. They start crying and get all aggressive... do you want to do it? So that's the thing that you have to figure out. When is it worth it for your intervention to sort of enter that space, because it is going to do the kind of work that you need it to do. So, there was a moment in grad school where we were reading Bell Hooks and reading Bell Hooks-this was a feminist theory class. All my colleagues in the class were like, "She does not use footnotes. Bell Hooks does not use footnotes. And you know, she has a PhD. She should know better." And I was like, "What? What in the world?" Really, we're sitting in a class talking about Bell Hooks's footnotes? You don't think that's a problem. And I just saw all these people turn red around the table But to me, in that moment, it mattered. What you're not going to do is malign one of our scholars on some bullshit. Right? But if it's just you making off-the-cuff remarks that you think are relevant to everybody... Some days I'm just like, you know, I don't even feel like it today, so I'm going to let you talk, but I'm going to go to the bar afterwards. Those are all kinds of self-care interventions and resistances, and you should adopt them all as part of your repertoire. >>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, to both of you. I was thinking... I'm next to this table of young teen girls. I don't think that they are so familiar with you, and that you were interviewing rappers who have a modern day equivalent. And I wanted you to maybe give them context, like they don't really know who they are. So I think you should tell them something that you did, so they can relate to it. My other point, the thing about 5 years ago with rap, the thing that a lot of rappers were saying was, "I be fucking bitches, feels like...(indistinguishable)." Everybody knows this, right? Has there been any thought in writing about this? Because it's so silly to me. Not only do you get lots of sex, nowadays, rap has to be here's your woman who's cheating with me. So there's this new dynamic of infidelity that's in it. So I just wanted to say those feelings about that. And also just to give them some context of what this book is about, because I don't really think they know what the context of the book is. >>JOAN MORGAN: I think that's actually really normal. The average age the young reader comes to Chickenheads is about 16, sometimes 15. And I'm also really uncomfortable being like, "I was the first." I'm just not that person. But what I would say is that they're primed for it. I actually think it's less about what I did than if your looking for a space, a text that makes sense of how you can like hip hop, what are these questions I have about this feminism thing, is it for me or not for me...it's a good point to kind of make your point of entry. I would say that the work we do around...you know, Mark Anthony Neal spoke earlier. I can't stress enough how important it is to do this work with crew. Just given where I come from, you roll with a crew. Not having a crew is a bad, dangerous thing. Mark and I have been friends since we were 3 years old. We grew up in the same building. He was my first best friend, still the forever BFF. So we bounce these things off each other a lot. Like all the time. He's usually one of the first sounding boards for my work. He feels a little supplanted by the Pleasure Ninjas. Just want you to know there's a little bit of saltiness about that. But a lot of work that's emerged out of our work on hip hop and feminism has been this deliberate deconstructing of masculinity, and what are the limitations of hip hop sexism and patriarchy. How does it limit to fullness of a man's humanity if that is the model of masculinity that is being constructed? So I think that Mark's work earlier, on Illegible Masculinities, speaks to just that. What are the ways that we're trained to look at black masculinity in this very narrow way that doesn't capture the humanity and the complexity of who men are. And I actually think that hip hop feminism did that work first. And then feminist black men took that work and ran with it. Yeah. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: Right. I mean, I don't know that there's been a real shift. I think what you're talking about it machismo and sort of 'upping the ante'. But what's interesting is the ways that black men malign and undermine other black men in their music, which is not something we talk about when we talk about how they are using women as pawns and as objects. It's also about sort of "tossing shade." Because hip hop doesn't just traffic in terrible narratives about who black women are. In many ways it also traffics in terrible narratives and limiting narrative about who black men are as well. And not just in terms of violence, but also in terms of sex and sexual desire. And you know, even though I'm not that hot on Jay-Z's politics these days, one of the things he says and that I really rock with is, in terms of hip hop growing up and reaching a certain level of emotional complexity in the majority, is that there is also a landscape of feelings and emotions that just don't get explored in music. And he was like, "It's time for men to start talking about how they feel about their relationships or how they feel about violence in their communities or how they feel about struggling to make ends meet, and not just a kind of narration of the hustle, or a narration of the confidence. I think that's actually really good. Yeah? >>AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is for both of you. How important is it that people are able to recognize the type of feminism that you associate yourselves with? We talk about hip hop and these sub categories, so how important is it to you....how did you both individually come to the type of feminism, how did you come to hip hop feminism, and to Crunk feminism specifically, as opposed to just black feminism. >>JOAN MORGAN: I identify as a feminist. I don't say I'm a hip hop feminist. If you're asking me, "Are you a feminist woman?" I identify as a feminist, I don't identify as a womanist, I don't do Africana....because I feel like it's semantics, and feminism allows me the broad point of entry to engage in multiple conversations. And I don't really want to spend a lot of time on labels. Hip hop feminism actually really came about as part of my own internal process of trying to reconcile my identity as a feminist woman that was writing, and I came out as a feminist very publicly in a kind of conflicted way in my journalism. So that part of my process of how I became feminist is very much integrated in as part of the work. But, hip hop I was really, from outside, I constantly had to justify, how can you being doing this kind of work in hip hop, how can you be writing about hip hop, how can you love hip hop and call yourself a feminist? And Chickenheads is the answer to that question. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: I identify as a Black Feminist, very specifically, probably above all else, because, mainstream white feminism, I just can't really rock with it. And I didn't come to feminism studying white women, I came to feminism in the classroom of a black woman, studying other black women. So, first and foremost I identify as a Black Feminist. And I say big-B, big-F all the time. And I tell them that it's like, a tradition. That I'm invoking particular kinds of folks when I say that. And the hip hop stuff, to me, sort of comes later, and that's our generational intervention and articulation in a really longstanding tradition. But first and foremost I'm a Black Feminist. The book that I just finished writing is about (indistinguishable) and I love them. And I will rap real hard for 19th-century black women, because they were tight as shit, and they were brilliant, and they gave me the sense that black women had been talking about this for centuries, and they didn't just start talking about this in 1973. It wasn't the beginning, but also it is. So, in a longstanding tradition, and what we want to do at CFC is say, "We're in this tradition and we want to make a contribution. >>AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I just wanted to thank you all for the work that you do, for two reasons. One is, maybe, getting in contact with myself as a man, my body. So, we think that we know what we talk about when we talk about human being, status, and power. But really we're not attached to our bodies in the way that I hear women talk about it. So it's made me kind of look at that and get in contact with my body and understand masculinity. But on another note, it's helped me to be a better son, a brother, a lover-all those things, because of understanding the complexities of black women, and testing those binaries that I learned growing up, of a good girl and wife being a good chick, and a ho. And, you know, testing that. These sexual partners that she has are not attached to an identity of her being a ho, or a freak, or a slut. Whatever the names that are made up. She pursued pleasure in the same way that I pursued pleasure and my brothers pursued pleasure. So it's given me a way to kind of deconstruct some of the things that I'd thought about, and help me understand. I understand why my mother chose this good for nothing dude over me. I don't look at it that way anymore, but I understand that she wanted to be loved, and she wanted to be touched, in a way that I could not love her and touch her. And that's like, wow, that makes sense. And helps me make sense of my home girls and my sisters. It helps me be a better Christian as well, because if I'm going to love my neighbor as I love myself, I'm forgiving of myself and understand myself. I have to do the same for the other people in my life. So thank you for the work you do. >>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks so much, both of you, for the amazing work you do. I have a question. Both of you mentioned that you don't really write about hip hop anymore, but you talked about the Crunk collective. So I guess my question was going to be about each of your decisions to write less about hip hop, though it's the framework of your theoretical experience and the soundtrack to your life. I wonder how you all think the hip hop academic community is diminished by you not contributing to it. For example, I know a lot of women have been inspired by your book, Joan. Just like I know a lot of people who were inspired by Trisha Rose's book. But before she did hip hop awards, there was this huge period where she didn't write anything. And so I just wonder how you think about how your absence from hip hop impacts it. >>JOAN MORGAN: Well, you know I was a music journalist. Oh, OK, the question is, how do we feel that our decision not to write about hip hop as much impacts the overall work that people are trying to do, particularly feminists are trying to do, around hip hop and feminism. So there are two things. I was a music journalist first. Before I was a hip hop journalist, I was a music journalist, and I was a black feminist writer. Those are the two places that people would situate me in terms of journalism. And I spent a lot of time in the club. You guys may not know this, but there was a time when a hip hop artist could never fill a large arena. If you needed to go write about an artist that was performing, they went on at 3 in the morning in a grimy club. It always kills me now when I'm in the green room for some artist and chicks come down in six inch heels and skirts up to here. We would have never worn that back in the day. You wore tims and shit you could run in. You know, it was grimy like that. But one of the things I was really clear of, very early on, I used to write for places like Spin. So this is not just hip hop, I'm talking about the Village Voice, I'm talking about white mainstream music publications. There was nothing sadder to me than the 40-something music journalist at the club. I would look at that person and go, "I am never going to be that." So I was planning a strategic exit out of that since 30. Part of my planning that strategic exit was to write something like Chickenheads, because I feel like the best work on hip hop feminism comes from people who are living the experience with their finger on the pulse of the culture of that time. I think that they can articulate a reality that I was aware of but that I had no business trying to articulate for them. At 50... I don't want to be at nobody's club at 50. There was a party yesterday. I was like, I'm hungry, and by midnight I really want to be home, in my bed. I'm no longer at the point of life where at midnight I'm thinking about going out. That doesn't happen anymore. I feel like this is not just true in hip hop, this is true in many forms of scholarship. Part of your maturity as an intellect, part of your generosity and growth as a thinker and scholar, is to train and nurture those underneath you and then step out of the way. And then use their work to help you continue to bring relevance to work that you want to do, so that you're not stuck and staid. I usually try to tweet during these things. I didn't tweet at all during Mark and Treva's presentation, because I felt like, generally-and this is a woman I lecture with, at this point we've lectured internationally together, we've lecture together a lot. I know in Treva's work, the second that I'm down there tweeting, she's so layered that I'm going to miss a critical connection. So her work is not something I can tweet during. I'm also humble enough, and respect her enough, that I might miss something really critical, that can add to my own thinking. I just think it's our job to move out of the way. I don't have any interest in being a gatekeeper. I don't work in a space where I feel like, if I don't do it and I don't say it, it can't be said. It is being said. It is being said well. Not just by people that are being published-it is being said in the blogosphere. I watch young people-these young women's age-who don't identify as feminist, who are having really sophisticated conversations around feminism. I watch my 14- year-old son do the same thing. And that's the joy that I take these days. It's really not about this kind of neuroses that if I don't do the work it's just not going to get done. I just fundamentally don't believe that. >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: Yeah. A couple things. One is that part of what you're talking about is labor. At CFC we're hip hop generation feminists. That's a really specific term. It means that hip hop is an analytic that matters to us, but it's not the primary way that we necessarily identify. So, in the manifesto that I read, we articulated a whole host of social and political concerns that articulated what it meant to be a part of the hip hop generation, and I would say that most of the posts that we write do work from that generational frame, even if we're not talking topically about hip hop, which is never what we promised to do in first place, because frankly that's not necessarily our interest. But also, you know, my second book is on hip hop. That is in the works. [AUDIENCE APPLAUSE] >>DR. BRITTNEY COOPER: I am still writing about hip hop, but I don't necessarily like the insinuation that I owe it to the culture to do it. Right? What I think, for me, what it means to be a hip hop generation feminist is that what I want to do is try to speak some truth to power about these power dynamics and historical forces that have shaped my life, and I'm committed in the book to talking about all the ways that I think women are placed in hip hop. They're not necessarily able to be MCs in the mainstream in a major way, but they are producing all kinds of literature talking about gritty urban narratives that have been pushed out of the mainstream, so I talk about that in the work. I talk about other ways women are evoking hip hop aesthetics in the music. And I'm thinking about other ways that hip hop gets invoked to help women make meaning of their lives. That's what that book is going to do. The other with CFC is that it's a labor of love, it's not a thing you get paid for. It's a thing that we do, for free, and we talk about things that are happening for us, in that moment, and that's not always the latest rap song that we heard, or whatever. The last thing that I'll say is, calling dudes out about hip hop-which is kind of what we do write about, that's a lot of what we do. (Name indistinguishable) is still running around town, mad at me for something that I said to him last week, and you know he and I are going to have a beer summit at some point, I'm committed to this beer summit. He's still asking about it. But I'm not always sure... I think what I'm also saying is that there's a certain kind of emotional labor that goes into this kind of work, the type of truth-telling that we want to do. So, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, when I was on with Rhyme-Fest, you know, that runs Kanye's foundation or whatever. He was being a jerk, a complete and total jerk, about issues relevant to black women. That sort of stepping in the neck of dudes and being like, "You need to respect us and you need to care about things that are happening to us." We at CFC are taking a lot of hits from it, and they're real hits. People are on Twitter, like, "Oh, you know, you aren't down for the cause, and you aren't representing brothers and everyone in the community..." Folks are just with all these posts about the CFC, what we weren't doing and how it was contradicting my Christian values... I'm just saying, these dudes trip, and they trip hard. And I've got a day job that matters to me, so I can't really get going with it like they deserve, and I have to protect my emotional health as well. So this work is sort of calling out sexism and telling the truth. People get off on the, "Oh, your people want to live. That's not fun for me, that's not my dream goal and desire." Right? I want there to be transformation. These folks make you pay real hard to do the work to make them even sit and listen so that they can change something. So that means that we have to take care of ourselves, and that means that we walk away a lot more than perhaps we used to when we first started. >>JOAN MORGAN: I think just another quick point about your question is one of the things I think about a lot, in terms of how does the work suffer if we're not doing it. I think one of the things-- we've been talking a lot in this conference about pedagogy. I think that people who teach cultural criticism, who use cultural criticism in the classroom in the form of an analytic, have to be really, really, really diligent that you don't allow your students to lapse into a kind of lazy critique and call it cultural criticism. I'm really not interested in reading anything about Beyoncé by someone who starts off saying, "I don't like her music, I don't watch her videos," but you want to talk to me about her latest piece of work. That's just lazy. It's just lazy thinking. Looking at a music video by an artist and writing about it as if its documentary means that you are not training your students well. An English professor would never allow their student to write about a novel as if it was a work of nonfiction. So there's a kind of laziness on the part of people who are doing cultural criticism who are actually teaching students That the students then take outside of the classroom, and what we get is a big mess, and not this real critical space. So, what I feel really comfortable doing is calling that out when I see it. And what I'm very dedicated to doing in the classroom is making sure that my students don't do that. That's actually unacceptable. Anybody else? [APPLAUSE]