The Journal of Black Canadian Studies

http://aries.oise.utoronto.ca/dawn/journal/

The Black Female Body and Artist in Canadian Hip Hop:

The Question of Femini(st)ne Space

J. Maki Motapanyane
York Univeristy

When I was young I used to wonder what I’d do with my life:

How many babies would I mother?
Would I be someone’s wife?
My mental vision always seemed to be including a mic
I didn’t know that I’d be married to these tunes that I
write…1
-Motion

Women have been present in hip hop since its

inception. Their poetry, rhymes, steps and tags mark the
margins of masculinized contemporary urban artistic spaces,
seeping through the in-between gaps, asserting their own
centrality in the absence and silences, which continue to
mask their presence. 2 In Canada, the masking of female
presence in hip hop is exacerbated, among other things, by
a substantial lack of literature on hip hop in Canada, and
of women’s participation in it in particular. This essay
aims at beginning steps in the theorizing of Black female
artistic space within the hip hop industry and communities
of Canada. Central to this theoretical exploration will be
an examination of the ways in which female artists
negotiate, carve out and strategize spaces of/for artistic
expression and living within a Canadian hip hop industry

1
Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), Motion in Poetry (Toronto: Women’s Press,
2002).
2
“tagging” is a term associated with the process of creating graffiti
art, in which an artist painting a particular space ( a wall or
building, subway car etc.) is said to be tagging that particular space.

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that remains male dominated. Furthermore, of interest to
this examination is an understanding of what the efforts of
female artists reveal about the characteristics and future
of hip hop in Canada. Before delving into an analytic
discussion of female negotiations of masculinized artistic
spaces, I must first visit two questions. First, what is
hip hop? Second, why focus on the Black female body?

Hip hop is an artistic form of expression with many

faces. It has been a living, breathing vehicle and voice
of social and cultural critique of politicization and
activism for marginalized Black and non-white voices,
primarily in North America and to a lesser extent but
increasingly today, in many parts of the world. Rap music,
the more prominent aspect of hip hop, is historicized as
having emerged out of the South Bronx of New York City in
the mid-1970’s as the cultural product of urban African-
American, Afri-Caribbean and Hispanic communities.3 Other
aspects of hip hop include graffiti, break dancing and the
art of the disk jockey (DJ). Contemporary understandings
of hip hop have opened up space for poetry, various forms
of hip hop inspired narrations, painting, journalism and
filmmaking, to also be embraced as hip hop art forms
alongside Emceeing, graf art and breaking. For emcee and
hip hop artist Eternia, hip hop is

… a culture I live everyday. I got into a debate with

a good friend the other day, about hip hop being
purely an art form, or perhaps even a subculture,
versus my belief that hip hop is a culture…Hip hop is
a culture to me because we have our own value sets,
dress style, speech and body language, mannerisms,
cultural artifacts. Hip hop provides a point of
reference, to me, when confronting other larger social
occurrences (war, school, politics, education)… I
would say I make rap music…but live hip hop culture.4

Hip hop in Canada is an artistic body of work, an ever

shifting and dynamic urban culture that rhymes, narrates,
paints, documents, dances and in so many other ways,
expresses, critiques and theorizes the social realities of
our time. It is important to emphasize that hip hop
theorizes, that hip hop has the capacity to philosophize,
that hip hop and its artists are legitimate intellectuals

3
Tricia Rose, Black Noise. (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
4
Eternia (Semiramis), email correspondence with author, April 23, 2003.

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of our time and furthermore, that there is no intellectual
space where hip hop, its artists and learners do not belong
or in which their experiences are not intellectually
appropriate for discussion. That being said, the socio-
political potential of hip hop in Canada must be maximized
through the process of holding ourselves and one another
accountable in our knowledge and cultural production. In
the words of emcee and poet Motion (Wendy Braithwaite),

…I started seeing how hip hop is the voice for this

era of history, like jazz was, or blues, soul, or even
spirituals and griots in Africa. Like how we look
back at those eras and characterize them by the music
and expression is the same way the future will listen
to the music and try to visualize us.5

But if hip hop is a living, breathing vehicle for

social and cultural critique, if it is an ever shifting and
dynamic urban culture as I claim, why am I choosing to
center my exploration around understanding the
manifestation of the Black female body within hip hop?
Surely the artistic spaces of hip hop are not solely
occupied and influenced by Black bodies? They are not. My
choice of terminology here echoes the response of Rinaldo
Walcott to Awad Ibrahim during a question period at the
Researching Black Canadian Musics and Black Music Cultures
in Canada conference (May 2003) at York University. Upon
being asked if hip hop is a Black musical/cultural form,
Walcott responded affirmatively while adding that it is a
hybrid Black musical form.6 While Canada’s hip hop spaces
are clearly populated by bodies of varying ethnic
backgrounds, and although this exploration is interested in
engaging with the experiences and strategies of any female
hip hop artist, emphasis is given to the Black female body
as a way of maintaining and subtly re-articulating the
major and dominant influences of Black diasporic identities
in hip hop in Canada.

Canadian literary spaces and cultural criticism has

been surprisingly silent on manifestations of hip hop in
Canada. Much of the research surrounding hip hop in North

5
Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), email correspondence with author, May 1,
2003.
6
Discussion between Awad Ibrahim and Rinaldo Walcott; question period
following Walcott’s keynote address “Towards a Methodology for Reading
Hip Hop in Canada” (at Researching Black Canadian Musics and Black
Music Cultures in Canada Conference Saturday, May 3, 2003).

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American has been written by Americans about the
manifestation and socio-cultural significance of hip hop in
the United States. Even within this substantial body of
American writing on hip hop, the presence and experiences
of female artists and hip hop community members are
virtually invisible. Much U.S. literature surrounding hip
hop continues to centre and historicize male figures while
devoting a few negligible pages to the presence and
contribution of women. Researchers such as Tricia Rose
have made important contributions to the documenting and
theorizing of women’s experiences in hip hop. As well,
writers such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, bell
hooks, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy (among
many others), have complicated debates surrounding hip hop
and Black music cultures in important ways. Theorizing the
intersection of race, gender and class in urban Black music
and examining the meaning of culture and identity as these
relate to hip hop, these writers have made important
contributions to ongoing debates surrounding hip hop.

In Canada, writers and researchers such as Awad

Ibrahim, Tony Young, Dalton Higgins and Rinaldo Walcott
have begun important steps in building a foundation for
thinking and writing about hip hop in Canada. Filmmakers
as well have played an important role in recording and
participating in the production of knowledge about hip hop
in Canada, as exemplified by the work of filmmakers Alison
Duke in “Raisin’ Kane”: A Rapumentary and Andrew Munger in
Make Some Noise!. More recently, hip hop has witnessed the
release of the U.S. filmmaker Rachel Raimist’s Nobody Knows
My Name, a documentary on the experiences of female artists
in underground American hip hop spaces. Canadian
journalists have also been at the forefront of efforts to
document the dynamics of the hip hop industry and
community. Journalists such as Emily Mills and Silk Kaya
(among many others) have contributed valuable pieces of hip
hop oriented commentary and critique to a number of current
Canadian hip hop websites. The Internet has provided a
space for sites such as theCyberKrib.com, hiphopcanada.com,
and phemphat.com to develop into useful databases and
sources of information on the hip hop community and music
industry in Canada. In addition, conferences like
Researching Black Canadian Musics & Black Music Cultures in
Canada are a fundamental step in building a framework and
support base for theorizing and documenting the many
aspects of hip hop in Canada. The work of researcher
Rinaldo Walcott in attempting to frame a methodology for

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reading hip hop in Canada, exemplifies the slow yet
consistent strides being made in building a Canadian body
of literature surrounding hip hop and urban music.7

Because much of the existing Canadian hip hop spaces

have not been extensively documented, direct dialogue with
members of the hip hop community and industry has been (for
this project) and must continue to be a central component
of writing and theorizing hip hop in Canada. The
involvement and space given to artists and community
members in the institutional academic production of
knowledge surrounding hip hop in Canada, and vice versa,
the community and artists’ opening of space to interested
learners or “researchers” can benefit both communities.
Additionally this would be a form of participatory research
with the potential of not only undermining more traditional
Eurocentric research methods, which emphasize imagined
“objectivity” on the part of researchers while constructing
those researchers not as learners but experts over the
subject(s) in question; but instead create a network of
support for research projects which exemplify extensive
collaboration with and within communities of interest.
This means a shift away from the fears associated with not
having sole recognition and in some instances, even sole
control over a research project. It also entails
challenging the myth that any process of knowledge
production surrounding a particular community(ies) can be
done and is complete without acknowledgement of the extent
to which the research project is indebted to the
intellectual contributions (whether visible or hidden) of
the members of that community.

Female Artistic Expression in Canadian Hip Hop Spaces

Theoretically engaging with women’s presence in the
Canadian hip hop industry and communities necessarily
involves an examination of the racialization and
masculinization of the industry. While the Canadian hip
hop industry has always been and is increasingly a multi-
ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faceted space of artistic
expression, it does not come without its own racialized,
gendered and classed power dynamics. This is more clearly
articulated by artist Eternia (of Assyrian descent) when
she states,
…the hip hop community and hip hop industry are two
7
Rinaldo Walcott, “Towards a Methodology for Reading Hip Hop in Canada”
(keynote address at the Researching Black Canadian Musics and Black
Music Cultures in Canada Conference, May 1-3, 2003).

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 separate things, in my mind. The industry welcomes
anything that is new or different, in fact it thrives
on this. So someone like me can probably make larger
career strides at a faster pace than my local black
male emcee counterpart…I stand out…people want to see
‘novelty’ things that are different…but still TALENTED
of course…I’m not saying this is fair. It’s not. But
it’s business.8

The complexities of race, gender and class, their

interconnectedness and simultaneous manifestation in the
Canadian hip hop industry, are exposed when Eternia begins
examining the dynamics surrounding her racialized (White)
body in a race, sex, class and sexuality conscious music
industry. Eternia’s statement is significant because it
reflects a subtle self-awareness that allows her to
somewhat examine her standpoint while pointing to the role
of racialization in hip hop marketing. The imaged popular
understandings of Eternia’s body as White (race) and
feminine (gender) result in a construction of her as a
“novelty” in contrast to the predominantly Black
masculinized hip hop spaces in which she seeks to express
her art form. The components of this novelty therefore, in
combination with her artistic skills and talent become the
basis on which she is marketed within an overwhelmingly
commercial and capitalist Canadian urban music industry.

Significant in Eternia’s discussion of the reception

of her raced and gendered body as a “novelty”, is the way
in which this statement (by way of contrast to Black male
bodies), subtly teases out the fact that White bodies are
also raced bodies. It is evident from the artist’s words
that the colour of her skin (“White”) has meanings attached
to it, which coupled with her gender, make her a novelty in
hip hop spaces that continue to be raced and gendered as
Black and masculine. As Razia Aziz indicates in Feminism
and the Challenge of Racism: Deviance or Difference?,
drawing out the racialized characteristics of the White
body is important because not theorizing Whiteness, not
seeing it as a “raced” identity, has played a large role in
feeding the ongoing myth that Whites are not affected by
processes of racialization.9

8
Eternia (Semiramis), email correspondence with author, April 23, 2003.
9
Razia Aziz, “Feminism and the Challenge of Racism: Deviance or
Difference?” in, Black British Feminism: A Reader, ed. Heidi Safia
Mirza (London: Routledge, 1997).

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 The complexities associated with the presence of
female artists in hip hop is further evidenced when race is
examined in relation to gender, class and sexuality. The
maculinization of hip hop presents significant barriers to
women’s expression and equal participation in the industry.
Masculinity is a constructed set of characteristics,
behaviours and traits that are equated with strength,
control and reason, traits which have been constructed as
the characteristic monopoly of the male gender. In its
being equated with hip hop, masculinity has supported the
imaging and myth of women’s participation in hip hop,
particularly as rappers, graf artists and break dancers, as
out of place, not serious and amateurish. Eternia
indicates this when she explains,

In the actual venues, clubs, open mic nights,

streetcorners: well I would argue women face
discrimination in a subtle fashion… Dudes will invite
you to do music, come to their studio, work with
them…and even though their belief in your talent is
sincere, they will ask you in the same sentence: So do
you have a boyfriend? Or look at you like you’re
food…I meet Women regularly who should have numerous
independent projects released, and don’t…I think these
women are constantly in a creative battle with their
male counterparts…I think many men in the industry
(not all) take on women as a ‘talent’ to ‘raise’,
instead of an ‘equal’ to ‘support’…we are something to
be molded, we are told ‘sound more like this, don’t
wear that, do this’. Yet many male artists are in
equal positions of power with their male counterparts,
they collaborate, they make music and finance their
music together. I don’t see those networks happening
with females as much.10

While the isolation of female hip hop artists in Canada

from one another as well as from the financial, technical,
managerial, legal and promotional resources (among other
considerations) needed to develop and promote one’s
artistic work continues to be significant, a number of
female artists are collaborating and creating professional
networks. Native female emcee Eekwol One of InnerSoulFlow
and Ndidi Cascade for example collaborated on a cross-
Canada campus tour in 2003 that undoubtedly increased the
exposure of both artists, while reminding audiences that

10
Eternia (Semiramis), email correspondence to author, April 23, 2003.

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hip hop can have a Native female face. This is further
demonstrated by the work of West coast rapper Girlie Emcee
(Cynthia Smallboy). As a member of the Native rap group
War Party, Girlie Emcee has shared the stage with a number
of Canada’s more well known “mainstream” (read-male) hip
hop artists including Maestro Fresh Wes, Choclair, Kardinal
Offishal and Ghetto Concept.11

Not surprisingly, while a select number of audiences

may be aware of the artistic output of Native female hip
hop artists in Canada, much of the information disseminated
on hip hop music in Canada remains male focused and
Torontocentric. While much more needs to be written of the
role of pioneering (and now Ontario-based) female hip hop
figures such as Michie Mee and Tara Chase, both of whose
artistic contributions have made it to video in Break the
Rulez with the group The Day After and Like it Like
respectively, even less is known of the activities of East
coast artists such as Shy Luv, Quebec residing artists such
as Killa Jewel and Western Canada and Prairie-based artists
such as Eekwol One, Girlie Emcee, Kia Kadiri and Ndidi
Cascade.12 Indeed, with the prominence of PhemPhat
Productions in Toronto, a significant amount of the
exposure given to female hip hop artists in Canada, whether
through showcases, workshops, shows and/or conferences, is
clustered in the urban spaces of Toronto. 13 Added to the
socio-political manifestations of gender, race and class in
complicating the access of female artists to industry
resources within a patriarchal, racist and capitalist
Canadian landscape, is sexuality. How intricate must be
the process of strategic masking undertaken by Queer
identified female artists within the industry?

The struggles of female hip hop artists in a male

dominated industry are not to be examined without pointing
out their own inherent complexities. The manifestation of
women’s presence in the Canadian hip hop industry is not

11
Information taken from Girlie Emcee’s online biography,
http://www.warparty.cjb.net
12
For further information on a number of Canada wide female hip hop
artists see
http://www.hiphopcanada.com/_site/entertainment/articles/ent_art073.php
13
PhemPhat Productions is a company devoted to exposing and supporting
female artists in all mediums of urban music in Canada. The company
recently gained the support and sponsorship of Universal Music Canada
for its Honey Jam Showcase (2002), which takes place annually in
Toronto, Ontario. For more information on PhemPhat visit
www.phemphat.com

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without its own contradictions. As Tricia Rose indicates,
the masculinized discourse of the hip hop industry is both
critiqued and supported by female artists in various ways.14
In Canada, this is illustrated in the various strategic
devices utilized by female artists in forming and shaping
their artistic output. In an interview conducted with
Emcee Tara Chase by journalist Del Cowie, Chase discusses
the sexism and insults she experienced from peer male
emcees in direct response to her gender and her attempts to
equate and relate this gender to the masculine imaged art
of rapping. She importantly points out that this sexism
pushed her to work harder at and within her art form.
Simultaneously however, Chase states,

I didn’t want to be looked at like she’s

good for a female rapper. It should be like she’s a
wicked rapper period. Sometimes I would write to
stand with the guys too, so I kinda stayed away from
the lovey-dovey topics. I was definitely more into the
raw and tried to blend with them too.15

This statement is illustrative of the complexity of female

engagement with what remains a male dominated industry.
Chase does not neglect the sexism she experiences within
the industry, thereby, highlighting the masculinization of
hip hop and the consequences of this in relation to the
experiences of female artists within hip hop. However, in
her association of “lovey-dovey” topics as non-guy-like (in
this instance and many others, guys being and determining
the standards of legitimate artistic output), Chase is
complicit in the on-going masculinization of hip hop, the
equating of female artists with femininity and therefore
artistic weakness and ultimately, the maintenance of Black
masculinity as the legitimate decision-making and defining
source of what hip hop is and means. Her account
importantly illuminates Chase’s personal strategy early in
her career as a female hip hop artist. Toughening and
making her artistic output rough and raw was one way to
gain legitimacy and stand on equal ground with already
validated male peers.

Alternatively and more currently, Motion has this to

say about strategy and being female in the Canadian hip hop
industry,
14
Tricia Rose, Black Noise. (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
15
Tara Chase in an interview with Del Cowie.
http://www.phemphat.com/tara.html accessed on April 23, 2003

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 Hip hop came up for me being the antithesis
of everything I was supposed to be, know and value…
flipping concepts, coming rugged, turning backs on the
status quo, affirming yourself in a world that tries
to keep you quiet… It’s meant being myself, and
stating my identity, telling the story from my
perspective as a feminine being. As a woman making
music, especially in hip hop, it take perseverance to
be what you want to be, and to resist expectations
that try to influence you or limit you to certain
roles.16

The strategies are many and shifting, what one female

artist begins with is not where she finds herself a few
years or even a month later. The purpose here is not to
characterize, categorize or strictly associate particular
artists and strategies with one another, but rather to
illustrate the range in strategies and their shifting
nature over time, context and circumstance. These
realities manifest within the many corners and spaces of
the hip hop industry and community. They can directly
impact the strategies of female artists in ensuring the
development and success of their art and can frame the
public discussions and debates surrounding hip hop in a
manner that contributes to the silencing and undermining of
the female voice. As argued by Tricia Rose, the subtle and
negative effects of the masculinization of hip hop culture
can evidence themselves in public reactions to the
critiques of female journalists and writers to the sexism
present within many hip hop spaces. Unlike respected or at
least debated critiques advanced by male journalists,
academics and writers, the critiques of female
intellectuals tellingly become characterized and reduced to
“complaint”.17 This corresponds to the wider efforts of
female artists in, as Rose states, “struggling for parity,
fighting to be taken seriously in a music industry that has
a horrible reputation for tolerating and participating in
the abuse, sexual harassment, and sexist containment of
women artists and employees”.18

It is important here to point out that race, gender

and class based inequalities and injustices that take place
within Canada’s music industry are reflective of the

16
Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), email correspondence with author, May 1,
2003.
17
Tricia Rose, Black Noise. (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
18
Ibid. pg. 170.

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racism, sexism and consumer culture supported within the
larger networks of power in Canadian society. Therefore,
the intent here is not to classify hip hop as unique in its
(as of yet) inability to develop noteworthy spaces free of
the complexities of race, gender and class. As Deborah
McDowell states in Pecs and Reps: Muscling in on Race and
the Subject of Masculinities, “Obviously, to single out rap
music in order to decry violence and sexism is patently
hypocritical, given the fact that violence and sexism have
immemorially given this society perhaps its most
distinctive signature”.19 Although McDowell is in this
statement speaking specifically of the U.S., her words
apply to the Canadian landscape if one thinks of the
genocide and as Enakshi Dua has illustrated in Canadian
Anti-Racist Feminist Thought: Scratching the Surface of
Racism, the racist and sexist immigration past and present
that have been at the core of the formation of the Canadian
“nation”.20

Black Elaborations of Canadianess through Hip Hop

In his May 2003 keynote address at the Researching
Black Canadian Musics and Black Music Cultures in Canada
Conference at York University, Rinaldo Walcott engaged the
audience in a theoretical analysis of hip hop as it may be
understood within the context of Canadianess and nation.
Central to hip hop Walcott stated, is an attitude of
insubordination whose complexity is (among other areas)
reflected in its popularity and current commodification.
This insubordination, while being a site of
commodification, is also a site from which according to
Walcott, (male) hip hop artists elaborate the Canadian
urban landscape. This elaboration takes place through the
refusal of (male) hip hop artists to be limited to neither
a particular ethnic cultural heritage (Caribbean, more
specifically Jamaican or St. Lucian for example), nor to
modernist understandings of the Canadian nation. These
artists remain insubordinate in their emphasis, as
exemplified by Kardinal Offishal’s Bakardi Slang, that hip
hop in Canada is not always dependent and in search of U.S.
guidance in its development.

19
Deborah E. McDowell, Pecs and Reps: Muscling in on Race and the Subject of Masculinities. In Harry
Stecopoulos & Michael Uebel (eds.), Race and the Subject of Masculinities. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997; pg.376.
20
Enakshi Dua, “Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought: Scratching the Surface of Racism” In Scratching
the Surface: Canadian anti-racist feminist thought ed. Enakshi Dua & Angela Robertson (Toronto:
Women’s Press, 1999).

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 As Walcott indicated, with Bakardi Slang, Kardinal
Offishal distances himself/his Canadian crew from Black
American language, presenting a Black Canadian voice that
is neither homogeneously Caribbean nor dependent on Black
American influences. This relatively ambiguous stance,
Walcott argues, is reflective of a “self-assured diasporic
Blackness” that is aware of the fact that it/he belongs and
at once does not belong. Therefore, Kardinal’s Bakardi
Slang can be viewed as an example of an articulation of
Black Atlantic diasporic identity, in which the artist is
aware of the ways in which his belonging in the Canadian
landscape continues to be contested, and yet he remains
sure (due in part and undoubtedly unintentionally to
Canadian Multiculturalism according to Walcott) that the
space he does occupy within the Canadian landscape is in
fact his rightful space. Thus, Kardinal’s Bakardi Slang
can be viewed as one example of this Black elaboration of
Canadianess. What remains unclear however, is women’s
presence and role in this insubordinating process of re-
configuring Canadian identity.

While examples of the work of well known male hip hop

artists are certainly more widely discussed and possibly
more easily available for analysis, theorizing the
insubordination of Black Canadian culture(s) and the role
of hip hop in particular in elaborating modernist
understandings of the Canadian nation, remains incomplete
without an adequate analysis of gender. If using the Black
feminist analytical frameworks advanced by Patricia Hill
Collins (1990), Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Johnetta Cole
(2003), June Jordan (2002) and Audre Lorde (1984) among the
works of many other Black feminist theorists, to analyze
Kardinal’s Bakardi Slang, an impression slightly different
from that presented by Walcott could arise. There is no
question that Kardinal’s use of language insubordinately
destabilizes notions of Black Canadian dependency on U.S.
guidance for the formation of Black identity (particularly
within the context of hip hop), while his confident
assertion of belonging in the Canadian landscape and
simultaneous insistence on not being reduced to that
landscape, challenge modernist understandings of
nationhood. However, the extent to which his work in
Bakardi Slang truly represents a Black elaboration of the
Canadian nation through hip hop is not easily determined.
The potential of the former in accomplishing the latter is
curbed by the role assigned to women in his video. A more

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accurate representation of hip hop in Canada would have
been one in which women were present as active agents, one
in which the insubordination of Kardinal’s message would
have reflected the extent to which it was shaped by both
men and women.

Despite the fact that the majority of Canadian hip hop

artists signed to record labels are men, the voice and
influence of female artists can be heard and felt on a
number of tracks by well known male artists, as well as
within the many community-based spaces of hip hop in
Canada. Kardinal’s insubordinate message was limited by
its failure to reflect this. Instead, the Bakardi Slang
video presented its audience with barely clothed
seductresses in the context of a nightclub. Kardinal and
his crew took center stage in their representation of
Canadian hip hop, while ready-to-please women filled the
backdrop, seductively co-signing the self-absorbed
masculinity of the video’s male star(s). What could have
really been insubordinate, what could have really stretched
and elaborated current understandings of Black Atlantic
diasporic Canadian identity would have been Kardinal’s
insightful use of language as a tool for re-defining and
re-asserting claims to space and identity, expanded by the
creation of space in his song and video for images more
accurately representative of the dialogical dynamics
(across “race”, gender, class and sexuality) that form
contemporary hip hop in Canada. For, as M. NourbeSe Philip
states, “The power and threat of the artist, poet or writer
lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that
speak to the essential being of the people among whom and
for whom the artist creates”.21 Thus, we begin to
understand what Ntozake Shange might have meant when she
wrote:
…she’s half-notes scattered
without rhythm/no tune
sing her sighs
sing the song of her possibilities
sing a righteous gospel
let her be born
let her be born
& handled warmly22

21
M. Nourbese Philip, A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays
(Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1997).
22
Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When
the Rainbow is Enuf (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1977).

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Female artists have been long looking for a language and
spaces within which to express the complexities and
aspirations of their communities and their lives. What a
powerful act it would be if more male artists also worked
to find a language and means by which to image their
communities and themselves in a manner divested from the
smoke screens of patriarchy, masculinity and
heteronormativity.

Lingual Negotiations

What are the words you do not yet have?

what do you need to say? What are the
tyrannies you swallow day by day and
attempt to make your own, until you
will sicken and die of them, still in
silence?23
-Audre Lorde

The masculinized space of a male dominated hip hop

industry is not the only space in which female artists
strategically negotiate their presence. Language, its
masculine structure/over and undertones, is another site of
sticky negotiation for women whose art is based on the
maneuvering and manipulating of words to squeeze out
expressions of their experiences and surroundings. The
prosaic questions posed above by Audre Lorde touch core
elements of interest in the explorations of this essay.
First, what do the various strategies of female artists
discussed in this essay reflect about the numerous
“tyrannies” manifesting in these women’s experiences?
Second, what is this language that contains the ability to
carry and express the complexities experienced by female
artists? As suggested by Patricia Hill Collins in Black
Feminist Thought, language is powerful precisely because it
has the power of creating and making real. When people
tongue (language) and “cheek” (mock) us in negative and
oppressive ways, we must believe them and take control of
the word.

When M. NourbeSe Philip discusses language in A

Genealogy of Resistance, she begins from the point of the
colonial destruction of the link between i-mage and word
for the colonized peoples of the Black Atlantic. This i-
23
Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.
in Flat- Footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives, ed. Patricia Bell-
Scott ( New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998).

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mage according to Philip, represents the literal imaging of
oneself, the insertion of one’s body and experiences into
the word, which then communicates this body, its visions
and experiences to others. For the African in what
(borrowing from Paul Gilroy) I am now referring to as the
Black Atlantic diaspora, the link between i-mage and word
was destroyed by the enforcement of a hostile European
language mobilized specifically (in relation to the
African) for the purposes of colonization, exploitation and
erasure.24 The process of decontextualizing and destroying
i-maging abilities of the African body through the erasure
of African languages, the languages through which the
African body contextualized itself and transcended its
experiences, can be equally applied to the effects of
masculinized languages of domination upon the Black female
body. M. NourbeSe Philip does not explicitly address the
masculinization of language, although her subject is always
a female “she”.

It remains unclear whether Philip, had she examined

the masculinity of language, would have found similarities
in the male centredness of some African as well as European
languages, and therefore been inclined to also reflect the
particular complexities of language as these relate to the
Black female body. Philip suggests that as Cecilia
Bustamente states, “…This is the dilemma of the dominated:
to disappear or change at the price of their lives”.25 Yet
in changing, one does not necessarily die. Elements of
one’s cultural embodiment and consciousness are forced
upon, in Philip’s words, the language of “anguish”, in ways
that can transform the language itself. Philip
acknowledges this when she suggests that although enforcing
a European language of domination upon the African body
constitutes a process of distilling one’s past, the
enforcement of English upon the Black colonial/postcolonial
body is not “the clearest distillation”.26 In the words of
poet Jessica Care Moore,

Don’t be afraid of the poets of the Hip Hop

generation

24
M. Nourbese Philip, A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays,
(Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1997)
25
Cecilia Bustamente, “The Poet and Her Text (Excerpt),” in A
Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays, ed. M. Nourbese Philip,
(Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1997).
26
M. Nourbese Philip, A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays
(Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1997).

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 Internationally invading your intellectual
institutions
Past present and future tense sense…
And if they still don’t understand what
We’re talking about
Tell them their words don’t fit in our
mouths
Exclamation point
!
Period.27

I would argue, as have Walcott (2003) and Stuart Hall

(2000) elsewhere, that the Black tongue, consciousness and
body’s refiguring of English and “White” spaces carries the
power to unsettle, re-formulate and re-define Eurocentric
patriarchal constructions of a national past and present.
How do Black women stretch racist and sexist language to
include and express fundamental parts of themselves? There
is no easy answer and the methods are many. Equally as
important to highlight is the fact that this process of
stretching and re-configuring language does take place in
the efforts of female emcees to negotiate the masculinized
and racialized spaces of language, and reflects the role of
Canadian female hip hop artists in also re-configuring
meanings of (Black) womanhood and Canadian identity.

Where to Now?
Here is the vision of one woman:

…If women ran hip hop

men would be relieved because it’s so
draining
to keep up that front of toughness & power &
control 24/7

…but best of all, if women ran hip hop

we would have the dopest female emcees ever
because all the young women afraid to bust
would unleash their brilliance on the world
cause it’s the time for the reclaiming of
hip hop.28

27
Jessica Care Moore, The Words Don’t Fit in my Mouth (New York: Moore
Black Press, 1997).
28
Aya de Leon, “Vision/If Women ran hip hop” (2002).
http://www.ayadeleon.com/vision.html accessed on April 25, 2003.

New Dawn 1(1) Spring 2006:28-49 43

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The question at heart is not whether men or women should
“run” hip hop. Aya de Leon’s verses however cut to the
center of the politics of a male-dominated hip hop industry
in which female artists must negotiate spaces of lingual
and artistic expression reflective of their standpoints and
perspectives. That being said, it is important to remember
that to speak of female hip hop artists in Canada must mean
addressing the subject of standpoint in a way that
clarifies the different ways in which race, gender, class
and sexuality manifest within the lives of Canadian women.
Clearly, the experiences of Native rappers Girlie Emcee are
not interchangeable with those of Eternia, nor those of
Eternia with those of Motion. Though a number of female
hip hop artists may attest to similar experiences with
regards to the making and sharing of music in a male
dominated industry, this industry is itself (as are the
geographic spaces that accommodate it) a space that is
raced, gendered, classed and sexualized in particular ways
and within the context of and in relation to which, the
subjectivities of individuals do not manifest in a
homogenous manner. At the forefront of a movement to
create and support equitable artistic spaces for women of
varying backgrounds in hip hop must be networks of support
and increased collaboration between female artists and
supportive male artists and members of the hip hop industry
and community. As Eternia indicates, “…females need their
own support networks (crews, producer, engineers, deejays,
etc) in order to get music done and done on time and with
all professional seriousness”.29 Motion seconds the
sentiment when she states, “My vision would be to see and
hear the female energy behind the boards on production in
this thing. There are so many emcees who are stressed by
the fact that they got lyrics, but no beats, and often
they’re put on the last priority list when it comes to
producers giving them the time and right music”.30

A number of female hip hop artists have begun creating

these much needed support networks. Rapper Apademek has
launched a project entitled She5Elements, which attempts to
bring “bring together a collective of diverse female
artists committed to preserving the spirit of hip hop. The
project, while in its initial stages, will be a platform
for artists to develop their individual talents as well as

29
Eternia (Semiramis), email correspondence with author, April 23,
2003.
30
Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), email correspondence with author, May 1,
2003.

New Dawn 1(1) Spring 2006:28-49 44

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collaborate with other female artists”.31 Moreover, as
Motion points out, “PhemPhat opens a forum to expose female
talent…(DJs) L’oquence and SVP lug crates. And rappers
like Mizdemeanor, Eternia and Tara are important because
they represent that straight up, mic-controller mentality
that sometimes gets overlooked in favour of flesh and
flash”.32 Having women as an influential presence in music
production and management (among other areas) has been key
in the visions some female artists have expressed for hip
hop in the future.

While this essay has articulated a number of the more

pressing concerns regarding women’s presence and
participation in hip hop in Canada, there is much work left
to be done. The theoretical contextualization of the
strategic negotiations in which female artists engage
within a male dominated industry and masculinized language,
has drawn significantly on the work of Black feminist
theorists throughout the Black Atlantic diaspora. This
theoretical analysis has attempted to “scratch the surface”
of the complex interconnectedness of race, gender, class
and sexuality as these manifest within the subjectivities
of female artists, whose words and forms of expression
continuously nuance modernist understandings of hip hop as
masculine, of Black Canadian as failed mimicry of Black
American and of “Canadian” as White. This limited
exploration represents only the beginning of its own
inquiries, and has hopefully been clear in its
encouragement of others to critique and augment its
theoretical premises. As the current collaborations and
activities of a number of female hip hop artists indicate,
the beginning steps have been set in motion, it is up to
the invested and concerned among us to support these steps
and write them into the history of the Canadian landscape.

J. Maki Motapanyane is a PhD candidate in the department of Women’s

Studies at York University in Toronto.

31
Emily Maureen Collins, “The birth of a new era: Women join forces to
change the face of hip hop”
<http://www.journalism.ryerson.ca/online/tangents/body/ecollins.htm>
(April 25, 2003).
32
Motion (Wendy Braithwaite), email correspondence with author, May 1,
2003.

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 -“Towards a Methodology for Reading Hip Hop in
Canada.” Keynote address presented at the Researching
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 Email Correspondences

Braithwaite, Wendy. Email correspondence with author, May

1, 2003.

Semiramis, Eternia. Email correspondence with author,

April 23, 2003.

Additional Internet Sites

www.phemphat.com

www.theCyberKrib.com

www.warparty.cjb.net

www.nativehiphop.net

www.hiphopcanada.com

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