Vixen Resistin’

Abstract

In recent years, scholarship on Black womanhood has become more closely connected to postmodern discourses on identity and resistance, following in the footsteps of Audre Lorde's claim that identity and sexuality have emancipatory potential. However, in the post-hip-hop era, feminists and media critics have once again brought up the idea of who controls the image. The purpose of this study is to describe possible sites of self-definition by Black women in music videos while accounting for the cultural industries that reproduce and exploit Black women's sexuality. Using textual analysis and the perspective of a noted music video performer, Melyssa Ford, this study articulates the expanse of ambiguity that lies between the images of Black womanhood that bombard consumers of BET and MTV and the selfconceptualization of the women who play those roles.

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