‘Being a woman is the only thing considered questionable. But not the whiteness’: Gender and race in normatively white hip hop scenes

Abstract

White rappers have been the ‘other’ in US hip hop culture, and through this minority position, in need of strategies for building authenticity and credibility. In predominantly white hip hop scenes, however, whiteness has often gone unmarked and undertheorized. Meanwhile, women of all backgrounds have frequently been marginalized in the global rap music industry and hip hop research. To address questions of power and identity related to gender, race and whiteness, this article focuses on feminist women and non-binary rappers in the mostly white and male Finnish hip hop scene. How do Finnish women and non-binary artists talk about race, whiteness and gender in relation to their identity and artistry? What kind of comparisons do they make between Finnish and US/global hip hop scenes? In addition to affording attention to non-male rappers who are often neglected in hip hop scholarship (apart from the pioneering work of hip hop feminists), the article’s wider objective is to offer intersectional analysis of whiteness in white-dominated hip hop scenes through critical whiteness studies. The main data for this article are semi-structured interviews with eight rappers. Analysing feminist women and non-binary rappers’ views on gender, race and whiteness in Finnish rap offers an interesting case for an intersectional examination of racial and gender norms in contemporary rap music. Further, the article addresses a research gap in whiteness studies: how is whiteness negotiated locally and what reflections and responses come up when whiteness is addressed directly?

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