1.5 pages

Towards a transnational hip-hop feminist liberatory praxis: a
view from the Americas
Tanya Saunders

Department of African American and African Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

The author argues that hip-hop feminism has come to a point where
it needs to take a transnationalist turn if it is going to realize its
potential to be a twenty-first century feminist praxis. The author
highlights how people speaking from a U.S. American context
inadvertently become a global referent for anti-oppression
movements and subjectivities. Unfortunately, by virtue of being in
one of the centers of global power, becoming a global referent of
anti-oppression has the potential to distort and even render
invisible the realities of Black women throughout the Americas.
Through taking a transnational approach to hip-hop feminism,
U.S. based advocates can increase the possibilities for hip-hop
feminism to function as a politic of solidarity and mutual
empowerment for Black women and girls throughout the
Americas. Data are drawn from participant observation and
interviews conducted in Havana, Cuba (1998–2010), and São
Paulo, Brazil (2008–2013).

ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 24 September 2015
Accepted 13 November 2015

KEYWORDS
Transnational; hip-hop
feminism; United States;
Americas; Brazil; Cuba

Hip-hop is a culture that was born in the streets for the streets. Its language, from its roots, has
a mission to transmit direct information through the visual arts, corporeal expression, rhythm,
rhyme, and poetry. The invisibility of women in our society was something that was commonly
accepted for a long time, and in Hip-hop culture it would not be different … those who have
Hip-hop as a style of life, as a flag of struggle, a work that goes beyond the stage, do not stop
and say to themselves: I will continue just for today and try one more time. (Oliveira 2009, pp.
7–9)

This excerpt is from the independent Brazilian publication (see Figure 1), Hip-hop Mulher:
Conquistando espaços (Hip-hop Woman: Conquering Spaces), which was published by in
2009. It is from the introduction of the text entitled, ‘Quem disse que vamos parar?’
(Who says that we’re going to stop?), written by the MC, Janaina ‘Re.Fem.’ Oliveira ‘Re.
Fem.’ is a shortened version of Janaina Oliveira’s stage name, Revolta Feminina (Feminine
Revolt). The Hip-hop Mulher zine was published and distributed by Tiely Queen, founder
of Hip-hop Mulher, a national network of feminist and/or women-centered female artists
in Brazil. This was the first hip-hop feminist anthology to be produced in the country
(see Figure 2).

In 2015, the National Front of Women in Hip-hop (FNMH2), published an anthology
entitled Perifeminas II: Sem Fronteira (Peri-feminisms II: Without Boundaries). It is the
second of the FNMH Perifeminas anthology series. The first of the series is entitled

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

CONTACT Tanya Saunders saunderstanya@gmail.com

SOCIAL IDENTITIES, 2016
VOL. 22, NO. 2, 178–194
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2015.1125592

mailto:saunderstanya@gmail.com

http://www.tandfonline.com

Figure 1. Title cover of the zine, Hip-hop Mulher: Conquistando espaços, an anthology organized by
Tiely Queen, founder of Hip-hop Mulher.

Figure 2. Perifeminas II: Sem Fronteiras Cover.

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 179

Perifeminas: Nossa História – Peri-femine: Our History. The word Perifeminas is a play on the
words ‘periphery,’ a term in Brazil used in reference to the marginal communities and/or
the slums of the nation’s cities, the word ‘feminine,’ and the word ‘meninas,’ which means
young girls or young women. These texts are calls to action for women and girls to con-
tinue representing their realities and to work for women’s empowerment and self-deter-
mination locally and globally.

The Hip-hop Mulher and Perfeminas anthologies focus on various issues concerning
women’s experiences: sexuality, sexual abuse, standards of beauty, Blackness, class
inequality, and how hip-hop itself offers a platform for women artists. Perifeminas II:
Sem Fronteiras, is the first, if not one of the few explicitly transnational, hip-hop feminist,
anthologies, while the zine Hip-hop Mulher: Conquistando espaços is the first hip-hop fem-
inist anthology in Brazil. In Perifeminas II, there are articles from women living on nearly
every continent in the world, including women from several island countries. Transnation-
alism is central to the histories explored in the anthology.

These anthologies are published and read by feminists throughout Latin America and
the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. As someone who circulates in hip-hop feminist spaces
throughout the Americas, I have been impressed by the global reach of the transnational
Black feminist blogospheres, such as those from Cuba and Brazil, and the reach of Black
feminist spoken word and dub poets. I think of feminists like Queen Nzinga Maxwell
(Costa Rica), Black feminist blogger Sandra Abdula-Rameríz (Cuba) or Black transmen
such as Odaraya Mello (Brazilian visual artists) who circulate in hip-hop feminist scenes.
These people assigned female at birth are read by hip-hop feminists and LGBT activists
throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. In the case of Sandra (also known as
Negra Cubana), she is read and quoted by world-renowned cultural figures such as Gil-
berto Gil (Brazilian artist and former Minister of Culture of Brazil).

Whenever I am in the States, I am often struck by their invisibility in U.S. American Black
hip-hop feminist activist discourses. That is, throughout my travels, and for the purposes of
this essay, I have come to one central question: if contemporary U.S. hip-hop feminism is
rooted in U.S. American1 Black feminism – in which hip-hop and Black feminism have
strong internationalist strains, and if it is accepted wisdom that hip-hop is now ‘global,’
then why are the voices and experiences of people reflected in hip-hop feminisms,2 who
are of African descent, particularly people from the Americas with whom we in the U.S.
have profound historical, economic, political and cultural ties, why are these voices
largely absent from contemporary U.S. American hip-hop feminist discourses? That is, in
countries such as Cuba and Brazil, hip-hop feminism, as a form of Black feminism, has
maintained its international/transnational solidarity as an element of its activist praxis.
Hip-hop feminists have done so to the point that they constantly reach out to hip-hop
feminists speaking from U.S. American contexts for inclusion in national and local events,
and in intellectual and artistic production. All the while U.S. hip-hop feminist engagement
with Spanish and Portuguese speaking hip-hop feminists is far more delimited.

In this essay, I argue that hip-hop feminists speaking from U.S. American contexts must
address our contemporary global positionality. We should consider how living in the
United States impacts the revolutionary possibilities (and here I mean revolutionary as a
reference to the ability to affect profound change), of hip-hop feminist activism to function
as a transnational solidarity politic. This solidarity of hip-hop feminism would function as a
transnational politic aimed at the collective empowerment of women, girls, people

180 T. SAUNDERS

assigned female at birth and folks who fall into various trans spectrums. I am especially
interested in thinking though this question as it relates to people who are Black American
(regionally-speaking) non-English speakers who do not live in the United States.

For the purposes of this essay, I am challenging the usage of the word ‘global’ in think-
ing about the relationship between various forms of American (regionally speaking) Black
feminisms and Black identities. U.S. Black American feminism, U.S. Black identity in general,
is Caribbean in origin. Black identity politics in the Americas is Caribbean in origin: as Black-
ness as an organized, transnational political identity had its global manifestation with
Haitian Independence, where Haiti classified itself as a Black republic and a safe haven
for any Black person. Given the profound historical connections that we have here in
the Americas, and the ways in which our various Black identities are constantly in conver-
sation with each other, culturally and even at the state level3 it is important to remember
that all ‘global’ is not the same ‘global.’ Because Black Americanness reflects a hemispheric
experience, and is hemispheric in origin, it is important not to fall into the trap of accepting
the discreteness of national boundaries in the Americas, such that being Black in Cuba or
Brazil is seen as the same as being Black in Croatia. It is important to have these conversa-
tions about global Blacknesses, global hip-hop, but taking this approach in the Americas
forecloses the type of largely regionally-based Black identity politics initiated by the Hai-
tians’ call for Black independence and liberation from racialized colonial violence happen-
ing in the Americas. It is in this context that I center this essay.

In the United States, as we take into consideration this particular historical and political
moment, we must also take into consideration our location. We need to consider the con-
temporary contradiction of being both Black and women, girls and people assigned
female at birth and who fall onto various trans spectrums, while having the privilege of
speaking from a U.S. American context, too. That is, addressing the experience of being
on various peripheries within the United States, but living in a global center of power;
of being aware of how when we claim space to frame and publically articulate our his-
tories, experiences, theories and challenges to social inequalities, that our voices get mag-
nified globally in such a way that we become a global referent for hip-hop feminism. We
also become a global referent for, as Gwendolyn Pough (2007, 2011) has argued, a twenty-
first century feminism. That is, remembering the ways in which demands for redress for
social inequalities within a U.S. American context has the possibility of drowning out
and, worse, rendering invisible the everyday realities and life investments of transnational
hip-hop feminist social movements happening beyond the borders of the U.S., especially
in non-English speaking contexts in this hemisphere. This power relationship is so dynamic
that for hip-hop feminists living in countries like Brazil, when someone working from a U.S.
American context discusses the forms of race/gendered/sexual inequalities faced by Bra-
zilians, it is seen and considered in the larger Brazilian public sphere.

Through an analysis of the two aforementioned Brazilian hip-hop feminist texts and
interview narratives from several Cuban and Brazilian hip-hop feminist artists and activists,
this essay highlights some of the counter-hegemonic discourses, social and political
investments of hip-hop feminists who have emerged as community leaders and as
respected cultural-workers nationally and regionally. They are activists who challenge
the consciousness of their fellow citizens in an attempt to spur fundamental and long-
lasting social change, i.e., a revolution, one in which the very needs of women, girls and
people assigned female at birth and those on various trans spectrums are included in

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 181

the very fabric of what is understood to be profound social change. What connects trans-
national hip-hop feminists (including those in the U.S. American context) is that the spark
that ignited much of their artistic and activist careers began via their encounter with local
and national hip-hop movements and/or arts scenes. To give the reader insight into this
phenomenon, data for this essay were drawn from participant observation and interviews
with state officials, scholars, and producers associated with Cuban Underground Hip-hop
(CUHHM) in Havana, Cuba (1998–2014). The data also includes participant observation and
interviews with hip-hop artists from São Paulo, Brazil (2008–2013). Lastly, a 2011–2012
Fulbright Scholar Award to Brazil also facilitated part of my data collection in Brazil.

Transnational hip-hop feminism: challenging the discreetness of national
boundaries

Women of African descent in this hemisphere share a key contradiction, that of being in
the west but not being ‘western.’ That is, hegemonic notions of western modernity are
rooted in anti-Black racism by which the idea of African inferiority is central to the delinea-
tion of European superiority and modernity. This ideological orientation is not unique, nor
particular to the United States, but has been central to the formation of American and, by
extension, western social structures and political economies. The awareness of the inter-
connectedness of anti-Black racism, heteropatriarchy, western capitalism and state-sanc-
tioned anti-Black violence in the Americas is reflected in a long history of transnational
solidarity projects that crossed geo-political boundaries. This includes a history of Black
U.S. American transnational feminist activism (Higashida, 2011; Young, 2006).

Hip-hop feminism as an explicit feminist praxis emerged in the 1990s, as a term coined
and theorized by Joan Morgan in her book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
(1999). The fact that hip-hop feminism came forth with the emergence of hip-hop
studies in the 1990s, should not be a surprise. Black women have always been a part of,
and played a foundational role at that, in Black social movements in this hemisphere.
Black intellectuals such as Joan Morgan wrote that the fallout from the 1960s had an
impact on Black youth who grew up during this period; an effect that is intertwined
with the period’s form of deindustrialization linked to the stealth pace of the 1970s’ and
1980s’ waves of globalization. Morgan (1999) writes:

I am down, however, for a feminism that demands we assume responsibility for our lives. In my
quest to find a functional feminism for myself and my sistas – one that seeks empowerment
on spiritual, material, physical, and emotional levels … We need a voice like our music – one
that samples and layers many voices, inject its sensibilities into the old and flips it into something
new, provocative, and powerful. And one whose occasional hypocrisy, contradictions, and trite-
ness guarantee us at least a few trips to the terror-dome, forcing us to finally confront what
we’d all rather hide from. [my emphasis added] (pp. 61–62)

This echoes the words of Re.Fem. which opened this text. Re.Fem. has not read When
Chickenheads Come Home to Roost as she does not speak English. But I cannot help but
wonder what a conversation between Joan Morgan and Re.Fem. would be like, what it
would sound like. I know for myself it would be enlightening and profound. What I do
want to note here is that Re.Fem. is a part of several national hip-hop feminist organiz-
ations that work to gather the resources necessary to invite hip-hop feminists, artists

182 T. SAUNDERS

and intellectuals from the United States to Brazil. While in Brazil, visitors give public work-
shops and participate in hip-hop feminist gatherings where Brazilian women, girls, gender
queer and trans folks have an opportunity to ask questions about the artists’ work and
their philosophy. In these contexts where people do not speak English, they make
usage of various online translation apps, seek out people who know a little English, to
try to get a sense of what the English speaking visitor’s discourse is, so that they can
really engage with visitors during events.

Brazilian hip-hop feminists use these opportunities to share and rethink their truths
through an exchange with hip-hop feminists, particularly Black hip-hop feminists, from
various international contexts throughout the Americas and the world. These moments
allow for the building of transnational solidarity and intellectual exchange in an effort
to continuously rethink the dynamism of race/gender/sexual oppressions. Additionally,
as is the case in Brazil, many of these women do not have access to Brazilian universities
because of culturally entrenched racism. For example, one of my Brazilian doctoral stu-
dents from the Federal University of Bahia, who is an Indigenous Brazilian hip-hop femin-
ist, commented the following about her experience of going to Howard University’s
medical school, ‘You can imagine what it was like going to Howard University’s medical
school and seeing so many Black people, so many Black medical students. There are
more Black students in that school than there are Black doctors in the entire country of
Brazil – though things may be a little better now because we have the arrival of the
Cuban doctors, and you know how they are treated by Brazilians. But if the situation is
so bad for Black doctors, imagine gender too.’ Here she was referring to the ways in
which Cuban doctors have been represented in Brazilian local media as gorillas, referen-
cing Cuban doctors’ Blackness. This comment also resonated with me as I remembered
an encounter with Fab Five Freddy1 in São Paulo. I asked him why he was no longer
going to Cuba to work with the hip-hop movement there. His response, Cuba has a
struggle, but it will be ok. He was not as worried about Cuba because Cuba at least has
Black doctors and lawyers.

If Black women have access to national university systems in Cuba and Brazil, scholars
such as bell hooks are seen as a part of a radical fringe of pseudo-intellectualism, and stu-
dents have an exceptionally difficult time graduating if they engage the work of national
or international Black feminist scholars. It is in this way that Cuban and Brazilian Black fem-
inism is firmly rooted outside the academies and within the local communities. Given this
context, it makes sense that hip-hop feminist activism has such a national and local pres-
ence in Brazil. In Cuba, it has served a formative role in the emergence of contemporary
Black Cuban feminism and Black Cuban queer activism.

The political, historical (marked by generation), economic and cultural moment in
which Morgan (1999) argues hip-hop feminism is rooted, has also been echoed, taken
up and generalized in Kitwana (2002) and Chang (2005) description of the ‘Hip-hop gen-
eration.’ Kitwana writes the following about the hip-hop generation:

we are the first generation to come of age in an America that has ended legal racial segre-
gation. We are the first generation of African Americans to enjoy the fruits of the civil rights
and Black power movements … At the same time, we’ve witnessed the steady erosion of
the euphoria of racial integration and in some cases civil rights gains themselves … (2003,
pp. 147–49)

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 183

Chang, in drawing from Kitwana in his framing of the history of the hip-hop generation,
writes, ‘His [Kitwana’s] point was simple: a community cannot have a useful discussion
about racial progress without first taking account of the facts of change … My own
feeling is that the idea of the hip-hop Generation brings together time and race, place
and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity’ (Chang, 2005, p. 2) Morgan, Chang and
Kitwana together highlight a cultural turn in youth activism, particularly Black and racia-
lized youth activism, in which culture became a site of political contestation centered
around taking stock of the changes that have happened since an important historical
moment in U.S. American social movements (the 1960s movements), in which Black U.S.
Americans became more integrated into U.S. society and economy, while facing limit-
ations and setbacks that would prevent full participation into U.S. American life as citizens.
Taking hip-hop as a Black public sphere, Black women have always been a part of Black
social movements and the Black public sphere. In the case of feminism, the emergence
of hip-hop feminism hailed the emergence of the hip-hop generation, itself a marker of
a new historical moment.

In taking more of a diasporic approach to understanding hip-hop feminism, Durham,
Cooper, and Morris (2013) define hip-hop feminism as: ‘[A] generationally specific articu-
lation of feminist consciousness, epistemology, and politics rooted in the pioneering work
of multiple generations of Black feminists based in the United States and elsewhere in the
Diaspora but focused on questions and issues that grow out of the aesthetic and political
prerogatives of Hip-hop culture’ (2013, p. 722). Through decentering ourselves, and taking
into consideration our location within larger matrices of power, we have the possibility of
strengthening and reinforcing hip-hop feminism as a twenty-first century feminist move-
ment, and bringing the voices of the larger diaspora, whose home is actually in Latin
America and the Caribbean, into conversations in the United States. Though the present
work makes a particular argument about U.S. hip-hop feminists and their connections
to hip-hop feminist issues in the Americas, this perspective is in agreement with scholars
such as Isoke (2013, p. 317) who discuss the importance of ‘translocal subjectivities in
framing analyses of global black women’s political expression … how specific locales
relate to one another and resonate with one another as a form of cultural border crossing
and bridge-building.’

Like Black feminists, non-normative and queer Black subjects have always been part of
the Black public sphere. Scholars such as Adreanna Clay have brought visibility to LGBT
and queer populations who are also a part of the hip-hop generation. Her article ‘“Like
an Old Soul Record” Black Feminism, Queer Sexuality, and the Hip-hop Generation,’
argues that Me’Shell Ndegochello marks an important turn in Black feminism and reflects
the complexities and contradictions of hip-hop feminism (Clay, 2008, p. 53).

At the time of the publication of Clay’s article, discussions of Black queer and Black
lesbian sexuality were not common in hip-hop studies literature, and feminist literature
still considered hip-hop to be antithetical to feminism. For queer women of color raised
after the canonization of Black feminist theory, and who grew up as a part of the hip-
hop generation, Me’Shell Ndegochello’s presence in national media was groundbreaking:
she was visibility. In continuing these points, Clay writes in her book The Hip-hop Nation
Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics (2012) that one of the other fail-
ures, or setbacks, after the 1960s movements was that ‘the incongruity of the gains in

184 T. SAUNDERS

civil liberties accompanied by continued racism, sexism and heterosexism constitutes a
cognitive and communal crisis for youth’ (Clay, 2012, p. 5).

Contemporary social movements among post-1960s generations tend to take more
diffuse, non-traditional forms and are often unrecognized as social movements (Clay,
2012). The fact that the form in which contemporary activism is undertaken is not recog-
nized as social movement underscores another key point I would like to make: arts-based
social movements are not often understood to be social movements. When we also take
into consideration how U.S. hip-hop feminism, as an arts-based social movement, takes for
granted the discreteness of national borders, one in which the separation of cultural and
geopolitical difference is marked by linguistic difference; the result is the near invisibility,
within a U.S. American context, of transnational hip-hop feminist movements, and I mean
movements, occurring in the Americas. In this context, hip-hop feminists speaking from a
U.S. American context have played formative roles, but have also become a global refer-
ent. The limited critical engagement in the U.S. of the issues being addressed by non-
English speaking hip-hop feminists, not living within U.S. borders, limits recognition of
how what happens in the U.S. is firmly interconnected with transnational systems of
power that are foundational to the Americas, and by extension to the west. Osumare
(2008) calls this ‘connective marginalities,’ and in the hemispheric approach I am taking
in this essay, I would narrow Osumare’s term to ‘American connective marginalities.’

Osumare argues that hip-hop reflects structures of feeling, and as such, one of the
things that link hip-hop across national boundaries are ‘connective marginalities’; she
writes, ‘These are hip-hop perceived linkages across agency in the face of lingering
social inequalities in the postcolonial era. Connective marginalities, I argue, are four
major resonances, which unify hip-hop culture across a wide span of geographic land-
scapes: culture, class, historical oppression, and youth rebellion’ (Osumare, 2008, p. 15).

Rendering visible the connective marginalities in hemispheric hip-hop
feminisms

[There] is a feminist history on this Island, even during the Revolution. One that is not only the
FMC [Federation of Cuban Women]. And most of those women are Black, and some of them
are lesbians. You know, people outside of Cuba think that there is nothing here, that we have
no ideas here. That we have no consciousness. We want to change that.
– Norma Gulliard a prominent Cuban Black lesbian feminist activist, psychologist and mentor
to Cuban Underground hip-hop feminists. (Personal Communication, Havana, Cuba, 2014)

There are a lot of scholars who have critiqued the various discourses that argue that Black
feminist and Black queer agency is virtually an impossibility in the Global South. These
hegemonic discourses in academic literature and popular media racialize the Global
South as non-western (Latin America and the Caribbean are western), a dangerous, homo-
phobic, misogynistic and impoverished space or place. The justifications for this perspec-
tive are based on assumed facts about specific countries, which prevent any nuanced
engagement of what life is like for racialized, gendered, non-normative and queer subjects
in various local and national contexts. In this and the next two sections, I share some
thoughts in an effort to bring visibility to American connective marginalities, and draw
some attention to the political investments of transnational hip-hop feminists through
reflections on some of the social issues addressed by hip-hop feminists in Cuba and

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 185

Brazil. I strive to illuminate ways in which U.S. hip-hop feminism must be critical of the
larger geopolitical, and by extension commonplace, or accepted, everyday knowledge
concerning the ‘rest of the diaspora,’ such as Cuba and Brazil.

In the case of Cuba, it is argued that Cuba is (versus has) an undemocratic totalitarian
state where freedom of speech is repressed. The insidious part of this narrative is this
assumption: in this space – which is an entire country – it is assumed that no one has
the ability to think critically or think independently of Fidel Castro, much less organize
and critique anything in society in an effort to push for social change. In much of the aca-
demic scholarship on Cuba from the 1970s to the present, there is an assumed pause or
state imposed silence on feminist activism, much less any activism in Cuba. In the state’s
near total restriction of what is considered to be ‘activism,’ such as public protests directed
at state policy, the assumption has been that there is no political activism occurring in
Cuba, much less feminist or hip-hop feminist activism. This is an example of a perspective
where arts-based politicized activism is not seen as political. The activism occurring within
Cuba’s cultural sphere is not seen, much less considered. Not only did feminist activism
continue within Cuba, during the 1990s period, hip-hop feminism emerged and marked
a shift in public feminist organizing that provided an important rupture in which a contem-
porary, self-articulated Black Cuban feminism, Black lesbian and Black queer feminism has
emerged.

While Krudxs CUBENSI (Havana/Austin, TX) have done amazing work in bringing atten-
tion to Cuban hip-hop feminist and queer activism in the United States, they were only
able to do so after literally risking their lives, numerous times, in order to come to the
U.S in order to make usage of the U.S.’ global reach to bring some visibility to people
who are not even conceived of as even existing (see Saunders, 2015). Still, in the U.S.
Krudxs CUBENSI are seen as a novelty of sorts. What is lost is that they are a part of an
impressive, extremely active and vibrant hip-hop feminist movement in Cuba, and its
(Cuban) diaspora. They were part of a hip-hop movement, which provided a platform
from which they began their queer hip-hop feminist activism in the 1990s, activism that
played a formative role in the emergence of Cuban underground hip-hop feminism.

In the case of Brazil, Brazil is assumed to be a racial democracy where racial lines are
blurred to the extent that there are no races, so there is no racism. Also somehow it is
accepted that Brazil is a Black nation, but what does that even mean? Before one even
arrives in these countries from the U.S., people are already likely to believe that a Black
hip-hop feminist, for example, is a questionable if not an impossible subject position to
begin with, much less there being any large nationally active organizations working for
change (as in the case of Brazil).

Being conscious of the global reach and influence that is a result of being involuntary
global referents for marginalized subjects living in various global contexts, U.S. hip-hop
feminists must contend with a contradiction and power relationship. This is not only an
issue for U.S. American Black hip-hop feminists, but is an issue for Latinx4 hip-hop feminists
as well. This is especially so as Latinidad has its own complicated relationship with racial
inequality and anti-Black racism – that is the ways in which light-skinned Latinxs
become a U.S. American referent for Latinx oppression. Meanwhile, given the way in
which U.S. American racial politics function, a Blacktinx (Black Latinx) is a discursive
impossibility. This is also very important to consider because Black hip-hop feminism
and Latinx hip-hop feminism are both important references for hip-hop feminists in the

186 T. SAUNDERS

Americas, and are very much in conversation with each other. It is important to think about
these connections if we are to understand the intersectional experience of Blacktinxs.

Discourses concerning racialization in the U.S. context affect who gets classified as
Latinx and who represents ‘international’ or ‘global’ voices. That is, an important debate
occurring within U.S. Latinx studies is how the internal racial hierarchies within U.S. Amer-
ican communities are also rendered invisible by larger U.S. American discourses concern-
ing Latinidad, and how Latinxs conceptualize Latinidad. Scholars such as Rivera (2003) and
Negrón-Muntaner (2008) have argued, Blacktinxs and/or the visible corporeality of Black-
ness among Latinxs causes anxiety in a context where Blackness and Latinxness are under-
stood as separate racial categories. This is compounded by the anti-Black racism that is
also foundational to social structures in Hispano-Lusophone countries where upon the
arrival in the U.S., immigrants from Hispano-Lusophone countries are classified and read
as Latinx, unless they look ‘Black.’ The result is a light-skinned bias in terms of who
speaks, a light-skinned bias that results in the invisibility of Black Latinxs, and the continu-
ation of anti-Black racism within Latinx communities. The U.S. American racial category
Latinx is associated with specific non-English languages (Spanish and Portuguese), and
this affects the visibility of Black hip-hop feminists throughout the region as they are
living in a region understood as Latinx, in a U.S. American context. This can be conceptually
confusing in theorizing Black hip-hop feminists’ diasporic connections from a U.S. context.
That is taking into consideration linguistic U.S. American racial and national boundaries,
our knowledge of American nations (which is limited by larger U.S. American geopolitical
interests), both limits our ability to decenter U.S. American hip-hop feminism in such a way
that we are unable to be in conversation with the massive, nation-wide explicitly hip-hop
feminist organizations and social movements happening in Brazil, for example.

So what does this mean for a hemispheric approach to hip-hop feminism? The case of
Claudia Ferreira da Silva in Rio de Janeiro is instructive. She was a bystander killed in broad
daylight in a shootout involving the police in her neighborhood. As a caveat here, it is a
norm for Brazilian police to invade a favela (a slum), and indiscriminately shoot, killing
scores of people. It is also common, in urban cities, for police officers to send out a
warning that they are going to drive around the city at night to ‘clean it up.’ These are
notices to assumed ‘law abiding citizens’ to stay at home. Keep in mind many law
abiding citizens do not hear the warning. This was the case on Thursday 13 August
2015, when a group of men sent out a message warning of this cleansing. I listened to
the message. Let me just say, horrifying does not describe the sound of the man’s voice
who was articulating and justifying the need to kill; to murder for one night. I would
like to repeat this. In São Paulo, off duty vigilantly policemen sent out a message that
people should stay home because they were going to drive around and murder people
in poor, predominantly Black communities. And they did it. That night, off-duty São
Paulo police did drive-bys murdering Black people, largely Black youth, that they believed
were criminals. It is in this context that I would like to return to the case of Claudia Ferreira.

After Claudia Ferreira was shot by police, her bloodied body was thrown in the back of
an SUV that was supposedly going to drive her to the hospital. The police did not close the
trunk of the SUV completely, her bloodied body fell out, and she was dragged along a busy
city street in Rio de Janeiro for about one thousand feet, on a hot afternoon, before the
police ‘realized what had happened.’ These types of realities faced by Black Brazilians
are the basis for massive marches such as the three million-strong Black Women’s

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 187

March and the March Against the Black Genocide, all of which are organized by Brazil’s
Black social movements, which include many of Brazil’s national hip-hop feminist organ-
izations. ‘For us the U.S. is so impressive,’ Brazilian friends and colleagues say, ‘in the U.S.
Black lives have value. Black people have names.’

During this moment, where the BlackLivesMatter movement has garnered national and
international attention, I have received worried messages from friends from all over the
world. They are wondering how I could survive in such a racist country. In those
moments I feel a sense of frustration because I cannot imagine, even in the present
moment, thousands of police officers running into Black cities and neighborhoods
across the country and indiscriminately murdering dozens or hundreds of Black people,
on a Sunday afternoon or evening, or any other random day, which is a common occur-
rence in cities across Brazil, and in several American countries like Colombia.

While in Brazil, I have met numerous talented Black U.S. American feminist artists, many
of whom are interviewed on Brazilian TV, independent web shows; they are given a plat-
form to speak (in English) to hundreds of people at hip-hop feminists events, their
thoughts and ideas discussed on blogs. This is exceptionally commonplace in Brazil, but
not nearly as common within the United States. This is not to take a moment to
compare oppressions, but a moment to do what Brazilian, Cuban, Colombian, Costa
Rican and other hip-hop feminists do throughout the Americas, and that is to stop and
think about American connective marginalities from a hip-hop feminist perspective. In
this case, one example of connective marginalities is that of public spectacle of Black suf-
fering, mutilation gun violence, police and other forms of state violence. This is very much
a common feature of American life – and very much targeted at Black women.

The global hyper-awareness of the way in which the U.S. capitalist imperialist state is
murdering Black people within its borders is troubling for me in the face of the need
for international attention to also highlight the genocidal tendencies of the Brazilian
state, for example. I wonder, can there be a U.S. hip-hop feminism that explicitly and
specifically de-centers the linguistic, economic, militaristic and political hegemony of
the United States? And I do not mean at various moments mentioning someone who is
out there in the ‘diaspora.’ Can U.S. based hip-hop feminists incorporate, give space to,
a twenty-first century transnational hip-hop feminist praxis that challenges the discreet-
ness of geo-political and linguistic boundaries? I think the answer is yes, because hip-
hop feminists in the geo-political peripheries are already doing it.

Brazilian and Cuban hip-hop feminist praxis

Brazil’s Geledés: The Black Woman Institute was created on 30 April 1988. It is a political
organization of Black women which has as its institutional mission the struggle against
racism and sexism, the validation and empowerment of Black women in particular and
the Black community in general. The organization was started by women who were a
part of Brazil’s clandestine Black social movements during the Brazilian dictatorship,
during which Black feminists were also organizing underground. They write, ‘Geledés
is originally a type of feminine secret society of a religious nature found in the traditional
Yoruba societies. It expresses the feminine power over the land, fertility, procreation and
the community’s well-being’ (see http://www.geledes.org.br/the-geledes-black-woman-
institute/). The name is also linked to a version of story I learned within Yoruba religious

188 T. SAUNDERS

The Geledés Black Woman Institute

The Geledés Black Woman Institute

traditions. The ODU, known as a literary corpus encompassing existence, known as the
word of God or known as a deity, is understood as being female or having been con-
trolled by women. Through a trick, men took control of the ODU from women. The
woman did not like that and created the secret organization and called themselves
Gelede (a group of women warriors, who were later called witches) who worked to chal-
lenge male control of the word of God, or the knowledge of all creation (Madan, 2010,
p. 27). The idea of powerful Black women, in which the foundation of existence is gen-
dered female, and who held their own in the face of men’s tricks, is something that is a
part of the African syncretic religious traditions in the Americas. Why is this important? In
Brazil, the struggle against anti-Black racism is political, economic and profoundly cul-
tural. Candomblé, Vodún, Umbanda and other African syncretic religious traditions
which are largely controlled by women, are under attack. Conservative Christian evange-
licals are now continuing a longer colonial history of trying to eliminate these largely
women-controlled religious traditions, which are seen as primitive and barbaric – as
Black or African.

Seeing the potential in hip-hop, particularly in terms of its intervention into culture, into
knowledge, and seeing that many youth were moved to think about their everyday reali-
ties through the art form, Geledés began to organize Black feminist workshops and events
for the women in Brazil’s hip-hop scenes. It is in this way that Brazilian hip-hop feminism is
both connected to the everyday realities of Brazil’s hip-hop generation, and very much in
conversation with Brazil’s longer history of Black feminism.

The activism of Brazilian hip-hop feminists is centered around empowering women
artists, cultural empowerment, gender and sexual rights, and the right of Black people
to live. Take for example the graffiti images included in the Perifeminas II: Sem Fronteiras
hip-hop feminist anthology. The bio of the graffiti artist reads: ‘She began to do graffiti
in 2007. Inspired by the feminist movement, she began to paint feminine faces, with
the goal of inspiring women to have the desire to fight for their own economic, political,
cultural and religious autonomy’ (Frente Nacional de Mulheres no Hip-hop, 2014, p. 41)
(see Figure 3). The image that the graffiti artist painted is powerful. It is a painting of Ana-
stacia, known as ‘Slave Anastacia,’ who is a popular Brazilian saint. The story is that she was
horribly treated, tortured and mutilated by her owners. Besides being known for her
healing powers, she was known for having resisted rape by her owners, and/or was
accused of helping enslaved people to escape. As a result, she was placed in the
muzzle-like iron mask that prevented her from speaking. She eventually died from her
trauma. She has become a popular saint that people go to for healing. The graffiti in
the book shows her with the muzzle falling from her face, in front of a microphone
with the Brazilian flag behind her – not only is she no longer prohibited from speaking,
she is also speaking from the context of Brazil. The caption in the picture says, ‘And still
we can change [mudar in yellow] our history’ aka ‘We can control our own destiny’.

Brazilian hip-hop feminists are very much involved in their local communities. Brazilian
artist, Lú Afrobreak, entered the hip-hop scene as a break-dancer in 2003. Lú Afrobreak was
struck by the absence of women in the movement, particularly in the area of breakdan-
cing, and decided which area of hip-hop she would make her contribution: becoming a
b-girl. Lú, like many hip-hop feminists throughout the hemisphere, identifies as an activist.
She also identifies as a militant within hip-hop, which in a Cuban context translates into
being ‘super underground.’ She is understood as an independent artist who is so critical

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 189

of capitalism that she flirts with being explicitly anti-capitalist. For Lú, her art is a vehicle for
her activism. For her, hip-hop is revolution. It is consciousness. And anyone who believes
that there should be or could be a relationship between the market – specifically the music
industry – and hip-hop is someone who, according to Lú, has become commercialized;
they cease to be relevant to the grassroots, underground, activist vision of hip-hop,
even if they are commercial artists with a socially conscious message (a perspective that
is quite common in hip-hop in Brazil and in much of the world).

In an April 2013 interview with the author, Lú discussed her views on hip-hop and acti-
vism. For artivists (artists who are activists) like Lú, participating in the hip-hop community
as artivists or as artists is a way to include those excluded from Brazil’s economic ‘success’

Figure 3. From Perifeminas II: Sem Fronteiras.

190 T. SAUNDERS

into larger society. The failure to include many Afro-descendant people in the symbolic
and material success story of Brazil’s BRIC5 economy causes them to feel further margin-
alized and disenfranchised, as they are not able to participate in the country’s new consu-
mer society. Through having a space for cultural engagement and human expression,
people create possibilities for critical self-awareness by valuing their experiences,
culture, and history. It is difficult to value oneself when one’s experiences, realities, and his-
tories are not represented in hegemonic national culture, but instead rendered invisible, of
little value, criminal, and non-normative, which results in a feeling of emotional and social
alienation and, when compounded by economic disenfranchisement, leads to a general
sense of malaise and self-destruction.

Lú Afrobreak is from Diadema, a city just outside São Paulo known for its dangerous
neighborhoods. She is known for her work as a hip-hop activist and for all she has done
to get kids off the streets. Thus, in addition to trying to improve the situation of both
her community and Black people, she also runs workshops and programs to create
space for the training and support of b-girls. However, the intervention that women arti-
vists are making within their respective hip-hop movements are fraught with challenges,
to say the least. For example, one night, I sat and chatted with Lú about thirty minutes
before a hip-hop event. I saw her across the dance floor, sitting at the bar with her
partner, crying. I walked over to them and asked what was wrong.

Lú stated that she was explaining to her partner that one of the major drug dealers was
angry with her and said if she returned home that night, he would kill her. He was upset
because another kid who sold drugs for him started participating in Lú’s workshops. The
night before, this young man had stayed with Lú rather than going on his shift. He didn’t
want to sell drugs anymore. The following day, Lú sent word to the dealer that she
wanted to talk; she wanted to explain that she was helping this kid get out of the business.
Lú told me that this was her reality, and that sometimes people want to kill you. But she was
adamant that, through hip-hop, we could help each other; we could help Black people, and
especially Black kids, find another life. ‘We Black people go through a lot.’ She said looking at
me, ‘But we have to keep working, we will survive.’ She gave me a hug. She was determined
to stay in her neighborhood, even if sometimes people wanted to kill her. But she also knew
she was respected for her work, and the dealer needed some time to get over his anger.

These kinds of stories, stories pointing to the transformative and socially empowering
nature of hip-hop, as a way out for poor and marginalized children often living in violent
communities, is a common narrative concerning hip-hop artists in Cuba, Brazil, and
throughout the Americas. In fact, it is the underlying theme/assumption of Re.Fem.’s
comment in the initial Hip-hop Mulher excerpt. Central to the importance of hip-hop,
including hip-hop feminism in Hispano-Lusophone countries, is the experience of the awa-
kening. The shift is in the consciousness stimulated by participating in socially conscious
hip-hop communities and arts collectives that lead artists to organize and act in order to
improve their lives and their communities. The signature awakening moment for some
Afro-descendant people is typically the development of a Black and a feminist conscious-
ness. People are then able to articulate and link various power dynamics linked to a
malaise that was a part of their daily life. For Lú, it was the shift from calling herself
‘morena,’ which is what one calls oneself so as to not identify as Black in Brazil, to
calling herself ‘negra’ (Black). In Cuba, hip-hop feminists face similar issues and some differ-
ent realities.

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 191

Cuban MC La Fina says the following in a 2014 interview:

Until one day I decided that the next song would be Paradise Offended [Paraíso Ofendido]
because I started [pauses] when I had a personal problem. A man raped me [in a park],
dragged me from L and 17 to L and 21. He stepped on me, spit on me, grabbed my neck,
yet still I have a little bit of a problem here in this eye. And I called the police but I did not
charge him … I could not say anything to my mom and if my brother found out … he is
violent … it was a problem, it was a lot of suffering for me and my mom …

One of the central interventions that hip-hop feminists make is to take stock of the current
moment. There are many ‘posts’ that the hip-hop generation in the Americas have to face
(e.g. post-socialism, post-dictatorship, post-civil rights), and this is a point of convergence
which highlights why hip-hop has become an important referent and tool for them. In
Cuba, for example, was the emergence of the Special Period that marked the beginning
of a post-socialist Cuba. The 1990s was a particularly traumatic experience for Cubans, par-
ticularly Black Cubans. The government’s social programs, largely funded by its strategic
relationship with the Soviet Union, continued showing some improvement through the
1980s. Despite the more repressive movements of the early years, by the 1980s, there
seemed to be changes at the state level and more of an opening that was a result of
the activism of Cuba’s politicized artists and intellectuals. During this decade, Cuban
society had come to a point where there was largely no need for money.

The economic basis of racism had largely eroded, but the state left the cultural norms
associated with racism unaddressed. In the case of women, the material and economic
basis of women’s oppression had been addressed, but the cultural norms associated
with sexism went unchecked. Thus when the state was forced to liberalize its economy
to deal with the 1990s post-soviet economic crisis, material inequality returned. Instead
of continuing to move forward, Cubans experienced major setbacks. Material-based
racial inequality re-emerged, and many of the gains women made were largely eroded.
Take rape, for example. During much of the Revolutionary period a woman could walk
home at night and not worry about being attacked and raped in public – no matter
how late. The violence that women faced in the home was a problem the state failed to
address, and there are no domestic violence help lines or shelters in Cuba.

The rape that La Fina experienced highlights important shifts in Cuban society, includ-
ing the possibilities available to Black women, whose success story during the Soviet
period was hailed as an example of how socialism could be used to overcome the most
stark forms of social marginalization associated with capitalism – the oppression of
Black women. This guarantee no longer exists, and Black women are once again forced
to reconcile the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class – on a Caribbean
Island whose economy has returned to a dependence on tourism, and soon, sugar and
free-trade work zones. As a side note, free-trade work zones are known for their mistreat-
ment of women workers; the new free-trade zones in Cuba are being built and run by Bra-
zilian companies. Here I would like to note that again, it is important to undertake a
transnational hip-hop feminist politic as Black women’s oppression is still very much
tied to global capitalist moves, in which states oftentimes collude with each other.

In Fina’s narrative, she says that she wrote ‘Paradise Offended’ ‘when I had a personal
problem, a man raped me, dragged me from L and 17 to L and 21.’ First she describes this
very public assault as a ‘personal problem.’ I say this was a very public assault, because the

192 T. SAUNDERS

attacker raped her, beat her and dragged her three city blocks on a very busy city street in
a popular Havana neighborhood. The fact that Fina’s assault happened in such a public
context, clearly indicates that people were around and did not stop the attack. Bystanders
saw it as a ‘personal problem too.’ In addition to that, she did not feel comfortable in
talking to the police because she was afraid of what her brother would do. In the state-
ment about her brother, there is an important subtext, that there are also very little
resources, outside of the family, now available to Fina and Cuban women generally to
feel empowered or even protected. This in a context where the state is no longer even
able to fulfill the promises of its revolution, that of women’s autonomy and empowerment,
which included specific types of promises made to Black women about Black women’s lib-
eration – that is, in another moment, Fina’s attacker would have faced imprisonment or
some form of state sanction, regardless of whether she pressed charges. Her brother’s
anger partially was about the fact that someone could attack his sister, in public, and
walk away. Fina’s diary was not enough, she said, she felt she had to write a song
about it and publicly humiliate the attacker. This was one way for her to deal with the issue.

Cuban hip-hop feminism emerged during an important national rupture. It was a voice
for a new generation of post-Soviet, post-Cuban socialist women and girls, who worked to
make sense of their new context. The experience of a generational shift, linked to shifts in
national state policy and the advancement of global capitalism, is something that Cuban
artists also share with their U.S. American peers.

Conclusion

The goal of last few sections of this essay was to try to create an opening in which we, in
the United States, can pause and take into consideration the connective marginalities that
we share with Afro-descendent people in non-English speaking contexts in the Americas.
At the same time I wanted to bring visibility to some of the issues that non-English speak-
ing hip-hop feminists are addressing in their national and local contexts. These sections
were short, but I hope convincing enough to open the door to longer discussions and
thoughts about creative ways we can increase transnational hip-hop feminist engagement
in meaningful ways for all participants regardless of language or geographical location.
That is, working to cultivate conversations and transnational solidarity networks in
which we choose to consciously decenter ourselves, and actively resist our inadvertent
positioning, as global referents. We can do this by seeking out hip-hop feminists who
are already in conversation with hip-hop feminists speaking from a U.S. American
context, and critically engage their work. Including non-English speaking hip-hop femin-
ists into U.S. American national discussions is crucial in bringing visibility to hip-hop fem-
inists working in the region, thereby strengthening the internationalist element of hip-hop
feminism as a twenty-first century feminist praxis that way too many U.S. American hip-
hop feminists would like it to be.

Note

1. Fred Brathwaite, also known as Fab 5 Freddy is a U.S. American visual artist, filmmaker, producer
and central figure that was involved in the emergence of U.S. American hip hop within New York’s
experimental arts scenes. During the 1990s he was known for hosting Yo! MTV Raps, one of the
first TV shows dedicated to showcasing emerging hip-hop artists.

SOCIAL IDENTITIES 193

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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• Abstract
• Transnational hip-hop feminism: challenging the discreetness of national boundaries
• Rendering visible the connective marginalities in hemispheric hip-hop feminisms

Brazilian and Cuban hip-hop feminist praxis
Conclusion
Note
Disclosure statement
References