Reflection Paper

Due to it‘s a reflection paper, please use the article and the link I gave you.

Here is the link

https://aeon.co/ideas/gender-is-dead-long-live-gender-just-what-is-performativity

REFLECTION PAPER (50 points) Name: Click here to enter text.

HUM / NSCI / SSCI 325 ID: Click here to enter text.

Date: Click here to enter text.

1. Describe the most important thing(s) you learned or re-learned in this class (give a detailed summary and cite specific content from class/readings) about gender and gender-related topics. Make sure to describe why this content was meaningful to you. (Use the remainder of this page to answer this question.)

Click here to enter text.

2. What content surprised you most? (Use about half of this page to answer this question.)

Click here to enter text.

3. What will you do differently, now that you know …? (Use about half this page to answer.)

Click here to enter text.

A small girl and her mother passed a statue depicting a European man who had bare- handedly subdued a ferocious lion.The little girl stopped, looked puzzled and asked, “Mama, something’s wrong with that statue. Everybody knows that a man can’t whip a lion.” “But darling,” her mother replied, “you must remember that the man made the statue.” —As told by Katie G. Cannon

As critical social theory, U.S. Black feminist thought reflects the interests and standpoint of its creators. Tracing the origin and diffusion of Black feminist thought or any comparable body of spe- cialized knowledge reveals its affinity to the power of the group that created it (Mannheim 1936). Because elite White men control Western structures of knowledge validation, their interests pervade the themes, paradigms, and epis- temologies of traditional scholarship.As a result, U.S. Black women’s experiences as well as those of women of African descent transnationally have been routinely distorted within or excluded from what counts as knowledge.

U.S. Black feminist thought as specialized thought reflects the distinctive themes of African-American women’s experiences. Black feminist thought’s core themes of work, family, sexual politics, motherhood, and political activism rely on paradigms that emphasize the importance of intersecting oppressions in shaping the U.S. matrix of domination. But expressing these themes and paradigms has not been easy because Black women have had to struggle against White male interpretations of the world.

In this context, Black feminist thought can best be viewed as subjugated knowledge. Traditionally, the suppression of Black women’s ideas within White- male-controlled social institutions led African-American women to use music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for

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BLACK FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY

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constructing a Black feminist consciousness. More recently, higher education and the news media have emerged as increasingly important sites for Black feminist intellectual activity.Within these new social locations, Black feminist thought has often become highly visible, yet curiously, despite this visibility, it has become differently subjugated (Collins 1998a, 32–43).

Investigating the subjugated knowledge of subordinate groups—in this case a Black women’s standpoint and Black feminist thought—requires more ingenu- ity than that needed to examine the standpoints and thought of dominant groups. I found my training as a social scientist inadequate to the task of study- ing the subjugated knowledge of a Black women’s standpoint. This is because subordinate groups have long had to use alternative ways to create independent self-definitions and self-valuations and to rearticulate them through our own specialists. Like other subordinate groups, African-American women not only have developed a distinctive Black women’s standpoint, but have done so by using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge.

Epistemology constitutes an overarching theory of knowledge (Harding 1987). It investigates the standards used to assess knowledge or why we believe what we believe to be true. Far from being the apolitical study of truth, episte- mology points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and why. For example, various descendants of Sally Hemmings, a Black woman owned by Thomas Jefferson, claimed repeatedly that Jefferson fathered her chil- dren. These accounts forwarded by Jefferson’s African-American descendants were ignored in favor of accounts advanced by his White progeny. Hemmings’s descendants were routinely disbelieved until their knowledge claims were vali- dated by DNA testing.

Distinguishing among epistemologies, paradigms, and methodologies can prove to be useful in understanding the significance of competing epistemolo- gies (Harding 1987). In contrast to epistemologies, paradigms encompass interpretive frameworks such as intersectionality that are used to explain social phenomena.1 Methodology refers to the broad principles of how to conduct research and how interpretive paradigms are to be applied.2 The level of episte- mology is important because it determines which questions merit investigation, which interpretive frameworks will be used to analyze findings, and to what use any ensuing knowledge will be put.

In producing the specialized knowledge of U.S. Black feminist thought, Black women intellectuals often encounter two distinct epistemologies: one represent- ing elite White male interests and the other expressing Black feminist concerns. Whereas many variations of these epistemologies exist, it is possible to distill some of their distinguishing features that transcend differences among the para- digms within them. Epistemological choices about whom to trust, what to believe, and why something is true are not benign academic issues. Instead, these concerns tap the fundamental question of which versions of truth will prevail.

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E u r o c e n t r i c K n o w l e d g e Va l i d a t i o n P r o c e s s e s a n d U . S . P o w e r R e l a t i o n s

In the United States, the social institutions that legitimate knowledge as well as the Western or Eurocentric epistemologies that they uphold constitute two inter- related parts of the dominant knowledge validation processes. In general, schol- ars, publishers, and other experts represent specific interests and credentialing processes, and their knowledge claims must satisfy the political and epistemo- logical criteria of the contexts in which they reside (Kuhn 1962; Mulkay 1979). Because this enterprise is controlled by elite White men, knowledge validation processes reflect this group’s interests.3 Although designed to represent and pro- tect the interests of powerful White men, neither schools, government, the media and other social institutions that house these processes nor the actual epistemologies that they promote need be managed by White men themselves. White women, African-American men and women, and other people of color may be enlisted to enforce these connections between power relations and what counts as truth. Moreover, not all White men accept these power relations that privilege Eurocentrism. Some have revolted and subverted social institutions and the ideas they promote.

Two political criteria influence knowledge validation processes. First, knowl- edge claims are evaluated by a group of experts whose members bring with them a host of sedimented experiences that reflect their group location in intersecting oppressions. No scholar can avoid cultural ideas and his or her placement in intersecting oppressions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. In the United States, this means that a scholar making a knowledge claim typically must con- vince a scholarly community controlled by elite White avowedly heterosexual men holding U.S. citizenship that a given claim is justified. Second, each com- munity of experts must maintain its credibility as defined by the larger popula- tion in which it is situated and from which it draws its basic, taken-for-granted knowledge. This means that scholarly communities that challenge basic beliefs held in U.S. culture at large will be deemed less credible than those that support popular ideas. For example, if scholarly communities stray too far from widely held beliefs about Black womanhood, they run the risk of being discredited.

When elite White men or any other overly homogeneous group dominates knowledge validation processes, both of these political criteria can work to sup- press Black feminist thought. Given that the general U.S. culture shaping the taken-for-granted knowledge of the community of experts is permeated by widespread notions of Black female inferiority, new knowledge claims that seem to violate this fundamental assumption are likely to be viewed as anomalies (Kuhn 1962). Moreover, specialized thought challenging notions of Black female inferiority is unlikely to be generated from within White-male-controlled acad- emic settings because both the kinds of questions asked and the answers to them

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would necessarily reflect a basic lack of familiarity with Black women’s realities. Even those who think they are familiar can reproduce stereotypes. Believing that they are already knowledgeable, many scholars staunchly defend controlling images of U.S. Black women as mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels, and allow these commonsense beliefs to permeate their scholarship.

The experiences of African-American women scholars illustrate how indi- viduals who wish to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint through Black fem- inist thought can be suppressed by prevailing knowledge validation processes. Exclusion from basic literacy, quality educational experiences, and faculty and administrative positions has limited U.S. Black women’s access to influential aca- demic positions (Zinn et al. 1986; Moses 1989). Black women have long pro- duced knowledge claims that contested those advanced by elite White men. But because Black women have been denied positions of authority, they often relied on alternative knowledge validation processes to generate competing knowledge claims. As a consequence, academic disciplines typically rejected such claims. Moreover, any credentials controlled by White male academicians could then be denied to Black women who used alternative standards on the grounds that Black women’s work did not constitute credible research.

Black women with academic credentials who seek to exert the authority that our status grants us to propose new knowledge claims about African-American women face pressures to use our authority to help legitimate a system that deval- ues and excludes the majority of Black women. When an outsider group—in this case, African-American women—recognizes that the insider group— namely, elite White men—requires special privileges from the larger society, those in power must find ways of keeping the outsiders out and at the same time having them acknowledge the legitimacy of this procedure. Accepting a few “safe” outsiders addresses this legitimation problem (Berger and Luckmann 1966). One way of excluding the majority of Black women from the knowledge validation process is to permit a few Black women to acquire positions of author- ity in institutions that legitimate knowledge, and to encourage us to work within the taken-for-granted assumptions of Black female inferiority shared by the scholarly community and the culture at large. Those Black women who accept these assumptions are likely to be rewarded by their institutions.Those challeng- ing the assumptions can be placed under surveillance and run the risk of being ostracized.

African-American women academicians who persist in trying to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint also face potential rejection of our knowledge claims on epistemological grounds. Just as the material realities of powerful and domi- nated groups produce separate standpoints, these groups may also deploy dis- tinctive epistemologies or theories of knowledge. Black women scholars may know that something is true—at least, by standards widely accepted among African-American women—but be unwilling or unable to legitimate our claims using prevailing scholarly norms. For any discourse, new knowledge claims must

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be consistent with an existing body of knowledge that the group controlling the interpretive context accepts as true. Take, for example, the differences between how U.S. Black women interpret their experiences as single mothers and how prevailing social science research analyzes the same reality.Whereas Black women stress their struggles with job discrimination, inadequate child support, inferior housing, and street violence, far too much social science research seems mes- merized by images of lazy “welfare queens” content to stay on the dole. The methods used to validate knowledge claims must also be acceptable to the group controlling the knowledge validation process. Individual African-American women’s narratives about being single mothers are often rendered invisible in quantitative research methodologies that erase individuality in favor of proving patterns of welfare abuse. Thus, one important issue facing Black women intel- lectuals is the question of what constitutes adequate justification that a given knowledge claim, such as a fact or theory, is true. Just as Hemmings’s descendants were routinely disbelieved, so are many Black women not seen as credible wit- nesses for our own experiences. In this climate, Black women academics who choose to believe other Black women can become suspect.

Criteria for methodological adequacy associated with positivism illustrate the standards that Black women scholars, especially those in the social sciences, would have to satisfy in legitimating Black feminist thought. Though I describe Western or Eurocentric epistemologies as a single cluster, many interpretive frameworks or paradigms are subsumed under this category. Moreover, my focus on positivism should be interpreted neither to mean that all dimensions of pos- itivism are inherently problematic for Black women nor that nonpositivist frame- works are better.

Positivist approaches aim to create scientific descriptions of reality by produc- ing objective generalizations. Because researchers have widely differing values, experiences, and emotions, genuine science is thought to be unattainable unless all human characteristics except rationality are eliminated from the research process. By following strict methodological rules, scientists aim to distance themselves from the values, vested interests, and emotions generated by their class, race, sex, or unique situation. By decontextualizing themselves, they allegedly become detached observers and manipulators of nature (Jaggar 1983; Harding 1986).

Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First, research methods generally require a distancing of the researcher from her or his “object” of study by defining the researcher as a “subject” with full human sub- jectivity and by objectifying the “object” of study (Keller 1985; Asante 1987). A second requirement is the absence of emotions from the research process (Jaggar 1983).Third, ethics and values are deemed inappropriate in the research process, either as the reason for scientific inquiry or as part of the research process itself (Richards 1980). Finally, adversarial debates, whether written or oral, become the preferred method of ascertaining truth: The arguments that can withstand the

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greatest assault and survive intact become the strongest truths (Moulton 1983). Such criteria ask African-American women to objectify ourselves, devalue

our emotional life, displace our motivations for furthering knowledge about Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with more social, economic, and professional power. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that Black women would rely exclusively on positivist paradigms in rearticulating a Black women’s standpoint. For example, Black women’s experiences in sociology illus- trate diverse responses to encountering an entrenched positivism. Given Black women’s long-standing exclusion from sociology prior to 1970, the sociological knowledge about race and gender produced during their absence, and the sym- bolic importance of Black women’s absence to sociological self-definitions as a science,African-American women acting as agents of knowledge faced a complex situation. In order to refute the history of Black women’s unsuitability for sci- ence, they had to invoke the tools of sociology by using positivistic frameworks to demonstrate their capability as scientists. However, they simultaneously needed to challenge the same structure that granted them legitimacy. Their responses to this dilemma reflect the strategic use of the tools of positivism when needed, coupled with overt challenges to positivism when that seemed feasible (Collins 1998a, 95–123).

On the other hand, many Black women have had access to another episte- mology that encompasses standards for assessing truth that are widely accepted among African-American women. An experiential, material base underlies a Black feminist epistemology, namely, collective experiences and accompanying worldviews that U.S. Black women sustained based on our particular history (see Chapter 3).The historical conditions of Black women’s work, both in Black civil society and in paid employment, fostered a series of experiences that when shared and passed on become the collective wisdom of a Black women’s stand- point. Moreover, a set of principles for assessing knowledge claims may be avail- able to those having these shared experiences. These principles pass into a more general Black women’s wisdom and, further, into what I call here a Black femi- nist epistemology.

This alternative epistemology uses different standards that are consistent with Black women’s criteria for substantiated knowledge and with our criteria for methodological adequacy. Certainly this alternative Black feminist episte- mology has been devalued by dominant knowledge validation processes and may not be claimed by many African-American women. But if such an epistemology exists, what are its contours? Moreover, what are its actual and potential contri- butions to Black feminist thought?

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L i v e d E x p e r i e n c e a s a C r i t e r i o n o f M e a n i n g

“My aunt used to say, ‘A heap see, but a few know,’” remembers Carolyn Chase, a 31-year-old inner-city Black woman (Gwaltney 1980, 83).This saying depicts two types of knowing—knowledge and wisdom—and taps the first dimension of Black feminist epistemology. Living life as Black women requires wisdom because knowledge about the dynamics of intersecting oppressions has been essential to U.S. Black women’s survival. African-American women give such wisdom high credence in assessing knowledge.

Allusions to these two types of knowing pervade the words of a range of African-American women. Zilpha Elaw, a preacher of the mid-1800s, explains the tenacity of racism: “The pride of a white skin is a bauble of great value with many in some parts of the United States, who readily sacrifice their intelligence to their prejudices, and possess more knowledge than wisdom” (Andrews 1986, 85). In describing differences separating African-American and White women, Nancy White invokes a similar rule: “When you come right down to it, white women just think they are free. Black women know they ain’t free” (Gwaltney 1980, 147). Geneva Smitherman, a college professor specializing in African- American linguistics, suggests, “From a black perspective, written documents are limited in what they can teach about life and survival in the world. Blacks are quick to ridicule ‘educated fools,’ . . . they have ‘book learning’ but no ‘mother wit,’ knowledge, but not wisdom” (Smitherman 1977, 76). Mabel Lincoln elo- quently summarizes the distinction between knowledge and wisdom: “To black people like me, a fool is funny—you know, people who love to break bad, peo- ple you can’t tell anything to, folks that would take a shotgun to a roach” (Gwaltney 1980, 68).

African-American women need wisdom to know how to deal with the “educated fools” who would “take a shotgun to a roach.” As members of a sub- ordinate group, Black women cannot afford to be fools of any type, for our objectification as the Other denies us the protections that White skin, maleness, and wealth confer.This distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and the use of experience as the cutting edge dividing them, has been key to Black women’s survival. In the context of intersecting oppressions, the distinction is essential. Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essen- tial to the survival of the subordinate.

For most African-American women those individuals who have lived through the experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believ- able and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such expe- riences. Thus lived experience as a criterion for credibility frequently is invoked by U.S. Black women when making knowledge claims. For instance, Hannah Nelson describes the importance that personal experience has for her: “Our speech is most directly personal, and every black person assumes that every other black person has a right to a personal opinion. In speaking of grave matters, your

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personal experience is considered very good evidence. With us, distant statistics are certainly not as important as the actual experience of a sober person” (Gwaltney 1980, 7). Similarly, Ruth Shays uses her lived experiences to challenge the idea that formal education is the only route to knowledge: “I am the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of education, but both my mother and my father had good common sense. Now, I think that’s all you need. I might not know how to use thirty-four words where three would do, but that does not mean that I don’t know what I’m talking about. . . . I know what I’m talking about because I’m talking about myself. I’m talking about what I have lived” (Gwaltney 1980, 27, 33). Implicit in Ms. Shays’s self-assessment is a critique of the type of knowl- edge that obscures the truth, the “thirty-four words” that cover up a truth that can be expressed in three.

Even after substantial mastery of dominant epistemologies, many Black women scholars invoke our own lived experiences and those of other African- American women in selecting topics for investigation and methodologies used. For example, Elsa Barkley Brown (1986) subtitles her essay on Black women’s history “How My Mother Taught Me to Be an Historian in spite of My Academic Training.” Similarly, Joyce Ladner (1972) maintains that growing up as a Black woman in the South gave her special insights in conducting her study of Black adolescent women.

Experience as a criterion of meaning with practical images as its symbolic vehicles is a fundamental epistemological tenet in African-American thought sys- tems (Mitchell and Lewter 1986). “Look at my arm!” Sojourner Truth pro- claimed: “I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” (Loewenberg and Bogin 1976, 235). By invoking examples from her own life to symbolize new meanings,Truth decon- structed the prevailing notions of woman. Stories, narratives, and Bible principles are selected for their applicability to the lived experiences of African-Americans and become symbolic representations of a whole wealth of experience. Bible tales are often told for the wisdom they express about everyday life, so their inter- pretation involves no need for scientific historical verification. The narrative method requires that the story be told, not torn apart in analysis, and trusted as core belief, not “admired as science” (Mitchell and Lewter 1986, 8).

June Jordan’s essay about her mother’s suicide illustrates the multiple levels of meaning that can occur when lived experience becomes valued as a criterion of meaning. Jordan describes her mother, a woman who literally died trying to stand up, and the effect her mother’s death had on her own work:

I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my moth- er’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you can- not possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became your mother, the life of that woman was taken. . . .

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I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again. (Jordan 1985, 26)

While Jordan has knowledge about the concrete act of her mother’s death, she also strives for wisdom concerning the meaning of that death.

Some feminist scholars claim that women as a group are more likely than men to use lived experiences in assessing knowledge claims. For example, a sub- stantial number of the 135 women in a study of women’s cognitive development were “connected knowers” and were drawn to the sort of knowledge that emerges from firsthand observation (Belenky et al. 1986). Such women felt that because knowledge comes from experience, the best way of understanding another person’s ideas was to develop empathy and share the experiences that led the person to form those ideas. In explaining these patterns, some feminist the- orists suggest that women are socialized in complex relational nexuses where contextual rules versus abstract principles govern behavior (Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982). This socialization process is thought to stimulate characteristic ways of knowing (Hartsock 1983a; Belenky et al. 1986).These theorists suggest that women are more likely to experience two modes of knowing: one located in the body and the space it occupies and the other passing beyond it. Through multiple forms of mothering, women mediate these two modes and use the lived experiences of their daily lives to assess more abstract knowledge claims (D. Smith 1987). These forms of knowledge allow for subjectivity between the knower and the known, rest in the women themselves (not in higher authori- ties), and are experienced directly in the world (not through abstractions).

African-American women’s lives remain structured at the convergence of several factors: Black community organizations reflecting principles of African- influenced belief systems; activist mothering traditions that stimulate politicized understandings of Black women’s motherwork; and a social class system that rel- egates Black women as workers to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Amanda King, a young African-American mother whose experiences illustrate this con- vergence, describes how she used lived experience to assess the abstract and points out how difficult mediating these two modes of knowing can be:

The leaders of the ROC [a labor union] lost their jobs too, but it just seemed like they were used to losing their jobs. . . .This was like a lifelong thing for them, to get out there and protest. They were like, what do you call them—intellectuals. . . .You got the ones that go to the university that are supposed to make all the speeches, they’re the ones that are supposed to lead, you know, put this little revolution together, and then you got the little ones . . . that go to the factory everyday, they be the ones that have to fight. I had a child and I thought I don’t have the time to be running around with these people. . . . I mean I understand some of that stuff they were talking about, like the bourgeoisie, the rich and the poor and all that, but I had surviving on my mind for me and my kid. (Byerly 1986, 198)

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For Ms. King abstract ideals of class solidarity were mediated by her lived expe- riences as a mother and the connectedness it involved.

In traditional African-American communities Black women find consider- able institutional support for valuing lived experience. Black women’s centrality in families, churches, and other community organizations allows us to share with younger, less experienced sisters our concrete knowledge of what it takes to be self-defined Black women. “Sisterhood is not new to Black women,” asserts Bonnie Thornton Dill, but “while Black women have fostered and encouraged sis- terhood, we have not used it as the anvil to forge our political identities” (1983, 134). Though not expressed in explicitly political terms, this relationship of sis- terhood among Black women can be seen as a model for a series of relationships African-American women have with one another (Gilkes 1985; Giddings 1988).

Given that Black churches and families are often woman-centered, African- influenced institutions, African-American women traditionally have found con- siderable institutional support for this dimension of Black feminist epistemology. While White women may value lived experience, it is questionable whether com- parable support comes from White families—particularly middle-class families where privatization is so highly valued—and other social institutions controlled by Whites that advance similar values. Similarly, while Black men participate in the institutions of Black civil society, they cannot take part in Black women’s sis- terhood. In terms of Black women’s relationships with one another, African- American women may find it easier than others to recognize connectedness as a primary way of knowing, simply because we have more opportunities to do so and must rely upon it more heavily than others.

T h e U s e o f D i a l o g u e i n A s s e s s i n g K n o w l e d g e C l a i m s

“Dialogue implies talk between two subjects, not the speech of subject and object. It is a humanizing speech, one that challenges and resists domination,” asserts bell hooks (1989, 131). For Black women new knowledge claims are rarely worked out in isolation from other individuals and are usually developed through dialogues with other members of a community. A primary epistemo- logical assumption underlying the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims is that connectedness rather than separation is an essential component of the knowledge validation process (Belenky et al. 1986, 18).

This belief in connectedness and the use of dialogue as one of its criteria for methodological adequacy has African roots. Whereas women typically remain subordinated to men within traditional African societies, these same societies have at the same time embraced holistic worldviews that seek harmony. “One must understand that to become human, to realize the promise of becoming human, is the only important task of the person,” posits Molefi Asante (1987,

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185). People become more human and empowered primarily in the context of a community, and only when they “become seekers of the type of connections, interactions, and meetings that lead to harmony” (p. 185). The power of the word generally, and dialogues specifically, allows this to happen.

Not to be confused with adversarial debate, the use of dialogue has deep roots in African-based oral traditions and in African-American culture (Sidran 1971; Smitherman 1977; Kochman 1981). Ruth Shays describes the importance of dialogue in the knowledge validation process of enslaved African-Americans:

They would find a lie if it took them a year. . . .The foreparents found the truth because they listened and they made people tell their part many times. Most often you can hear a lie. . . .Those old people was everywhere and knew the truth of many disputes.They believed that a liar should suf- fer the pain of his lies, and they had all kinds of ways of bringing liars to judgment. (Gwaltney 1980, 32)

The widespread use of the call-and-response discourse mode among African- Americans illustrates the importance placed on dialogue. Composed of sponta- neous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker’s statements, or “calls,” are punctuated by expressions, or “responses,” from the listener, this Black discourse mode pervades African- American culture. The fundamental requirement of this interactive network is active participation of all individuals (Smitherman 1977, 108). For ideas to be tested and validated, everyone in the group must participate.To refuse to join in, especially if one really disagrees with what has been said, is seen as “cheating” (Kochman 1981, 28).

June Jordan’s analysis of Black English points to the significance of this dimension of an alternative epistemology:

Our language is a system constructed by people constantly needing to insist that we exist. . . . Our language devolves from a culture that abhors all abstraction, or anything tending to obscure or delete the fact of the human being who is here and now/the truth of the person who is speak- ing or listening. Consequently, there is no passive voice construction possible in Black English. For example, you cannot say, “Black English is being elim- inated.”You must say, instead, “White people eliminating Black English.” The assumption of the presence of life governs all of Black English . . . every sentence assumes the living and active participation of at least two human beings, the speaker and the listener. (Jordan 1985, 129)

Many Black women intellectuals invoke the relationships and connectedness provided by use of dialogue. When asked why she chose the themes she did, novelist Gayl Jones replied: “I was . . . interested . . . in oral traditions of story- telling—Afro-American and others, in which there is always the consciousness and importance of the hearer” (Tate 1983, 91). In describing the difference in the way male and female writers select significant events and relationships, Jones

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says “With many women writers, relationships within family, community, between men and women, and among women—from slave narratives by black women writers on—are treated as complex and significant relationships, where- as with many men the significant relationships are those that involve confronta- tions—relationships outside the family and community” (in Tate 1983, 92). Alice Walker’s reaction to Zora Neale Hurston’s book Mules and Men is another example of the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims. In Mules and Men Hurston chose not to become a detached observer of the stories and folktales she collected but instead, through extensive dialogues with the people in the communities she studied, placed herself in the center of her analysis. Using a similar process, Walker tests the truth of Hurston’s knowledge claims:

When I read Mules and Men I was delighted. Here was this perfect book! The “perfection” of which I immediately tested on my relatives, who are such typical Black Americans they are useful for every sort of political, cul- tural, or economic survey.Very regular people from the South, rapidly for- getting their Southern cultural inheritance in the suburbs and ghettos of Boston and New York, they sat around reading the book themselves, lis- tening to me read the book, listening to each other read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. (Walker 1977, xii)

Black women’s centrality in families, churches, and other community organiza- tions provides African-American women with a high degree of support for invoking dialogue as a dimension of Black feminist epistemology. However, when African-American women use dialogues in assessing knowledge claims, we might be invoking ways of knowing that are also more likely to be used by women. Feminist scholars contend that men and women are socialized to seek different types of autonomy—the former based on separation, the latter seeking connectedness—and that this variation in types of autonomy parallels the characteristic differences between how men and women understand ideas and experiences (Chodorow 1978; Keller 1985; Belenky et al. 1986). For instance, in contrast to the visual metaphors (such as equating knowledge with illumination, knowing with seeing, and truth with light) that scientists and philosophers typically use, women tend to ground their epistemological premises in metaphors suggesting finding a voice, speaking, and listening (Belenky et al. 1986).

T h e E t h i c s o f C a r i n g

“Ole white preachers used to talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’, but Jesus told us slaves to talk wid our hearts” (Webber 1978, 127).These words of an ex-slave suggest that ideas cannot be divorced from the individuals who cre- ate and share them.This theme of talking with the heart taps the ethic of caring, another dimension of an alternative epistemology used by African-American

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women. Just as the ex-slave used the wisdom in his heart to reject the ideas of the preachers who talked “wid dey tongues widdout sayin’ nothin’,” the ethic of caring suggests that personal expressiveness, emotions, and empathy are cen- tral to the knowledge validation process.

One of three interrelated components of the ethic of caring is the emphasis placed on individual uniqueness. Rooted in a tradition of African humanism, each individual is thought to be a unique expression of a common spirit, power, or energy inherent in all life.4 When Alice Walker “never doubted her powers of judgment because her mother assumed they were sound,” she invokes the sense of individual uniqueness taught to her by her mother (Washington 1984, 145). The polyrhythms in African-American music, in which no one main beat subor- dinates the others, is paralleled by the theme of individual expression in Black women’s quilting. Black women quilters place strong color and patterns next to one another and see the individual differences not as detracting from each piece but as enriching the whole quilt (Brown 1989).This belief in individual unique- ness is illustrated by the value placed on personal expressiveness in African- American communities (Smitherman 1977; Kochman 1981; Mitchell and Lewter 1986). Johnetta Ray, an inner-city resident, describes this African-influenced emphasis on individual uniqueness: “No matter how hard we try, I don’t think black people will ever develop much of a herd instinct. We are profound indi- vidualists with a passion for self-expression” (Gwaltney 1980, 228).

A second component of the ethic of caring concerns the appropriateness of emotions in dialogues. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in the validity of an argument. Consider Ntozake Shange’s description of one of the goals of her work: “Our [Western] society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings, and yet be very respectable. This, to me, is a travesty. . . . I’m trying to change the idea of seeing emotions and intellect as distinct faculties” (Tate 1983, 156).The Black women’s blues tradition’s history of personal expressiveness heals this binary that separates emotion from intellect. For example, in her rendition of “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s lyrics blend seamlessly with the emotion of her delivery to render a trenchant social commentary on Southern lynching. Without emotion, Aretha Franklin’s (1967) cry for “respect” would be virtually meaningless.

A third component of the ethic of caring involves developing the capacity for empathy. Harriet Jones, a 16-year-old Black woman, explains to her interviewer why she chose to open up to him: “Some things in my life are so hard for me to bear, and it makes me feel better to know that you feel sorry about those things and would change them if you could” (Gwaltney 1980, 11). Without her belief in his empathy, she found it difficult to talk. Black women writers often explore the growth of empathy as part of an ethic of caring. For example, the growing respect that the Black slave woman Dessa and the White woman Rufel gain for each other in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose stems from their increased understanding of each other’s positions. After watching Rufel fight off the

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advances of a White man, Dessa lay awake thinking: “The white woman was sub- ject to the same ravisment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn’t knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us” (1986, 220). As a result of her newfound empathy, Dessa observed, “It was like we had a secret between us” (p. 220).

These components of the ethic of caring—the value placed on individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy— reappear in varying combinations throughout Black civil society. One of the best examples of the interactive nature of the importance of dialogue and the ethic of caring in assessing knowledge claims occurs in the use of the call-and-response discourse mode in many Black church services. In such services both the minis- ter and the congregation routinely use voice rhythm and vocal inflection to con- vey meaning. The sound of what is being said is just as important as the words themselves in what is, in a sense, a dialogue of reason and emotion. As a result it is nearly impossible to filter out the strictly linguistic-cognitive abstract meaning from the sociocultural psychoemotive meaning (Smitherman 1977, 135, 137). While the ideas presented by a speaker must have validity (i.e., agree with the general body of knowledge shared by the Black congregation), the group also appraises the way knowledge claims are presented.

The emphasis placed on expressiveness and emotion in African-American communities bears marked resemblance to feminist perspectives on the impor- tance of personality in connected knowing. Belenky et al. (1986) point out that two contrasting orientations characterize knowing: one of separation based on impersonal procedures for establishing truth, and the other of connection in which truth emerges through care. While these ways of knowing are not gender specific, disproportionate numbers of women rely on connected knowing. Separate knowers try to subtract the personality of an individual from his or her ideas because they see personality as biasing those ideas. In contrast, connected knowers see personality as adding to an individual’s ideas and feel that the personality of each group member enriches a group’s understanding. The sig- nificance of individual uniqueness, personal expressiveness, and empathy in African-American communities thus resembles the importance that some feminist analyses place on women’s “inner voice” (Belenky et al. 1986).

The convergence of African-influenced and feminist principles in the ethic of caring seems particularly acute. White women may have access to women’s experiences that encourage emotion and expressiveness, but few White-con- trolled U.S. social institutions except the family validate this way of knowing. In contrast, Black women have long had the support of the Black church, an insti- tution with deep roots in the African past and a philosophy that accepts and encourages expressiveness and an ethic of caring. Black men share in this Black cultural tradition. But they must resolve the contradictions that confront them in redefining Black masculinity in the face of abstract, unemotional notions of mas- culinity imposed on them (Hoch 1979).Thus, the differences distinguishing U.S.

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Black women from other groups, even those close to them, lies less in Black women’s race or gender identity than in access to social institutions that support an ethic of caring in their lives.

T h e E t h i c o f P e r s o n a l A c c o u n t a b i l i t y

An ethic of personal accountability also characterizes Black feminist epistemology. Not only must individuals develop their knowledge claims through dialogue and present them in a style proving their concern for their ideas, but people are expected to be accountable for their knowledge claims. Zilpha Elaw’s description of slavery reflects this notion that every idea has an owner and that the owner’s identity matters: “Oh, the abominations of slavery! . . . Every case of slavery, how- ever lenient its inflictions and mitigated its atrocities, indicates an oppressor, the oppressed, and oppression” (Andrews 1986, 98). For Elaw abstract definitions of slavery mesh with the personal identities of slavery’s perpetrators and its victims. African-Americans consider it essential for individuals to have definite positions on issues and assume full responsibility for arguing their validity (Kochman 1981).

Assessments of an individual’s knowledge claims simultaneously evaluate an individual’s character, values, and ethics. Within this logic, many African- Americans reject prevailing beliefs that probing into an individual’s personal viewpoint is outside the boundaries of discussion. Rather, all views expressed and actions taken are thought to derive from a central set of core beliefs that cannot be other than personal (Kochman 1981, 23). “Does Aretha really believe that Black women should get ‘respect,’ or is she just mouthing the words?” is a valid question in Black feminist epistemology. Knowledge claims made by individuals respected for their moral and ethical connections to their ideas will carry more weight than those offered by less respected figures.

An example drawn from an undergraduate class session where the students were all Black women illustrates the uniqueness of this portion of the knowledge validation process. During one class discussion I asked the students to evaluate a prominent Black male scholar’s analysis of Black feminism. Instead of removing the scholar from his context in order to dissect the rationality of his thesis, my students demanded facts about the author’s personal biography.They were espe- cially interested in specific details of his life, such as his relationships with Black women, his marital status, and his social class background. By requesting data on dimensions of his personal life routinely excluded in positivist approaches to knowledge validation, they invoked lived experience as a criterion of meaning. They used this information to assess whether he really cared about his topic and drew on this ethic of caring in advancing their knowledge claims about his work. Furthermore, they refused to evaluate the rationality of his written ideas without some indication of his personal credibility as an ethical human being.The entire exchange could only have occurred as a dialogue among members of a group

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that had established a solid enough community to employ an alternative episte- mology in assessing knowledge claims.

Traditional Black church services also illustrate the interactive nature of all four dimensions of this alternative epistemology. The services represent more than dialogues between the rationality used in examining biblical texts and sto- ries and the emotion inherent in the use of reason for this purpose. The reason such dialogues exist is to examine lived experiences for the presence of an ethic of caring. Neither emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason. Instead, emo- tion, ethics, and reason are used as interconnected, essential components in assessing knowledge claims. In this alternative epistemology, values lie at the heart of the knowledge validation process such that inquiry always has an ethi- cal aim. Moreover, when these four dimensions become politicized and attached to a social justice project, they can form a framework for Black feminist thought and practice.

B l a c k W o m e n a s A g e n t s o f K n o w l e d g e

Social movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s stimulated a greatly changed intellectual and political climate in the United States. Compared to the past, many more U.S. Black women became legitimated agents of knowledge. No longer passive objects of knowledge manipulated within prevailing knowledge validation processes, African-American women aimed to speak for ourselves.

African-American women in the academy and other positions of authority who aim to advance Black feminist thought now encounter the often conflicting epistemological standards of three key groups. First, Black feminist thought must be validated by ordinary African-American women who, in the words of Hannah Nelson, grow to womanhood “in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear” (Gwaltney 1980, 7). To be credible in the eyes of this group, Black feminist intellectuals must be personal advocates for their material, be accountable for the consequences of their work, have lived or experienced their material in some fashion, and be willing to engage in dialogues about their findings with ordinary, everyday people.

Historically, living life as an African-American woman facilitated this endeav- or because knowledge validation processes controlled in part or in full by Black women occurred in particular organizational settings. When Black women were in charge of our own self-definitions, these four dimensions of Black feminist epistemology—lived experience as a criterion of meaning, the use of dialogue, the ethic of personal accountability, and the ethic of caring—came to the fore- front. When the core themes and interpretive frameworks of Black women’s knowledge were informed by Black feminist epistemology, a rich tradition of Black feminist thought ensued.

Traditionally women engaged in this overarching intellectual and political

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project were blues singers, poets, autobiographers, storytellers, and orators.They became Black feminist intellectuals both by doing intellectual work and by being validated as such by everyday Black women. Black women in academia could not openly join their ranks without incurring a serious penalty. In racially segregated environments that routinely excluded the majority of African-American women, only a select few were able to defy prevailing norms and explicitly embrace Black feminist epistemology. Zora Neale Hurston was one such figure. Consider Alice Walker’s description of Hurston:

In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers, rather than among “the literati.” . . . Like Billie and Bessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from “common” people. (Walker 1977, xvii–xviii)

For her time, Zora Neale Hurston remains an exception, for prior to 1950, few African-American women earned advanced degrees, and most of those who did complied with prevailing knowledge validation processes.

The community of Black women scholars constitutes a second constituency whose epistemological standards must be met. As the number of Black women academics grows, this heterogeneous collectivity shares a similar social location in higher education, yet finds a new challenge in building group solidarities across differences. African-American women scholars place varying amounts of importance on furthering Black feminist scholarship. However, despite this new- found diversity, since more African-American women earn advanced degrees, the range of Black feminist scholarship has expanded. Historically, African-American women may have brought sensibilities gained from Black feminist epistemology to their scholarship. But gaining legitimacy often came with the cost of rejecting such an epistemology. Studying Black women’s lives at all placed many careers at risk. More recently, increasing numbers of African-American women scholars have chosen to study Black women’s experiences, and to do so by relying on ele- ments of Black feminist epistemology in framing their work. For example,Valerie Lee’s (1996) study of African-American midwives in the South deploys an inno- vative merger of Black women’s fiction, ethnographic method, and personal nar- rative, to good effect.

A third group whose epistemological standards must be met consists of dominant groups who still control schools, graduate programs, tenure process- es, publication outlets, and other mechanisms that legitimate knowledge. African-American women academics who aim to advance Black feminist thought typically must use dominant Eurocentric epistemologies for this group. The dif- ficulties these Black women now face lie less in demonstrating that they could master White male epistemologies than in resisting the hegemonic nature of these patterns of thought in order to see, value, and use existing alternative Black

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feminist ways of knowing. For Black women who are agents of knowledge with- in academia, the marginality that accompanies outsider-within status can be the source of both frustration and creativity. In an attempt to minimize the differ- ences between the cultural context of African-American communities and the expectations of mainstream social institutions, some women dichotomize their behavior and become two different people. Over time, the strain of doing this can be enormous. Others reject Black women’s accumulated wisdom and work against their own best interests by enforcing the dominant group’s specialized thought. Still others manage to inhabit both contexts but do so critically, using perspectives gained from their outsider-within social locations as a source of insights and ideas. But while such women can make substantial contributions as agents of knowledge, they rarely do so without substantial personal cost. “Eventually it comes to you,” observes Lorraine Hansberry, “the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely” (1969, 148).

Just as migrating between Black and White families raised special issues for Black women domestic workers, moving among different and competing inter- pretive communities raises similar epistemological concerns for Black feminist thinkers. The dilemma facing Black women scholars, in particular, engaged in creating Black feminist thought illustrates difficulties that can accompany grap- pling with multiple interpretive communities. A knowledge claim that meets the criteria of adequacy for one group and thus is judged to be acceptable may not be translatable into the terms of a different group. Using the example of Black English, June Jordan illustrates the difficulty of moving among epistemologies:

You cannot “translate” instances of Standard English preoccupied with abstraction or with nothing/nobody evidently alive into Black English. That would warp the language into uses antithetical to the guiding per- spective of its community of users. Rather you must first change those Standard English sentences, themselves, into ideas consistent with the per- son-centered assumptions of Black English. (Jordan 1985, 130)

Although both worldviews share a common vocabulary, the ideas themselves defy direct translation.

Once Black women scholars face the notion that on certain dimensions of a Black women’s standpoint, it may be fruitless to try to translate into other frame- works truths validated by Black feminist epistemology, then other choices emerge. Rather than trying to uncover universal knowledge claims that can with- stand the translation from one epistemology to another (initially, at least), Black women intellectuals might find efforts to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint especially fruitful. Rearticulating a Black women’s standpoint refashions the par- ticular and reveals the more universal human dimensions of Black women’s everyday lives. “I date all my work,” notes Nikki Giovanni, “because I think poetry, or any writing, is but a reflection of the moment. The universal comes from the

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particular” (1988, 57). Lorraine Hansberry expresses a similar idea: “I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from the truthful identity of what is” (1969, 128).

To w a r d Tr u t h

The existence of Black feminist thought suggests another path to the universal truths that might accompany the “truthful identity of what is.” In this volume I place Black women’s subjectivity in the center of analysis and examine the inter- dependence of the everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge shared by African- American women as a group, the more specialized knowledge produced by Black women intellectuals, and the social conditions shaping both types of thought. This approach allows me to describe the creative tension linking how social conditions influenced a Black women’s standpoint and how the power of the ideas themselves gave many African-American women the strength to shape those same social conditions. I approach Black feminist thought as situated in a context of domination and not as a system of ideas divorced from political and economic reality. Moreover, I present Black feminist thought as subjugated knowledge in that African-American women have long struggled to find alter- native locations and epistemologies for validating our own self-definitions. In brief, I examined the situated, subjugated standpoint of African-American women in order to understand Black feminist thought as a partial perspective on domination.

Because U.S. Black women have access to the experiences that accrue to being both Black and female, an alternative epistemology used to rearticulate a Black women’s standpoint should reflect the convergence of both sets of experiences. Race and gender may be analytically distinct, but in Black women’s everyday lives, they work together. The search for the distinguishing features of an alter- native epistemology used by African-American women reveals that some ideas that Africanist scholars identify as characteristically “Black” often bear remarkable resemblance to similar ideas claimed by feminist scholars as characteristically “female.” This similarity suggests that the actual contours of intersecting oppres- sions can vary dramatically and yet generate some uniformity in the epistemolo- gies used by subordinate groups. Just as U.S. Black women and African women encountered diverse patterns of intersecting oppressions yet generated similar agendas concerning what mattered in their feminisms, a similar process may be at work regarding the epistemologies of oppressed groups.Thus the significance of a Black feminist epistemology may lie in its ability to enrich our understand- ing of how subordinate groups create knowledge that fosters both their empow- erment and social justice.

This approach to Black feminist thought allows African-American women to

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explore the epistemological implications of transversal politics.. Eventually this approach may get us to a point at which, claims Elsa Barkley Brown, “all people can learn to center in another experience, validate it, and judge it by its own stan- dards without need of comparison or need to adopt that framework as their own” (1989, 922). In such politics, “one has no need to ‘decenter’ anyone in order to center someone else; one has only to constantly, appropriately, ‘pivot the center’ ” (p. 922).

Rather than emphasizing how a Black women’s standpoint and its accompa- nying epistemology differ from those of White women, Black men, and other collectivities, Black women’s experiences serve as one specific social location for examining points of connection among multiple epistemologies. Viewing Black feminist epistemology in this way challenges additive analyses of oppression claiming that Black women have a more accurate view of oppression than do other groups. Such approaches suggest that oppression can be quantified and compared and that adding layers of oppression produces a potentially clearer standpoint (Spelman 1988). One implication of some uses of standpoint theory is that the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them. This is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social the- ory, itself reflecting the binary thinking of its Western origins. Ironically, by quan- tifying and ranking human oppressions, standpoint theorists invoke criteria for methodological adequacy that resemble those of positivism.Although it is tempt- ing to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else and there- fore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes, and effects of oppression, this is not the case.

Instead, those ideas that are validated as true by African-American women, African-American men, Latina lesbians, Asian-American women, Puerto Rican men, and other groups with distinctive standpoints, with each group using the epistemological approaches growing from its unique standpoint, become the most “objective” truths. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives. “What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life,” maintains Alice Walker, “is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world the com- mon thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity” (1983, 5). Partiality, and not universality, is the condition of being heard; individuals and groups forwarding knowledge claims without owning their position are deemed less credible than those who do.

Alternative knowledge claims in and of themselves are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such claims are routinely ignored, discredited, or sim- ply absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms. Much more threatening is

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the challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to the basic process used by the powerful to legitimate knowledge claims that in turn justify their right to rule. If the epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into question, then all prior knowledge claims validated under the dominant model become suspect. Alternative epistemologies challenge all certified knowledge and open up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alter- native ways of validating truth. The existence of a self-defined Black women’s standpoint using Black feminist epistemology calls into question the content of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriv- ing at that truth.
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Sexuality Education Building an evidence- and rights-based approach to healthy decision-making

As they grow up, young people face important decisions about relationships, sexuality, and sexual behavior. The decisions they make can impact their health and well-being for the rest of their lives. Young people have the right to lead healthy lives, and society has the responsibility to prepare youth by providing them with comprehensive sexual health education that gives them the tools they need to make healthy decisions. But it is not enough for programs to include discussions of abstinence and contraception to help young people avoid unintended pregnancy or disease. Comprehensive sexual health education must do more. It must provide young people with honest, age-appropriate information and skills necessary to help them take personal responsibility for their health and overall well being.

This paper provides an overview of research on effective sex education, laws and policies that shape it, and how it can impact young people’s lives.

WHAT IS SEXUAL HEALTH EDUCATION?

Sex education is the provision of information about bodily development, sex, sexuality, and relationships, along with skills-building to help young people communicate about and make informed decisions regarding sex and their sexual health. Sex education should occur throughout a student’s grade levels, with information appropriate to students’ development and cultural background. It should include information about puberty and reproduction, abstinence, contraception and condoms, relationships, sexual violence prevention, body image, gender identity and sexual orientation. It should be taught by trained teachers. Sex education should be informed by evidence of what works best to prevent unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, but it should also respect young people’s right to complete and honest information. Sex education should treat sexual development as a normal, natural part of human development.

WHY IS SEXUAL HEALTH EDUCATION IMPORTANT TO YOUNG PEOPLE’S HEALTH AND WELL-BEING?

Comprehensive sexual health education covers a range of topics throughout the student’s grade levels. Along with parental and community support, it can help young people:

• Avoid negative health consequences. Each year in the United States, about 750,000 teens become pregnant, with up to 82 percent of those pregnancies being unin- tended.1,2 Young people ages 15-24 account for 25 percent of all new HIV infections in the U.S.3 and make up almost one-half of the over 19 million new STD infections Ameri- cans acquire each year.4 Sex education teaches young people the skills they need to protect themselves.

• Communicate about sexuality and sexual health. Throughout their lives, people communicate with parents, friends and intimate partners about sexuality. Learning to freely discuss contraception and condoms, as well as activities they are not ready for, protects young people’s health throughout their lives.

• Delay sexual initiation until they are ready. Comprehensive sexual health education teaches abstinence as the only 100 percent effective method of preventing HIV, STIs, and unintended pregnancy – and as a valid choice which everyone has the right to make. Dozens of sex education programs have been proven effective at helping young people delay sex or have sex less often.5

• Understand healthy and unhealthy relationships. Maintaining a healthy relationship requires skills many young people are never taught – like positive communication, conflict management, and negotiating decisions around sexual activity. A lack of these skills can lead to unhealthy and even violent relationships among youth: one in 10 high school students has experienced physical violence from a dating partner in the past year.6 Sex education should include understanding and identifying healthy and unhealthy TH

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relationship patterns; effective ways to communicate relationship needs and manage conflict; and strategies to avoid or end an unhealthy relationship.7

• Understand, value, and feel autonomy over their bodies. Comprehensive sexual health education teaches not only the basics of puberty and development, but also instills in young people that they have the right to decide what behaviors they engage in and to say no to unwanted sexual activity. Furthermore, sex education helps young people to examine the forces that contribute to a positive or negative body image.

• Respect others’ right to bodily autonomy. Eight percent of high school students have been forced to have intercourse8, while one in ten students say they have committed sexual violence.9 Good sex education teaches young people what constitutes sexual violence, that sexual violence is wrong, and how to find help if they have been assaulted.

• Show dignity and respect for all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. The past few decades have seen huge steps toward equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. Yet LGBT youth still face discrimination and harassment. Among LGBT students, 82 percent have experienced harassment due to the sexual orientation, and 38 percent have experienced physical harassment.10

• Protect their academic success. Student sexual health can affect academic success. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that students who do not engage in health risk behaviors receive higher grades than students who do engage in health risk behaviors. Health-related problems and unintended pregnancy can both contribute to absenteeism and dropout.11

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY ABOUT EFFECTIVE SEX EDUCATION?

• Comprehensive sexual health education works. Research has repeatedly found that sex education which provides accurate, complete, and

developmentally appropriate information on human sexuality, including risk-reduction strategies and contraception helps young people take steps to protect their health, including delaying sex, using condoms or contraception, and being monogamous.5

– A 2012 study that examined 66 comprehensive sexual risk reduction programs found them to be an effective public health strategy to reduce adolescent pregnancy, HIV, and STIs.12

– Research from the National Survey of Family Growth assessed the impact of sexuality education on youth sexual risk-taking for young people ages 15-19 and found that teens who received comprehensive sex education were 50 percent less likely to experience pregnancy than those who received abstinence- only-until-marriage programs.13

– Even accounting for differences in household income and education, states which teach sex education and/or HIV education that covers abstinence as well as contraception, tend to have the lowest pregnancy rates.14

• National Sexuality Education Standards provide a roadmap. The National Sexuality Education Standards, developed by experts in the public health and sexuality education field and heavily influenced by the National Health Education Standards, provide guidance about the minimum essential content and skills needed to help students make informed decisions about sexual health.15 The standards focus on seven topics as the minimum, essential content and skills for K–12 education: Anatomy and Physiology, Puberty and Adolescent Development, Identity, Pregnancy and Reproduction, Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV, Healthy Relationships, and Personal Safety. Topics are presented using performance indicators—what students should learn by the end of grades 2, 5, 8, and 12.16 Schools which are developing comprehensive sexual health education programs should consult the National Sexuality Education Standards to provide students with the information and skills they need to develop into healthy adults.

• Evidence-based interventions are proven effective for schools serving communities at risk. Schools may wish to embed evidence-based interventions (EBIs) in their sexual health education programs. Others may wish to provide EBIs as targeted interventions for groups of students at high risk. To do the latter, these programs should be provided in an after school setting. Researchers have identified dozens of EBIs where participants showed statistically significant declines in teen pregnancy, HIV, or other STIs. Following are collections of EBIs targeting youth from a variety of backgrounds.

– Science and Success: Programs that Work to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, HIV, and Sexually Transmitted Infections (Advocates for Youth, 2012): Advocates for Youth undertook exhaustive reviews of existing programs that work to prevent teen

“Comprehensive sexual health education helps young people take steps to protect their health, including delaying sex until ready, and using condoms and contraception when they do become sexual active.”

pregnancy, HIV, and STIs and compiled a list of programs that have been proven effective by rigorous evaluation. Thirty-six effective programs were identified.5

– 16 programs demonstrated a statistically significant delay in the timing of first sex.

– 21 programs showed statistically significant declines in teen pregnancy, HIV or other STIs.

– 16 programs helped sexually active youth to increase their use of condoms.

– 9 programs demonstrated success at increasing use of contraception other than condoms.

– Emerging Answers (The National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 2007): Researcher Douglas Kirby examined studies of prevention programs which had a strong experimental design and used other appropriate analysis criteria. Two-thirds of the 48 comprehensive sex education programs studied had positive effects:17

– 40 percent delayed sexual initiation, reduced number of sexual partners, or increased condom or contraceptive use;

– 30 percent reduced the frequency of sex, including return to abstinence; and

– 60 percent reduced unprotected sex.17

– The Office of Adolescent Health, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, keeps a list of evidence-based interventions, with ratings based on the rigor of program impact studies and strength of the evidence supporting the program model. Thirty-one programs meet the OAH’s effectiveness criteria and that were found to be effective at preventing teen pregnancies or births, reducing sexually transmitted infections, or reducing rates of associated sexual risk behaviors (defined by sexual activity, contraceptive use, or number of partners).18

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ABSTINENCE-ONLY-UNTIL- MARRIAGE PROGRAMS?

Many students receive abstinence-only-until marriage programs instead of or in addition to more comprehensive programs. These programs:

• Depict abstinence until heterosexual marriage as the only moral choice for young people

• Mention contraception only in terms of failure rates

• Focus on heterosexual youth, ignoring the needs of LGBTQ youth

• Often use outdated gender roles, urging “modesty” for all girls while painting all boys as sexual aggressors.

• Have been found to contain false information

• Are not supported by the majority of Americans.19

Only one abstinence-only program has ever been proven effective at helping young people delay sex; yet in withholding information about contraception, it leaves those who do have sex completely at risk. Studies show that 99 percent of people will use contraception in their lifetimes,20 and that the provision of information about contraception does not hasten the onset of sexual debut or increase sexual activity.10 Meanwhile, thirty years of public health research clearly demonstrate that comprehensive sex education can help young people delay sexual initiation while also assisting them to use protection when they do become sexually active. We want young people to behave responsibly when it comes to decisions about sexual health, and that means society has the responsibility to provide them with honest, age- appropriate comprehensive sexual health education; access to services to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections; and the resources to help them lead healthy lives.

YOUTH SEXUAL HEALTH PROMOTION: THE BUILDING BLOCKS

All young people need comprehensive sexual health education, while others also need sexual health services. Youth at disproportionate risk for sexual health disparities may also need targeted interventions designed specifically to build self efficacy and agency. Further, administrators and other policy makers must recognize that structural determinants, socio-cultural factors and cultural norms have been shown to have a strong impact on youth sexual health and must be tackled to truly redress sexual health disparity fueled by social inequity.

COMPREHENSIVE SEXUAL HEALTH EDUCATION

ALL YOUTH

SEXUAL HEALTH SERVICES

SEXUALLY ACTIVE YOUTH

TARGETED INTERVENTIONS

YOUTH AT DISPROPORTIONATE

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Advocates for Youth, 2014

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HOW IS THE CONTENT OF A STUDENT’S SEX EDUCATION DECIDED?

Many factors help shape the content of a student’s sex education. These include:

• State and federal funding the school district receives

• State laws and standards regarding sex education

• School district level policies and/or standards regarding curricula and content

• The program or curriculum a district or individual school selects

• The individual(s) who delivers the program.

With thousands of school districts around the nation, students’ experiences can vary drastically from district to district and school to school.

WHAT ARE FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL STRUCTURES THAT AFFECT SEX EDUCATION?

In the United States, education is largely a state and local responsibility, as dictated by the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This amendment states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”3 Because the Constitution doesn’t specifically mention education, the federal government does not have any direct authority regarding curriculum, instruction, administration, personnel, etc. In 1980, the U.S. Department of Education was created. While this move centralized federal efforts and responsibilities into one office, it did not come with an increase in federal jurisdiction over the educational system.

The U.S. Department of Education currently has no authority over sexual health education. However, there have been federal funds allocated, primarily through the Department of Health and Human Services that school systems and community-based agencies have used throughout the last three decades to provide various forms of sex education.21

• Federal funding: Until FY2010, there was no designated funding for a comprehensive approach to sex education. In 1982, federal support of abstinence- only programs began, and in 1996, expanded drastically. From 1996-2010, over $1.5 billion in federal funding went to abstinence-only programs, which were conducted with little oversight and were proven ineffective. While one large stream of funding for abstinence-only programs was cancelled in 2010, at publication one still exists (as authorized by Congress through Title V funding) and is funded at $50 million per year.22

In 2010, two streams of funding became available for evidence-based sex education interventions.22

– PREP: The Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) was authorized by Congress as

a part of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. PREP provides grants ($75 million over five years) for programs which teach about both abstinence and contraception in order to help young people reduce their risk for unintended pregnancy, HIV, and STIs. In Fiscal Year 2012, 45 states applied for PREP. PREP grants are issued to states, typically the state health departments. All programs implemented with PREP funding are to educate adolescents about both abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and STIs, including HIV/AIDS, and must cover at least three adulthood preparation subjects such as healthy relationships, adolescent development, financial literacy, educational and career success, and healthy life skills.

– The President’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative (TPPI) funds medically-accurate and age- appropriate programs to reduce teen pregnancy. Seventy-five grantees in 32 states received TPPI funds in FY 2012. TPPI grants are distributed by the Office of Adolescent Health to local public and private entities. Grantees must implement an evidence-based program which has been proven effective at preventing teen pregnancy. According to OAH, 31 programs meet these criteria, including one abstinence-only-until-marriage program.

– States may accept PREP, TPPI, or Title V funds. Many states accept funds for both abstinence- only programs and evidence-based interventions. In 2013, 19 SEAs and 17 LEA received five year cooperative agreements from CDC/DASH to implement ESHE within their school systems.

In addition, in 2013, CDC/Division of School Health issued a request for proposals to fund State Education Agencies (SEAs) and Large Municipal Education Agencies (LEAs) to implement Exemplary Sexual Health Education (ESHE). ESHE is defined as a systematic, evidence-informed approach to sexual health education that includes the use of grade-specific, evidence-based interventions, but also emphasizes sequential learning across elementary, middle, and high school grade levels.23

States may accept PREP, TPPI, or Title V funds. Many states accept funds for both abstinence-only programs and evidence-based interventions. In 2013, 19 SEAs and 17 LEAs received five year cooperative agreements from CDC/DASH to implement ESHE within their school systems.22

• The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act: While there is as yet no law that supports comprehensive sexual health education, there is pending legislation. The Real Education for Healthy Youth Act (S. 372/H.R. 725), introduced in February 2013 by the late Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), would ensure that federal funding is allocated to comprehensive sexual health education programs that provide young people with the skills and information they need to make informed, responsible, and healthy decisions. This legislation

sets forth a vision for comprehensive sexual health education programs in the United States.

• State policy: State sex education policy may be governed by a state law as passed by the state legislature and signed into law by the state’s governor and/or the State Department of Education may have established state sex education standards. State policy on sex education can vary widely. As of 2012,

– 30 states have no law that governs sex education, and schools are not required to provide it

– 25 states mandate that sex education, if taught, must include abstinence, but do not require it to include contraception.

– Six states mandate that sex education include either a ban on discussing homosexuality, or material about homosexuality that is overtly discriminatory.22

Each state has a department of education headed by a chief state school officer, more commonly known as the Superintendent of Public Instruction or the Commissioner of Education (titles vary by state). State departments of education are generally responsible for disbursing state and federal funds to local school districts, setting parameters for the length of school day and year, teacher certification, testing requirements, graduation requirements, developing learning standards and promoting professional development. Generally, the chief state school officer is appointed by the Governor, though in a few states they are elected.23

State departments of education may also have Standards which provide benchmark measures that define what students should know and be able to do at specified grade levels. These sometimes, but not always, address sexual health education. For instance, Connecticut and New Jersey have standards similar to the National Sexuality Education Standards in place and which address reproduction, prevention of STIs and pregnancy, and healthy relationships. A number of other states have general health education standards which do not directly address sexual health, while others make mention of HIV/STI prevention and abstinence but don’t demand the most thorough instruction in sexual health.24

• Local Policy: At the school district level, Pre-K-12 public schools are generally governed by local school boards (with the exception of Hawaii which does not have any local school board system). Local school boards are typically comprised of 5 to 7 members who are either elected by the public or appointed by other government officials.21

Local school boards are responsible for ensuring that each school in their district is in compliance with the laws and policies set by the state and federal government. Local school board also have broad decision and rule-making authority with regards to the operations of their local school district, including

determining the school district budget and priorities; curriculum decisions such as the scope and sequence of classroom content in all subject areas; and textbook approval authority. 21

Typically, school boards set the sex education policy for a school district. They must follow state law. Some school boards provide guidelines or standards, while others select specific curricula for schools to deliver. Most school boards are advised by School Health Advisory Councils (SHACs). SHAC members are individuals who represent the community and who provide advice about health education.21

HOW CAN I WORK FOR COMPREHENSIVE SEXUAL HEALTH EDUCATION FOR STUDENTS IN MY COMMUNITY?

There are a number of ways to help ensure that students get the information they need to live healthy lives, build healthy relationships, and take personal responsibility for their health and well being.

• Urge your Members of Congress to support the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, in person, by phone, or online.

• Contact your school board and urge them to adopt the National Sexuality Education Standards and require comprehensive sexual health programs.

• Join a School Health Advisory Council in your area – both young people and adults are eligible to serve on most.

• Organize within your community – a group of individuals, or a coalition of like-minded organizations – to do one or all of the above.

CONCLUSION

Young people have the right to lead healthy lives. As they develop, we want them to take more and more control of their lives so that as they get older, they can make important life decisions on their own. The balance between responsibility and rights is critical because it sets behavioral expectations and builds trust while providing young people with the knowledge, ability, and comfort to manage their sexual health throughout life in a thoughtful, empowered and responsible way. But responsibility is a two-way street. Society needs to provide young people with honest, age-appropriate information they need to live healthy lives, and build healthy relationships, and young people need to take personal responsibility for their health and well being. Advocates must also work to dismantle barriers to sexual health, including poverty and lack of access to health care.

Emily Bridges, MLS, and Debra Hauser, MPH Advocates for Youth © May 2014

REFERENCES 1. CDC. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, 2011. Atlanta: US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2012.

2. Finer LB et al., Disparities in rates of unintended pregnancy in the United States, 1994 and 2001, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2006, 38(2):90–96.

3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2011. Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2012.

4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2012. Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2013.

5. Alford S, et al. Science and Success: Sex Education and Other Programs that Work to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, HIV & Sexually Transmitted Infections. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, 2008;

6. Dating Matters: Strategies to Promote Health Teen Relationships. Atlanta: Center for Disease Control and Prevention; 2013.

7. National Sexual Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12. A Special Publication of the Journal of School Health. 2012: 6-9. http://www. futureofsexed.org/documents/josh-fose-standards-web.pdf. Accessed October 2, 2013.

8. Davis A. Interpersonal and Physical Dating Violence among Teens. National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 2008. Retrieved November 15, 2013 from http://www.nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_ pdf/focus-dating-violence.pdf

9. Ybarra ML and Mitchell KJ. “Prevalence Rates of Male and Female Sexual Violence Perpetrators in a National Sample of Adolescents.” JAMA Pediatrics, December 2013.

10. Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. The 20011 National School Climate Survey: The School Related Experiences of Our Nation’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth. New York, NY: GLSEN, 2012.

11. CDC. Sexual Risk Behaviors and Academic Achievement. Atlanta, GA: CDC, (2010); http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/ health_and_academics/ pdf/sexual_risk_behaviors.pdf; last accessed 5/23/2010.

12. Chin B et al. “The effectiveness of group-based comprehensive risk- reduction and abstinence education interventions to prevent or reduce the risk of adolescent pregnancy, human immunodeficiency virus, and sexually transmitted infections: two systematic reviews for the Guide to Community Preventive Services.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, March 2012.

13. Kohler PK, Manhart LE, Lafferty WE. Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy. Journal of Adolescent Health. 2007; 42(4): 344-351.

14. Stanger-Hall KF, Hall DW. “Abstinence-only education and teen pregnancy rates: why we need comprehensive sex education in the U.S.

15. National Sexual Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12. A Special Publication of the Journal of School Health. 2012: 6-9. http://www. futureofsexed.org/documents/josh-fose-standards-web.pdf. Accessed October 2, 2013.

16. National Sexual Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12. A Special Publication of the Journal of School Health. 2012: 6-9. http://www. futureofsexed.org/documents/josh-fose-standards-web.pdf. Accessed October 2, 2013.

17. Kirby D. Emerging Answers 2007. Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 2007.

18. Office of Adolescent Health. “Evidence-Based Programs (31 Programs). Accessed March 5, 2014 from http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/oah- initiatives/teen_pregnancy/db/programs.html

19. Public Religion Research Institute. Survey – Committed to Availability, Conflicted about Morality: What the Millennial Generation Tells Us about the Future of the Abortion Debate and the Culture Wars. 2011. Accessed from http://publicreligion.org/research/2011/06/committed-to-

availability-conflicted-about-morality-what-the-millennial-generation- tells-us-about-the-future-of-the-abortion-debate-and-the-culture-wars/ on May 13, 2014.

20. Daniels K, Mosher WD and Jones J, Contraceptive methods women have ever used: United States, 1982–2010,National Health Statistics Reports, 2013, No. 62, , accessed Mar. 20, 2013.

21. Future of Sex Education. “Public Education Primer. “ Accessed from http://www.futureofsexed.org/documents/public_education_primer.pdf on May 13, 2014.

22. Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, Siecus State Profiles, Fiscal Year 2012. Accessed from http://www.siecus. org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=1369 on May 13, 2014.

23. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “In Brief: Rationale for Exemplary Sexual Health Education (ESHE) for PS13-1308. Accessed from http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/fundedpartners/1308/strategies/ education.htm on May 13, 2014.

24. Answer. “State sex education policies by state.” Accessed from http:// answer.rutgers.edu/page/state_policy/ on May 13, 2014.

MISSION

Established in 1980 as the Center for Population Options, Advocates for Youth champi- ons efforts to help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their reproductive and sexual health. Advocates believes it can best serve the field by boldly advocating for a more positive and realistic approach to adolescent sexual health.

OUR VISION: THE 3RS

Advocates for Youth envisions a society that views sexuality as normal and healthy and treats young people as a valuable resource.

The core values of Rights. Respect. Responsibility.® (3Rs) animate this vision:

RIGHTS Youth have the right to accurate and complete sexual health information, confi- dential reproductive and sexual health services, and a secure stake in the future.

RESPECT Youth deserve respect. Valuing young people means involving them in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs and policies that affect their health and well-being.

RESPONSIBILITY Society has the responsibility to provide young people with the tools they need to safeguard their sexual health, and young people have the responsibility to protect themselves from too-early childbearing and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV.

SOME RELATED PUBLICATIONS FROM ADVOCATES FOR YOUTH

The Facts: Comprehensive Sex Education and Academic Success

The Facts: Comprehensive Sex Education Research and Results

See the complete library of publications at www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Gender Representation on Gender-Targeted Television Channels: A Comparison of Female- and Male-Targeted TV Channels in the Netherlands

Serena Daalmans1 & Mariska Kleemans1 & Anne Sadza1

Published online: 5 January 2017 # The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Abstract The current study investigated the differences in the representation of gender on male- and female-targeted channels with regard to recognition (i.e., the actual presence of men and women) and respect (i.e., the nature of that representation or portrayal). To this end, the presence of men and women on two female- and two male-targeted Dutch channels (N = 115 pro- grams, N = 1091 persons) were compared via content analysis. The expectation that men’s channels would portray a less equal and more traditional image of gender than women’s channels was generally supported by the results. Regardless of genre as well as country of origin of the program, women were under- represented on men’s channels, while gender distribution on women’s channels wasmore equal. The representation of wom- en in terms of age and occupation was more stereotypical on men’s channels than on women’s channels, whereas men were represented in more contra-stereotypical ways (e.g., performing household tasks) on women’s channels. Since television view- ing contributes to the learning and maintenance of stereotyped perceptions, the results imply that it is important to strengthen viewers’ defenses against the effects of gender stereotyping when watching gendered television channels, for instance through media literacy programs in schools.

Keywords Gender-targeted channels . Gender stereotyping .

Gender representation . Content analysis . Television

Over the past decades, research has made it abundantly clear that women are underrepresented in the media and that, when they are present, they are more often than not represented in stereotypical roles (Collins 2011; Emons et al. 2010; Furnham and Paltzer 2010; Lauzen et al. 2008; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Because the roles of women in society have expanded tremendously as a result of the ongoing process of emancipa- tion, these consistent findings are often seen as remarkable (Collins 2011; Emons et al. 2010; Lauzen et al. 2008; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). However, recent developments in the television landscape may provide new insights on the issue. There are indications that specific gender-targeted genres (e.g., soaps and teen scene) might actually showcase both a more equal distribution of men and women as well as less stereotyping in its gender portrayals (Gerding and Signorielli 2014; Lauzen et al. 2006). Following on from this speculation, the emergence of channels that specifically define men or women as their target group and thus predominantly broadcast gender-targeted genres (also called narrowcasting, Kuipers 2012; Smith-Shomade 2004) might be a promising development with regard to a more representative portrayal of both men and women. However, gender portrayal on such gendered channels is rather unexplored, and is therefore cen- tral to the current study.

Narrowcasting, or organizing user groups into specific au- dience markets, started from the 1980s onward in the United States (Kuipers 2012; Lotz 2006). It meant that specific, often gendered, audience groups were targeted via specific pro- gramming and advertising content (Sheperd 2014). Following this pattern, we term narrowcasting on channels that explicitly target either a female or a male audience Bgender-targeted channels^ here. Gender-targeted television channels employing narrowcasting currently form an increas- ingly large portion of the television landscape in a multitude of countries (Kuipers 2012; Smith-Shomade 2004; Van Bauwel

* Serena Daalmans s.daalmans@maw.ru.nl

1 Behavioural Science Institute, Communication Science, Radboud University, Postbus 9104, 6500, HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 DOI 10.1007/s11199-016-0727-6

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11199-016-0727-6&domain=pdf

2016). Previous research into narrowcasting has, on the one hand, focused on the emergence of female-targeted channels, such as Lifetime and Oxygen, and its programming strategies, content choices, and rhetoric used to win female audiences and advertisers of female products (Byars and Meehan 1994; Hundley 2002; Lotz 2006; Meehan and Byars 2000; Tankel and Banks 1997). On the other hand, researchers studied whether specific gender-targeted programs such as Sex and The City and Ally McBeal can be considered (post-) feminist texts (Akass and McCabe 2004; Dubrofsky 2002). What re- mains unclear based on previous research is how the gendered focus of such channels and of programs suitable to broadcast on gender-targeted channels affect the representation of men and women in terms of presence and stereotyping.

Investigation of the portrayal of men and women in pro- grams broadcast at gender-targeted channels becomes urgent when considering statements by television scholars who label gender-targeting or narrowcasting as a hegemonic practice (Meehan 1990; Sheperd 2014; Smith-Shomade 2004). Moreover, studying gender representation remains of the ut- most importance because watching television still is the most time-consuming pastime (Collins 2011; Signorielli 2012). As a result, television is seen as one of the main institutions as- sociated with disseminating stereotyped views of the world and its gender roles. From the theoretical vantage point of cultivation theory as well as social learning theory, television is confirmed as one of the main agents of socialization (Bandura 1977; Gerbner 1979; Signorielli 2012). Research has shown that television viewing contributes to the mainte- nance as well as the learning (molding) of gender stereotyped perceptions among children, adolescents, and adults (Larson 2001; McGhee and Frueh 1980; Signorielli 1989; Welch et al. 1979). Furthermore, it is generally accepted that television impacts gender socialization in people’s self-image as well as their image of others (Signorielli 2012). Assuming that television has the potential to shape attitudes, self-perception, and behavior—on top of the idea that stereotyping plays a crucial role in the maintenance of power inequalities within wider social, cultural, political, and economic structures (Cottle 2000; Dyer 1993, 1997; Morgan 2007)—it becomes important to analyze and understand the nature of gender-role portrayals on gender-targeted channels.

Previous research on gender stereotyping inmedia has gen- erally focused on two levels of gender stereotyping. The first level of gender stereotyping includes the actual presence of men and women in television programs (whether they ap- pear), termed recognition. The second level focuses on the nature of that representation or portrayal (how they appear), termed respect (Collins 2011; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Research into narrowcasting remains inconclusive about whether the representation of men and women on gender- targeted channels differs from the overall established patterns of underrepresentation of women (i.e., recognition) and

stereotyping portrayal of both men and women (i.e, respect). Moreover, known previous research into narrowcasting has only studied female-targeted channels (Byars and Meehan 1994; Hundley 2002; Lotz 2006; Meehan and Byars 2000; Tankel and Banks 1997), but a comparison between the gen- der representation on male-targeted and female-targeted chan- nels is lacking. This comparison is important because, if these gender-targeted channels differ in how they represent gender, this might lead to differing conceptions of gender roles and gender aspirations between their male and female target audi- ences (Gerding and Signorielli 2014).

In all, the question that is central to the current study is: What are the differences in the representation of gender on male- and female-targeted Dutch channels with regard to the characteriza- tion concepts of recognition and respect? This question will be investigated by analyzing gender-targeted television channels in the Netherlands, a country in which 40% of the television land- scape currently explicitly targets a gendered target audience (Stichting Kijkonderzoek [SKO] 2014).

In their longitudinal analysis of gender on television, Signorielli and Bacue (1999) use presence and gender-role stereotyping as indicators of recognition and respect respec- tively. These concepts stem from a study of televised racial minorities by Clark (1972), who posited that positive changes in the treatment of lower status groups (minorities including women) can be seen as a process that follows two stages: recognition and respect. In gender research, recognition can be seen as the presence of women on the television screen (Lauzen and Dozier 2005; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Respect is measured by the extent toward which women are not portrayed in stereotypical roles, but rather represented in a diverse manner because this diversity is necessary to be rep- resented fairly and positively (Signorielli and Bacue 1999).

Recognition: Presence of Men and Women on Television

Recognition is defined as men and women being represented on television proportional to their presence in society (Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Research into gender representation has over- whelmingly found that women are underrepresented on televi- sion compared to their presence in society (Collins 2011; Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Greenberg and Atkin 1980; Koeman et al. 2007; Signorielli and Bacue 1999; Tedesco 1974). The last decades have shown a trend towards a more equal distribution of male and female characters (Elasmar et al. 1999; Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Greenberg and Collette 1997; Lauzen and Dozier 2005; Vande Berg and Streckfuss 1992), but increases are often small and women re- main underrepresented (Koeman et al. 2007; Segijn et al. 2014).

There are some indications that levels of over- or under- representation are connected to the gender of the target

Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 367

audience. Gunter (1986) found that soap operas in 1970s that were specifically geared toward a female audience had an equal distribution of male and female characters. Gerding and Signorielli (2014) similarly found that whereas females were underrepresented in ‘tween programs geared towards male adolescents, the programs geared towards female ado- lescents mirrored the U.S. population. Based on previous re- sults we posit that women will be underrepresented compared to their presence in society on men’s channels, but not on women’s channels (Hypothesis 1).

Previous studies have revealed that television genres can differ in the ways they represent gender. It has been shown that gender stereotyping is surely still present, but has generally re- vealed a trend of decreasing stereotyping in genres such as tele- vision fiction (Emons et al. 2010; Greenwood and Lippman 2010; Gunter 1986; Signorielli and Bacue 1999), teen scene programming (Gerding and Signorielli 2014), and advertising (Wolin 2003).Moreover, the portrayal of women in these genres has become more representative of the lives and status of con- temporary women. In contrast, other studies—mostly on televi- sion advertising, but also on fictional programs—conclude that women are still underrepresented and portrayed in a stereotyp- ical way and that the degree of stereotyping is even worsening (Allen and Coltrane 1996; Bretl and Cantor 1988; Ganahl et al. 2003; Harwood and Anderson 2002; Koeman et al. 2007; Milner and Higgs 2004). Based on the latter results, some have argued that, due to its continued gender-stereotyped nature, tele- vision forms a lagging social indicator, which reflects Bhow the economy or society was rather than how it is or how it will be^ (Estes 2003, p.4; see also Emons 2011; Kim and Lowry 2005).

Taken together these results reveal that there is inconsisten- cy in the literature about the relation between genre and gen- der-stereotyping. These possible genre differences become relevant and important when combined with the increased attention from a cultivation perspective that has been given to the possibility of genre-specific cultivation effects (Bilandzic and Busselle 2008; Bilandzic and Rössler 2004; Cohen and Weimann 2000; Grabe and Drew 2007; Morgan and Shanahan 2010). Following the idea put forth by Hawkins and Pingree (1981) that different TV genres may cultivate different views of the world, research has revealed large dif- ferences between genres (Gomes andWilliams 1990; Koeman et al. 2007; Pennekamp 2011). Because men’s and women’s channels cater to different expected audiences most likely with a selection of different gendered genres, this might influ- ence the gender representation on these channels as a whole. This then leads to the following research question: Do genre- differences play a role in the presence of men and women on gender-targeted television channels? (Research Question 1).

The country of origin of the selected programming might also play a role in gender representational differences between channel types. Previous research has revealed that country of origin plays a significant role in the degree of stereotyping

present in the representation of gender (Emons et al. 2010; Furnham and Paltzer 2010; Wiles et al. 1995). For example, Emons et al. (2010) found that U.S. programs on Dutch tele- vision represented more male adults, more women involved in childcare, more men involved in a job, and fewer males in- volved in other activities compared to Dutch programs on the same channels. Based on this comparison, they conclude that American programs on Dutch television are more gender- stereotyped than programs of Dutch origin. Their research indicates that gender portrayals on television can be artifacts of the culture of the society they were created and thereby potentially reflective of the degree of gender equality in the culture of origin. Because the Dutch television landscape hosts a large degree of foreign (especially American) pro- gramming, it becomes interesting to see how this affects gen- der representation on Dutch gendered channels (Kuipers 2008, 2011). We therefore pose the following research ques- tion: Do differences in country of origin of the program play a role in the presence of men and women on gender-targeted television channels? (Research Question 2).

Respect: Stereotyping in Gender Representation

Analyzing the presence of women in the television world is only a relatively small aspect the representation of women on TV. BA more complete understanding of how women are portrayed on television comes from examining the type and depth of the roles in which they are cast – what Clark (1972) referred to as respect^ (Signorielli and Bacue 1999, p. 530).We therefore also investigate how women appear in television programs.

The first indicator of respect analyzed in the present study is age. Studies have found that inequalities in the age of tele- vised men and women persist because women are continually represented as younger than their male counterparts are (Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). The fact that men on television are predominantly rep- resented as older and therewith are perceived to be wiser than their female counterparts can be interpreted as women being given less respect (Signorielli and Bacue 1999).

Furthermore, previous research on gender-targeted children’s programming has revealed that programs geared toward a boy audience often showcased rather traditional gender-biased por- trayals, whereas programs geared toward a girl audience less often featured gender-stereotypical roles and sometimes even showcased counter-stereotypical roles (Banet-Weiser 2004; Gerding and Signorielli 2014; Leaper et al. 2002; Northup and Liebler 2010; Thompson and Zerbinos 1995). Taken together with previous research on age as an indicator of respect (Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Signorielli and Bacue 1999), we expect a more traditional image on men’s channels than on women’s channels. This leads to the expectations that a larger percentage of women will be young adults on men’s channels

368 Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378

than on women’s channels (Hypothesis 2a) and a larger percent- age of men will be adults on men’s channels than on women’s channels (Hypothesis 2b).

The second aspect of respect that we will analyze focuses on the social roles in which men and women are cast (Emons et al. 2010; Gerbner 1995; Greenberg and Atkin 1980; Gunter 1986; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Studies showed that televised men are more likely to be cast in occupational roles, whereas tele- vised women are more likely to be cast in nurturing or marital roles (Gunter 1986; Lauzen et al. 2008; Signorielli and Bacue 1999; Tedesco 1974). Televised women are traditionally repre- sented as housewives who perform housekeeping chores and are preoccupied with family life (Emons et al. 2010; Gunter 1986; Koeman et al. 2007; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). The results on gendered representation of social roles, combined with the previously outlined results regarding the predominance of traditionally gender-stereotyped portrayals in programming geared towards boys and amore gender-balanced representation in programming geared towards girls (Banet-Weiser 2004; Gerding and Signorielli 2014; Leaper et al. 2002; Northup and Liebler 2010; Thompson and Zerbinos 1995), leads us to expect that women on men’s channels will be represented performing household/caregiving tasks more often than women on women’s channels (Hypothesis 3a) and men on men’s channels will be represented performing household/caregiving tasks less often than men on women’s channels (Hypothesis 3b).

In line with this reasoning, studies have found women to be underrepresented with regard to being professionally employed (Elasmar et al. 1999; Gunter 1986; Coltrane and Adams 1997; McNeil 1975; Signorielli 1989; Signorielli and Bacue 1999), which is the next indicator for respect that we will analyze. Over time, there appears to be an increase of women represented as having a job and a decrease of men represented as have a job (Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Again, however, this trend is not straightforward because the occupational status of men and women on television tends to fluctuate (Emons et al. 2010). Nevertheless, due to the expectedly more gender-traditional rep- resentation on men’s channels (Banet-Weiser 2004; Gerding and Signorielli 2014; Leaper et al. 2002; Northup and Liebler 2010; Thompson and Zerbinos 1995), we predict that women will be granted less respect on men’s channels in terms of oc- cupational status. Thus we hypothesize that women on men’s channels will be represented as being professionally employed less often than women on women’s channels (Hypothesis 4a) and that men on men’s channels will be represented as being professionally employed more often than men on women’s channels (Hypothesis 4b).

The suggestion that family life and parenthood are of greater significance to women than to men is also implicit in the fact that parental status is more often made explicit for women than for men (Davis 1990; Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Gunter 1986; McNeil 1975). The final indicator of respect that we will analyze, therefore, is parental status. Again there is a

trend toward a more egalitarian distribution of known parental status for characters over time. The percentages of known pa- rental status decreased from 81% for women and 54% for men in McNeil’s (1975) study to 56% for women and 42% for men in Glascock’s (2001) study. Again, a more traditional represen- tation is expected to be more prevalent on men’s channels than on women’s channels (cf. Banet-Weiser 2004; Gerding and Signorielli 2014; Leaper et al. 2002; Northup and Liebler 2010; Thompson and Zerbinos 1995). We therefore expect women on men’s channels to be represented as mothers more often thanwomen onwomen’s channels will be (Hypothesis 5a) and men on men’s channels to be represented as fathers less often than men on women’s channels will be (Hypothesis 5b).

Combined, these hypotheses test differences in the levels of recognition and respect given to men and women on men’s and women’s television channels by testing differences in terms of stereotypical or counter-stereotypical role portrayals between the two channel types, comparable to what Gerding and Signorielli (2014) did in their study on ‘tween programs. Aswe argued, these differencesmay impact the ideas that men and women have about what are acceptable gender-role pat- terns and what to expect from oneself and others.

Method

To test our hypotheses, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of gender-role portrayals of 1091 characters in tele- vision 115 programs aired during primetime on four gender- specific television channels in the Netherlands in 2014. All four gendered cable channels on the Dutch television were analyzed: RTL7 and Veronica as men’s channels and RTL8 and Net5 as women’s channels. This distinction was made clear in the explicit statements on their marketing pages as well as their slogans broadcasted during their televised com- mercial breaks (e.g., BEverything women love,^ BWhat wom- en want,^ BRTL7 knows what men want,^ and BMore for men^). Examples of programs on women’s channels are 15 Kids and Counting and Sex and The City; men’s channels broadcast, for instance, Top Gear and programs about soccer. All included channels are commercial broadcasters because Dutch public service broadcasters do not identify specific tar- get audience but are (by law) aimed at informing and enter- taining the general population (Koeman et al. 2007).

A check of the validity of the distinction in gendered chan- nels was conducted by verifying the audience profiles, based on gendered viewer ratings, for each channel (Stichting Kijkonderzoek [SKO] 2014, p. 39). The ratings revealed that the audience profile of the male channels RTL 7 and Veronica is indeed male-dominated, with respectively 64.0% and 55.1% of the viewers in 2014 being male. The women’s chan- nels RTL8 and Net5 were shown to have a more female audi- ence. Women represented 64.2% of the audience watching

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RTL8, and 63.5% of the audience watching Net5. In terms of market share, the male channels RTL7 (5.0%) and Veronica (4.4%) had a combined market share of just below 10%, whereas the women’s channels RTL8 (2.4%) and Net5 (3.5%) had a combined market share of just below 6% (Stichting Kijkonderzoek [SKO] 2014).

Sample

For each of the four channels, five primetime evenings (6 PM–midnight) of broadcasting were coded and analyzed. The evenings were recorded as part of a larger clustered sam- ple of several constructed weeks and the channels were there- fore recorded on consecutive days over the course of several weeks (29 March 2014–12 May 2014). This type of sampling leads to more representative results than recording an actual week (Riffe et al. 2005) because television channels some- times have thematic weeks that may not be representative of year-long programming. All programs were analyzed but only if the complete episode was aired within the timeframe of the sample. The context unit of our study was one episode, there- fore only information that was shown in the specific episode was used for coding.

A total number of 56 programs (48.3%) were broadcasted on a women’s channel: NET5 (26, 22.6%) and RTL8 (30, 26.1%), and 59 programs (51.7%) were broadcasted on a men’s channel: RTL7 (24, 20.9%) and Veronica (35, 30.4%). From the total of 1091 characters that were present in the programs, 597 (54.7%) were presented on men’s chan- nels; 494 (45.3%), on women’s channels.

Recording Units and Coding Procedure

The two channel types constitute the units of analysis for our study. Recording units were storylines (for fictional programs) and items (for entertainment and reality programs) within pro- grams and the main characters or persons who were featured in them. Entertainment and reality as a genre contained programs, such as Masterchef and Top Gear, whereas fiction as a genre contained both comedic fiction, such as Two and a Half Men andMike&Molly, and dramatic fiction, such asCriminalMinds and The Bold and the Beautiful. The women’s channels sample consisted of 56 programs, of which 34 (60.7%) were fictional and 22 (39.3%) were entertainment and reality. Themen’s chan- nels sample consisted of 59 programs, of which 30 (50.9%) were fictional and 29 (49.1%) were entertainment and reality.

Coding initially differentiated between fictional and non- fictional programming, of which the latter included the genres News and Information and Entertainment and Reality. However, the results revealed that there were actually no pro- grams in the sample which belonged to the News and Information genre.

Based on Emons et al. (2010) up to ten items or storylines, each with up to eight persons, were coded. For fiction these eight characters were selected by coding only main characters in the episode. Amain character was defined as a character who plays a leading role in the narrative and whose choices and behavior were essential for the development of the plot (Egri 1960; Lauzen and Dozier 2005; Weijers 2014). In entertainment and reality programs, the eight persons who had the most speaking and/or screen time per item were coded. Show hosts and re- porters were coded but excluded from the analyses because they differed from the rest of the population as a result of their func- tion rather than their gender or the channel type on which they were portrayed (i.e., every show host always has an occupation; marital and parental status are very rarely made explicit). Moreover, only aminority of the initial sample consisted of these types of characters (n = 50). In addition, animated persons from three program broadcast on men’s channels were also excluded.

The coding instrument used to analyze the persons and characters in the sample (see Table 1 for coding definitions, categories, and frequencies) was developed using prior studies of prime-time television (Davis 1990; Elasmar et al. 1999; Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Greenberg and Atkin 1980; Koeman et al. 2007; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). Two coders were involved in the coding process. Coders re- ceived coder training and independent practice on programs that were not part of the sample. The coders independently coded practice materials and then compared and discussed the results. The coding instrument was edited after these discus- sions to fix potential problems prior to coding and analysis. After the final revisions in the coding instrument, a little over 10% of the program sample (n = 14; 12.1%) was randomly selected to be double coded.

Intercoder reliabilities were calculated in SPSS using the macro by Hayes for Krippendorff’s alpha (Hayes and Krippendorff 2007). All variables were analyzed as nominal variables except for age, which was analyzed as an ordinal variable. The cut-off points were defined based on Lombard et al. (2002) who suggest that Krippendorff’s alpha coeffi- cients of .90 or higher are always acceptable and .80 or higher are acceptable in most situations. As reported in Table 1, intercoder reliabilities are acceptable for all variables (Kalphas > .87).

Results

Presence as an Indicator of Recognition

The first hypothesis stated that women would be underrepre- sented on men’s channels, but not on women’s channels, com- pared to their presence in (Dutch) society (Hypothesis 1). In 2014, 49.5% of the Dutch population (N = 16,829,289) was male whereas 50.5% of the population was female (Centraal

370 Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378

Bureau voor de Statistiek 2014). The gender distribution on men’s and women’s channels was examined with a Chi square goodness of fit test whereby the societal percentage was used as the expected value. The results showed that women were significantly underrepresented on men’s channels compared to their presence in society. Women made up only 22% of the cast, whereas men (78%) were much more present com- pared to the gender distribution in society, χ2(1, n = 597) = 192.48, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .57. In contrast, women (and men) on women’s channels were not underrep- resented. Their presence did not differ significantly from so- ciety in terms of gender. Women composed 48.6% of the populat ion whereas men composed 51.4%, χ2(1, n = 494) = .73, p = .394, Cramer’s V = .04. In all, the results provide support for Hypothesis 1 because underrepresentation of women was only found on men’s channels. The first research question asked if the genre of the pro- grams presented on men’s and women’s channels would lead to a differing presence of men and women on these channels. The results revealed that, based on the adjusted residuals on men’s channels, the percentage of men significantly exceeded expected frequencies within the entertainment and reality genre (87.9%, adjusted residuals =8.1), whereas the percent- ages for women (although still underrepresented) significantly exceeded expected frequencies within the fictional genre on men’s channels (40.1%, adjusted residuals =8.1), χ2(1, n = 597) = 65.20, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .33. In contrast, on women’s channels the percentage of women significantly exceeded expected frequencies within the entertainment and reality genre (54.8%, adjusted residuals =2.4), whereas the percentage of men (55.9%, adjusted residuals = 2.4) signifi- cantly exceeded expected frequencies in fictional genre, χ2(1, n = 494) = 5.57, p = .018, Cramer’s V = .11. In all, there is a more pronounced difference in the representation of gender on men’s channels in different genres than on women’s channels, where gender is more evenly divided. The second research question asked if country of origin of the programs presented on men’s and women’s channels would lead to a differing presence of men and women on these channels. Overall, results showed that women were underrep- resented in programming from all countries. However, on men’s channels in programs created in the United States, the percentage of women significantly exceeded expected fre- quencies (34%, adjusted residuals =8.0) with the percentage of men (66.0%) falling below expected rates, χ2(2, n = 597) = 64.85, p < .001, Cramer ’s V = .33. Comparatively, men are starkly overrepresented in program- ming from both the Netherlands (95.2%, adjusted residuals = 5.8) and Other countries (91.1%, adjusted residuals =3.7), with the percentage of women falling below expected rates (NL: 4.8%, Other: 8.9%). In contrast, on women’s channels there were no significant differences between countries of origin in the presence of men and women, χ2(2, n = 494) = 4.35, p = .114, Cramer’s V = .10. These results prompted a closer inspection of the particular programming originating in the Netherlands and Other coun- tries in the sample. Programs on men’s channels that were created in The Netherlands were predominantly sports talk shows (n = 4) and reality crime shows (n = 5). We need to note here that Dutch programs constitute only 17.9% of the Table 1 Overview of coded variables Variable Definition Categories Kalpha Frequencies n (%) Genre Genre to which the program belongs (N = 115) Entertainment and Reality Fiction 1.00 52 (45%) 63 (55%) Country of origina Country of origin of the program (N = 115) The Netherlands United States, Great-Britain / Other 1.00 22 (20%) 85 (73%) 4 (3.5%) / 4 (3.5%) Gender Person or character’s gender (N = 1091) Male Female .98 720 (66%) 371 (34%) Age Person or character’s age in terms of the life cycle (N = 1091) Child (0–12) Teenager (13–18) Young adult (19–34) Adult (35–49) Middle-aged (50–64) Senior (65+) .87 21 (1.9%) 45 (4.1%) 408 (37.4%) 455 (41.7%) 116 (10.6%) 46 (4.2%) Household and caregiving tasks Whether the person or character engages in household or caregiving tasks (for example: cleaning, doing the laundry, or taking children to school) (N = 1091) Yes No .93 71 (6.5%) 1020 (93.5%) Employment Whether the person or character is portrayed as being professionally employed or explicitly mentions having a job (N = 1091) Yes No Unknown .96 681 (62.4%) 20 (1.8%) 390 (35.7%) Parental status Whether the person or character is portrayed as a parent or explicitly mentions being a parent (N = 1091) Yes No Unknown .96 147 (13.7%) 19 (1.8%) 905 (84.5%). a In the analyses, the categories of BGreat-Britain^ and BOther^ were combined due to low cell frequencies Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 371 programming on men’s channels. All other programs were originally from United States (71.4%) or from Great Britain and other countries (10.7%). Programs on men’s channels from other countries were all male-oriented shows such as Top Gear, the famous BBC car talk show. Comparatively, the programs aired on men’s channels originating in the United States are a little more mixed, consisting of for exam- ple the reality crime showCops as well as comedy shows such as Mike & Molly and drama such as Criminal Minds. Age as Indicator of Respect The second set of hypotheses stated that women would be represented as young adults on men’s channels more often than on women’s channels (Hypothesis 2a), whereas men would be portrayed as adults on men’s channels more often than on women’s channels (Hypothesis 2b). The distribution of women along age categories differed significantly between channel types, χ2 (5, n = 372) = 13.70, p = .018, Cramer’s V = .19 (see Table 2a). In accordance with hypothesis 2a, the residual analysis revealed that on men’s channels over half of all women (56.8%, adjusted residuals =2.7) were portrayed as young adults which was significantly more than the 42.1% on women’s channels. As predicted in Hypothesis 2b, 49.2% of men (adjusted residuals =2.9) were represented as adults on men’s channels, and this was also significantly more than the 37.8% onwomen’s channels, χ2(5, n = 719) = 19.04, p = .002, Cramer’s V = .16. Although not hypothesized, these results also revealed that adult women (40.0%, adjusted residuals =2.8) were significantly more present on women’s channels than on men’s channels (25.8%). As the percentages above already indicate, most of main characters in the sample were either young adults or adults. The other age categories that we discerned (child, teenager, middle-aged adults, and seniors) appeared less frequent (12.3– 14.6% for middle aged men, all other percentages <7.5%, see Table 2a). No notable differences in presence of men and women of these age categories on either men’s or women’s channels were found, except for significantly more male chil- dren on women’s channels (3.9%, adjusted residuals = 3.5) than on men’s channels (.4%). Tasks as Indicators of Respect We expected that women on men’s channels would be over- represented performing household or caregiving tasks com- pared to women on women’s channels (H3a). We did not find support for this hypothesis, since 12.1% of women on men’s channels and 11.7% of women on women’s channels per- formed these tasks and these numbers did not differ signifi- cantly, χ2(1, n = 372) = .017, Cramer’s V = .007, p = .897 (see Table 2b). It was further hypothesized that men on men’s channels would be significantly underrepresented performing house- hold or caregiving tasks compared to men on women’s chan- nels (Hypothesis 3b). The results supported this hypothesis as Table 2 Indicators of respect for women and men on gender- targeted channels Represented women Represented men Indicators Men’s channels Women’s channels Men’s channels Women’s channels (a) Age Child 3.8% 1.7% .4% 3.9%* Teenager 4.5% 4.2% 3.7% 4.7% Young adult 56.8%* 42.1% 31.0% 34.6% Adult 25.8% 40.0%* 49.2%* 37.8% Middle aged 3.0% 7.5% 12.3% 14.6% Senior 6.1% 4.6% 3.4% 4.3% n 132 240 465 254 (b) Household and caregiving tasks Yes 12.1% 11.7% 1.5% 7.9%* No 87.9% 88.3% 98.5%* 92.1% n 132 240 465 254 (c) Employment Yes 43.2% 57.1%* 64.9% 72.8%* No 3.0% 4.6% .4% 1.2% Unknown 53.8%* 38.3% 34.3%* 26.0% n 132 240 465 254 (d) Parental status Yes 19.7% 23.8% 5.4% 15.4%* No .8% 5.4%* .2% 1.6%* Unknown 79.5% 70.8% 94.4%* 83.1% n 132 240 465 254 * Frequency significantly exceeded expectations by adjusted standardized residuals 372 Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 7.9% of men on women’s channels performed household or caregiving tasks (adjusted residuals =4.3) compared to only 1.5% of men on men’s channels, χ2(1, n = 719) = 18.44, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .16 (see Table 2b). Employment as Indicator of Respect Women onmen’s channels were expected to be represented as having an occupation less often than women on women’s channels (Hypothesis 4a), whereas men on men’s channels were expected to be represented as having an occupation more often than men on women’s channels (Hypothesis 4b). A sig- nificantly larger percentage of women (57.1%, adjusted resid- uals = 2.6) was indeed portrayed as having an occupation on women’s channels than on men’s channels (43.2%), χ2 (2, n = 372) = 8.31, p = .016, Cramer’s V = .15 (see Table 2c). This finding confirms Hypothesis 4a. Contrary to Hypothesis 4b, men on men’s channels were portrayed as having an oc- cupation significantly less often than men on women’s chan- nels were (see Table 2c). On men’s channels, 64.9% (adjusted residuals = − 2.6) of the men were portrayed as having an occupation compared to 72.8% of men on women’s channels, χ2(2, n = 719) = 6.75, p = .035, Cramer’s V = .10. Furthermore, the results also revealed a significant overrepre- sentation within the unknown category of occupation for both women (53.8%, adjusted residuals = 2.9) and men (34.6%, adjusted residuals = 2.4) on men’s channels. Parental Status as Indicator of Respect The final set of hypotheses predicted that women on men’s channels would be represented as mothers more often than women on women’s channels (Hypothesis 5a) and, converse- ly, that men onmen’s channels would be represented as fathers less often than men on women’s channels (Hypothesis 5b). The results revealed that women’s parental state significantly differed between the channel types, χ2(2, n = 372) = 6.41, p = .040, Cramer’s V = .13 (see Table 2d). However, the residual analysis shows that this difference is due to the knowledge of explicit childlessness of women between chan- nel types, where women were significantly more often explic- itly childless on women’s channels (5.4%, adjusted residuals = 2.3) than onmen’s channels (.8%). There was no significant difference between the representation of women as mother between men’s channels (19.7%) and women’s channels (23.8%). We thus need to reject Hypothesis 5a. The results also indicated that men were, as expected in Hypothesis 5b, significantly more often represented as fathers (15.4%, adjust- ed residuals = 4.5) on women’s channels than on men’s chan- nels (5.4%), χ2(2, n = 719) = 25.08, p < .001,Cramer’s V = .19 (see Table 2d). Hypothesis 5b is thus supported. Discussion The primary goal of our studywas to provide insight into theway that gender was represented on television channels targeting ei- ther men or women. The overarching expectation that, due to the target audience, men’s channels would portray a less equal and more traditional image of gender than women’s channels would in terms of both recognition and respect was generally supported by our results. In line with the results of Gerding and Signorielli (2014), our study revealed that whereas women were grossly underrepresented on men’s channels, gender distribution on women’s channels mirrored the Dutch population. This phenom- enon cannot be explained by the idea that audiences would prefer watching members of their own gender because women should then have been overrepresented on women’s channels just like men are on men’s channels. Because this was not the case, we can conclude that in contrast to women’s channels, men’s chan- nels show a lack of recognition for women. Moreover, an explo- ration of the level of recognition per genre and per country of origin of the programs on the gendered channels also revealed that women’s channels, regardless of genre as well as the country of origin of the program, showcased a more equal presence of men and women than men’s channels did. In all, this means that only women’s channels fulfill the first of the two stages towards positive and fair treatment of women: recognition (Clark 1972; Lauzen and Dozier 2005; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). In addition, our results revealed that men’s channels also lagged behind in terms of the second stage of positive and equal portrayal (Clark 1972): respect. First, the stereotypical value of youth for women (as an indicator of a lack of respect, see also Davis 1990; Emons et al. 2010; Lauzen and Dozier 2005; Signorielli and Bacue 1999) is much more pronounced on men’s channels than it is on women’s channels. Women on women’s channels were not only represented as older than they were on men’s channels, but they were also distributed more evenly over the age categories of young adult and adult. Second, in terms of occupational status, women on women’s channels weremore likely to be portrayed as being profession- ally employed than women on men’s channels were. However, the results for the other indicators of respect re- vealed a less straightforward conclusion. As for the percentage of women performing household or caregiving tasks and the overrepresentation of women as parents, there were no signifi- cant differences between men’s and women’s channels. However, it should be noted that women’s channels were more likely than men’s channels were to represent men as performing household and caregiving tasks and being parents. Household and caregiving tasks especially were divided rather equally be- tween both genders—in contrast to the results by Emons et al. (2010). Therefore we conclude that at least the degree of gender stereotyping (at least in terms of these indicators) is lower on women’s channels and that they thereby still grant more respect to women and men than men’s channels do. Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 373 The most striking result found in our study is that it is the representation of men (rather than women) in which the true differences between men’s and women’s channels are found. Men are represented in counter-stereotypical ways on women’s channels and become connected to the home and family almost as much as women. This focus on home and family life on women’s channels could be interpreted as a post-feminist resur- gence of the focus on gender differences and stereotypical fem- inine values onwomen’s channels (Gill 2007;McRobbie 2009). Another, more positive, interpretation might, however, be that the private domain is being re-evaluated. Women’s channels seem to present an image in which home and family life are important—for both men and women. This might be interpreted as the private domain itself increasingly gaining respect on these channels. Also, besides their connection to family life, high percentages of both men and women are represented as being professionally employed on these channels, resulting in a more diverse depiction of both genders. Limitations and Directions for Future Research Although the findings here are of clear importance in adding to our understandings of the differences in gender representa- tion on gender-targeted channels, there are some limitations to our study that should be addressed. First, the sample consisted of a constructed week recorded on consecutive days. Therewith, we did not control for seasonal differences in pro- gramming. Recording several weeks, one in each season may contribute to the representativeness of the results. Second, in terms of variables we decided to code as many of the aspects that were associated with the central concepts of recognition and respect as discerned by Clark (1972) and Signorielli and Bacue (1999). To this end, we closely followed previous codebooks (Davis 1990; Elasmar et al. 1999; Emons et al. 2010; Glascock 2001; Greenberg and Atkin 1980; Koeman et al. 2007; Signorielli and Bacue 1999) in the operationalization of our variables. As a consequence, we were not able to explore every one of the aspects in an in- depth manner. For example, household and caregiving tasks were coded as either being performed or not performed. Because of this, if one character was portrayed performing household tasks for an entire episode and another performed only one such task, both were coded as performing these tasks in the same way. It is recommended that future research would measure the number of tasks performed by each character so as to gain more insight into gendered task distribution. Furthermore, with regard to the variable of occupation, the coding based on previous work relatively simplistically reflected if a person had a job or not (or if it was unknown). Even though the differentiation between having a job or not captures implicit messages of gendered worth in the public sphere, future research should add a dimension of gender-role stereotyping to this vari- able in building on previous work (Coltrane and Adams 1997; Glascock 2001; Signorielli 1989; Signorielli and Bacue 1999; Signorielli andKahlenberg 2001). Future research could establish for gendered channels if there are differences between men and women with regard to the type of occupation, the prestige asso- ciated with that occupation, as well as the authority they have over other workers in that occupation in order to determine how stereotypical the representation of work formen andwomen is on these channels. This is important because media portrayals pro- vide one of the sources of information against which people in modern societies give meaning to in their work and family lives (Coltrane and Adams 1997; Signorielli and Kahlenberg 2001). Seen in this light, the media’s previously documented tendency of linking men with jobs in which they have authority and wom- en with jobs with less prestige and less authority over other workers (Coltrane and Adams 1997; Glascock 2001; Signorielli 1989), potentially aids in the perpetuation of gender stereotypes and the maintenance of the gendered status quo. Third, we decided to exclude show hosts and reporters in entertainment and reality programs because there was almost no variation with regard to the dependent variables. Although their presence was low compared to the other characters who were coded, their representation is important against the back- ground of the current study. For instance, talk shows are fre- quently watched, and the position of host carries a certain amount of authority and expertise with it, implying that the gender representation of show hosts may also contribute to viewers’ stereotyped views of the world and its gender roles. Previous research has already outlined that men form the ma- jority of show hosts in programs devoted to Bhard^ content (e.g., politics and economy), whereas women are dominant as show hosts for Bsoft^ topics (e.g., family and romance) (Gerbner 1995; Koeman et al. 2007; Segijn et al. 2014). Therefore, future research should include an in-depth analysis of these roles on gendered channels to assess potential differences. In addition to including show hosts and reporters in future analyses, it might be interesting to explore the relationship of the gender of individuals behind the scenes of the gender- targeted television channels (e.g., managers, writers, directors, advertisers) and the on-screen portrayal of men and women. This is particularly interesting because it could explore the assumption which some media analysts and scholars have put forward that if more women had positions of authority behind the scenes in the entertainment world, the media would offer less gender-stereotyped portrayals of men and women (Benét 1978; Lauzen and Dozier 1999; Mills 1988). Some of these dynamics have been explored for prime-time program- ming by other researchers (e.g., Glascock 2001; Lauzen and Dozier 1999; Lauzen et al. 2006; Lauzen et al. 2008), but never systematically for gendered television channels. A final recommendation for future research would be to complete a cultivation analysis to measure how the audiences’ conceptions of gender are affected by the programming on these gendered channels (Gerbner et al. 1978; Morgan 2007; 374 Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 Signorielli 1989; Signorielli and Bacue 1999). This directive for future cultivation research is further strengthened by re- search based in social role theory (Eagly and Wood 2012) which proposed that gender stereotypes might change when gender distribution changes (Diekman and Eagly 2000), and it is encountered in daily life or through mediated exposure (Eagly and Steffen 1984). Future research could then assess if more traditional or progressive role-pattern expectancies are indeed cultivated in the audiences of men’s and women’s channels respectively. This would necessitate surveying viewers of both types of channels with varying levels of ex- posure to television about their conceptions of gender roles. As outlined previously, some of the findings presented in our study are concerning; however, until a cultivation analysis is conducted, the actual influence of these programs on actual perceptions of gender and gender roles remain unknown. Practice Implications Television broadcasters work fervently to entertain and keep their audiences watching and loyal, all in order to turn a profit by selling advertising space to makers of products and services aimed at specific (gendered) niche audience groups (Kuipers 2012; Turow 1998). However, through their politics of narrow- casting, viewers—and particularly viewers of men’s channels our study points out—are at risk for developing too narrow conceptions about gender roles that may prove to be limiting in real life. Because research has shown that television viewing contributes to themaintenance, as well as the learning, of gender stereotyped perceptions (Gerbner et al. 1978; Larson 2001; McGhee and Frueh 1980; Welch et al. 1979), we would there- fore argue that the everyday television viewer should be made aware of the presence of stereotyping on television. A possible way to do this is to pay attention to this issue in media literacy programs, which are part of school curricula in an increasing number of schools (Koltay 2011; Tuominen and Kotilainen 2012). In these lessons, educators at all levels of education should sensitize their students about gender-role depictions in television programming and the (possible) effects they have on men and women. In this way, they would ideally be providing a continuous strengthening of children’s, adolescents, and young adults’ defenses against the effects of gender stereotyping they may encounter when watching various (gendered) television channels throughout their life. Conclusion To conclude, some context for the rise of men’s and women’s channels might be provided by the idea that we now live in a post-feminist era in which there has been a resurgence of the belief in sexual difference (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009). It has also been suggested that the increased status of women in society has put pressure on the concept of masculinity (Beynon 2002), which could explain the more traditional gen- der portrayal on channels aimed at male audiences. However, whatever the cause of the matter may be, our study makes clear that rather than mirroring emancipatory changes in soci- ety via a trend towards a more equal representation of gender on television, the Dutch television landscape has become di- vided through some large differences in the way gender is represented on men’s versus women’s channels. Taken together, we can conclude that, in the Netherlands, it seems that a more equal image of gender might be cultivated particularly for female audiences, while the messages cultivated for male audiences remain highly gender-stereotyped. These findings highlight a wor- risome phenomenon when combined with several com- plexities in gender-related practices and attitudes in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is generally regarded as one of the more gender-equal countries in the world (United Nations Development Program [UNDP], 2015), due for example to the continuously growing working force participation of women, the increasing percentage of women with a college degree, the increase of women with a seat in parliament, a growing participation of men in household chores as well as childcare in the last de- cades, and a continuous increase in the share of individ- uals who do not favor gender stereotypes in upbringing, education, and the workplace (Arends-Tóth and van de Vijver 2007; Collier et al. 2013; Emons 2011; Gesthuizen et al. 2002; UNDP 2015). However, the Netherlands also recently dropped three places in the Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum 2016) due to the fact that in the Netherlands women’s workforce participation rate is still lower than men’s. Women gener- ally have part-time jobs, earn considerably less than men do, and are severely underrepresented in senior executive positions. Considering these complex and conflicting real- ities in gender-related practices and attitudes in the Netherlands, we feel that the results of our study seen in the light of cultivation theory (Gerbner et al. 1978) and social learning theory (Bandura 1977), combined with the persistent finding that men in general tend to hold more traditional gender views than women do (Bolzendahl and Myers 2004; Brewster and Padavic 2000; Cameron and Lalonde 2001), highlight issues that are important and relevant to consider when examining the potential effects of these gendered representations. As such, the gendered representation on particularly men’s TV channels might form a roadblock that stands in the way of true emanci- pation and ideas of gender equality being reinforced in the minds of not only women but particularly men. 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Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global- gender-gap-report-2016/. 378 Sex Roles (2017) 77:366–378 http://dx.doi.org/10.5553/TCW/138469302014042003008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00289596 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems116 http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1018883912900 http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4501_2 https://kijkonderzoek.nl/images/SKO_Jaarrapport/SKO_jaarrapport_2014.pdf https://kijkonderzoek.nl/images/SKO_Jaarrapport/SKO_jaarrapport_2014.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1527476403259746 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1974.tb00376.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01544217 http://iite.unesco.org/pics/publica-tions/en/files/3214705.pdf http://iite.unesco.org/pics/publica-tions/en/files/3214705.pdf http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2015_human_development_report.pdf http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2015_human_development_report.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08838159209364167 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1979.tb01733.x https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2016/ https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2016/ Gender... Abstract Recognition: Presence of Men and Women on Television Respect: Stereotyping in Gender Representation Method Sample Recording Units and Coding Procedure Results Presence as an Indicator of Recognition Age as Indicator of Respect Tasks as Indicators of Respect Employment as Indicator of Respect Parental Status as Indicator of Respect Discussion Limitations and Directions for Future Research Practice Implications Conclusion References Bring Wreck to Those . Who Disrespect Me Like a Dame: Women, Rap, and the Rhetoric of Wreck men of the Hip-Hop generation, like the Black women who t before them, find themselves in a similar position of trying to navigate a space for themselves in a Black-male-dominated public discourse. While we cannot say women of the Hip-Hop generation the same spaces in the public sphere as their foremothers, we ay with some degree of certainty that the way Black women of the past navigated the public sphere has had a direct effect on the way Black women of the Hip-Hop generation feel they can move . withn this sphere. Quite fi-ankly, by the time we reach the Hip- 1 Hop era, Black women have generations of conditioning to stay in I the background while Black men claim the limelight. We also have a history of seldom speaking out against Black manhood even when it poses a direct threat to Black womanhood. We also have, how- ever, glimmers of Black female outspokenness that grabs public at- n and disrupts the Black male dominance of the Black public sphere. Examples of these instances surfaced when Michele Wal- lace wrote Black Macho and the Myth o f the Superwoman and had the nerve to go on T V and defend her ideas; when Ntozake Shange wrote lZor Colored Girls W h o Have Considered Suicide and the play it all the way to Broadway; when Alice Walker wrote the The Color Purple and it was adapted as a feature film; whe11 1 I B r l n g Wreck t o T h o s e W h o O l s r e s p e c t M e W o m e n . Rap. a n d R h e t o r l c of W r e c k Terry McMillan wrote the novel Waiting to Exhale and it too was adapted as a feature film. Each of these instances of Black female 1 1 t i ture. Rather, I am more concerned with documenting the ways Black women of the Hip-Hop generation intervene in the public outspokenness was met with tremendous outcry from the Black sphere and the wavs they bring wreck to it. public sphere. They were lambasted by Black men and even some Black women for portraying negative images of Black manhood or showing Black men in a negative light. Some people even accused them of the classic "airing dirty laundry." ''& Rhetoric of Wreck I It is these legacies-both those of the Black women who were outspoken and those of the women who allowed Black men to shine in the Black public sphere--that I believe the women of the Hip-Hop generation build on. While women of the Hip-Hop gen- eration do not dominate the movement by doing the majority of the work to ensure the movement's success, as the Black women in the civil rights and Black Power movements did, if we look care- fully, they are the ones doing the meaningful work. They are the activists, the ones trying to use Hip-Hop to create meaningful change. I expand on the theorization and definition of wreck in Hip-Hop by thinlung about its uses as a rhetorical tool that builds on Black womanist traditions and a Hip-Hop present. I am con- cerned with the ways the rhetorical practices of Black women parti- cipants in Hip-Hop culture bring wreck-that is, moments when Black women's discourses disrupt dominant masculine discourses, break into the public sphere, and in some way impact or influence the U.S. imaginary, even if that influence is fleeting. While bringing wreck may not change the world in drastic or even long-lasting ways, it is my hope that by shedding light o n those crucial moments in Hip-Hop culture where Black women have brought wreck, we wdl be able to make more meaningful use of future moments of wreck. So far, I have examined the historical lineage of bringng wreck as it pertained to Black people throughout U.S. history and their in- tervention in the larger U.S. public sphere. I have explored wreck as disruptions that somehow shifted the way Black people were viewed in the society at large. Bringng wreck does not always change the world, but it is capable of malung small and meaningful differences. As a way of thinlung specifically about the potential in- herent in Black feminist change, bringng wreck offers new possi- bilities for the potential of Black women's speech and action. The phrase "bringng wreck" is used in Hip-Hop typically to signify skill and greatness: the rapper is so good, has so much skill, that he or she wrecks the microphone. Or, the break dancer can bring wreck by outdancing all other competitors and making others afraid to approach the dance floor because they cannot compete. Often, bringmg wreck is used in a boastful manner, such as Queen Latifah's refrain "Check it while I wreck it, sing it while I bring it." She is telling the crowd to pay attention to her because her rapping slulls are so good that she can do damage with her very words. It is also used as a form of praise. After rapping, deejaying, or break- dancing very well, one could be told something like: "You brought wreck! Your style is nice! You wrecked it!" In short, when a mem- Exploring various theoretical texts and histories of women in Hip-Hop provides a sense of the space that has been allowed to them and serves as an opening to think about how they use that space to create a rhetoric of wreck that allows them to combat the factors that hindered their foremothers. I am not so much con- ber of the Hip-Hop generation is really good at what he or she does, that person is praised for bringng wreck. Bringing wreck is also used to connote damage already done. A member of the Hip-Hop generation may marvel, for example, over the aftermath of a twister, hurricane, flood, or tropical storm by say- cerned with writing women into Hip-Hop history; I assume their presence. Neither am I concerned with documenting the work of p * v n - r ~ = m ~ l pr2nnPr or everv woman involved with Hip-Hop cul- ing, "Ilamn, Mother Nature brought wreck!" It can also connote anger and a desire or intent to d o real damage. For example, the woman who caught her partner cheating might say, "Oh, no hc IBring Wreck to Those Who Olsrcspect Me Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc of Wreck didn't. He don't know who he's messing with. I will bring wreck" before she breaks a car windshield or trashes an apartment. AU of these shades of bringrng wreck contribute to the kinds of wreck Black women participants in Hip-Hop culture exhibit. However, the wreck that I want to focus on can best be described as a rhetori- cal act that can be written, spoken, or acted out in a way that shows resistance. Bringng wreck, as the term is used here, is a rhetorical act that has close ties to various other speech acts that are often linked to Black womanhood: talking back, going off, turning it out, having a niggerbitchfit, or being a diva. Each of these actions has simultaneously been embraced by some Black women as a marker of unique Black womanhood and renounced as the stereotypical Black woman stance by others. For example, while most Black women would relish the fact that they can tell people o& put them in their place, and leave them speechless, they do not embrace the stereotype of the neck-moving, eye-rolling, loud, hand-on-hip, Sapphire-like Black woman throughout the popular and dominant cultures. Serious attention is begrnning to be paid to this gift of gab that seems to represent Black women, and critics are coming up with descriptive names for tallung that talk. Black women's speech acts-what they say, and how and where they say it-are garnering some critical attention. The ways Black women come into and develop language have been taken up by linguists, cultural critics, and well-known writers who offer their own accounts of coming into language and voice. In these accounts and inquiries into Black women's language use, we get the begin- nings of an understanding of the potential inherent in Black women's speech and action. Linguists such as Denise Troutman- Robinson and Geneva Smitherman are already laying out the im- portance of Black women's speech for sustained resistance against oppression. Troutman-Robinson notes that due to the systemic na- ture of oppression in the United States, Black women have had to develop and pass on to future generations of Black women a form of verbal and nonverbal expression that combines politeness with assertiveness.' It is necessary, in a society that harshly stereotypes vmlr UJomanhood and seeks to render you invisible, to assert your- : self and make yourself visible. However, it is also necessary to main- ; tain a degree of civility and politeness while being assertive. Smitherman maintains that we must develop a womanist lan- I guage for the twenty-first century that "speaks the truth to the peo- ~ l e . " ~According to her, we must build on the legacy of our foremothers and draw on their linguistic leader~hip.~ "Is the African t*., - American Verbal Tradition the purview of Black men only? What are the discourse options available to Black women? W h o is the Black woman, and how do a Black woman ~ o u n d ? " ~ Srnitherman : finds that Black women do indeed lay claim to the African Ameri- can verbal tradition: they signify, play the dozens, and "talk hit."^ For her, and for myself, the challenge lies in channeling Black i: women's use of language toward meaningful change. Part of har- i nessing the power and potential of Black women's speech and ex- : pressive culture is recognizing how Black women come into 1 language and examining the spaces in which that speech and ex- : pressive culture occurs. The spaces that have been found thus far I' are the ktchen and the garden. Black women's speech and expressive culture have been limited in the public sphere due in part to circumstances discussed earlier in ' this work, such as maintaining community, promoting Black man- hood at the expense of Black womanhood, and constantly vindicat- ing Black womanhood against misrepresentation. They have also been limited because the places in which they have been allowed : to thrive have been devalued. It is only recently that we have begun to reclaim the legacy of Black women's language and expressive culture as it is found in the everyday spaces of their lives. Writer f i c e Walker finds these legacies in the gardens of women like her mother, who found a way to express their creativity through mag- nificent gardens and splendid quilts in spite of the oppressive and repressive states of their lives.6 Writer Paule Marshall reclaims these legacies from the poets in the kitchen, women like her own mother, an immigrant from Barbados, and her friends, who sat in the kitchen and talked with one another about everything from child rearing to politics to the economy to war. Their responsc to being made to feel invisible was to take their mouths and make them into guns. Amongst each other, in the kitchen they were I Brlng Wreck to Those Who Olsrespect Me Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc of Wreck heard; they were validated.' Black feminist cultural critic bell hooks lalSo remembers her mother and other Black women talking in the lurchen, and it is from them that she learned how to talk back, even as she, Eke the young Paule Marshall, was not allowed to join in on g-own-folk conversation. The concept of "talking back" as a Black women's rhetorical stance is crucial as we move from a discussion of the what and where of Black women's speech and expressive culture to a discus- sion of the potential and possibility inherent in bnngrng wreck. Bell hooks notes that talking back is more than expressing one's creative power. Taking back is a challengng political gesture of resistance to forces that render Black women nameless, voiceless, and invisible. Talking back is "a gesture of defiance that heals . . . that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement fiom object to subject-the liberated voice.""ringng wreck draws on Black women's speech patterns such as talking back in that it too is concerned with resistance and liberation. However, it also builds on a legacy of Hip-Hop in which a more stylized rhetor- ical presence is used, drawing o n grander elements of show and spectacle than talking back. Bringng wreck also builds on and moves past other Black wom- en's speech acts such as going off, which writers Faye Childs and Noreen Palmer describe as the Black woman's unique way of deal- ing with anger and fmstration. For them, going off is an unhealthy way of dealing with anger-and it feeds the stereotypes of Black womanhood. They identifj two levels of going off, the "sista sass I level" and the "Sapphire level." The sista sass level is "the type of angry response that include[s] slanted eyes, angled body posture, ti- tled heads, and sashaying on about our business when finished speabng our minds ."The Sapphire level is "an escalated angry re- sponse that takes an argument to the extreme.""' The Sapphire sis- ter loses perspective, can become abusive, and uses violent tactics. Some aspects of going off are clearly present in bringing wreck; if we think of bringing wreck as the Hip-Hop continuation of Black women's rhetorical traditions, then the connections become all the more expected. r h ; l A r ndp31- eoing off is a direct effect of the "invinci- ble Black woman syndrome."" They argue that Black women struggle to maintain an appearance of strength while denying their limitations and sometimes their weaknesses. They believe that Black women are so used to denying their own needs, anger, and hurt that it often builds up, and the end result is going off." This uncontrolled/uncontrollable state is where going off and bringng V r e c k part ways. Bringing wreck is a decided act, not an unavoid- able breaking point. While there is a level of being fed up involved, the women of the Hip-Hop generation who enact a rhetoric of wreck do so after making a conscious decision to speak out. They are bringng wreck in order to create change. Similar to going off, turning it out is another speech act that is linked to Black women. Linguist Karla Holloway sees turning it out as the Black woman's response to being made to feel less than a grown woman, like a mindless person with no character, integrity, or common sense. Black women are usually treated this way when others buy into the stereotypes surrounding Black womanhood. For Holloway, turning it out could mean "handing over to our ad- versary our version of the stereotype that motivates their disrespect to us-just to prove to them that they could no better handle the stereotype than they can determine or control our character."I3 Turning it out coincides with bringng wreck more than going off does, because it is a conscious act. O n e decides to turn it out; one does not just snap after constant abuse or neglect. At the moment when the Black woman realizes that she has been disrespected, she proceeds to turn it out in a willful act, in the spiritual tradition of "I shall not be moved." Similarly, the niggerbitchfit is a stance that some would place in the realm of stereotyped representations of Black womanhood. For writer Jill Nelson, the niggerbitchfit is a powerful rhetorical tool for change, "what happens when a nice colored gr l , having exhausted all possibility of compromise, communication, and peaceful conflict resolution, turns into everyone's worst nightmare, a visible grown- up Black woman mad as hell and with nothing to lose, and opens her n ~ o u t h . " ' ~ It is thc embodiment of righteous anger and rage, a response to being fed up. Or, in the oft-quoted words of Fannie Lou Hamer, the niggerbitchfit surfaces when one is "sick and tirrd I IBrlng Wreck to Those Who Disrespect Me ofbeing sick and tired." Nelson sees it as a revolutionary act that is ! an expression ofrage against attacks on Black womanhood from just about all aspects of society. To as a niggerbitchfit, the act has to be a public display. Nelson believes that the best niggerbitchfits are those that are strategc and collective, when Black women speak out loudly together in righteous anger and outrage against disre- spect that impacts all our lives: "At its best it is a tool for uniting, organizing, channeling rage into collective power, and that collec- tive power into the ability to effect change."15 It is the potential for collective niggerbitchfits that becomes appealing when thinlung about the possibilities for Hip-Hop feminism bringng wreck in Hip-Hop culture. If we could envision ways to harness the collec- tive power for bringng wreck within the Hip-Hop generation in order to combat the sexism and misogyny within it and outside of it, then we would no doubt be able to use this power to effect meaningful change. Diva is another term that has been used to describe Black wom- en's public speech acts. Lisa Jones's "bulletproof diva" is the Black woman who recognizes her own beauty and strength because she realizes that the larger society will never validate her or even be able to comprehend her true worth. For Jones, the bulletproof diva is not "the emasculating black bitch too hard for love or piety. It's safe to assume that a Bulletproof diva is whoever you make her- corporate grl, teen mom, or the combination-as long as she has the lip and nerve to raise up herself and the ~ o r l d . " ' ~ The bullet- proof diva as a construct of the third wave of Black feminism, which Lisa Jones represents, is crucial to understanding the concept and ultimately the potential of bringing wreck. The definition of the bulletproof diva has within it implied activism. In order to qual- ift, one must be linked to the tradition of community uplift. How- ever, this Hip-Hop version of uplift expands further than the Negro communities of old. The bulletproof diva potentially raises both herself and the world. The possibilities for the bulletproof diva having an impact on the world becomes evident when we read her in conversation with Lauren Berlant's notion of "diva citizenship," which provides the framework for an understanding of how the diva and subsequently Women. Rap. and Rhetoric of Wreck bringng wreck can be used in the counter-public sphere of Hip- Hop and the larger public sphere to evoke change. Berlant writes, "Diva citizenship does not change the world. It is a moment of emergence that marks unrealized potentials for subaltern political activity. Diva citizenship occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege."" *Although diva citizenship does not have world-altering strength, Berlant recognizes it as a moment when the normally unprivileged diva is able to grab the public, captivate the public, and subvert at- ! tention away from the dominant story line. She ceases to be invisi- I ble, reinscnbes herself into the public space, and provides a retelling / of the dominant history. While holding the larger public captive i and telling her story, the diva bids others to not only acknowledge j her suffering but identify with it. The diva's retelling and reinscrib- ing become pedagogical moments for the larger public and compel i them to want to change and be better human beings. Ultimately it t is these pedagogcal implications that bringng wreck is most con- : cerned with. When a woman of the Hip-Hop generation is able to I build on the legacy of Black women's activism, expressive culture, i and speech acts and grabs hold of the public sphere by bringng wreck, there must be the potential for change. Ultimately, the mo- ment of bringing wreck should bring those who witness it to a dif- : ferent understanding of Black womanhood, even if only momentarily. Women. Rap. Wreck Most examinations of rap music and Hip-Hop culture critique rap as a masculine discursive space and seldom look a t Black women's experiences within this space. With the exception of critiques of misogyny and sexism in rap music and Hip-Hop culture, how rap music and Hip-Hop culture influence Black womanhood goes un- explored. Several Hip-Hop scholars have begun to take on the task of writing women into the history of Hip-Hop and validating the creative contributions of women to the field. They have written I Brlng Wreck t o Those Who Olsrespect Me Women. Rap. a n d Rhetorlc of Wreck women and rap music provides a rich starting ground for explora- tions into the ways Black women use the whole of Hip-Hop cul- ture to not only assert agency, claim voice, grapple with and create images, negotiate sexual and body politics, evoke Black feminism, continue lineages, and empower themselves, but also lay claim to the public sphere and subvert stereotypes and domination by bring- ing wreck. Cheryl Keyes argues strongly for the centrality of women's voices in rap music, noting that they are not incidental and have added significantly to the genre of music. Her essays " 'We're More Than a Novelty, Boys': Strateges of Female Rappers in the Rap Music Tradition" and "Empowering Self, Malung Choices, Creat- ing Spaces: Black Female Identity Via Rap Music Performance" place the artistry of female rappers on the map and lend credence to their skills. She notes that early women rappers, while shedding light on the female perspective of life in urban America, often em- ployed strategies such as appropriating male performance behavior and directly contradicting male standards as a way to gain recogni- t i ~ n . ~ ~And she shows that their co-opting of b-boy stances did not stop them from borrowing from foremothers such as comedienne Jache "Moms" Mabley and song stylist Millie J a c k s ~ n . ~ ~ Like the revisionist historians discussed earlier, Keyes firmly locates women in the rap continuum. She also places female rappers in four catego- ries: the queen mother, the fly gr l , the sista with attitude, and the le~bian.~'For my own purposes, categorization of women rappers is not beneficial, since lines blur and identities constantly intersect. I am more interested in the ways women rappers resist easy catego- rization in defining their own identity and negotiating representa- tions of Black womanhood. Therefore, the way they grapple with images and deal with sexual politics becomes crucial. Venise T. Berry, Tricia Rose, Eric King Watts, and Kyra Gaunt have begun to think about the ways women rappers deal with con- flicting female images and sexual politics In Hip-Hop. Berry ex- plores the development of a Black feminist voice in rap music via a struggle for positive images and Black female identity construc- t i~n.~"he also exanlines the way women rappers resist stereotypes. Rose sees women rappers as a part of the dialogic process in rap and notes that there are three dominant themes in women's rap songs: "heterosexual courtship, the importance of female voice and mas- tery in women's rap and black female public displays of physical and sexual freedom."29 Watts notes the potential for an empowering eroticism of the female voice in Hip-Hop. He examines the power of the erotic to lend women control over their own representation and by extension the entire rap game itself.30 And Gaunt finds that there is a direct lineage between the games that Black women grow up playing and their contributions to Black expressive cu1tures.j' All of the research that has been completed on Ulack women in rap is crucial and sets the foundation for further study. Frankly, com- pared to what has been written about men, there has not been enough of a focus on women and rap. Therefore, what currently exists becomes crucial for further studies. I find that these early works formulate not only a history of women in rap but also the beginnings of a theoretical body of work aimed at understanding women's participation and the societal elements that influence and/ or inhibit that participation. Rap music and Hip-Hop culture, as an example of a youth movement that crosses gender, sexuality, race, and class, becomes an excellent example of public displays of intersections and contact zones, providing an ideal space to examine the way difference is simultaneously constructed and navigated. The ways Black women find a voice and establish a presence in this arena further nuances the ways difference is negotiated in this particular youth movement. What happens when Black womanhood enters Hip-Hop culture? How does that presence bring wreck to commonly held ideas about gender and difference? And what impact does this wreck have on the larger societal public sphere? I believe that Black women participants in Hip-Hop culture have developed key survival skills and formulated various ways to bring wreck to the stereotypes and margnalization that inhibit their in- teraction in the larger public sphere. Through Hip-Hop culture, a generation of Black women is coming to voice and bringing wreck. These women are attacking the stereotypes and misconceptions that influenced their lives and the lives of their foremothers. And they are maintaining a public presence while they counter the negative 1 F" I Brlng Wreck to Those Who Olsrespect M e I Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc o f Wreck i: representations of Black womanhood that exist within Hip-Hop culture. Usually when they are able to grab public attention by bringng wreck, these moments become instances when everyone pays attention. Queen Latifah's "U.N. I.T.Y." presents one such in- stance. "U.N.I.T.Y.," which won a Grammy in 1993, presents the per- fect starting example of a Black woman bringng wreck in Hip-Hop in a way that has implications for change both within the counter- public sphere of Hip-Hop and the society at large. In this song, Queen Latifah builds on the legacy of promoting and fostering community and vindicating Black womanhood left by her Black womanist foremothers by calling for unity. Love of the Black com- munity is evident in the song's refrains: she chants that Black men and women should be loved "from infinity to infinity." The song is also an instance of outspokenness in that she calls attention to sexual harassment, domestic violence, and the influence negative images of Black womanhood have on young Black women. The first verse of the song is a critique of society that calls into question beliefs about "proper" dress and being able to walk on the streets free from harassment. Queen Latifah's story of wallung down the street in cutoff shorts on a hot day and being groped by an un- known man carries with it the experiences of millions of women who walk down the street and receive catcalls from strangers and the millions of women who suffer more than verbal abuse, the women who are attacked or raped. Queen Latifah's story is the in- \ between, in that she is not raped but she is touched in addition to the verbal harassment of being called a bitch. Because it is in- between, it serves as a pedagogcal moment in the diva sense of bringng wreck. It has the power to call into question not only what happened to Queen Latifah but also all of the variations, such as what could have happened to her and what has happened to many women. As we listen to Queen Latifah, we realize that no matter how short the pun-pun shorts a woman is wearing, it is not okay for a man to make lewd comments. And it is definitely not okay for a man to touch, fondle, rape, or otherwise invade the sanctity of her body and her personal space. Queen Latifah's lyrics make us call Into question a variety of acts that occur daily in the objectification of women, from catcalls to physical harassment and rape. And by b. doing so she brings wreck not only to "those who disrespect [her] like a dame," but also to notions ofwhat is acceptable in our society in regard to women and their bodies. While this form of wreck does not s o past the initial moment when the song was released and constantly played on the airwaves, it does represent a moment when the masses of people were thinking about these issues collec- w v e l y . Queen Latifah's strong message has feminist undertones, even if Queen Latifah herself does not identify as a feminist. When asked if she was a feminist, Queen Latifah balked: "I don't even adhere to that shit. All that shit is bullshit! I know that at the end of the day, : I'm a Black woman in this world and I gotta get mine. I want to i see the rise of the Black male in personal strength and power. I i: wanna see the creation of a new Black community for ourselves and respect from others."32 Queen Latifah, then, appears to be a Hip- : Hop embodiment-minus the cursing of course-of the Black clubwomen who went before her. She has definite goals that do not include the label "feminist," but her agenda, because she is a Black woman, certainly overlaps with feminist causes such as harassment and domestic violence. However, the vindication of Black woman- hood is a trait she shares most strongly with the Black women who went before her. Queen Latifah also tackles the impact that negative representa- tions of Black womanhood found in rap lyrics have on the young Black women who listen to it. In addition to letting the listener know that she is neither a bitch nor a ho, she also challenges the image of the gangsta bitch popularized in the rap lyrics of some men rappers and questions the usefulness of this image to young Black women. This critique is important because often young women lis- ten to these lyrics minus any real critique, and they emulate the kind of woman that the men rap about. The gangsta bitch, in an era of gangsta rap, becomes the epitome of Black womanhood; she is what young women strive to be in order to gain acceptance from the men. Queen Latifah brings the reality of this kind of lifestyle into focus when she cautions young would-be gangster girls about the possibilities of being shot or having their face sliced with :I knifc I Brlng Wreck to Those Who Disrespect M e I by another gangster g1r1.~~ Her words of advice are an example of bringng wreck because she actively seeks to uplift and create change. Queen Latifah is reaching out to a younger generation of Black women in order to teach them the reality of trying to emulate the kind of woman some rappers-ln this instance her own friend rapper Apach-rap about as the ideal woman. The reality for the gangsta bitch is she could be shot and killed, or she can be scarred for life with one slice of the knife. This image is a very different image than the "ride or die chicks" that most men rappers paint in their lyrics, the down-for-whatever, hard-core shortys who will do anything for their men. Queen Latifah offers the reality, and by doing so she brings wreck. In the second stanza, Queen Latifah calls attention to domestic violence and represents a woman who has had enough and finally leaves the abuser. She paints the picture of a woman who has come to the realization that love does not come with physical pain. Queen Latifah's 'lyrics are forceful and empowering. She lays out the facts and suggests actions that the woman can take. Even though she tells the story in the first person, the message, the pedagogical moment, comes as a stated fact that is directed at the listener: "A man don't really love you if he hits ya." This well-placed statement broadens the implication of bringing wreck further. It makes the story bigger than the teller and includes the millions of abused I women suffering around the world. Queen Latifah brings wreck by bringing the issue of women's abuse into focus for the society at large and causing us to question both the abuse against women and our own action or inaction against it. Similarly, Eve's "Love Is Blind" brings the issue of domestic vio- lence into both the counter-public sphere of Hip-Hop and the larger public sphere. Eve, however, does not take on the persona of the battered woman, as Queen Latifah does in "U.N.I.T.Y." She instead takes on the persona of the vengeful best friend. She threat- ens the abuser with murder throughout the song, which ends with her killing the abuser. Similar to Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y.," Eve uses the song as a pedagogical moment. However, it is a lesson aimed not only at the women who suffer abuse but also at the men Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc of Wreck who abuse. For the men, the message is clear: keep beating up on women and you might catch a bullet and die. For the women, the message is similar to the one found in Queen Latifah's lyrics: men who really love you do not hit you. Eve makes use of rhetorical questions throughout the song to highlight her point by essentially asking if a man who really loves a woman would g v e her a black eye, make her cry every night, and ultimately cause her to wish for * his death.s4 Eve is bringing wreck not only by rapping the lyrics and L i posing these questions. She also expands on the activist elements of bringng wreck by building institutions aimed at combating the !- problem. She started the Love Is Blind foundation to address do- r, j t mestic violence issues in more significant ways than a song ~ o u l d . ~ ' She too has a mission of uplift similar to that ofher Black foremoth- ers, and she would like to see a collective effort of women in the r Hip-Hop generation uplifting each other. She notes, "A lot of 1 women tell me I uplift them. . . . We gotta do it collectively. . . . I 1 see how a lot of women disrespect themselves. When we change our actions, men will change their minds. I think a lot of women get tired of hearing that shit. I'm glad that women feel like I can uplift them."36 While Eve's words may seem a bit naive in terms of the exact amount of influence women's actions have on the men rappers who use the words bitch and ho, she is on to something in her desire for the collective action of Black women. This collective action could take the form of the collective niggerbitchfit that Jill Nelson encourages. O r it could be as simple as Black women col- lectively deciding not to deal with men who do not respect Black womanhood, as Rebecca Walker recommends in "Becoming the Third W a ~ e . " ~ ' The important point is that songs such as "Love Is Blind" and "U.N.I.T.Y." inspire the desire for collective action. Eve's "Love Is Blind" and the second stanza of Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." build on the diva qualities of bringng wreck in that they offer testimonies aimed at changng the world, or at least the way we think about women's place in it. Within each rapper's delivery and style of rap there are other ele- ments ofbringing wreck. These are most evident in the music vid- eos of these songs. In the "U.N.I.T.Y." video, for example, Queen Latifah raps the lyrics from a telephone booth, and she is yelling 1 I Brlng Wreck to Those Who Disrespect Me into the phone in a manner that can best be classified as turning it out or going off. In the video for "Love Is Blind" Eve represents the calculated and thought-out stance of a woman ready to turn it out or, better yet, navigate a niggerbitchfit. She studies the situa- tion; throughout the video, she is on the side examinirig the scene. The video, unlike the lyrics, does not end with her killing the abuser. She does use the gun to threaten him, but the event culmi- nates in a bright beam of lights and doves flying into the air and hlm on the ground alive. The video version, more than the song alone, serves as a pedagogtcal moment. Both songs' lyrics and vid- eos offer examples of the ways Black women have used rap music to bring wreck. "SheUsed to Be M y Girl": Hip-Hop As Woman and the Issueof Representation As S. Craig Watluns notes in Representing: Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema, Black youth view representation prac- tices as important and vital for both the political aspects and the pleasurable aspects of their lives. They use both aspects in combina- tion with representation to respond to a world that is becoming in- creasingly saturated with communications media. Representing, as Black ~ o u t h in the Hip-Hop generation see it, expands far beyond the common definitions of the word. They have created a culture of representing that includes "a complex set of practices, styles, and i n n o v a t i ~ n . " ~ ~The spectacle of representation then becomes a styl- ized manner of conveying to the world-via the various media available through Hip-Hop-the plight of the Hip-Hop generation as they see it. For this historically margnalized and invisible group, the spectacle is what allows them a point of entry in the public space that has proved to be violent and exclusionary. As Watkins notes, "For many Black youth, the sphere of popular culture has become a crucial location for expressing their ideas and viewpoints about the contradictory world in which they l i ~ e . " ~ ' The counter- public sphere of Hip-Hop allows them the space and tools to voice Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc of Wreck their views on the world and their own lives, to represent in ways that only they can. A common form of representing that occurs in Hip-Hop is men rappers representing Black women and Black womanhood. This representing plays out in a variety ofways, but the most often noted is the representation of Black women as bitches, hos, stunts, skeez- ers, hoochies, and chickenheads. All of these derogatory representa- -tions have been the subject of much feminist criticism of rap. Likewise, there has been a lot of focus on representations of Black women as strong Black mothers or dear mamas (not to be confused ( with baby mamas and their drama) and Black queens. These are the ! more positive representations that serve as the flip side to the 1 bitches, has, and so on. These lunds of representations help remix P i the classic madonna/whore split, These are also the representations [ that Black women rappers seek to bring wreck to by countering the I lyrics and adding their own stories and voices. Such representations j 1 o f Black womanhood garner the most attention, both from the I women rappers who speak out and from the feminist thinkers who offer critiques. Other representations that are just as problematic but perhaps a bit more complicated do not receive as much critique i I or outcry. One such representation is that of Hip-Hop gendered [ feminine. fj k A representation that can be read as at the same time positive and 1 negative is that of Hip-Hop itself being represented as a woman. The use of woman as a symbol for Hip-Hop can be compared to b. 5 historical uses of woman as symbols of both nation and virtue throughout time. These kinds of representations of Black women in rap can be compared to early American representations of wom- en's place in the public. Theorist Mary P. Ryan writes of early American women who were not allowed to speak publicly but in- spired public speaking. These women were the center of toasts and honored at civic celebrations, but they were not allowed to com- mand the public space and speak. These women were also used as ! public symbols: they stood for and represented liberty and civic vir- tue and served either as outcasts or ornaments but never as wantrd and validated public speaker^.^" So, basically, we can have a woman i Statue of Liberty and a statue of the goddess ofjusticr each repre- 1 I Brlng Wreck to Those Who Dl5respect Me Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc of Wreck senting the key virtues of our public sphere, but women were not free to formally get up and argue a case for liberty and justice in the public realm. These national symbols and virtues can be compared to the practice of gendering Hip-Hop feminine. Perhaps the most widely recognized version of this particular form of representation of woman as symbol in Hip-Hop is found in Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." The song breaks down the history of rap music and Hip-Hop culture, representing Hip-Hop as a woman that Common loves. He first met her when he was ten. He takes us on through Hip-Hop's Afrocentric and pro-Black stages and is quite upset when she goes to Los Angeles and becomes too commodified. He mourns the mainstream's co-optation of Hip- Hop, blaming commercialization and a wave of gangsta rap for ru- ining the pure Hip-Hop he used to know, but he vows to save her.4' The video for Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." offers the visual image o f the story he tells in the lyrics. We see him as a youngster in his room listening to Hip-Hop music. We also see a young, beautiful Black woman dressed in old-school Hip-Hop gear. Although we rarely see her face, we see lots of her body. The video follows this young woman, the female embodiment of Hip- Hop, through various stages. The clothing she wears and the situa- tions she is placed in represent the key stages of Hip-Hop culture. However, Hip-Hop gendered feminine has no agency. She is some- thing men rappers love, something they do. She does not act; she is acted upon. She does not do; she is done. T h s is evident in the video when we see how helpless the female embodiment of Hip- Hop is in the face of the forces that would seek to destroy her, such as capitahst exploitation, commodification, and gangsta culture. No matter how positive the image of Hip-Hop as a woman seems, as a symbol, i t does nothing to encourage women's agency and partici- pation in Hip-Hop. As a symbol, the woman is never as strong as the men who possess her and use her for their own ends. ' Common's rendering of Hip-Hop as a woman inspired others to offer their own gendered representations of Hip-Hop. One exam- ' representations that seek to gender Hip-Hop masculine have also surfaced. In addition to the letter to Hip-Hop written by feminist journalist Joan Morgan in her book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, in which Hip-Hop is not only gendered masculine but k represented as a once loving partner who has lost his way and be- ? r' came abusive, a recent film and a song from its sound track also seek i!. k, ..... to represent Hip-Hop in the masculine. Brown Sugar and a song C* iG-from its sound track by Erykah Badu titled "Love of My Life (Ode i i to Hip-Hop)'' both rely heavily on the Common song and fall short !' of fully bringng wreck to the gendered representations of Hip-Hop i. as feminine. Although Badu sings of her love for Hip-Hop and gen- g ders Hip-Hop masculine in her lyrics, she (re)presents a different I version in the video, in which she herself embodies Hip-Hop. She becomes like the beautiful Black woman in the Common video and goes through all the various stages of Hip-Hop. She even wears a variety of colorful T-shirts that are clearly marked "Hip-Hop." Even though Erykah Badu's video fips back to representing Hip- Hop as a woman, she at least has agency and is represented as fully active in the video. We see her face as well as her body. She is break-dancing, deejaying, and rapping. She acts. She has agency and in this way brings wreck to the representation that Common offers of the female Hip-Hop. The film Brown Sugar at first glance appears to gender Hip-Hop as masculine. Written by Rick Famuyiwa (who also-along with Todd Boyd-wrote the Hip-Hop-inspired coming-of-age story The Wood)and Michael Elhot, the film remixes the romantic com- edy genre for the Hip-Hop generation. Famuyiwa also directs the film, and Sanaa Lathan and Taye Diggs play the lead characters, Sid- ney Shaw and Andre "Dre" Ellis. Hip-Hop symbolizes a multitude of things in this film. It represents the friendship and growing ro- mantic feelings between Sidney and Dre, and it also represents each to the other. For example, throughout the film, Sidney is working on a book that she titles I Used to Love Him. The book is a letter to Hip-Hop that documents and traces its growth. It is also a letter to Dre that conveys how Sidney really feels about him. Similarly, Sid- ple is the Roots song "Act Too (The Love o f . . .)";" another is in ney represents all that is true and pure about Hip-Hop for Dre. the Tribe Called Quest song "Bonita Appleb~m."~Wther , While these embodiments of Hip-Hop appear to move us away recent I 1 IB r l n g Wreck t o Those Who Disrespect Me from the typical representations of Hip-Hop gendered feminine, the film cannot sidetrack this common trap. The references and im- ages in the film clearly show that here, just as in the Common song and the Erykah Badu video, Hip-Hop is gendered feminine. The character of Sidney overwhelmingly and consistently represents Hip-Hop throughout the film. From the signature delicate gold nameplate she wears in every scene except those in which she is formally dressed to the way she acts as the barometer for what is real Hip-Hop, Sidney, more than any other character in the film- even the MC Cabby, played by Mos Def-represents Hip-Hop in ths film. A constant refrain in the film is the question that Sidney asks each of the rappen she interviews: "So, when did you fall in love with Hip-Hop?" The film starts out with a series of men rappers, DJs, and well-known rap record label owners contemplating that ques- tion. Rappers such as Method Man and Black Thought, DJs such as Pete Rock, and record label owners such as Russell Simmons and Jermaine Dupre all recollect the songs and artists that made them fall in love with Hip-Hop. Not surprisingly, all of these men name other men and songs by other men. While this initial fiarning of men naming and listing other men as the sparks that ignited their love for Hip-Hop may seem to effectively gender Hip-Hop mascu- line, we need to look at the scene more carehlly to get the true meaning. It is Sidney who poses the question each time. It is she they seek to impress with their answers. She might just as well be saying, "So, when did you first fall in love with me?" Likewise, even though Dre represents Hip-Hop to Sidney in that her letter to Hip-Hop doubles as a love letter to him, Sidney also represents Hip-Hop to Dre. I t is her validation that he seeks and craves throughout, both through the music reviews she writes and through the look in her eyes, to let him know if he is remaining true to real Hip-Hop. In proving himself worthy of Hip-Hop, Dre is ultimately trying to prove himself worthy of Sidney. Sidney is also, for Dre, the woman who is like Hip-Hop. In a New Year's Eve toast, it is Sidney, not his wife, who receives the ultimate praise and compliment. ]>re toasts Sidney by likening her to “the perfect verse over a tight beat.” And he closes the toast by adding, “To

W o m e n . Rap. a n d Rhetor l c o f Wreck

I t Hip-Hop.” By likening Sidney to what is quintessentially Hip- ! Hop-the perfect verse over a tight beat-and collapsing Sidney b i and Hip-Hop, Dre effectively one-ups Tribe Called Quest’s praise L

in “Bonita Applebum.” Sidney is more than a Hip-Hop song; she is Hip-Hop.

i

I There are several other subtle instances in the film that work to ! place Sidney in the role of Hip-Hop and that gender Hip-Hop fem-

*inine. The last instance that I will discuss here stems from the film’s title, which also represents Dre’s dream grl in the movie. “Brown sugar,” according to llre, stands for the woman who is “definitely wifey material, fine, smart, classy, but not a snob, hella hella sexy,

; but not a ho.” The fact that the screenwriters chose to title the en-

c tire movie based on this one statement by Dre effectively exhibits

1 the film’s ultimate gendering of Hip-Hop as feminine in the movie. i. Not only is Hip-Hop at its purest considered brown sugar, so is

Sidney. I

I These kinds of complicated representations in which women are meant to stand for all that is good and pure g v e way to the kinds of conflicted representations to which women of the Hip-Hop generation have a hard time brinpng wreck. Like the early Ameri- can women, women of the Hip-Hop generation are used to repre- sent symbolically and are discouraged from claiming a public voice and representing for themselves. The struggle to claim a space in the masculine sphere of Hip-Hop leaves women fighting not only the historical stereotypes that plague Black women but also the negative images and misconceptions attributed to Black women in Hip-Hop culture. In an effort to claim a space for themselves, Black women involved with Hip-Hop culture must continuously bring wreck.

Bringing Wreck: Confronting and Changing Images and Representations

13lack women of the Hip-Hop generation are not content just to be n synlbol of Hip-Hop; in acts of resistirlg and renegotiating thc inl-

I Bring WrecK to 7 hose wno ulsrespect Me

ages that men rappen have used to represent women within Hip- Hop, they have sought to bring wreck to the images. The most widely quoted and recognized example of this h n d of wreck comes from Queen Latifah with songs such as “U.N.I.T.Y.” and “Ladies First.” Women rappers from Queen Latifah to Salt-N-Pepa, YO- Yo to Missy Elliott, and Roxanne Shante to Eve bring wreck to misrepresentations of Black womanhood in Hip-Hop culture and rap music by their very presence in this counter-public sphere. Their physical presence as real women, not symbols, helps to shake

I up notions of “a woman’s place.” The fact that they use their lyrics to bring women’s issues to the forefront of rap music and Hip-Hop culture further disrupts the commonly held misconceptions and misrepresentations of Black women in Hip-Hop. This wreck and disruption take place on a variety of levels, two of which I’ll men- tion here.

The first disruption I explore takes place in what some have called the sister of Hip-Hop: spoken word. Two spoken-word art- ists who speak out and bring wreck to the negative images of Black womanhood that exist in Hip-Hop culture are Jessica Care Moore and Sarah Jones. Both women have a stage presence that can easily be labeled Hip-Hop. They also infuse their poetry with sentiments and images farmliar to the Hip-Hop generation. And both poems that I will discuss here were performed on the show that blends spoken word with rap, DefPoetryJam.

Jessica Care Moore says, “I’m a Hip-Hop cheerleader / carrying hand grenades / and blood red pom porns / screaming &om the sidelines of a stage I These words not only flip the script on the stereotypical image of woman as cheerleader, but also bring into focus the lineage of Black women standing on the sidelines cheering Black men on and working diligently to build and shape the Black public sphere. Moore’s words effectively add herself and women of the Hip-Hop generation to that lineage. Throughout the poem, she complicates notions of women’s place in Hip-Hop by

1 bringng to the surface women’s significance to the growth of the Hip-Hop movement. She also criticizes the negative images and messages that come out in the music. Moore writes:

I’m a Hip-Hop cheerleader I buy all your records Despite the misogyny Not looking for the blond in me. . . I’ll be your number one fan I’ll scream the HAY’S I’ll tolerate all your hoes I’m a Hip Hop cheerleadeF5

Moore uses spoken word both to claim a voice and to bring Hip- Hop to task. She incorporates and signifies on Hip-Hop phrases such as “hey, how and uses them to question and critique misogyny. She uses the poem ultimately to explore the larger relationship be- tween Black men and women.

Sarah Jones seeks to disrupt the images of Black women as sexu- ally promiscuous and the limiting of Black women’s worth to their vagnas. Her poem “Your Revolution” has the mantra-like refrain “Your revolution will not happen between these thighs,” signifying on Black Power movement ideas about “pussy power” through its remix of Gil Scott Heron’s classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and also signifies on Hip-Hop’s constant references to sex that end up objectifying Black women. Jones flips the script and uses the rappers’ own words to disrupt their objectifying narratives. In front of each of the men rappers’ lyrics Jones adds the refrain “Your revolution wdl

O f course, the rappers who make booty songs are not thinhng about revolution. Jones is, however, and by doing so she is more than building on the militant poet foremothers of the Black Arts movement. Beneath the repetitive refrains is the hidden question that brings wreck to the booty-focused factions of Hip-Hop: “Why are you not thinking about revolution instead of being obsessed with sex?” This critique brings the reader to question why indeed rap music does not have more uplifting and powerful messages to g v e us.

Sarah Jones’s “Your Revolution” for a while was played on the same radio stations that played the rap music she critiqued. As a re- sult of her taking the rappers’ own lyrics and using them in her

I

I Brlng Wreck t o Those Who Olsrespect M e Women. Rap. and Rhetorlc o f Wreck

poem, the Federal Communications Commission labeled “Your ~ ~ v o l u t i o n “indecent and fined Portland radio station KBOO seven thousand dollars. The fact that she had to fight to get the FCC to reverse its decision and clear her poem of the indecent label exemplifies the very real repression that can occur when Black women speak out and bring wreck. Jones notes, “Hip-Hop is the most important tool our generation has in terms of expressing the different layers of our reality. . . . It’s fine if rappers want to be ball- en, but just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I’m nothing but body parts in a song. . . . My words were meant to tell everyone from Jay-Z to Bigge, I love your slulls, but here’s what I would love to hear contributed to the c~nversa t ion .”~~ The controversy of the FCC’s 1999 decision and Jones’s subsequent fighting of that decision has made an impact on the larger public, with numerous articles appearing in various media. She has the public attention, and this allows her to bring wreck in the diva sense because this moment is a pedagogcal one that we wlll look back on and think about in terms of not only free speech but also the objectification of women in rap music.

The second level of disruption I will focus on here moves from the genre of spoken word to that of rap and takes into consideration a rapper who most people would not credit with combating stereo- types. Foxy Brown, with her hypersexual persona, at first glance would appear to epitomize the hos and bitches that men rappers rap about and spoken-word artists such as Jessica Care Moore and Sarah Jones speak out against. Foxy Brown, in fact, often claims these la- bels for herself. The reclamation of terms once considered deroga- tory is widely debated, but I will not enter that debate at the present time. I wlll offer, however, that rappers such as Foxy Brown, Trina, Khia, and Lil’ Kim can showcase the double standards that have plagued women throughout the ages. For example, in “My Life” Foxy Brown raps about the double standards that exist for men and women rappers. She raps about the fact that if she is unpleasant, people call her either a bitch or rude. However, they find the same behavior in men amusing. She also notes that men who have multi- ple partners are called macks, while women are called whores.4H Foxy Brown brings wreck to age-old double standards and claims a

2 space for herself as a woman in the sphere of rap. She is also claim- 1

j ing her right to be who she wants to be in that sphere, whether she I

\ is considered rude or sexually promiscuous. She also notably ad-

i dresses the misconception that men are involved with rap for the b love of it. Examples such as Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.”

/ and The Root’s “Hip Hop You the Love of My Life” highlight widely held beliefs that only men can have “real” love for Hip-

I *Hop, just like only men can have “real” rapping skills. AU others

are in it for the money. Foxy Brown brings wreck to claims that she is in it for the money by asking, “What the fuck he in it for?” She also calls men rappers to task for the way they collapse women into categories of bitch and ho based solely on gender.

Foxy Brown’s “My Life” offers but one example of the lund of wreck that Black women rappers bring to the counter-public

I sphere of Hip-Hop. Eve’s “Love Is Blind” and Queen Latifah’s I i I “U.N.I.T.Y.,” both discussed earlier, are others. Missy “Misde- i i. meanor” Elliott’s celebration of her right to an attitude in “I’ma

Bitch” is yet another. The list of Black women bringng wreck and thereby controlling their own representations in the counter-public sphere of Hip-Hop and the larger society is long and continues to grow each time a woman picks up a mike and wrecks it. It also grows when women involved in Hip-Hop begn to share their own experiences and stories, as Foxy Brown does in “My Life.” The power of autobiographical accounts and life stories in the disruption of negative representations of Black womanhood and Black women coming to voice is also used by women of the Hip-Hop generation to bring wreck to the negative images and stereotypes that influence their lives.

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