A King Named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory ISSN: 0740-770X (Print) 1748-5819 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20 A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee Savannah Shange To cite this article: Savannah Shange (2014) A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 24:1, 29-45, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602 Published online: 14 May 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 2181 View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rwap20 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2014 Vol. 24, No. 1, 29–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602 A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee Savannah Shange* Department of Africana Studies and the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj’s gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject. Keywords: gender performance; femme; hip hop; blackness; queer theory; homonormativity On her breakthrough mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty, Nicki Minaj rapped about her penchant for “bad bitches,” piquing the interest of queer hip hop heads when she bragged: “I only stop for pedestrians/ or a real, real bad lesbian” (Maraj 2009). In the three years since her debut, Minaj has shot to stardom as the reigning hip hop and now pop diva. Her sexuality has remained at the center of her public persona, propelled by both the spectaculariza- tion of her body as a target of sexual desire and her piecemeal lyrical expressions of queerness. In the blogrolls and YouTube comment chains that track Minaj’s1 popular reception, a current of disdain runs beneath the critical props and teenybopper adulation. In addition to the familiar chorus of “put your clothes back on” nostalgia, there is also an ongoing critique of her professed-and-then-not-professed bisexuality as being just a gimmick. This suspicion of her same-sex desire in online discursive spaces is part of a critical consensus that foregrounds capital as the “true” engine of Minaj’s strategic queerness. If Minaj’s selectively “gay” maneuvering is indeed an attempt at material gain, does that automatically dismiss her potential to upset heteronormative scripts in hip hop? Or, more *Email: [email protected] © 2014 Women & Performance Project Inc. 30 S. Shange bluntly, how much pussy does one have to talk about eating for it to “count” as queer? I invoke Nicki in these pages as a thinking partner to help me examine the distance between provocation and transgression, and how queer practice and commodification inter- act in the discursive flows of black popular culture. In these flows we find currents that are both strategic and static, essentialist and ambiguous, coerced and agentic, coursing through the same narrative. This article traces how Nicki creatively navigates these crosscurrents, particularly when marked as black, female, and famous. While recent scholarship has noted Minaj’s nimble sexuality play, most has not recog- nized or marked her performance of gender as femme (Whitney 2012; Butler 2013; Smith 2013). In this analysis, I foreground femmehood, building on the presumption that “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of the repetition of a law that is not its consolidation, but its replacement” (Butler 1990, 40). Thus, I argue that Nicki’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform “straight” or “queer,” but upon closer examination, she refuses both. It is this refusal of legibility, of any parochial rendition of black sexuality, that fuels derisive dismissals of Nicki’s black femme subjectivity as yet another Top 40 titil- lation, particularly within the user-generated content of mainstream gay and feminist online spaces like Autostraddle and Clutch. If a stable, transparent, performance of queer identity has such currency, might femme subjects be perceived to fall a few cents short in their (mis) recognition as conforming to and benefiting from heteropatriarchal gender norms? Further, how do we as queers perpetuate our own enclosure by enforcing homonorms on our femme kin, judging them as inadequate? Where does Nicki Minaj fit in our attempts to map the popular contours of black feminism over the past generation? And finally, what forms of queer black subjecthood might we misrecognize in our pursuit of legible queer genealogies in hip hop, in our pursuit of kinship? Making ourselves visible to each other as queer family is a strategy of black life in the face of social death, an effort at liberatory rupture in a world “sutured by anti-Black solidarity” (Wilderson 2010, 59). I am guided particularly by film theorist Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight as a compass towards these ends, which thus far is the only book-length work on black femme cultural representation. Before engaging Minaj’s musical oeuvre, I take a step back to sketch the contours of tactical queerness in relationship to homonormativity, both in its dominant and nondominant permutations. I then briefly situate Nicki in the historical context of contemporary commercially successful women in rap, before finally turning to her contingent performances of black femmehood on wax, on film, and in print. Sincerely, strategically queer At the heart of this inquiry is what we might call strategic queerness and its encounters with a homonormative impulse that distinguishes the legitimate from the illegitimate queer. Stra- tegic queerness unfurls as a heuristic from Gayatri Spivak’s(1988, 13) argument for the “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.” Having witnessed the widespread misuse of her concept, Spivak sought to distance herself from the term, but not necessarily its project, lamenting that “my notion just simply became the union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 31 wondered about that” (Darius, Jonsson, and Spivak 1993, 35). While this piece circulates Spivak’s notion as academic currency, it also seeks to centralize the “strategies” used by queer(ed) subjects within the constraints of late capitalism. As sketched here, strategic queerness is a situation-specific performance of nonheteronormativity enacted in the service of a subject’s material, political, erotic, or discursive interest(s). In this frame, Nicki’s penchant for “real big ol’ ghetto booty” can be understood as a strategically queer assertion of self that provides her with a financially lucrative buffer against heteronormative demands, even as it provides the tender homecoming of another woman’s black femme flesh (Raymond and Maraj 2010). Diverging from Spivak’s conception, strategic queerness in this sense does not necessarily denote an exclusively scrupulous visibility. She demonstrates the ethical dimension of strategy through the example of a diverse set of subaltern groups articulating a collective identity that denies difference in order to make a claim on the state. By contrast, a strategically queer individual may be interpreted as inauthentic, cowardly, or even immoral – the inverse of the “good gay subject” produced and regulated through regimes of homonormativity. We see this dynamic when Nicki fans were chided on mainstream white lesbian website AfterEllen.com that “if you buy her album, you are buying into fauxmosexuality,” and reminded that “the last thing we need is another straight woman pretending to identify with our culture just to lure us as custo- mers” (Bendix 2010). As articulated powerfully in recent years, homonormativity often dovetails into homonationalism, which we might sketch as a hegemonic patriotism that hinges on the queer liberal subject’s investment in the Western state apparatus (Puar 2005, 2007; Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 2008). Homonationalism’s “good gay subject” is not only white and bourgeois, but is also monogamously partnered, normatively gendered, and as committed to the flag as he or she is to the nuclear family. In Puar’s(2005, 122) frame, “queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rheto- ric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” In this context, the War on Terror and the Islamophobic strains of homo- national discourse serve to legitimate imperial aggression overseas. The same queer “imperialist center” also serves to “other” communities within the United States because their race, class, gender deviance, politics, and/or affect fall outside the boundaries of ideal queer liberal subjectivity.

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