f-word

"Exactly What Does a Feminist Look and Act Like?"

I had just posed the question to one of my smartest female students. We had developed a relationship that was part professor-mentor, part big sister during my three-years teaching at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college in Clinton, New York. She had also been the research assistant on my now published and provocatively titled book, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women.

She was in my office following the recording of a three-hour long conversation with several young women about feminism, hip hop, sexuality, beauty, and politics. Excerpts from this interview would inform the fi nal chapter of the book on the connections between hip hop and feminism. I asked her this question right before I excused myself to ladies room—partly to give her time to refl ect, partly to freshen my feathering Chanel Russet Moon lipstick.

With heels clicking on the bathroom fl oor, I stopped to take a good look at myself in order to contemplate what my dear student saw and did not see: a late thirty-something, straight-talking, nine years married, nattily dressed mother of a two-year old daughter who had once worked the runways in Paris, spoke French fl uently, listened to hip hop, and understood the culture thoroughly because it was the music of my generation in its 1970s-1990s heyday. What she did not see or understand was that all of that could be rolled up in a feminist body.

We were close. To say that I was stunned that she didn’t realize I was a feminist was an understatement.

In fact, when I returned to my office, she looked perplexed. She then said, “I didn’t know you were a feminist.” I asked the question again. She provided the usual stereotypical claptrap about feminists and feminism—too radical, men were an anathema, not especially style-conscious.

By the conversation’s end, she understood that feminists were as complex and contradictory as everyone else. We could not be neatly shoved into a one-size fi ts all, and many of us don’t even agree. There are those who many would prefer to see in a woodshed for some of the piffle they espouse. Indeed, as much as I admire Gloria Steinem, her “Women are Never Front-Runners” article in The New York Times had me reaching for a bottle of seltzer water to quell an apoplectic fit.

There are those of us who have a certain proclivity towards beauty culture, while others shun it flat out as a patriarchal trap. Some of us like Hillary Clinton; others go gaga for Barack Obama, and yes, even John McCain (though admittedly I haven’t figured that one out yet). Many of us resist identity politics (the ‘we-are-all-women-so-we-should-move-as-one-undifferentiated-gendered-tribe’) as we strive to coalesce around ‘interest politics’ as women.

My student went off to law school and me to Vanderbilt. After the book’s publication, I sent her a signed copy at her new position at the Carter Center in Atlanta. I don’t think that she would ever call herself a feminist in theory or practice, but I believe she would give the term “women’s rights advocate” a whirl.

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of French and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is also the author of Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold.

~T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting