Cardi B’s Uses of the Erotic: Twerking and Rapping as a pregnant Black woman
Cardi B, born Belcalis Almanzar, is a young Black woman who has launched a successful career as a rapper in the American music and entertainment industry. She recently released her debut studio album Invasion of Privacy (2018), breaking records after reaching number one across America in just 24 hours of its release. Through her hard work and persistence, she has established herself as one of the most sought after artists in the music industry. Despite her accolades, hegemonic narratives of Black womanhood and sexuality have scripted and misrepresented Cardi as a welfare queen, jezebel, and ratchet. Cardi’s background as, in her own words, a “regular shmedgular degular girl from the Bronx,” who made a living as a stripper is framed through the lens of white hetero patriarchal and capitalist structures that reproduce her image into degrading stereotypes of Black womanhood. While destructive dominant representations of Black women are consistently mapped onto Cardi B’s body, she subverts these representations by tapping into and deploying her inner erotic power (Lorde, 1984), thereby offering an alternative understanding of Black women’s sexuality. Specifically, Cardi B’s 2018 Coachella performance, in which she rapped lyrics from her debut album and twerked on stage all while being visibly pregnant, contests the controlling images (Collins, 2000) that are projected onto Black women and articulates a transgressive performance of Black womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality.
On April 15, 2018, rapper Cardi B took the Coachella stage and performed an energetic 30-minute set of the most popular tracks on her album, which debuted 10 days prior to the show. The set began with the song “Get Up 10,” which details her journey working as a stripper to make a living to her current illustrious rap career, while images of Cardi B as a stripper were shown on a screen. She then appeared rapping her sexually explicit and braggadocio lyrics in a mesh-covered bustier top and white high-waisted pants that revealed her pregnant belly. In presenting herself as a Black pregnant woman who is a rapper and a former stripper, Cardi displays a narrative of Black womanhood and motherhood that deviates from respectable representations of Black women.
Cardi B is not interested in performances of respectability politics, where she must desexualize herself and perform appropriate models of Black femininity. In an effort to confront dominant codes of Black female sexuality and motherhood, Black mothers who are under public scrutiny often act more conservative and reserved, and craft demure maternity pictures. Cardi B, however, contests the racist Black female paradigm by pushing the boundaries of what is considered socially acceptable for pregnant Black women to do.
Her twerking and gyrating hips on stage proudly declare that she is a sexual being. She harnesses her inner erotic power to affirm her sexual energy, which is denied to her as a pregnant Black woman by society. The desexualization of the pregnant Black body is a mechanism of the patriarchy to further suppress and regulate Black women’s sexuality. Though sex and maternity are inextricably linked, pregnant women are shamed if they express these connections. They are penalized for exposing their pregnant bodies, as their pregnant bodies reveal their shameful carnal desires. Cardi B directly challenges these patriarchal notions in her performance.
After twerking and provocatively dancing on stage to “She Bad,” she announces to the audience, “And that’s how I got pregnant ya’ll. Just like that.” She explicitly links her pregnant body to her sexuality and sexual activity. Cardi B reclaims the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women” and a “creative energy empowered” (Lorde, 1984). She accesses the erotic as a source of power and embodied knowledge that allows her to fully and deeply express joy and pleasure. Cardi B disrupts the patriarchal representations of pregnant women that seek to desexualize her by presenting her pregnant Black body as a site of desirability and ongoing sexuality.
She defies society’s expectations of Black women by presenting herself as a multifaceted Black woman who can be pregnant, erotic, and a rapper. L.H. Stallings calls this the Black Ratchet Imagination, where “the performance of the failure to be respectable, uplifting, and a credit to the race” (L.H. Stallings, 2013) allows for new transgressive possibilities of Black female subjectivities that are unrestricted, complex, and multidimensional.
Works Cited:
1. Hill, Collins P. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000.
2. Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.
3. Stallings, L.H. “Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. Vol 2. Issue 2. SUNY Press, 2013, 135-139.
