This essay analyses black female American gangsta rap as a radically historically specific phenomenon arising in the urban milieu of the early nineties in the US. It takes into account lyrics, performances and visuals (music videos) of female gangstas, not as singular component parts, but as patterns of interference that are cross-linked and thus shape up as provisional, never finished female gangsta body. The femininity of this amorphous body will be described as made by inappropriate/d others appearing within gangsta rap, namely ventriloquists, tricksters and cyborgs. Subjects of analysis are Bo$$ and her album Born Gangstaz (1992), Mia X and her album Unlady Like (1997), Lady of Rage and her album Necessary Roughness (1997), and Lil' Kim and her album Notorious K.I.M. (2000). Since the notion of inappropriate/d femininities allows for acknowledging the mutual pervasion of (gendered/stereotyped) borderlines, it offers a reading of gangsta femininities' critical potential that contests both current interpretations of female emancipation as oppositional stance towards men, and of gangsta rap as a male dominated domain.

This essay is a contribution to the still marginalized but constant debate held by scholars and artists about black women in American hip hop culture. It is informed by the assumption that hegemonic discourses in American rap music about patriarchy, sexual exploitation and abuse, commodification, and oversexed objectification of women imploded in the late eighties—a time of acute focus on language and identity politics (Quinn, 2000, 120)—and left a discursive blank space, in which extra-ordinary and inappropriate/d femininities could appear together with and within gangsta rap (cp. Light, 2004, 143). Against the commonly held view of female rap performances as responses to or re-appropriations of dominant masculine gestures (see Rose, 1994,146f; Perry, 2004, 156) this essay claims that these femininities were born out of the silence of tumbling gender and race discourses and settled down in the bodies of black female American gangstas.

Commonwealth Literature Journal, Sexual Exploitation, American Hip Hop Culture, Dominant Masculine Gestures, Black Female American Gangstas, Theoretical Grounds, Human Gangsta Bodies, Armed Communities, Visual Reproduction, Folkloristic Mythology, Science Fiction.