I Endorse That Strip (from the poetics of Nicki Minaj)

[performance: I play the first :35 seconds of this song, then I lower the volume and read the poem over the rest of the song. It's probably helpful to listen to the entire song and then read the poem as well.] 

From the Poetics of Nicki Minaj

I Endorse That Strip

“what women are we talking about when we say women” –bell hooks

what we talk about when we say strippers

what we talk  about when we say prostitutes

when we say hoes, when we say sex workers

what we talk about when we say sluts

what we talk about when we say mom

what we talk about when we say daddy’s girl

shaming in the I can’t help but be bodied & error

the object’s recoil, in the traphouse of gossip

when we say: delicate, fluid, unreason, hysterical

brided, obey, the right to choose, the guilt

how violence is fed to us, micro aggressions

self defense classes, how you walk to your car

clutching your keys, the drugs in your drink,

pantied or not beneath skirt, asking for it,

girl friended in weapons, betrayal double bound

armed for the thinness, masked in display

I endorse the performance in the radical binary

the feminist politics of irony/ ironing/ commercials

of cleaning products/ magazine gloss of the neglected

photoshop seen & distilled, I endorse the make-up

empty spaced, the glazing in a postal hegemonic

patriarchal white supremacist gaze, I endorse cultural desire

& the critique, womanhating not solely the realm of men,

the rapeable body, I endorse its rage, beyond solace, beyond

getting over it, the exhaustion, the divorce not of love but necessity

the suicide of escape from the container

the excision of the dollness that is a temperate

line, the balance of a passive darkness, oh you know better

discourse of abuses, the frame beyond the film’s script

where the beatings and the coercions find her double fisted

in the ass, find her bounced off walls but no bruising on the face

for the close-up, what we talk about when we say porn, what we

talk about when we confuse a woman’s desire for any power, for any autonomy

for the nodding agreement to stake a spot in misogyny, because

misandry does not exist at any institutional level, so when you

pull up to the table of self-denigration, eat deep, smile sweet

I endorse that naked grin, I endorse the clip of the clit that the mother

hands down and says: now we are all one

what are we talking about when we say women 

poem:  copyright Megan Burns