Saturday, February 16, 2013

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 

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