Yoniphobic Language: Azealea Banks

Between costumes:

     and between the desire for:


       and who decides what spins:

             here's a snip/ snip: the

a woman's body is a tableau for war













Azeala Banks says in an interview that this is not a Nicki Minaj diss song.

She told Vibe magazine:

“I don’t think Nicki necessarily opened the door for anyone else but herself.” 

“I don’t think the door was ever closed for urban female artists,” said the “Needsumluv” MC. “There has always been a female killing it. Have we forgotten about Eve? Eve had hot records, movies, a TV show, fashion line, ad campaigns, etc. Right before Remy Ma went to jail, she was killing it, and was well on her way to the top. She had bars on bars on bars. Lil Mama also made a splash with ‘Lipgloss.’ Plus all the other alternative chicks like M.I.A. and [Santigold]. I don’t think Nicki necessarily opened the door for anyone else but herself,” she laughed.

She continues: “I think she’s doing a great job with what she’s doing. But I don’t think any of the current female rappers’ success’ are contingent upon anything Nicki Minaj did. It’s contingent upon our talents and creativity.”

She goes on to praise Pink Friday‘s beats, hooks and lyrics, and even calls Nicki “mad sexy”. But her main criticism is the “Stupid Hoe” rapper’s wild style. “I think a lot of the things she started doing with her look were distracting,” she says. “I think she’s talented enough to sustain a very fruitful career without the ugly wigs and ugly costumes.”

Link to Article: 
http://idolator.com/6217852/azealia-banks-talks-nicki-minaj-to-vibe

The Nicki Minaj Project: Mask

Masking: Subliminal Tricks

the art of posing:

what the eye gets, in other words

how the world is refracted/ reflected back

The use of the mask both subverts identity and draws attention to it.

To remove one’s face is an intensely personal act, the body becomes a mirror offering back in many ways the norms and cultural neuroses of the times.

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish lifting up all these faces.”

 –Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun

The mask is the “escape valve.” It plays as a child does with the notion of singularity, of unity, of wholeness. In adults, the mask signals a break with normalcy. It’s a signal, a cipher that notes the movement from expectation to realization from the world of the real to the world of the unreal; the mask creates a bridge. The elaborate display of the body enacts first and foremost the promise of the elaborate display of the narrative, of the action and of the imaginary world.

The body is intimate and vulnerable, offered up for sacrifice. The body is armed and hidden at the same time, layered in costume and personas, so that the true identity can never be pinpointed. It reveals by hiding. The “world” of the body becomes a theatrical display. As such, the promise of the body is one of pleasure, one of entertainment even in moments of discomfort and disgust.

The self is flexible. It is the quality of the illusion that counts. To be indebted to an “other” is less important than the act of embodying the mask. The mask is a tacit agreement between the wearer and the viewer; it promises to excite and the viewer in turn promises to enact the role of awarding attention, be it positive or negative. It is an art of seeing and then an act of choice in the gaze or the refusal to participate.

“feminists have used self-images to describe a gender specific phenomenon” –Joan Rivéres “Womanliness as a Masquerade”

Aggression contained within the personal odyssey.

Vulgarity is a display, a language mask that provides a barrier while also signaling what is inclusive and who is excluded. The adoption of racial slurs and sexist epithets draws a line between the user and the other, and it includes those who are willing to trespass. It handles the uncomfortable, and it abuses the standards by which any “body” of people decides what is acceptable in language. Aggression shaped by language and enacted in language allows the mask to remain armed. It accepts into it the rite of a culture of aggression and attempts to contain it, in the same way that the mask and rites of mourning and funeral practices attempt to contain grief.

self exploitation:

“it’s a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult”  -Lucy Lippard, “Scattering Selves”

If we accept this as true, then we must also ask what is subtle and who defines the edges of the abyss from the actual descent into it, and also in bounding holes, who guards the borders.