Blaxploitation blues: How black women identify with and are empowered by female performers of hip hop music.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the ways in which black women consume and make sense of hip hop music performed by female and male artists. It has two goals: to explore how black women interpret lyrics in hip hop music; and, to determine the extent to which these interpretations may be debilitating or empowering to black women, by facilitating social change, rationalizing women's discontent, or contributing to their subjugation. As the results indicate, the gender of the artist influences how participants interpret lyrics of similar surface messages. For instance, when the artists were female, the participants found multiple and competing interpretations of the lyrics, whereas when the artists were male, the participants uniformly interpreted one message---the surface message. As such, messages that were considered debilitating to women, empowered participants when sung by female artists. When the artists were male, however, this same surface message functioned to harm, or was deemed inconsequential. The results suggest that <italic>speaker effect</italic> is accurate---people define or interpret words differently based on the perceived group identity of the person speaking. This means the interpretation process is more than a simple interaction between the audience member and what is being said; it is also the interaction between the audience member and the speaker.