Notes on Trap Feminism

seeing people's glow up right. And Cecily and I met because she was working with a feminist women's organization that was focused on abortion, that was particularly focused on abortions and abortion rights for black and brown women who have traditionally been left out of the conversations with regard to feminism or have been erased from the history of first

second third wave feminism. And what she explores in her memoir is her own acceptance and understanding of what it means to be a trap feminist right, what it means to decide that you were no longer going to bow to the constraints that a white supremacists, misogynistic, patriarchal society places on the bodies and the experiences and the movements and the vocal tones of black women, And what this book lifts up is the lived experiences of black girls

from the hood right whose stories are oftentimes told, if told at all, particularly by Hollywood, with how downtrodden, how troubled, how we should all feel empathy and sad as opposed to lifting up the fullness of these people and their joy and experiences and community and relationship building. So I'm excited for you all to be a part of this conversation, and I would love that when you have an opportunity after listening, that you share your thoughts on what your

definition of feminism is. Are you a feminist? Coming up next, dear friends, is my conversation with the author of Bad Black Girl, Cecily Bowen. I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, Folks, I am so excited to welcome to ooka AffA Daily for the first time, Cecily Bowen, who is the author. I love this title. I love this title, Bad Fat Black Girl. Notes from a Trap Feminist. Cecily, you are also the host of Purse.

The host of Purse, the first podcast about female and queer rappers, which you know, according to mainstream hip hop, you would think that we only have about one or two female rappers right now, let alone any queer one. So I appreciate that as well. And you were formerly the senior entertainment writer at Refinery twenty nine, creating different outlets and spaces in white pop culture for black female voices. Talk to me about what it means to be a

trap feminist. Let's just start from the beginning so people understand the distinction, because I think that right now we are seeing a I don't even want to say a resurgence, but a birth of a different type of feminism, a different type of womanism. So talk to me about what it means to be a trap feminist. And I'm so glad that you brought that up, because while feminism was something that I had initially started to like say out loud and kind of ruminate on almost ten years ago.

Now the impetus for writing this book is because we're having that that resurgence or you know, this kind of popularization of a very specific kind of feminism that is rooted in the experiences of essentially the hood, Black Girls and the soundtrack to that. I'm glad you mentioned the podcast perse first, because the soundtrack to this movement is all of this amazing female route that we have right now. So just for some contacts, I think that's super important.

But what it means to be a trap feminist is to really look at and honor the experiences of Black women, and specifically Black women who are from the hood, So black women who come from that cultural space of blackness that is so often commodified, that is so often appropriated, and that it's so often vilified and talked about without actually ever hearing from the Black women who live those experiences.

And it's very important to understand that trap feminism is not about pathologizing or intervening in the lives of like hood black women to like. What it actually does is celebrate all of the ways in which those specific kinds of black women have already been thriving and surviving and living and being the blueprint and literally creating cultural exports that people continuously exploit all the time and you know, been popping while we was doing it, you know. And

so that that is what trap feminism does. And one of the things that is so dope about it is that it does look specifically at trap music and the sight of trap music as a way to start interrogating some of the themes regarding gender and sexuality and race and capitalism and money and all of those kinds of things. You know, I I love this because, you know, one of the things that I think too often happens is

in our request to be I don't even know. We don't really use the term politically correct, because nothing is politically correct anymore. But in our way to kind of distance black people and blackness from the hood, right, there has been this um, what can I say, sanitizing of the black sanitizing of the black experience, and sanitizing of the type of black women or black woman that is

okay to discuss. Right. So I would argue that, you know, when we when we had Michelle Obama as our first lady, right, even though Michelle Obama was very clear that she came from the South Side of Chicago, even though she's very clear about like the distinctions and of her upbringing, she still came through Ivy. She still had to, um, I would say, wash off some of the hood nature itself

in order for acceptance. So do you feel that in this kind of space that we are in now, and this cultural space that we are in, that we can have conversations with about what it means to be from the hood, about what it means to have this multifacetedness as black people, as black women without having to sanitize ourselves or make ourselves safe for mainstream consumption. Like we

don't have to run from it anymore. I think that, you know, that's one of the revolutionary properties of social media is that that's where black women are having those conversations without watering down or sanitizing themselves. There's literally the first I don't know why this is the first person we came to online. There's this hairstylens I follow She like does wig installations and her name is queenly Or.

She's based in Alabama, but like she does these voiceovers of her doing her installation, and she speaks in her accent, she cusses, she's very she's very clear just about who she is, and she's getting all of these followers and all of you know, these kinds of you know, now she's starting to do like brand deals and stuff, and

she does that unapologetically for being who she is. And I think it's interesting because you know, I feel like for the first you know, for the twenty tens and maybe like the early as, the only people we were letting do that, actually men who were impersonating black women like those were the only people that we were letting show up in the hood like girls. And so now I feel like we're actually letting black women do it.

But it's so interesting. I love that you brought that up because you know, you mentioned some of the places that I that I worked, and you know, essentially that is what a lot of people would call women's media, you know, main culture. And it was when I got to that space. You know, obviously I'm from Chicago, but then I've also lived in DC, I've lived in Atlanta. I'm from these very like black these places with like

these you know, big black populations. But I think it was when I started to work in media that I started to see that the black people who were traditionally occupying space in that specific industry were absolutely not from the hood, and the ones that were were doing everything they could to you know, not be from the hood. And but but the thing about it was that because I had a very non traditional path into journalism and into media, like I ever went to journalism school or

any of that. My voice and my perspective as a black girl from Ahood is actually what got me in the door. It was, you know, we were in on the advent of this. It was the era of the personal narrative, and we were questioned. It was like where pop culture and feminism were really having another kind of merging together. Was when Scandal was on. Everybody wanted to know if everything was feminist. And so my voice really

got me in the door. And I knew I could not start to sacrifice who I was, you know, for the work and for the space. And obviously, like you know, I had to try to figure out how to navigate that, you know, while also like maintaining like you know, the

norms of like professionalism and things like that. But I was very adamant that I did not want to sacrifice who I was, and I was adamant that like as much as we talked about, like, you know, the origins of a certain hairstyle, I knew that that wasn't enough in terms of actually reflecting the voices of those women because I think on the very other side of that, we have all of these moments happening on the political side right where we have black trans women being killed

at super high rates. Most of those black trans women who were being killed we're from the hood. You know. We have Brianna Taylor's death. You know, we have all of these All of a sudden, black women are like martyrs, and like we hear about them in death, and we hear about them after they've been you know, experienced intimate partner violence. We hear about them as statistics, you know, in terms of you know, them contracting hid or what the income gap is between them. There were all of these.

There are all these very material outcomes of what it means to be black and from the hood and to be female and black and from the hood that folks like to talk about, and in that way, hood black girls become ideas and they're not Actually we don't actually ever hear from them though, we don't talk to them, and it's not enough that we just say, oh, they influenced this cultural trend. That that's not make up for

us not hearing those stories. And so you know that it was really wanting to just make space for the fact that we we can be spoken too, and we should be allowed to speak instead of always being spoken about. You know. What I also find interesting too is the pushback that we see in the comments sections on some black pages. Right so, you will have you know, various various folks, various black women, right so, whether it's city girls, whether it is you know, a lotto, whether it is

Michelle Obama, what have you. And there's always a set of black people, black women in particular, who are embarrassed by those said women or saying you know, uh, so and so didn't die so that you could shake your ass like this or so and so didn't What do you say? You know, what? What? What? What? What? Is it? Just the internalized like whiteness of it all, or like don't let black don't let white folks, you know, don't air out our dirty laundry type of thing. What do

you think is kind of this stem where? Where where that internalized oppression is coming from? So I think it has a lot to do with respectability and survival. I think that we are, you know, it's it's hammered into us from such, you know, from so many different angles and from so many different places that in order to make it in the world, that in order to be

an upstanding citizen. You are to deny a lot of the things that really make you black and make ubliquity black black, you know, not not just you know, your

ancestral roots or anything like that. And so, you know, it was a conversation that was I remember the same conversation happening with black men around sagging their pants, the conversations that were had around black men wearing locks or having braids, and institutions and institutions from the NFL and the NBA to more House and so I think it's really just a reflection of that. But I think the issue with that is that, first of all, respectability politics

have never saved us, and they never will. And the faster we accept that, the better off we will be. Honestly and truly, that will not stop us from experiencing the trickle down of systemic racism, gender based violence, sexism, or any of that. However, I do think that some of the tools of respectability they help lighten the load. I mean, I can say, even for myself, the fact that I am college educated, the fact that I the fact that I have the gift of literacy itself, the

fact that I can read and write period. You know, has it helps me to have the platform to even be able to talk about to be able to talk about tripe feminism. But I think where we mess up is that we cannot participate in that while also promoting the eradication of the things that just make us black, you know. And I learned that from a lot of

different people. You know, one of my mentors, friends, one of my professors and college was doctor who was Nicole Brown, who started this program called Soul High, Saving our Lives, Hearing our Truths. And the basic principle of this program was that you know, us as college students and college professors, we would go to work with black girls and like local schools off campus, you know, people who were just from that neighborhood, and you know, we were not going

into those schools. Were like an interventionist approach. A lot of the programs that have been catered to working with black girls were about like you know, polishing them up, teaching them about we have to teach them about hygiene, we have to teach them to be ladies, we have to teach them to thrive. Because like the idea was that there was something inherent about black girlhood or about being black girls from the hood that they just didn't know about like how to be like women of the world.

And we were like, no, actually, we want to go in there and like do art and like let them tell their own stories, and we want them to roll their necks and pop their lips, and we want them to just ruvel in the beauty that is black girlhood. And then we can make them that we can make the meaning of that, and they can make the meaning of their own lives. But like, let's have them tell us, actually, you know, what the what their lives are, like, what

they need and what they need to experience. And so that is a practice that is very much so embedded in the heart of tripe feminism and in terms of

how I work. But I think that's also my response to a lot of the fear, going back to your question, to a lot of the fear and a lot of the respective respectability pushback that we see online, especially from other black folks, that like, if we you know, no one died from to be able to for me to shake my ass on the internet, But they also didn't die for me to be ashamed of shaking my ass

on the internet. Even that wasn't that wasn't the end all, be y'all, Like, let's beat Like when we talk about why you know, if we you know, Martin Luther King is usually who late who they use as the example. But like if we want to talk about what Martin Luther King died for, like Martin Luther King died as at the hands of white supremacy, and then an attempt at end white supremacy, like it ain't had nothing to do it. Who was shaking the ass or who was not?

You know, because in an ideal world, you know, if we really eradicated white supremacy, me shaking my ass would not be a sign of inferiority or unproductivity or failure in a way that you think it is, because oh god, I love it, Like yes, yes, I'm not. I'm not gonna turn into no white woman for y'all. I'm sorry, I'm just not gonna do it, Okay, like y'all we are, we are not of elitism is not gonna save us respectability.

It's not gonna save it us. And and honestly, like we've been doing fun, I think that's also the issue that like the damn is that you think is being caused by black girl shaking her ass on the internet just doesn't exist in the way as you think it does. But what does is like misogyny. I was going to say her, yeah, because because what the product that the issue is not about whether or not or how or when to shake your ass, right like, that is actually

not the thing. It's about being free or being or living in a perceived free society that there is not going to be repercussions for doing so. Repercussion being like, oh, well that's why she got raped or that's why she got beat or that's why this happened. And it's just like, well, wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute, that didn't come from that action. That came from what we

have decided in our society is normal and acceptable. Right, that misogyny is okay, that patriarchy is okay, that abuse of women is okay. You know, it was earlier. It was supposed to be the seventeen seventeenth birthday of Michaia, who was gunned down last year in front of her foster care home by police who rolled up in the

midst of a fight. And and you know, and Makaiah did not receive the type of wall to wall coverage campaign and all of these things, and a part of me believes, and I want to ask you, this, is it because she was not the perfect martyr? Is it

because she wasn't thin? Is it because her background wasn't polished right that we couldn't say that, oh, she was asleep in her bed or oh she was doing X like that she was in the action of defending herself and her body, and we don't like to see black women doing that, Like what do you why do you

think you know? And because I want to honor that, like honor the truth about why her name will most likely be lost as years go on and not a part of the broader array of hashtags that we know and stories that we can conjure because of the contact of it. That is so and you literally hit the

nail on the head. People are not rallying around the death of that fifteen year old girl because let's be like, she was a fifteen year old child who had already been disserviced and not receiving things that she deserved as an innocent child just by way of being in a

problematic foster care system in the birthplace. But it literally is because she was in the active mode of fighting back and defending herself from she saw as a threat that people have not run to like defend her name in the same way that they did a black woman who literally wasn't doing anything except sleeping. And I think that that and also so much comes with that, the fact that she was a bigger black girl. People did not see her as a victim who even needed to

defend herself in the first place. Yeah, they thought that she should just have been in a situation. She must have been the aggressive, she must have been the person

who calls all of this chaos. And even the fact that the police's response to seeing her with a knife was to shoot has everything to do with the fact that she was a big black woman, Because then, yell, how many videos have you seen a white people wielding swords hitting the girl come on, hitting the police using their martial arts, spitting in their faces, slapping the person them out, And those officers don't even think to reach for a weapon, not a taste or not a baton,

not a handcuff. And so we have to be honest about how black girl bodies are literally read as more dangerous and also less valuable. Yes, because the decision that's being made is whose life am I here to save and who can and who can go in my efforts to save those lives. And Makaya's life ended up at the bottom, and that has everything to do with the fact that she was a fat black girl, and people

who refuse to acknowledge that are being intentionally obtuse. At this point, do you think that because you know, even in the title of your book, right, you use the word fat? Yeah? Right? And if do you use it, I'll just ask why do you use the term why do you use the term fat? Yeah? So I think it's really interesting because I think that, first of all, I use the term because I am fat. That's that's what I am. That is a descriptor of my body,

that is that is how I look. And I do understand that the word fat is very loaded, and I think for a lot of people, right, it comes with

a negative connotation. And we've developed all of these other words like plus size or thick or voluptuous or what you know whatever, all these quote unquote likes you from those amisms to describe fat that are supposed to that are supposed to imply that we don't mean harm when we say them, and so I actually think that I intentionally use the word fat because I want people to actually come back to that place of discomfort, Like I want you to come back to that place where you

are thinking of fat as an inherently negative word, so that then you can like hear everything else that I have to say and then hopefully question that, like why why the word fat was bad in the first place, And so that is that is why I use that word. I've always gone by you know, bad Fat Black Girl on the internet. That's that was my social media handle. Honestly, you know, I wanted to title the book just notes from a trip Feminist period, Like I wanted that to

be the title. Um as we were kind of workshopping some other titles that just because they thought folks would know My publisher UM and my editor and my agent. They were like, Okay, we're not sure that people are immediately gonna know what trap feminist trip feminism is, so we might need another title that's like that kind of brings people into by the book. And so I get why we got there, But I mean that title bad

Fat Black Girl, obviously it's super important to me. It's right there, um, you know, and that is how I identify myself online. But I'm glad you brought this up too, because I think in the context of black folks and like black folks from the hood, you know, the body po sitivity space traditionally has been represented by a lot of white people and a lot of white Yes, it's been very you know, like body positivity has been like

overrepresented by whiteness. And I think one of the misconceptions that came out of that was that black people are somehow not fatphobic or less fatphobic, and that also wasn't true.

So it was really important that I was able to talk about my fatness and the context of my blackness, to talk about the desirability and body politics and the kind of the economies of desirability within black culture specifically, and again trip music trip culture was one of those sites where it was right there, really saw how black

women's bodies were being talked about in that context. So I think another reason why it was important for me to really identify myself as fat in the context of this conversation was because it was important that folks didn't know that I was approaching like hip hop or hip hop criticism or commentary from the perspective of a video bits in like, if we look at a lot of the women who have been allowed to take up spaces, it's like hip hop journalists or hip hop you know artists,

the artists, they all look at certain way. You know, even somebody particularly right now exactly, they all look the same. Yeah, And even somebody like Angeli Yee, you know who hosts like you know, I'm reviewably one of the hugest you know, hip hop talk shows. Um, And I've met Angelie. She's such a dope person. But you know, Angeli ye is light skin, she's she's um, She's what a lot of people would consider desirable and attractive. She's saying she's not sad,

you know, like your aren't like that. Women don't appear in hip hop. The closest thing we've got is Lizzo and and the bigger Rizzo and the bigger the more famous Lizzo has gotten, the more pop her music has started to sound like it like we we we hardly even have room for people who are plus sizes and hip hop. So it was just really important for me to like insert myself in that way and to say no, like it's a fat bitch talking right now? Can I

curse on me? I'm sorry the show is called Okay Okay, yeah, like I needed people to know, like it's it's a big bitch talking to y'all are gonna hear what I have to say? You know? Um? You know the one I want to ask you this too, like just with regard to your podcast purse first and wanting to showcase black female rappers as well as like black female queer rappers.

You know, do you think, like I hate when people say like, oh, we're in the golden age of like X right, um, but what do you feel about the prevalence or the way in which black female rappers are being marketed are being presented right now? You know? As a as a commisseur of female rapper right um, I have always loved the rap girl. Ever since Traina, Ever

since Traina's nan verse, I have been a rap girl girl. Okay, I think at first, I think I would say, like in two thousand and nineteen, I was just I was so excited because it instill I'm just to be clear. But in twenty nineteen, I was so excited because it was like we had not only did we have you know, I think the goal poster everybody was that we had

more than one female rapper at the time. So not only did we have more than one female reppert the time, like we had girls make the stallion, We had you know, Rico Nasty, we have it mother. It was also like the diversity of the sounds, like we were getting um, you know, we had Doja Cat coming out who was like, who's really like giving like kind of tyler of a creator, all encompassing creative vibes. And then we had Megan who had this really deep voice with like this like UGK

type of inspired floating. We had a city girls from Miami who would like direct us and thee Trina. We had young and May who was a stud from New York. You know, like we had this diversity a female right, and I was like, oh, this is licked. This this

is where it's at for me. How I'm starting to feel these days, I think coming into twenty twenty and twenty twenty one is that obviously all female rappers have to thank the career trajectory of Nicki Minaj for the doors that have been able to being open to them in terms of the types of commercial success that they

have been able to attain. And I think what a lot of people learn from that was that Nicki Minaj had to go through her awkward and in my opinion, terrible super based phase right where she was, you know, wearing pink chicken wing necklaces and making and looking yeah like, you know, wearing the big wigs, you know, doing the Lady Gaga aesthetic and kind of making the top hits in order to in order to cross that threshold and

become mainstream. And so now what I'm seeing is that that is also kind of the formula that a lot of the rap girls are being forced to kind of also fit into. It's like, the moment they hit a certain amount of followers on Instagram, it's like, let's put them into lea. It's hard and some types. Let's teach them how to do a five, six, seven, eight. Let's teach them how to do this when they hold the mic, give us a give us some hand tests, some moves, and let's find a cute and let's find a cute

pop inspired beat to have them wrap over. And I hate it. I hate it because one is compromising their artistry. I think you mentioned a Lottle earlier in this conversation. She's the most recent one that we've seen this. Her recent single is various, like a remake of a of a Mariah Carey made, and it is very much so not her. The video she seems very unnatural. She seems like she's concentrating so hard on those moves, and also it has taken her out of a lane that she

was actually occupying. We never asked little Dirk to do Coreo. We never asked a little baby to come do Chorea and to come make pop songs, and we do. We'll let them do the pop songs, but not in that way where we need to need them to have a pop image. Like we let black men be hood niggas from start to finish and then everyone else figures out a way to let them in. But I feel like with the rap girl, they don't get to just stay

street bitches. They have to at some point become glam girls or pop girls or pop stars or content creators or influences or whatever whatever the case may be that is. That is frustrating. So I'm actually season two a Purse Verse is going to be returning. We're just like figuring

out our funding situation. And I cannot wait because me and my co host Pierre, who was a queer rapper, which is also another subset of folks that we have, you know, on the show, Like, we have so much to talk about around that and and around how they're kind of trying to follow this certain like, um, make

a female rapper template. That is really watering down. Um, it's watering down the options and you know, and it goes back to like kind of what I talked about and trap feminism, like when we talked about the sanitation of like black Yeah, And part of the reason why that was necessary is because there were a lot of like one dimensional representations of black people from the hood to the point where it was actually stereotypical. And I

feel like, what what entertainment and music in Hollywood? And everyone thought the solution to that was, well, let's lean into like black exceptionalism. Let's lean into you know, black girls who go to coo the other side of the perspect all the way to the other side of the spectrum. Well, like, really that wasn't necessarily the solution. Like the actual answer was that what y'all don't realize is that there are thousands of different stories from the hood that you could

be telling. How about you just stopped telling the same one. How about you stop only looking for the trauma and the tragedy in the hood and actually start looking at the joy in the in the in the creativity and the resilience and the fun and you know, all of those things about it. And so you know, like, we don't need another show about the drug game fifty cent,

you know what I'm saying. Like, I think I think that's why so many people like pe Valley, because like it was a different perspective on like strippers then we them of black strippers in particular that we've seen in a while. And so I think it's the same thing with I feel like I see people making that mistake

with the rap girls. Um, people are like, oh, we didn't have enough women in raps, so now we you know, Nicki Minaj was the only rap girl that we let be successful, so we need to have more than one

rap girl who can be successful. Whereas actually it's like Nicki Minaj is the only rap girl we let be successful, and we made Nicki Minaj compromise a lot of her artistry in order to do that right, how about we actually let more black girls be successful in rap without having I compromise themselves, Like, let's just let's just let them say who they want to be from start to finish.

And I feel like that is you know, the kind of premise in the theme of your book is just like, how about we just let black girls just be right, so be like the period like that's that's just like, how about we just let them be um successfully. I just thank you so much. Then, this has been such a delightful conversation. Um, I am so excited for you. I wish you nothing but like boodles and oodles of success with bad fat black girl notes from a trap feminist.

Everyone go and pick it up and buy it today. I'm just I'm I'm so excited for you and I hope that you will come back and join us again. Absolutely, thank you so much. This has been such a grateful moment of us reconnecting and I'm just so happy to be ten years it's been a decade, Like, wow, thank you so much to day. Yeah, I appreciate it so much.

That is it for today's Woke Up Daily podcast. To hear more from today's show, Support me on Patreon at patreon dot com, slash woke AF Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.