(slightly different than my usual post but she is a female artist of color and I felt this was necessary)
Madame Tussauds, the popular wax figure museum in NYC has finally made a figure of the “rap queen” Nicki Minaj. Who came to fame in 2010 with her number 1 album “Pink Friday”, now 5 years later she’s been made into wax to be remembered forever in the museum as a significant pioneer in rap/pop music.
They decided on immortalizing a moment from her controversial Anaconda video. Rapper azealia banks had a few things to say about this
Some people are in defense of the museum saying, her video shows her doing just that so why would a wax figure be inappropriate..
The reason being that video was about body acceptance for women who do not match the eurocentric ideal of beauty that is on every television screen and magazine. Likewise the video presents Nicki in complete control of the situation, she rarely loses eye contact with the audience taking away from the idea of the “male gaze”. Coined by Laura Mulvey
[T]he film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of the spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised
sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone.
By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator
can indirectly possess her too. (Mulvey, 1992: 28-9)
She is in control of how she is viewed and her sexuality and is not shying away coyly she states
"I went overboard with the video to show that I'm not going to hide. And those big-booty dancers I have, they're not going to hide. Black girls should feel sexy, powerful and important too." Famed fashion designer Robert Cavalli calls her an "ambassador" for the growing acceptance of a shapelier female silhouette: "She inspires women to embrace their curves, and to be more confident."
What the wax figure presents is an opportunity for people to take Nicki herself out of control and allow others to use her body the way they want. And below we see that azealia banks' guesses were correct.
This is of course not the first time she’s been criticized for her “scandalous” appearance. For the anaconda single she released the album art of herself in a sexy pose and received a huge amount of backlash saying how inappropriate she was and how she had no self-respect. Nicki responds on her Instagram account
vs.
She presents to us two similar images, the main difference being?
These thin (primarily) white women are posing in similar outfits but as a society we have deemed this acceptable because?
They avoid direct eye contact therefore susceptible to the male gaze?
Are thin and therefore their bodies can exist in the appropriate realm of female bodies?
Black bodies have been hyper-sexualized historically and today many women and even men feel they need to appear a certain way to change people's perceptions of their bodies. They become ashamed of features out of their control. Features that are ancestral, that give us a look into culture, Made to feel that what one is naturally is “too much”
"The historical construction of black females as sexual commodities distinguishes contemporary representations of black female bodies from those of other women. Patricia Hill Collins reminds us, “Black women’s bodies have been objectified and commodified under U.S. capitalist class relations” (Black Feminist Thought 132).8 She asserts that historically, “Black women’s sexuality could be reduced to gaining control over an objectified vagina that could then be commodified and sold.... current portrayals of Black women in particular—reducing women to butts—works to reinscribe these commodified body parts” (133). Like the sexualization of black women, the sexual objectification of black girls has roots in slavery. Wilma King notes, “[o]nce slave girls reached adolescence, they faced the possibility of sexual exploita- tion” (158). +"
So people assimilate and dress in a way that no one could ever think is inappropriate for fear of being associated with this racist opinion that black men & women or WOC in general are just objects of desire. And then there are people like Nicki Minaj who with her fame does a complete 180, she lets herself be sexy as long as she's the one in control of the situation.
What I am getting at is that these issues are apart of the bigger issues of feminism excluding women of color from the movement because our demands are laid out differently. Nicki is trying to get black women to accept their sexuality rather than assimilate and hide it because that’s expected or rather demanded from society.
Additional Sources
+ DAGBOVIE-MULLINS, SIKA A. "Pigtails, Ponytails, And Getting Tail: The Infantilization And Hyper-Sexualization Of African American Females In Popular Culture." Journal Of Popular Culture 46.4 (2013): 745-771. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Aug. 2015.
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