Missy Elliot: The Age of Queering Hip Hop

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Yasmine Tadross

In mid-March the Speicher-Rubin Women’s Center for Equity and Diversity hosted an event centered around how Missy Elliot deconstructs the hip hop narrative and allows people within the genre to embrace other facets of identity outside of just a racial one.

This was an interactive presentation in which I displayed two music videos; “Supa Dupa Fly” from 1999 and then her most recent video for her 2017 single “I’m Better” to help showcase her image then and now.

We discussed how reputation is vital as well as using theories such as Queer Theory and African Cultural Theory to convey that Missy challenges intersecting ideas of racialized gender sexuality. Ultimately, the purpose of the event was to showcase that Missy Elliot is vital to the political climate in 2017 because she allows people to embrace identities beyond just the two binary categories of gender.