a bad bitch in three acts: a collaboration between bobbi johnson, ryn stafford, and sadichha karki
Our visual soundtrack project “The Bad Bitch in Three Acts: Visualizing Origins of Mainstream Power Performance for Africana and Asian Women” underwent an evolution symbolic of the phenomenon we wanted to attend to. Who is the “Bad Bitch”? How was she created? We are at a significant cultural musical moment wherein the Bad Bitch heroine has expanded past the arena of black female performance in mainstream cultures. In the case of South Korean rapper CL, her music video “Hello Bitches” features corn rows, Bantu knots, bamboo earrings and twerking, which is a revealing statement pertaining to the evolution of K-pop. We are concerned about where nation configures into this music culture. The Bad Bitch, we suggest, does not belong to America. She was, however, intended to intertwine into the rhetoric around black female sexuality through the institution of slavery and European colonization. In that sense, her shadow has always been a constant in cultural statements made by black diaspora.
We decided to engage with a powerful way of looking at the Bad Bitch. The first of her kind was Venus, and she didn’t decide to become one on her own. We harnessed essays such as “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” by Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman” by Anne Anlin Cheng, and most significantly “Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman. Within the last essay, Hartman lays a historical framework used to justify the economic necessity of the Bad Bitch as a commodity. Within her abstract of the essay, she states that “as an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature” (Hartman, 1). In response to the inquiry concerning what is the Bad Bitch’s nation, Hartman makes the Atlantic, a body of water, a haunting place of belonging for the modern black woman’s body. We took the essay, which is written poetically, and circled three or four words on a page that caught our eye. After which, we chronologically configured them into our own poem, our own narrative, our own song which would take us through a map of written sexual identities.
Layered with our spin off of Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” is “Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic”, a poem written and performed by Suheir Hammad. Hammad uses stereotypical imagery that has littered the consciousness of those who pornotrope black and brown femme bodies. She makes use of tropes such as “Hiram Girl”, “Geisha Doll”, “Belly Dancer”, “Private Dancer” and “Venus Hottentot Laundry Girl”, slamming and rejecting all in a matter of seconds. A powerful theme in these two poems is beauty as death; the women who are celebrated as beautiful by colonists must first be dead. They have to undergo a visceral trauma before they can be locked in a trophy case. At one point, Hammad simply states “My beauty is dead to you / I am dead to you.”
In our collective poem, Hartman writes of “two girls bent on achieving an impossible goal.” Therefore, at the central point of our engagement is a question: Where do purported black female sexuality and purported Asian female sexuality meet? Can they meet, for within the essays we used, black female and Asian female sexualities have been situated at opposite corners. The former bring aggressive, emasculating and deviant, the latter being fragile, coddling and pure. Still, the reason we attend to this question is because the answer reveals itself in the modern mainstream. To this point, we used many sound bites from rapper Nicki Minaj, for throughout her career as a black female artist, she hasn’t departed from a sprawling list of Asian imagery in her songs. In tandem with that, music like CL’s creates an interesting addition to the map Crenshaw, Cheng and Hartman have created.
Underlying these sonic happenings is an instrumental of “Four Women”, a song by Nina Simone which contends historically with black female sexualities and identities. The iconic song has a recognizable instrumental effect, which ironically was sampled in Jay Z’s “The Story of O.J.” and features predominantly male imagery in the music video. We want to reclaim it’s sonic abilities by calling into question the somber ramifications of the Bad Bitch.
Riffing off of Hartman’s idea of putting Venus in Two Acts, we decided the Bad Bitch would be chronicled in three. If one act is the current cultural moment, the other two would be the histories of the black and Asian female sexualities which preceded it. These sexualities, which are starkly opposite, in that same respect live within the same vein of the consequences of pornotroping, colonization and slavery.
The blending of the past and present is designed to demystify as well as complicate. As Saidiya Hartman asks, “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” (Hartman, 4). In other words, is there a price to pay when one performs the Bad Bitch, regardless of her race and nation? What is that price? And lastly, is Hartman correct when she second handedly asserts that “the dead write the future”? If Venus is situated at the crux of what it means to be a bad bitch sexually, then the dead do have an irrefutable relationship with the living. The point of crucial necessity is in investigating the ghosts that haunt a song like “Boss Ass Bitch” by Nicki Minaj, and in attempting to repair the damage Venus had done onto her, and by extension, all black women.