Note for a “Round the Way Girl”

Note for a “Round the Way Girl” on Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow

“In Hustle, we can appreciate Nola’s (Taryn Manning)
yearning to be more than a pimp’s pussy cash box …”

By Stephane Dunn

Hmmmm ... a film about a street hustling pimp with rap star aspirations ... how special, another ghetto rags to rap riches movie ‘cause Eminem’s 8 Mile (2002) hasn’t been remade enough. Still, I swallowed my considerable skepticism and went to see it like a good cultural critic should. Surprisingly, Hustle & Flow offers a bit more of an interesting and intelligent treatment of the ghetto rags-to-riches formula and blessedly avoids the Hollywood polish of such movies as 8 Mile. Writer-director Craig Brewer’s gritty Southern ’hood drama offers an unflinching physical and social portrait of contemporary Memphis street life. While it retains the inherent phallocentric dominance that has long structured such films, it offers a significant and unique contribution to the dialogue about ghettocentric cinematic representations.

The imagery of black female sexuality, particularly that associated with poor and working-class black women has long been a controversial and disturbing issue for African American audiences because of the historical problem of racist representations. In the nineteenth century, Euro-American scientists and cultural theorists associated the very bodies of African women with sexual abnormality. Through much of the twentieth century, American popular culture imaged black women as problematically hypersexual or asexual, bitchy, domineering, emasculating, unfeminine, and unwomanly. Encapsulated somewhere between slave-era notions of the Mammy and contemporary notions of the “Jezebel,” the portrait of sexualized black women encompasses contemporary stereotypes of ghettocentric lower class women, which Hip Hop culture — rap videos and ghetto action films — have popularized.

Hustle & Flow at least adds a bit of flesh to the representations of such characters. D-Jay, played deliciously by Tarence Howard, stars as the anti-hero pimp with rap success dreams who is, unlike the more popularized black pimp archetype, unadorned and materially poor. Though D-Jay is the film’s center, the female characters build the pathos of his representation and much of the film’s richness. In ghetto action films since the 1970s blaxploitation genre, white and black female characters have by and large been treated in simple terms: blond, po’ white trash trophy ho’ (Nola in Hustle), adoring black girlfriend and/or ho’ whom the hero may treat deferentially or not (Shug in Hustle), the sapphire-like fussy bitch (Lexus in Hustle), and the unsupportive, cold, uptight, black middle-class woman (Yevette in Hustle).

Read More at Bright Lights Film Journal

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Stephane Dunn is a writer, professor, and film journalist living in Atlanta, GA. She has published several articles on film, literature, and popular culture and is the author of the forthcoming Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies (University of Illinois Press 2007).