"Bitch" is the New (Black) Feminism

From The Chronicle Review (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
From the issue dated March 14, 2008


Standing Up for 'Bad' Words
By STEPHANE DUNN

It took me five years to finally tell my conservative religious mother and my pastor stepfather the title of my book, which at that time was "Baad Bitches" & Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies. I figured it was unfair to wait until I sent it to her in the mail or she strolled past it in Barnes & Noble, or, even worse, some concerned church folk called her on the phone about it. Now, my mother was a woman once known to backhand-slap bad words and cussin' right out of your mouth. So I sat across from them at the dining-room table, giggling nervously, and hurriedly blurted out the first two words of the title. Mama looked at me, her left eyebrow raised way too high. My stepfather looked at her, then glanced at me and took over the nervous grinning.

I rambled on some more about how it was a study about race and gender, underlining women's representations in some 70s action movies associated with the blaxploitation genre.("Blaxploitation" was a controversial label for these movies aimed at black audiences; the genre emerged after the commercial success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971.) Mama rescued me: "Well, they used that word all the time in them movies. Mmmmph, guess we won't be taking it to church. We'll just say the second part and people can look it up." My mother loved the actress Pam Grier back in the day, when Coffy and Foxy Brown came out, but she found them disturbing for the same reasons that I did. I exhaled.

A year later, I received a seemingly innocuous e-mail message from my editor with a line about possibly shortening the book's title. The press was squeamish about the B-word in the wake of the Don Imus scandal last spring, when Imus called the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." What were my thoughts? I sent a reply, trying to explain why the title fit. But I was so pleased that my book was finally on its way to publication that I suggested a compromise: What about bleeping the letters following an uppercase B and substituting asterisks or dashes, as is often done with words deemed profane? I didn't even like my own suggestion. Until then there'd never been a hint of distaste for the title from the press or readers; I'd heard only how much people liked saying, "How's the 'baad bitches' project going?"

Imus's careless and racist, and sexist reference to Rutgers' black basketball players infuriated me; it was personal and political. The controversy turned up the heat about the use of racialized words. I was surprised, though, to find myself debating my book's title with my publisher. I've always loved those 70s films, which have become so much a part of our cultural fabric, and been fascinated with their problematic portrayals of women and with the connections between the hip-hop and blaxploitation subcultures, particularly in how they use the word "bitch." While the word "bitch" — and its variants — has long been a derogatory reference to "difficult" women and femininity generally, it has been flipped and claimed by women to signify female empowerment and to celebrate tough women who don't accept subordinate positions easily.

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Stephane Dunn is a writer and a visiting assistant professor of English at Morehouse College. Her book, "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.