ABSTRACT
Music has been a site of struggle and empowerment for women for many years, while simultaneously acting as an arena of degradation and oppression (Hollows 2000). Subcultural work from the 1970s onward has pointed to music, and the cultural groupings which emerge from it, as providing an important space for young people, particularly in their teenage years, although the relationship between young women and music has often been the focus (Hebdige 1979; McRobbie 1991; Thornton 1995). Not only has it acted as a medium for providing distance between young people and their parents, but it can also be used as a political tool and a voice for the dispossessed, in addition to the pleasurable escapism of modern-day pop. However, young African-Caribbean women, like many women, are engaged in an ambiguous relationship with the music they consume, and, with the increasing relevance and popularity of music videos, the sexualized images they view. This discussion will explore the way Black women negotiate the spaces created for them within certain musical forms and question why they continue to listen to, enjoy, and actively promote songs which portray them ambiguously. Importantly, through acknowledging the variety of both celebratory and derogatory imagery embedded within Jamaican ragga
and African-American hip-hop and R’n’B, it will suggest that such musical effects on the construction of young female sexual selves enable Black girls to resist where they are placed in hierarchies of femininity. However, it will also be suggested that such resistance may only be temporary, limited to specific representations of Black girlhood.
