ABSTRACT
The problem with recent feminist readings of Nicki Minaj is that each theory employed to understand this artist’s complex videos, as do all theories, predicts its outcomes. The postmodern, in which new feminisms find their intellectual hinterland, reduces people to an aesthetic of signs and fragments; disconnects the signifiers from any particular signifieds, the fragments from wholes; and finds that there is no requirement for a feminist to be this or that or that, or even to use the word “feminist.” There are just unconnected fragments for us “as scholars, consumers, and black folk” to recombine in whatever way we wish. This chapter argues that while we must read texts from our own perspectives, in order to make sense of them it is important to read one text using another informing “text as theory.” That is, a related text which examines the target text in an encounter which gives information about each text. No objective position is reached, but the process of reading between the texts can produce less subjective readings, that do not fall back on trite and predictable theoretical responses.
