Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere

Hip-hop culture began in the early 1970s as the creative and activist expressions — graffiti writing, dee-jaying, break dancing, and rap music — of black and Latino youth in the depressed South Bronx, and the movement has since grown into a worldwide cultural phenomenon that permeates almost every aspect of society, from speech to dress. But although hip-hop has been assimilated and exploited in the mainstream, young black women who came of age during the hip-hop era are still fighting for eq…