Sisters of the Boogie: the Hip-Hop Feminist Epistemology of a Project Girl Turned Professor

• In Event: Black Feminist Ways of Knowing in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This piece is an autoethnographic exercise that recenters me, the author, as a Black woman within the context of education. Hip-Hop saved my life at a time when my life could have taken off on a dangerous trajectory. It embraced me and reared me and helped me to find the strength and power to stand up against it and exercise my own agency. Reading Black Feminist literature brought me to a place in which I was ready to truly interrogate Hip-Hop and understand how it affects me: as a Woman and as a Scholar. Hooks’ Sisters of the Yam changed my life, and Collins’ Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology paved the way for me to theorize a Hip-Hop Feminist Epistemology for myself that is fluid and flexible. This HHFE has two dimensions: a process of knowledge validation that sits within a realm of contradiction and an inurement of one’s own erotic power.

Author

• Dawn Hicks Tafari, Winston-Salem State University