Pass Her The Mic: Why female artists have been pushed to the margins of hip hop spaces and suggestions for how to recenter women in the Arizona hip hop scene

This Barrett thesis is a praxis-oriented research project designed to address issues that women face in hip hop and to give voice to female artists in the Arizona hip hop community specifically. In creating this project, I sought to encourage women in my community to create a conversation about their roles in the hip hop scene, to listen to and unite with other female artists in the valley, and to help create the networks and spaces that center the diverse narratives female hip hop artists express which the industry at large currently fails to represent. This paper examines similar research done in the field of hip hop sexism and hip hop feminism across the world, with an emphasis on US hip hop culture, to identify what many hip hop scholars and feminists point to as the sources of sexism in hip hop and the systems that maintain it, focusing on (1) the rap industry’s favoring of sexist lyrics and disfavoring of womxn’s points of view throughout the commercialization of hip hop culture and music, (2) the media’s discrimination against female hip hop artists in their coverage, and (3) the unequal distribution of space and resources allocated to women of color in hip hop resulting from black men’s need for those spaces and resources in order to reassert their masculinity in the face of their exclusion from the widley accepted white hegemonic masculinity they have been barred from. Combining the methods of successful activists in the US with findings from a series of interviews with women from the Arizona hip hop scene, I make recommendations on actions to take in the Arizona scene in order to combat the sexism found in hip hop while maintaining a pro-hip-hop stance throughout.