#commidity

In a study of Nicki Minaj and how she uses personas and black culture to further her brand, my brain immediately goes to twerking. Merriam-Webster defines twerking as “sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting.” Urban Dictionary defines it as a “mating ritual performed by primates in which the female repeatedly shakes its ass up and down in order to attract a mate,” and “something that Miley Cyrus should never, ever do.”

These highly differing definitions portray the dichotomy that twerking, as a phenomenon, and Nicki Minaj faces in her portrayal and marketing. Nicki Minaj “is, instead, a commodity who has gone rogue by upending gender norms, detouring from the politics of respectability for black women performers, and taunting the audience with queer performances while denying a queer identity”  (Hunter and Cuenca 33). She is powerful and empowering but she is also problematic.

The question to ask here is whether or not using her platform as a space to push back against societal norms justifies her commodification of that pushback. Twerking is an excellent thing to dive further into the matter in a simpler, more easy to understand way.

Twerking derives from African cultural dances. “Kelechi Okafor, an actress and twerk instructor in South London . . . looks at twerking as a movement that empowers women and helps them to keep in touch with their cultures, not hypersexualizing them.” This may be true for some, but there is an undeniable difference between this:

and this:

With the women literally made into animals and lyrics touting having a “pussy so wild they should throw it in a cage,” it is hard to believe the argument that women twerk to respect their African ancestry. 

However, an argument can be made for the dichotomy of twerking in empowering while also being problematic. It has become a symbol of a sort of sexual revolution, with women shaking their asses for themselves and for others, daring people to judge them for their promiscuity. While this message of embracing your sexuality is great, the fact that the dance also comes with a racial history makes everyone embracing that message problematic.

Apart from that performance just being bad in general, Miley’s use of the dance to liberate herself sexually while not acknowleding it origins is problematic. She is using twerking to market herself, much less successfully than Minaj, and has left out the bit about empowering others that Minaj and other artists inherently embody because they can claim the dance’s origin as theirs.