From Hip-Hop Queen to Hollywood’s Hot Mama Morton(s): Latifah’s Reel Role as the Sexual Un/Desirable

This paper explores the cinematic representation of hip-hop artist Queen Latifah in her lead movie roles in Chicago (2002) and Bringing Down the House (2003). Drawing from black feminist and feminist cultural studies theoretical and methodological approaches to studying popular communication, I analyze Latifah’s form (physicality) and function in the films that construct her as the mammy and hot mama-two controlling images of black womanhood. Depending on her relation(ship) to white female and male bodies, Latifah is the sexual un/desirable. She is a freak. Her characters fall outside white heteronormativity not only because of what the black body is, but also because of what the black body does. In questioning the dialogue of difference-represented through the “oppositionalÀ hip-hop body-I address the processes by which media makers appropriate subcultural icons to signify difference while reinscribing racist notions of blackness, which work to facilitate white hegemony in the popular.

Publisher: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY
Year of Publication: 2008