Another 'Bockle' of Moe

Da Brat's Mugshot

It was 2000 or 2001, I was in ATL, it might have been homecoming, it might not have been. It has been a while so everything is slightly obfuscated. But I do know I was at Deux Plex on Cheshire Bridge. It was a mostly college party. Pnut might have been spinning. There was a commotion and then an outburst by someone, I'm pretty sure it was the DJ, that went something like this, "Brat just knocked a chick upside the head." Women swiftly migrated out of the VIP to the dancefloor and bar areas. Her provocation, as bandied about, was rebuffed holleration: it was alleged that Brat approached a young woman, got shut down and in response hit the woman upside the head with a bottle, of what, I never did find out. I didn't see it for myself but I'm pretty certain it happened given the commotion, the DJ's outburst, and the grumblings about it amongst clubgoers for the rest of the evening and on campus in its wake.

So this report of Da Brat assaulting a waitress/Falcons dancer doesn't surprise me but it does lead me to comment on misogyny, objectification, and gendered violence against women by women, in Da Brat's case, a semi-closeted butch lesbian. I was at the Feminism and Hip Hop Conference in 2005 and Psalm One, a Chicago emcee who appears to be a butch lesbian--whether she is out or not I don't know--performed rhymes that ran entirely counter to Feminism. She was a woman rapping and she wasn't objectifying herself so I guess that charmed the organizers but all she was doing, by my reading, was occupying a familiar but disconcerting objectifying heterosexual male gaze/stance. That she was a woman was neither here nor there. Simplemindeness leads too many to believe that certain bodies are immune from perpetuating isms. People of Color, Women and/or LGBTQ's identities do not endow them with progressiveness and sometime they can be as vigilant as the mainstream in instilling perpetuating and maintaining the strictures that incongruously tightly circumscribe their lives.