THE DIRTY SOUTHERN BELLE
THE DIRTY SOUTHERN BELLE: Southern Hip Hop as Rhetorical Inquiry in Contemporary Narratives of Southern Black Womanhood
Are you a Southern Black woman who listens to Southern hip hop? You are invited to participate in a research study titled, “The Dirty Southern Belle: Southern Hip Hop as Rhetorical Inquiry in Contemporary Narratives of Southern Black Womanhood”. This project works to explore how Southern Black women are using Southern hip hop to establish, reclaim, and frame Black womanhood in the contemporary American South. On this website, you will find information about the research study, principal researcher, and the researcher's subjectivity statement. Please proceed if you are interested in becoming a research participant!
ABOUT THE RESEARCHER
Brittany Clark Young is the primary investigator and student researcher. Brittany is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at North Carolina State University in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program. She is a proud HBCU alumna and holds a master’s degree in English and African American Literature from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University. Brittany also holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Relations from Louisiana State University. Her research and teaching interests are Hip Hop Studies, Race and Popular Culture, and Black Women’s Rhetorics. Her work has mainly centered the voices of Black women. Brittany was born and raised in Louisiana and considers herself an advocate for Southern Black women, making personal, activist, and academic commitments to this community. “The Dirty Southern Belle: Southern Hip Hop as Rhetorical Inquiry in Contemporary Narratives of Southern Black Women” is Brittany’s doctoral dissertation project.
Dissertation Committee Co-Chair: Dr. Ronisha Browdy
Dissertation Committee Co-Chair: Dr. Helen Burgess
Faculty Research Contact: Dr. Kami Kosenko
ABOUT THE RESEARCH STUDY
As Black women move through history, there is a need to redefine, reclaim, and in some cases, establish, their stories. The theorizations and lived realities of Southern Black women’s lives are reflective of current sociocultural moments. To theorize about Southern Black women, we need to first understand how the Southern Belle trope has excluded Black women socially, culturally and politically — resulting in white women’s privilege at the expense of Southern Black women. More specifically, we need to understand how definitions of the Southern belle have changed temporally for Black women as we center this project around Southern Black women now. I offer the Dirty Southern Belle as a method through which to explore these moments, but not as a monolithic definition of Southern Black women’s existence, rather as a radical communal praxis, or the culmination of epistemological theory and methodological practice grounded in community, to explore how Black women employ Southern hip hop as an aural technology in their discourses, narratives, and rhetorical practices. I position this inquiry within a Black hip hop feminist framework. Using this framework calls for research partners outside of academic circles and allows for a more comprehensive analysis and understanding of Southern Black Women's lives.
This dissertation works to understand what social circulation (Kirsch & Royster, 2012) looks like within a contemporary Southern landscape, which requires a deeper investigation into which aural technologies Southern Black women are using within the "circles in which they travel, live, and work" (Kirsch & Royster 23). Southern hip hop is not the only, but a prominent technology. Ultimately, this dissertation is concerned with how Southern Black women have employed acts and/or performances of social circulation to co-opt the Southern Belle trope and define contemporary representations and negotiations of Southern Black women. I turn to the following questions to undertake this inquiry:
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1. What types of narratives and themes do Southern Black women, who recognize Southern hip hop as a primary meaning making site, produce?
2. How do Southern Black women employ Southern hip hop in the process of social circulation to reframe the Southern Belle trope and values associated with it?
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Participant Eligibility
To be a participant in this study, you must be 25 years of age or older but not over 64 years of age and identify as Black or African American. You must also identify as a "cis-gender woman, trans woman, or non-binary person who has been politicized or perceived as 'woman'" by others. You must listen to Southern hip hop at least once a month and/or identify as a member of Southern hip hop culture. Lastly, to meet residency requirements, you must have been born and raised until 18 years of age in one of the following states or districts: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
You cannot participate in this study if you do not meet the inclusion criteria.
RESEARCHER SUBJECTIVITY STATEMENT
At the 1995 Source Awards, prominent Southern hip hop group Outkast is known for a moment and saying that solidified the future of Southern hip hop — “The South got something to say!” (Bradley 2021). Regional identity is an important part of Southern Black womanhood. This is seen in cultural sayings like, “What’s your set?” “What you rep” and even extended further when someone asks, “Who your people is and where they from?”. The American South is a prime place for Black women to explore their race, gender, class, and sexuality and hip hop is a way for Black women to do so. Hip hop researcher Bettina Love says Southern rap is significant because it “speaks directly through a Southern drawl that expresses the pain of the enduring slavery, racial inequality, the joy and pride of being Black, and the unwavering spirituality of Black” (Love 47).
I was seven years old when I started writing stories. These stories were set in the small Southern town where I was raised. My great grandmother encouraged me to not only to write, but to share them. When she passed, stories were how I kept her memory alive. Like so many Southern Black women before me and so many after me, we are connected through our stories. We are connected through our ways of being. We operate outside the bounds of space and time. We pass our Southern Black womanhood down as a method of survival, a token of love, and a reclamation of joy. With this cultural lineage, I carry not only the women before me but my family name. I carry their past accomplishments and future dreams. I am of my people, but what happens when I am ‘the people’ my daughter will carry? What does it mean to still honor and carry tradition, while trying to create your own traditions and build your own version of womanhood?
My desire to answer these questions led me to this project. I needed to understand how I can honor my temporal linage as a Southern Black woman, but to do so while being a Southern Black woman, now. I use Southern hip hop to help me do so. I lean into the communal of Southern Black women to unapologetically reclaim Southern womanhood, outside the limitations of the Southern belle trope, through stories, discourses, and narratives — told by us, for us, and between us.
This statement is a researcher subjectivity statement, which lets researchers share how they came to care about the topic they are studying and the way their own experiences affect how they do research (Parker 105). It is my experience being born and raised in a rural Southern town, my love for hip hop, and my desire to reframe and disrupt Westernized notions of knowledge that led me to this project. As a Southern Black woman and member of hip hop culture I am an insider, but as a researcher, I become an outsider. I acknowledge this in my work and the research process. I acknowledge the role that insider-outsider nuances play in this work, and as such actively consider this in analyses.
Doing Black feminist work, I understand I have a responsibility to Black women beyond my own personal gain. I hope to honor Southern Black women’s words and amplify them to reclaim Southern Black womanhood. I understand my goals may not always align with the women who chose to embark on this journey with me. Therefore, research participants are relieved of storyteller guilt, which can be described as the feeling or the need to participate in research as members of the Southern Black woman community or the need to alter stories to meet the researcher’s objective. Research participants own their stories and how those stories are told, therefore participants have a right to discontinue participation at any time.
As such, this dissertation is not a ‘traditional’ academic undertaking. It is an Afrofuturist and lived project that centers and prioritizes the voices of Southern Black women. The Dirty Southern Belle operates from a place of resistance and Black joy. This project is not about who the Dirty Southern Belle is, but rather what the Dirty Southern Belle does. As a radical communal practice, the Dirty Southern Belle employs Black women’s narratives and Southern hip hop in the process of social circulation to disrupt white discourse about womanhood in the American South, which has been framed by the Southern Belle.
I invite you to participate, not as just a research participant, but as a co-researcher, as I plan to create meaning with and alongside the Southern Black women in this study. I invite you to share your narrative. If you are interested in participating, please click the link below!
RECRUITMENT FLYER
