Damn, I Love the Strippers! A Black Feminist Analysis of Rihanna’s “Pour It Up”

This article argues that Rihanna’s music video for “Pour It Up” disrupts the grotesque/hypersexual dichotomy regarding Black women’s bodies in the popular/mainstream music industry by constructing exotic dancers as multi-dimensional artists and athletes, not always already objects lacking autonomy and self-determination or silenced bodies reduced to their appearance. Additionally, the article argues that the video subverts the idea that exotic dancing is only significant as a consumer commodity, as well as the idea that constructions of Black exotic dancers must always perpetuate discourses that denigrate Black women.