Make It Nasty: Black Women's Sexual Anthems and the Evolution of the Erotic Stage

This paper discursively examines the interplay between explicit, sexually narrative hip-hop music and Black women's erotic cultural production in material and digital spaces. In drawing on Black feminist thought and hip-hop studies, this research wrestles with the consumption of Black women's erotic performance in the United States through the controversy of Nicki Minaj's Madame Tussauds wax figure. The essay forwards a century-long genealogy that centers racialized fantasy and erotic stages as central to Black erotic performance. Finally, it posits Black women's centrality to erotic cultural production as a significant, pedagogical challenge to the ways erotic labor emerges in popular discourse.