An Interview with Gwendolyn D. Pough

This interview was conducted by telephone on March 21, 2006, between New York and Laurel, Maryland.

CARPENTER: I'd like to start by talking about your book, Check It While I Wreck It. Can you talk about the title a little bit?

POUGH: The title originally comes from a small piece of a Queen Latifah song—at the beginning, before she raps—where she says, "Check it while I wreck it, sing it while I bring it (give it to 'em La), ok give me a few seconds" [laughs]. So, basically, I thought about it as a title to look at the ways women make a space for themselves in hip-hop and make themselves seen and heard. It was meant to be like a chant for the recognition of women in hip-hop—"check it while I wreck it"—giving a shout-out to Latifah and also using the concept of "wreck" itself as a kind of way that women of the hip-hop generation claim a space in the public sphere. Meaning, that when they enter spaces where they have been denied, a space of voice, they have to bring wreck.

CARPENTER: I find your approach to critiquing and examining the issue of gender in hip-hop really interesting because you take a different slant. You talk a lot, of course, about the complications facing feminist discourse in hip-hop, but you also talk about seeing the empowerment of women in hip-hop. That term, "wreck," speaks to that—it can be flipped either way. It can have a negative or a positive connotation. In thinking of that, I want to know what your thoughts are about how women are empowered in hip-hop. Now, I'm going to cite Lil' Kim because she's been an iconic figure in these conversations. So, how do we celebrate such an image while recognizing how she also perpetuates negative images of black female sexuality?

POUGH: I think the one thing that I try to do with my critique of hip-hop, when I look at people like Lil' Kim and even when I look at male rappers and their work, is to try to see that it's never just as cut and dry as we think it is—it's never black and white. There are always multiple sides to the issue. So with somebody like Lil' Kim or Foxy Brown, when we contextualize it, in some ways they do represent a kind of space where they are claiming this public sexual identity in ways that we may have seen in small spurts before, but we really haven't seen because of the politics of silence surrounding black women and sexuality. So, I'm not going to say that theirs is a totally positive image, but in a lot of ways they represent a space of freedom that, for whatever reasons, we haven't had. So, we need to take that all into consideration when thinking about them.

CARPENTER: I want to jump on that idea of "space." I know that the subtitle of your book is Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere and I believe that your dissertation also dealt with the public sphere.

POUGH: Yes.

CARPENTER: So two questions, really: In thinking about moments where we might want to embrace or celebrate what Foxy Brown may be presenting to us, there are also moments that we may want to shield young people—and I know that you have nieces—from ideas that they can't fully embrace, understand, or filter through. How do we negotiate that love? When and where are the places that are appropriate to claim that love? Where are those spaces?

POUGH: Well, I think that when we are talking about young people, especially young women and young men who are participating in hip-hop culture, people like my niece—she was a little bit younger when I was writing the book, she's in high school—whether I like it or not, she's probably listening to this music, getting these images. So, I think in a...