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4“She’s a B*(u)tch” Centering Blackness in The Watermelon Woman She’s a what? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? —Missy Elliott I n 1999, Missy Elliott released her album Da Real World, and on it was a single titled “She’s a B*tch.” While the explicit version of the song spoke the word “bitch,” the clean version was released with the second letter of the word replaced with an asterisk on the cover for the single. This was hardly necessary since the word “bitch” is not one of the words deemed profane by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and so is not regulated or censored. The effect then, of this asterisk, is a delimiting of the possibilities of how the song is read. Indeed, the word could just as easily be rendered “butch” rather than “bitch,” and even a substitution of the word “butch” in Missy’s song functions to question the discursive possibilities implied in the open space between the b and the t: “She’s a butch, when you say my name / talk mo’ junk but won’t look my way / She’s a butch / See I got more cheese / So back on up while I roll up my sleeves.”1 It has long been speculated within the hip-hop community that Missy Elliott is a lesbian; blogs like www.rapdirt.com and www.bossip.com openly speculate about her sexuality. And though the exclusionary and nationalist nature of hip-hop might seem to render the articulation of a lesbian identity impossible, Queen Pen collaborated in 1997 with Me’Shell NdegéOcello to record a song, “Girlfriend,” a remaking of Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s song “Boyfriend,” in which the two women rap, “If that’s your girlfriend she wasn’t last night,”2 reversing the 1DUNNING_pages.indd 84 3/13/09 11:03:47 AM “She’s a B*(u)tch” 85 heterosexual implication of NdegéOcello’s original lyrics. Queen Pen is not as well-known as Missy is; being an out hip-hop artist probably does little to help on that front. But if we read the asterisk in Missy’s song as a semantic interplay on bitch/butch, then Missy’s ambiguous “clean” version of the song marks both what is possible and what is impossible about the articulation of a lesbian identity in the extremely male, heterosexual, and nationalistic space of hip-hop. This play on bitch/butch also requires a particular kind of reader. If we speculate that Missy consciously played upon the possibilities of that asterisk in order to hail her gay and lesbian audience, then she renders a queer reading unintelligible to those not prepared to consider the discursive possibilities embedded within the erasure of that critical vowel. We can read Missy’s play on “B*tch” as a queered double invocation, and as a kind of linguistic “almost not quite” play on the speculation about her sexuality. Though the artful use of an asterisk leaves open a queer interpretation of Missy’s song, it can also be read as marking the word “butch” as a kind of profane unutterable, leaving an empty space where the lesbian should be. The problem of erasure regarding the black lesbian is at the heart of Cheryl Dunye’s 1995 film The Watermelon Woman. What Missy Elliott’s ambiguous play on “b*tch” tells us is that the black lesbian can only exist as an allusion in black popular culture. Dunye’s response to such silencing of black lesbian history and experience is this “mockumentary ”3 film meant to excavate and explore the experience of being both black and lesbian, then and now. As I pointed in the introduction to this volume, the problem of invisibility is one experienced by all black queers in the fields of queer theory and gay and lesbian studies. Yet even in black queer discourse, it is the black lesbian body that is most absent. Writing in Black Queer Studies, Jewelle Gomez notes: The invisibility of black lesbians is already an “epidemic” in many academic arenas—black/African studies, women’s studies, literature and sociology. The affliction of invisibility is in danger of spreading to queer studies as well.4 That the black lesbian is absent from queer studies, even black queer studies, might be most evident by the jacket art on several recently published books that consider black and queer subjectivity, texts, and issues. The very volume in which Gomez’s article...

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