PRIDE 2025 | Music as a place for world-making in Black Queer Women
By Pilar Caceres Cartagena
We are delighted to present the following submission from our 2025 Pride Series. The present entry, “Music as a place for world-making in Black Queer Women” was submitted by Pilar Caceres Cartagena, a Ph.D. Student in African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin (She/They).
This year, 2025, marks an important milestone for Black queer women in music, especially in Hip Hop. Doechii, a rising Black queer woman Hip Hop artist, has recently won the Grammy for Rap Album of the Year for her debut mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal. [1] She is the third Black woman to ever receive this award in more than fifty years since the creation of Hip Hop, and the first ever Black queer woman to achieve this recognition. Doechii's presence in Hip Hop highlights how music can serve as a platform for expressing the realities that Black women face in a world marked by anti-Blackness and queerphobia. In a political landscape that often seeks to erase these voices, a Black woman like Doechii uses her music to imagine new possibilities in her life, the music industry, and a healing journey.
This raises the question: what does it mean to use music to construct and imagine new possibilities in the practice of world-making? Scholars such as Kevin Quashie, [2] Marquis Bey, [3] and Jayna Brown [4] theorize that in our current world/reality, it is nearly impossible even to imagine possibilities for Black queer people outside of the oppressive ways Blackness has been historically defined. Black people have been historically and systematically dehumanized, and existing within Blackness means a constant state of social death. For that reason, Black queer world-making emphasizes the necessity of “build[ing] other worlds” [5] to create new possibilities that transcend the colonial conceptualizations around Blackness with no ontological value. The construction of these worlds is possible through arts and music, where artists constantly create fugitive moments, constructing their own new definitions for what it means to be Black and queer. Black queer world-making offers "new modes of being by creating a new world outside the dominant culture." [6] It refers to the practices that Black queer people engage in to defy the oppression of the system by finding liberatory “sources of joy, creation, and refusal.” [7]
This practice of world-making through music is not a recent development. Historically, Black women have used music to express their daily lives, including their desires, dreams, pain, and critiques of a world that constantly reduces their existence to a subjugated role. Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Feminist Thought, acknowledges that Black women are not only cultural producers but also they construct epistemologies and knowledge through their acts of resistance. [8] Similarly, Daphne Brooks in Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound argues that Black women’s music is not only a performance, but also an intellectual labor. Music functions as both an archive and a mode of theorizing, preserving the histories of Black struggle and joy while offering radical critiques of race, gender, power, and modernity. [9] Furthermore, Black women have been positioned outside the traditional norms of womanhood, femininity, and humanity as these categories are built under whiteness. For instance, Nikki Lane elaborates on the “queerness of Black woman,” stating that “Black queerness derives from these overlapping systems of oppression within various contexts, and perhaps more importantly, those whose bodies are deemed racial, sexual and gender deviants have learned to make do survive and produce counterhegemonic discourses that exceed normative prescriptions.” [10] To be both Black and woman has often meant existing outside the normative understandings of gender and sexuality.
Music becomes a space for creating new worlds, where the existence of Black women could become different possibilities, particularly for Black queer women whose identities are also intersected by the non-normative and racialized constructions. This is visible in different music genres, such as the blues. Angela Davis, in her text Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, examines how blues artists like Ma Rainey and Bessire Smith use music to express their individuality, desires, and refusals, challenging heteropatriarchal racist norms. [11] Through their music, these women claimed space for Black queer desire in a world that constantly seeks to silence it. As a music genre, the blues disrupts traditional social and cultural expectations that define Black womanhood, allowing Black queer women to create fugitive spaces where they could experience moments of freedom beyond oppression.
Another example can be seen in Hip Hop, which has been a medium that historically has had portrayals of hegemonic masculinity. However, Black women also use Hip Hop to “resist patterns of sexual objectification, as sexuality as a way of deconstructing patterns of the subjugated position by their race, sexuality, and gender.” [12] Furthermore, some scholars theorize that Hip Hop is per se a queer music genre because it has been created outside the mainstream of normative media. For instance, Riley C Snorton claims that Hip Hop represents the voice of marginalized and non-normative experiences that were excluded "in the dominant culture." [13] Rinaldo Walcot shares that Hip Hop is a queer medium because it "emerges out of the hood, or should we say queer histories of the urban Black diaspora." [14]
Beyond the discussions about whether Hip Hop is queer or simply a medium to reproduce hegemonic masculinity, it represents a space for Black queer world-making. Black queer women use Hip Hop to story-tell their existence and realities outside the constraints of this world, similarly to the blues. For example, in Doechii's song "Black Girl Memoir," [15] she constructs and envisions a new world where Black women “could be anything.” Similarly, in the song "Bloom," [16] she incorporates audio to manifest the harsh realities of surviving in a capitalist society where financial resources are critical for survival. At the same time, she constantly dreams of new possibilities for her music career. She uses the metaphor of blooming to narrate her aspirations, suggesting that Black women could achieve different possibilities outside these constraints, constructing a different world.
In conclusion, music represents more than a sound for Black queer women; it offers a medium to imagine a new world, a different possibility outside anti-Blackness and queerphobia. From blues to Hip Hop, music has provided the space to create fugitive acts that escape and subvert the oppression imposed on Black and queer bodies.
Notes
[1] Doechii, Alligator Bites Never Heal, 2024, TDE and Capitol Record.
[2] Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 2.
[3] Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 15.
[4] Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 7.
[5] Bey, Black Trans Feminism, 63.
[6] Pilar Cáceres Cartagena, "Black Queer World-making in Afro-Peruvian Female Queer Hip Hop Artists," (Master's Report, University Name, 2025), 23.
[7] Leonard D. Taylor, Dion T. Harry, and Reginald A. Blockett, "Black Queer Fugitivity: Agency, Language, and Digital Joy," The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy 3, no. 2 (2021): 106.
[8] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge) 1990, 22.
[9] Daphne Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 6.
[10] Nikki Lane, "Megan Thee Stallion sings the blues: Black queer theory and intersectionality," in The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities, ed. Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto (New York: Routledge, 2023), 516.
[11] Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 5.
[12] Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 170.
[13] Riley C, Snorton. "As Queer as Hip Hop Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International." Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): xv.
[14] Rinaldo Walcott. "Boyfriends with Clits and Girlfriends with Dicks: Hip Hop’s Queer Future." Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no 2 (2013): 168-169
[15] Doechii, “Black Girl Memoir,” Oh the Places You’ll Go, Top Dawg Entertainment, 2020.
[16] Doechii, “Bloom,” Alligator Bites Never Heal, Top Dawg Entertainment, 2024.
Bibliography
Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Brooks, Daphne. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.
Brown, Jayna. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Caceres Cartagena, Pilar. "Black Queer World-making in Afro-Peruvian Female Queer Hip Hop Artists." Master's Report, University of Texas at Austin, 2025. https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/59604.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.
Doechii. Alligator Bites Never Heal. 2024. TDE and Capitol Records.
———. “Black Girl Memoir.” Oh the Places You’ll Go. Top Dawg Entertainment, 2020. Spotify.
Lane, Nikki. "Megan Thee Stallion sings the blues: Black queer theory and intersectionality." In The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities, edited by Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, 512-526. New York: Routledge, 2023.
Nyong’o, Tavia. "Queer Hip Hop and its Dark Precursors." Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): 144-146.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Quashie, Kevin. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Snorton, C. Riley. "As Queer as Hip Hop." Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): vi-x
Taylor, Leonard D., Dion T. Harry, and Reginald A. Blockett. "Black Queer Fugitivity: Agency, Language, and Digital Joy." The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy 3, no. 2 (2021): 105-119.
Walcott, Rinaldo. "Boyfriends with Clits and Girlfriends with Dicks: Hip Hop’s Queer Future." Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): 168-173.
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