“I’m talking WAP, WAP, WAP": Ratchetness, Redefining, and Reclaiming
[Essay] How Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP" reclaimed ratchetness and complicated the conversation of feminism.
Published in the Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities.
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Abstract: This essay examines Cardi B’s “WAP” as a redefinition of trap music’s misogynistic structure of female sexuality. After “WAP”’s release in 2020, the internet erupted into contentious debates about sex positivity, bodily autonomy, and female objectification. Many people, from ordinary Twitter users to high-profile politicians, either celebrated or criticized “WAP”’s ratchetness, a derogatory term used to describe Black women who are hypersexual, loud, and tacky. Too often, perspectives fell along a feminist binary: “WAP” was either completely progressive or completely regressive for female Black liberation and feminism as a whole. Adding to these contemporary discussions about Black female trap music and the sex positivity movement, this essay rejects that binary. It argues that while “WAP”’s tackiness imitates the genre’s male- generated template of female sexuality, it redefines its derogatory structure by posing radical ideas about female autonomy during sex and reclaiming ratchetness as a liberating response to respectability politics and sexual objectification. “WAP” utilizes ratchetness as an instrument through which Cardi B confidently asserts female sexual boundaries and preferences.
Keywords: ratchetness, reclaiming, respectability politics, sex positivity, trap music