Cardi Put the WAP on Offset
Aaryn L. Green, Maretta Darnell McDonald, Veronica A. Newton, Candice C. Robinson, Shantee Rosado · 2024
Cardi B uses her voice and platform to speak her truths on motherhood and sexuality. Her standpoints often cause controversial debates about how Black women should behave as mothers. One of the most adversarial conversations about Cardi B concerned her pregnancy, which she officially announced on Saturday Night Live in April 2018 after months of speculation. Public discussions mostly surrounded her as an unwed mother, even though she had privately gotten married to Migos rapper Offset. In this chapter, the authors use cultural ideologies about family formation to better understand the public response to her supposed unwed pregnancy, the racialized assumptions about working mothers, and the narratives around Black men as hypersexual fathers who abandon their children. This patriarchal perspective of Black womanhood has led to a stigmatization of Black women and Black mothers’ sexuality. Controlling images present Black women’s sexuality as deviant, however, Cardi B challenges normative notions of women’s sexuality by subversively disrupting these images of Black womanhood and motherhood.