Beyond empowerment and exploitation: Black women’s interpretive strategies and the reception of race-based sexual stereotypes in Black women’s rap music

Black women’s sexuality has long been framed by race-based sexual stereotypes (RBSS), particularly the enduring Jezebel stereotype. While scholarly debate over whether Black women rappers (BWRs) challenge or reinforce these stereotypes is extensive, the interpretive perspectives of Black women listeners remain largely absent from the analysis. This qualitative study addresses that gap through semi-structured interviews with 20 Black women frequent listeners of rap music. Drawing on hip-hop feminism, script theory, and Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model, thematic and discourse analysis reveals three distinct interpretive strategies: negotiated reclamation, reinforcement anxiety, and oppositional refusal. The third strategy, which existing reception scholarship has not identified, refuses not one side of the empowerment/exploitation binary but the binary’s authority to organize evaluation at all, locating its origin in the same racial logic that produced the Jezebel stereotype. This ‘neither/nor’ extends hip-hop feminism’s ‘both/and’ framework and names a metacritical interpretive move the field has not yet fully theorized. Together, the three strategies contribute empirical grounding to the study of Black women’s media literacy as a historically developed practice of resistant interpretation.