Why activists need to embrace popular culture—and use it as a force for change.

By Sofía Quintero

Sofía Quintero (aka Black Artemis) is a Bronx born writer, activist, educator and comedienne of Puerto Rican-Dominican ancestry. A self-proclaimed “Ivy League home girl,” who earned an MPA from Columbia’s School of International Affairs, she has married her activism with storytelling in the critically acclaimed Black Artemis novels (www.blackartemis.com), as well as other works under her own name, including Divas Don’t Yield. Sofía also co-founded Chica Luna Productions and Sister Outsider Entertainment to help produce socially conscious entertainment in many media.

I write urban fiction for women who love hip-hop, even when hip-hop fails to love them in return. These are women who are fluent in both English and Ebonics and who refuse to let misogyny drive them out of the subculture they helped build, not merely as consumers but as practitioners, now that this subculture has also become a global commodity. We have this saying in the hip-hop community called “keeping it real,” but what if what’s “real” needs to change?

Women will keep it real because they’re going to bring hip-hop subculture back to its roots in resistance, when it was a vehicle for personal change and social transformation, and not a purveyor of oppressive ideologies by people against their own people. Writing novels is how I try to contribute to that movement, because the answer is not to concede but to resist.

I am particularly concerned about young women, who, through popular entertainment, are being sold a false sense of empowerment by the films they watch and the books they read and the popular culture they consume.

Despite all the girl power icons and language, the average young woman today does not explore, define or pursue empowerment on her terms. Rather, she capitulates to the male gaze and convinces herself that she’s empowered because she chose to capitulate rather than to resist.

Why does she not resist? Because she is afraid. She should be afraid, because everywhere she looks popular culture tells her that she’s damned if she does, and she’s damned if she doesn’t. If she doesn’t wear those low riders and tube tops, men will not break off a piece of their power and lend it to her. However, if she does don the low riders and the tube top, and then becomes a target of both wanted and unwanted male attention, she asked for it. So she better make like Buffy or Dark Angel and know how to kick butt in those leather pants and stiletto heels.

Of course she’s afraid. She only has two choices. She can either choose to be invisible or she can choose to be targeted. That’s not empowerment. She’s afraid because she does not see genuinely empowered and fearless women in the films she watches and the books she reads.

Young women read a genre known as chic lit, which is one of the reasons I wrote Divas Don’t Yield. But this is not The Devil Wears Prada or the Nanny Diaries. This is not a novel about a woman vying for the corner office while navigating the boss from hell or searching for the perfect pair of Manolo Blahnik’s. The characters in my novel are a group of unapologetic activists who drive from New York City to San Francisco to attend a women’s conference, each packing a little more baggage than she thought. These young women are grappling with issues of race, class, sexual orientation and faith. And as much as they like to dance, chew the fat and tell jokes, they also have serious discussions about issues that affect them in their communities, much like the women I know, whom you rarely see in popular fiction.

I do this work because I came to understand that we cannot seriously begin to heal our culture if we refuse to critically engage, deconstruct and offer compellingly progressive alternatives to the media we consume under the veneer of entertainment. We, as activists, need to translate our issues into accessible narratives that broaden our conversations beyond the elites that we have formed, even though we didn’t intend to do that. If we want to expand our ranks and recruit more people to our causes, we have to meet people where they are but take them some place better. Popular culture—films novels, songs, plays and other forms—is a very powerful way to do that.

The poet and activist Audre Lorde said it best. She wrote: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, and then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

Excerpted from “Women Telling Our Stories and Promoting Justice,” Sofía Quintero’s 2006 Bioneers conference plenary, which is available for purchase on CD or DVD at the Bioneers Store.