Cardi ‘Don’t Gotta Dance’ for No One
By Hettie V. Williams
Cardi B is a Flapper. A twenty-first century Flapper. She’s among many young women entertainers — women such as Beyonce′, Lady Gaga, and now Cardi, who have challenged traditional gender norms in their art as a bid for self-affirmation and human freedom. In her music, Cardi, a social media star and rapper, has made women’s economic and sexual autonomy noticeable themes. She is poignantly outspoken and her personal biography is etched into the lyrics of her songs such as the case with “Bodak Yellow”:
I don’t dance now
I don’t gotta dance
I make money moves
Cardi makes her own money. She “don’t gotta dance no more” for men in strip clubs. She now has a measure of control over her own narrative. As a self-supporting, unbought, and unbossed woman, Cardi is a sexual agent and not a mere object of male desire. She has feminized words coining phrases such as “shmoves” and “shmoney” to tell her story to the world. Cardi is a woman seeking to direct her destiny on her own terms.
Flapper’s have long had their significance eclipsed by the suffragist as a representative example of the new (modern) woman. But, their bid for autonomy in the early twentieth century was as important as the demand for women’s voting rights and employment equity. Though the suffragists may have been more conscientiously feminist in word and deed, Flappers such as Clara Bow helped to define the new woman through their style,
comportment, dress, and behavior as trendsetters who challenged social conventions about femininity and womanhood more generally. Their bid for personal freedom, as they bobbed their hair, smoked in public, and wore dresses with a raised hemline, was juxtaposed with the movement for women’s voting rights. These women, such as Bow, were self-supporting and some like Josephine Baker danced scantily clad on stage. But, Cardi “don’t gotta dance” no more.
Cardi B was born Belcalis Almanzar, to a Dominican Father and Trinidadian mother, in the Bronx section of New York on October 11, 1992. She was raised primarily in…