Who Am I and What Is This?

My name is Annie Harrigan and I am a junior joint concentrating in History & Literature and Studies of Women, Gender, & Sexuality at Harvard College. My biggest academic interests are the intersections of socio-political movements, history, identity, and art and culture. This website and all of the content on it was born out of a desire to study Black women in music over the last century and map out how Black women popular music artists have expressed their sexuality in their music as a means of exhibiting musical resistance. As a Black woman musician and someone who loves art critique and media studies, I was interested in particular in how those who identify like me have taken their identities and struggles and turned them into art. 

 

Outside of the classroom, I'm really interested in art journalism and cultural critiques, fields I hope to go in after school. I firmly believe that art journalism, or any type of journalism truly, is inadequate when it does not take into account the identities of artists, socio-political environments, and cultural movements. Further, I find that art critics, particularly music journalists and critics, do not recognize the weight of implicit biases in their work when commentating on Black women. Black women's musical work has been critiqued unfairly since the beginning of music recording. Black women popular music artists have been critiqued for their looks, their bodies, their personal lives, their sexualities, and pretty much anything that has nothing to do with their music. All of this is because of racism. Stereotypes about Black women devalue us, hypersexualize us, and deem us as undesirable. Because of the ways in which Black women are hypersexualized but also seen as sexually undesirable, I believe that when Black women exhibit any type of sexuality or sexual expression in music, they are showing musical resistance -- resistance against these stereotypes, respectability politics, misogynoir, and anybody/thing that attempts to police Black women's bodies. 

 

This project maps out the last century of Black women exhibiting musical resistance through five different eras: The 1920s-40s: Blues Music; 1950s-60s: Civil Rights Era and Protest Music; 1970s-80s: Post-Civil Rights and Cultural Revolution (Disco, Dance-pop, and Funk); 1990s-2000s: Turn of the Century and Hip-Hop Feminism; and 2010s-Today: The Age of BLM, #MeToo, Mainstream Identity Politics and Social Media Virality. For each era, I have chosen one to two songs that I believe epitomizes Black women musical resistance at the time. For each song, I have created a critical karaoke in which you can listen to me discuss the song and its importance as the song plays in the background. These can be found under the "Listen" tab of the "Learn" page. Because I love multimedia projects, I have also included portraits of some of the Black women musicians whose work I am working with under the "Look" tab (of the "Learn" page), a Spotify playlist which each song that I analyzed on the "Home" page, and journalistic and analytic writing I have done on contemporary Black women musicians and music including a critical analysis of "WAP" by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion under the "Read" tab of the "Learn" page.

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I hope you enjoy this multimedia project and learn about the incredible contributions that Black women have made to music over the last century and the power of Black women in music. 

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