Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 46
Abstracts
Panel 7: Gender
17:30 – 17:45
Pussy Power?
Rosa Katzemburg
Cats, German Rap, and Intersectional Animal Studies
Benjamin Burkhart / Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media
Non-human animals, especially dogs, have long
played an important role in the visual aesthetics of
rap. Well-known US rappers such as Snoop Dogg
or DMX and especially their music videos come to
mind. Typically, dogs are objectified in these
contexts
as
symbols
of
the
rappers’
(hyper-)masculinity (cf. Alonso-Recarte 2020).
This gendered practice has also been transferred to
German rap, as evidenced, for example, by
so-called “pit bulls” in music videos and social
media posts by 187 Strassenbande. Unlike dogs,
cats are often gendered as feminine (see, e.g.,
Merskin 2018: 179–204; Rogers 2019: 114–140). It
is therefore not surprising that cats appear in the
media productions of female rappers. A striking
example from German rap is the music video for
the song “Pussy Power” (2021) by Katja Krasavice.
While this video features numerous domesticated
cats, several videos by male rappers feature
so-called “wild cats” – for example “B.L.F.L.”
(2020) by Capital Bra and Azet. That is, only
specific types of cats play a role in certain
gendered productions in the realm of German
rap. However, all of these videos have one
thing in common: the inclusion of cats in these
videos follows speciesist logics of exploitation,
objectifying the non-human animals involved.
Music videos such as Katja Krasavice’s could,
in principle, be read as feminist due to the
(presumably) ironically exaggerated staging of
a female rapper alongside nonhuman animals
which are stereotypically associated with
femininity.
Nevertheless,
from
an
intersectional perspective, a blind spot
remains, as although intra-human categories
of social difference are criticized, the
exploitation of the non-human animals
involved is not problematized. In my
contribution, I aim to critically discuss the role
of cats in German rap videos, drawing on
approaches from intersectional animal studies
(e.g., Adams 2020; Gamerschlag 2011;
Mütherich 2015).
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