High Life Vixen

Emerson, R. A. (2002). “Where My Girls At?: The Video Vixen as a Gendered Racial Formation.” Journal of Popular Culture , 36(2), 234–251.

Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human . Duke University Press. high life vixen

This paper draws on Rosalind Gill’s (2007) concept of postfeminist sensibility —where empowerment is expressed through choice, consumption, and sexual display. The HLV perfectly embodies this: she “chooses” to be objectified because it yields material gain. Angela McRobbie (2009) calls this “female individualization,” where success is measured by visible markers of wealth. Additionally, the HLV operates under what Weheliye (2014) terms “racialized biopolitics”—her body is both hyper-visible (as a Black or brown woman, often mixed-race) and subject to respectability policing. Emerson, R