Introduction

It’s the BDSM (Baby Doll Sugah Mama) aka MC PricklyPear aka Living Dead Grrl, comin’ to you live to spit some rhymes. But anyways.   For as long as I can remember, all I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer. When I was a child that meant writing and illustrating my own children’s books. As I grew a little older, it meant young adult novels. But in my senior year of high school, we read T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, (PricklyPear is a nod to that) and I found my calling – poetry. Most of what I’ve learned about poetry is self-taught, self-expression. I don’t know a lot about theory or why things works the way that they do, just the way things feel and when they feel right.

I think that’s why spoken word resonated so deeply within me. It called the oppression I felt as a bisexual woman, a child of two mothers, my inherent activism and understanding of the world as being fundamentally wrong in places and wanting so badly to do something about it. But it not only called, but sang as well, vibrated in my bones. I began listening to almost nothing but, began speaking and writing in ways that had never occurred to me before.

It was spoken word that allowed me to access hip hop. I was never very musically inclined, and much like DJ Justice, I disavowed myself from hip hop culture beginning at a very young age. But I do believe that spoken word and hip hop are coming together in very interesting ways in today’s culture, and I know several artists straddling the  divide between the two, moving back and forth in ways that make my head spin.

And yet, after all these serious and heartfelt reasons, the first half of my name is an inside joke, something for me to get a kick out of (I’m writing my thesis and teaching a class on the theory and historical representation of BDSM), and it’s not like PricklyPear is very serious sounding despite its sentimental roots, and to top it all off Living Dead Girl: a nod to my love of zombies and the Rob Zombie song. If I had my way I would’ve kept going, but I thought three was enough to confuse you. I still really want to add Genderfuck ...

But I also think all of these names, while hilarious, are important. As a Johnston student, I move in and out of disciplines constantly. It was important for me to represent many aspects of my identity, rather than just try to box it in to just one. Instead of categories, I have multiplicity.

I’m excited to see where this class takes me.

Oh yeah, and here are some of my favorite songs. I'm interested in what you think they say about me.