Ebony A . Utley

Infidelity raises questions: Why do women stay with a cheater? Why do women cheat?
Why do women become "the Other Woman"? How do past experiences with infidelity impact future relationships?

Drawing on interviews with U.S. women of various ages, racial backgrounds, educational
attainments, and sexual orientations, this insightful study examines their personal experiences of being cheated on, cheating, being the Other Woman, or some combination of the three. Always engaging and equal parts uplifting and dispiriting, their narratives range from all-too-familiar stories to unconventional perspectives on love, life, and interpersonal communication.

""Why is the battle between good and evil a recurring theme in rap lyrics? What role does the devil play in hip hop? What exactly does it mean when rappers wear a diamond-encrusted "Jesus" around their necks? Why do rappers acknowledge God during award shows and frequently include prayers in their albums? Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God tackles a sensitive and controversial topic: the juxtaposition—and seeming hypocrisy—of references to God within hip hop culture and rap music.

This book provides a focused examination of the intersection of God and religion with hip hop and rap music. Author Ebony A. Utley, PhD, references selected rap lyrics and videos that span three decades of mainstream hip hop culture in America, representing the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South in order to account for how and why rappers talk about God. Utley also describes the complex urban environments that birthed rap music and sources interviews, award acceptance speeches, magazine and website content, and liner notes to further explain how God became entrenched in hip hop.

For more on Ebony Utley visit www.theutleyexperience.com""

The thirteen essays selected for Power and Pleasure in Popular Culture aim to explain why popular culture is an irresistible guilty pleasure. This anthology forces readers to think about why they enjoy popular culture by asking questions about its relationship to power: Who truly has power over popular culture—its creators or its consumers? Under what circumstances is popular culture empowering? When is it disempowering? Is pleasure contingent upon acquiescing to power, resisting power, and/or wielding power over others? These questions are considered from the perspectives of gender, sexual orientation, class status, and racial identity.

Additional emphasis on food, fashion, television, film, music, political cartoons, virtual communication, and physical bodies increases the likelihood that students will identify with the content found in this book and connect the readings with their lived experiences. The various theoretical approaches presented within also encourage students to use their critical media literacy skills to determine what aspects of popular culture have the power to turn them on. With original section introductions written by Dr. Ebony A. Utley, Power and Pleasure in Popular Culture is an ideal reader for any course dealing with the complexities of popular culture.

With the release of Beyoncé’s 2013 eponymous album, culture critics charged all in on whether Beyoncé is a feminist figure or an antifeminist product of capitalism, and yet, no one has asked younger people how her music resonates with them. This study examines the attitudes of young girls (aged 11–16) towards Beyoncé. They viewed “Girls Run the World” and “Flawless” in focus groups and were asked about their impressions of Beyoncé and her relationship to feminism. Through a grounded theory thematic analysis of the data, a relationship among the emergent themes manifested as follows. When Beyoncé highlights the girls’ physical, race, class, sexual, and gender vulnerabilities, they counter with sexual respectability politics that result in an ambivalence toward Beyoncé who may be a feminist but is not the girls’ role model.

Infidelity is commonly understood as hurtful communication because it involves a relational transgression and devaluation. This qualitative study of 65 women who survived a partner’s sexual affair expands the literature on infidelity and hurt by exploring its coexistence with intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV organizes the infidelity narratives into six categories: social, economic, emotional, and psychological
aggression as well as sexual and physical violence. Infidelity’s coexistence with IPV is not infidelity as a precipitating factor for IPV or infidelity as part of a pattern of violent or aggressive behaviors. Instead, in these narratives, infidelity embodies the aforementioned
forms of IPV.

This article challenges disempowering stereotypes about Other
Women by investigating how they negotiate power in imbalanced romantic relationships. This study defines an Other Woman as a woman who engages in a sexual relationship with a man who is in a committed sexual relationship with an Initial Woman. In these instances, a man’s infidelity can be characterized as a form of interpersonal power whereby he controls the rewards and costs the women involved with him experience. Employing an interpretive description methodology, this qualitative essay analyzes 35 narratives to consider how Other Women respond to men’s infidelity as interpersonal power by realizing their personal power. An exploration
of Other Woman interaction with the symbolic “me,” “him,” “her,” and “us” components of an affair reveals underrepresented personal empowerment strategies Other Women use, including (a) increased self-concept, (b) prioritized pleasure, and (c) acknowledged personal growth.

In addition to media representations that depict black sex as easy and free, main- stream research often normalizes infidelity as a black-community pathology. This essay counters the stereotypes by presenting black women’s first-person narrative experiences with infidelity, discussing the impact of a unique imbalanced sex ratio in the African American community, and considering the pertinent public-health implications of infidelity. Interviews conducted with twenty women yielded twenty- five hours of data and the following emergent themes: definitions of infidelity, infidelity discoveries, violations, responses, and making plans.

Although scholars have argued that sexual assault is a growing crisis on col- lege campuses, there are few studies that highlight the ways in which college men communicate their feelings about sexual assault education. This pilot study fills that void by highlighting college male students’ voices. Using open- ended questions and thematic analysis, the authors noted how respondents confirmed and contradicted earlier findings. The authors conclude by offer- ing future directions for prevention educators and gender studies teacher- scholars.

This paper analyzes the rhetorical function of the tropes of love and sex in the quintessential break up song, ‘‘I Used to Love Him,’’ from Lauryn Hill’s multi-platinum 1998 album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Through a textual analysis that emphasizes the recurrent tropes of synecdoche and metaphor, I argue that, despite the song’s seemingly liberating and empowering message, its conception of love is rooted in movements towards new forms of domination as opposed to self-actualization. This critical examination of a black love relationship within hip hop’s myriad mediated representations of loveless black sex contributes to the resurgent interest in discourses on love.

Although hip hop’s emphases on violence and sex have been the subject of numerous research studies, little is known about the connection between hip hop and love. This study begins to fill that lacuna by investigating how individuals exposed to hip hop culture perceive love. Seventy-one youth of color ages 14-25 viewed rapper Soulja Boy Tell ’Em’s video “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” and completed open-ended survey questions about their relationship to hip hop, interpretations of the video, and lived experiences with love. The youth’s responses reveal that they actively sought love’s representations within hip hop culture.

Traditional conceptions of rhetorical ethos treat character exclusively as an instru- ment of persuasion, but the persona of the rhetor often functions as a means of con- stituting the self in relation to a complex network of social and cultural relationships. This generative function of character becomes especially important in cases where suppressed groups attempt to find rhetorical means to alter their cir- cumstances. Using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a case study, we argue that the text develops a complex and nuanced construction of King’s character. This construct allows King to criticize his target audience without alienating himself from it and also allows the “eavesdropping” black audience to discover a model for reconstructing their own sense of agency. This constitutive dimension of character occurs simultaneously and in intimate connection with its use as an instrument of persuasion concerning specific issues. Based on this case, we argue that rigid distinctions between instrumental and constitutive functions of rhetoric are misleading and that rhetorical critics should regard the constitution of self and the instrumental uses of character as a fluid relationship.