April 2003 | 25.3

Shady Agonistes: Eminem, Abjection, and Masculine Protest

During an acceptance speech at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, Eminem, a.k.a. Marshall Mathers, lashed out at the techno artist Moby, referring to him as “a little girl” and assuring him that he is not above hitting a man with glasses.  The audience was not impressed; the boos increased as he spoke, forcing him to offer a quick list of recognitions and leave the stage. The incident seemed too awkward to be a publicity stunt, different from the usual tough guy posturing of rap artists. When he returned to the stage later to accept the award for the Video of the Year, he was contrite, announcing that he had been having anger management classes. The incident exposes that side of Eminem that has been subject to constant criticism since the release of his Slim Shady LP in 1999.  Eminem has been accused of misogyny and homophobia for his abusive lyrical content, and yet in his public persona, he has continued to portray himself as misused and misunderstood. This combination of vulnerability and rage, of victim and perpetrator is indicative of the psychology of many young working class males, a disposition known as “masculine protest.”

When Eminem refers to Moby as a “little girl” and threatens violence in order to humiliate him and ensure his submission, he engages in behavior that is symptomatic of what R.W. Connell defines as “masculine protest”:

arising from a childhood experience of powerlessness, and resulting in an exaggerated claim to the potency that European culture attaches to masculinity. Among these young men there is a response to powerlessness, a claim to the gendered position of power, a pressured exaggeration (bashing gays . . .) of masculine conventions. (111)

Protest masculinity maintains a heavy investment in sharply defined gender boundaries (109). The maintenance of coherent gender distinctions is periodically achieved by violence, guaranteeing the subordination of women and the punishment of gay men. The phenomenon is often a group behavior, an effort to reaffirm or undermine each other’s manhood within a collective setting, and is particularly common within urban street gangs where there is a hyperbolic commitment to face saving, resulting in an environment dominated by vendetta (111, 116). The recurring conditions formative of masculine protest are “poverty and an ambience of violence” (111).

 Although he employs a series of personas in his raps, Eminem nevertheless maintains a consistent personal history, suggesting that his several shape changes are merely exaggerations of his personality. Of course, Freudian psychology reminds us that creativity manifests the artist’s subconscious. So far, the rapper has assumed three personas in his lyrics: Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers.  In the biography Eminem: Crossing the Line, Martin Huxley identifies the Slim Shady identity as an arrogant alter ego who revels in drugs, theft, rape, violence, murder, and mayhem and who trivializes evil through humorous indifference to the suffering he causes (51). Marshall Mathers, the private self made public, is tortured by doubt, anger, and grief, lashing out at the his ex-wife, his mother, his absentee father and showing a real parental tenderness toward his daughter Hailie. Eminem (a name reflecting the alliterative nature of Marshall’s initials) is the public persona, the famous rapper who juggles Shady’s truculence with Marshall’s tortured introspection; Eminem has the perspective to explain the poor behavior of his other personalities, to rebut his critics and detractors without Shady’s comic violence.

For those familiar with Eminem’s background and lyrics, his conformity to the standard paradigm of masculine protest is virtually self-evident. He comes from a Detroit working class household defined by poverty and domestic abuse. He is the child of an absentee father and a mother who found it difficult to provide for her family. Eminem complains that the family was frequently uprooted because of financial problems, forcing him to change schools regularly and to remain alienated from his classmates. In his lyrics, the rapper identifies himself as “trailer trash” and “white trash” and portrays himself in a series of degrading minimum wage jobs from which he is regularly fired and for which he is extremely resentful (Huxley 6). In the track “Rock Bottom” from the Slim Shady LP, Eminem complains of his inability to earn a reasonable wage and to provide for his infant daughter:

I deserve respect

But I work and sweat for this worthless check . . .

Minimum wage got my adrenaline caged

Full of venom and rage

Especially when I’m engaged

And my daughters down to her last diaper. . . .

Of course, the rags to riches paradigm is ubiquitous within hip hop. A background of poverty is requisite to credibility within the profession. If the emerging artist is going to appeal to an audience of largely young inner city males, he must share some of their experiences, and the discovery that other rappers (e.g. Ice Cube) have come from privileged middle class backgrounds has proven detrimental to their careers. Perhaps more than in any other segment of the popular music industry, the artist needs authenticity; there must be a connection between the rapper’s personal background and the social complaint that constitutes his/her lyrics. Of course, for the artist who has built his career upon complaints of poverty, success can have a negative impact. The suffering artist has lost some of his authenticity once he no longer suffers. In the first track of his Marshall Mathers LP, Shady reveals that he can no longer rap about being  “broke,” but he can still rap about drugs and violence, particularly violence against women.

In her book You Forgot about Dre!, Kelly Kenyatta relates the ambience of violence that characterized Eminem’s early childhood and adolescence. He grew up in a poor neighborhood where he was subject to periodic assaults from larger and older boys (88-89). In one incident, he was beaten by a classmate, D’Angelo Bailey, in the school restroom and subsequently developed a cerebral hemorrhage (Huxley 8), an event documented in the song “Brain Damage”:

A kid who refused to respect adults

Wore spectacles with taped frames and a freckled nose

A corney looking white boy, scrawny and always ornery

Cause I was always sick of brawny bullies pickin on me . . .

The sense of helplessness revealed in his lyrics is countered by fantasies of revenge in which he engages in comic violence against his tormentors. In “Brain Damage,” he brags of flattening the tires on all the bikes in the rack to get revenge on bullies, and he imagines beating D’Angelo Bailey over the head with a broom handle. Evidently, his lyrics are therapeutic, allowing him an outlet for aggression and frustration. It is generally the Slim Shady persona who punishes Marshall’s enemies; he is the maniacal personality born out of abuse. In “I’m Back,” Shady says that he was “punked and bullied” on his “block/Till . . . [he] cut a kitten’s head off and stuck it this kid’s mailbox.” He even identifies with the notorious perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre whose actions were apparently a response to hectoring from other students.

R.W. Connell’s definition of masculine protest as an Aexaggerated claim to the potency . . . [western] culture attaches to masculinity” (111) is certainly descriptive of Eminem.  Even in adulthood, the rapper is slightly built, not particularly tall, heavy, or muscular, so like Hamlet he “unpacks his heart with words and falls to cursing.” Yet Hamlet recognizes that this own behavior is a sign of his personal impotence, his inability to translate words and thoughts into violent action. Eminem seems to believe that he is intimidating; he makes a variety of dramatic threats, most recently promising to beat up whoever downloaded The Eminem Show (his third CD on a major label) onto the internet. While it is understandable that he would be enraged by this action since it doubtlessly lost him money, his physical stature may not allow for much of the violence that he pledges.  Moreover, while his colleagues at the former Deathrow Records battled other rappers who blurred the distinction between “gansta rap” and real gangsters, resulting in real murders, Eminem clashes with women, gays, and effete pop stars like Brittany Spears, N’Sync, and Moby. While his decision to battle less ominous opponents may be construed as wise, it, nevertheless, reveals the hidden vulnerability of masculine protest. He scapegoats those groups who he believes occupy an even lower place in the social hierarchy than he does.

The emphasis on vendetta and face saving that is common to masculine protest and hip hop seems to be a particular preoccupation of Eminem. Amazingly, despite the ghastly statements he makes about others, he seems both surprised and hurt when anyone challenges or criticizes him, and he uses the criticism as a pretense for additional abuse. Clearly, his persecution complex has taken a pathological turn, and the verbal sparring that results is tremendously disturbing at the same time that it is entertaining. He admits that his detractors are his instigators; their repudiations stoke the rage that drives his art: “But I’m glad they feed me the fuel/that I need for the fire to burn” (“The Way I Am”). The list of celebrities who have been the target of his punitive satirical barbs is long. In “The Real Slim Shady,” he accuses Christina Aguilera of giving him “VD” because she criticized his lyrics on MTV and revealed his marriage to his long suffering girlfriend Kim, a fact that he was trying to conceal (Kenyatta 112-113). The feud with Moby had a similar origin. In an interview, the techno artist referred to the rapper’s lyrics as misogynist, and so on Eminem’s next album, Moby became a “thirty six year old bald headed fag.” Other pop stars who denounced Eminem and ended up being featured in his music include Will Smith, Vanilla Ice, and The Insane Clown Posse. He does not, however, limit himself to musicians, but takes revenge upon politicians and activists who try to censure and censor him. He attacks Bill Clinton who blamed his violent lyrics in the wake of the Columbine massacre, but he is particularly vituperative toward politician’s activist wives: Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore, and Lynne Cheney.

He reserves his most strident abuse for women, and this invective first gained media attention and notoriety for him. However, his motivations may be as pathological as they are practical and professional. Sociologist David Morgan argues that the subordination and degradation of working class males in their jobs can result in a “strong patriarchal authority” in their private lives (98), the result being the violent repression of women and children. In Male Myths and Icons Roger Horrocks observes that rock stars are particularly prone to the scapegoating of women to express “their own sense of imprisonment and suffocation” (130). On the issue of women, Eminem has been unapologetic. He has tried to placate the gay community with several conciliatory statements; however, about women, he explains that he does not have a high opinion of them (Weiner 55-56). The expressions of hostility toward women are too numerous to delineate even if one excludes the use of the word bitch, which is ubiquitous within Hip Hop. In “97 Bonnie & Clyde,” Eminem fantasizes about putting his girlfriend Kim’s dead body in the trunk of his car and disposing of it at the beach. The lyric is a dramatic monologue addressing his daughter (whom he brought to the studio to record sound effects for the track), explaining that they have to go to the beach in the middle of the night with “mommy” in the trunk.  The Marshall Mathers LP contains the track “Kim,” the prequel to “97 Bonnie and Clyde” in which he imagines actually killing the woman who, between albums, became his wife. “Kim” is a disturbingly histrionic track that straddles the line between music and drama.

Many generic attacks on women can be gleaned from Eminem’s lyrics, particularly “Kill You” from the Marshall Mathers LP, in which Slim Shady promises violence toward any woman who disappoints him: “Cause ladies’ screams keep creepin’ in Shady’s dreams.”  The Real Slim Shady begins with an allusion to the domestic abuse involving Motley Crue’s ex-drummer Tommy Lee and his former wife Pamela Anderson, and then goes on to mock feminists’ disapproval. Slim fights with an overweight woman in “As the World Turns,” until she gets the better of him at which time he “fucks that fat slut to death.” The coercive domination of women represented in his lyrics goes far beyond the abuse and disrespect requisite to popularity in rap music. The speaker revels in the scenes of violence that he creates, and while it is not clear that he is guilty of any such behavior himself, his lurid fantasies certainly suggest a smoldering anger toward women in addition to his wife and mother.  In one statement, he complains bitterly that beautiful women never showed an interest in him before his success (Weiner 55).

Perhaps the most scandalous and evocative dispute is with his own mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, who sued him for ten million dollars after the Slim Shady LP. In a special session of Congress on obscenity and violence in the media, Lynne Cheney expressed incredulity that Eminem has won major awards even though he   “advocates” raping and killing his own mother (Weiner 80). While the word advocates may not be appropriately descriptive of the lyric, he certainly does imagine violence against his mother, but he also mocks the idea that anyone would take him seriously: “‘Oh now he’s raping his own mother, abusing a whore/Snorting coke, and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?’” In Masculinity in Crisis, Roger Horrocks suggests that young men often become overly demonstrative of their masculinity because of the difficulty in “tearing themselves away from their mothers” (97). Such a struggle may explain Marshall Mathers’ masculine protest as well as his aggression toward his mother and women in general. He lashes out at his mother in order to claim his masculine identity from the suffocating maternal bond. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “abject mother” suggests that young men experience a revulsion toward the maternal body in their process of self-definition; the maternal body marks the boundary of self and not self (Oliver 59). Certainly there is a non-sequitur link between Eminem’s mother and his masculinity, particularly since he seems to need to prove his virility and control by imagining her suffering. In “Kill You,” he uses the word beef (to fight) to refer to his struggles with women and particularly his mother, and the use of the word in the chorus suggests a specific masculine posturing intended to reveal his strength and resolution. However, it is also clear that he has more grievances toward Debbie Mathers-Briggs than is common among adolescent males attempting to break the maternal bond. In “Kill You,” she is “vile, venomous, volatile, vicious, [and] vain.”  In “My Name Is,” he complains that he just found out that his mother “does more dope” than he does.  In other tracks, he mentions neglect and emotional abuse, most recently in “Cleaning Out My Closet” from The Eminem Show, where he laments that his mother abused prescription drugs, accused him of stealing from her, wished he had died instead of her brother, and sued him for making her abuses public. In retaliation, he deprives her of her grandchild, Hailie, who “will not even be at her funeral.” Eminem’s adolescent hostility evidently lingers in adulthood.

The highly successful film 8 Mile (2002), based upon Marshall Mathers’ life offers a potential motivation for the rapper’s aggressiveness toward women. The protagonist, Bunny Rabbit, is betrayed by his girlfriend who supports his career but also sleeps with his agent. However, Eminem’s notoriously public brawl with his mother is mitigated slightly by the film script in which the mother, play by Kim Bassinger, is merely weak and desperate, involved with a man her son’s age because she needs money to support her family. She and the son are reconciled, even after he drives away her boyfriend, because she wins money at bingo.

While Eminem has done little to mute the hostility that he expresses toward women, he has made an effort to placate the gay community’s outrage over his frequent use of the word faggot. In 8 Mile, he enlists the assistance of a gay co-worker who covers his shift while the rapper goes to perform, and he defends the same man against another freestyle rappers insults, quipping “why you messing with the gay guy, you the faggot?” After The Slim Shady LP received criticism for its homophobia, Eminem stated that he found the accusation humorous because he really does not have a problem with gay people (Huxley 128). He adds that he does not care what gays do so long as they “don’t come around me with that shit” (Weiner 83). He explains that his use of the word faggot does not “necessarily mean gay person,” but means “pussy” or “cissy”; “fag” is a slight against one’s manhood: “That’s the worst thing you can say to a man, it’s like callin’ ‘em a girl” (Weiner 83). He admits that “hip-hop is all about manhood, it’s about competition, about bein’ macho. . . . If you’re battling another dude in a freestyle battle, calling him a faggot, you’re choppin’ down [his] manhood” (Kenyatta 110)  Perhaps, more meaningfully, Eminem reveals that ridiculing another person’s homosexuality is a way of saying, “I’m not gay” (Weiner 83).

The rapper’s tortured denials reveal a real lack of understanding of the issue. Masculine protest is a performance with conservative gender construction as its objective, the creation of masculine identities through the public rejection of the feminine. Connell reminds us that protest masculinity and homophobia require an audience (111); they are exhibitions in which young men confirm their respective commitments to traditional masculine values. Their behavior demonstrates that the most troubling identity a man can embrace is to be a “fag.” Doubtless, Marshall Mathers’ school yard experiences being bullied by bigger kids, not to mention his years “freestyling” in Detroit rap clubs, included reckless accusations about his sexual orientation; thus he very likely developed a reactionary habit of stigmatizing others in the same way, projecting his shame and vulnerability.

Occasionally, Eminem’s use of the word faggot in his lyrics does seem to be disconnected from accusations about sexual practices. He uses the word to refer to women who anger him or pop stars such as N’Sync and New Kids on the Block or even his own absentee father—all of whom are at least ostensibly heterosexual. However, just as often, his slurs are accompanied by allusions to queer sex. In his ongoing feud with the Insane Clown Posse, he includes lurid descriptions of gay sex to degrade his enemies. In a particularly explicit instance, he dramatizes oral sex (complete with moans and slurping sounds) performed on one of his recurring characters, Ken Kaniff, the imaginary gay man who is Eminem’s stalker. The two men sharing Ken’s body are Shaggy 2Dope and Violent Jay of the Insane Clown Posse, but their activities are interrupted when they refer to Ken as Eminem.  In another instance, he ridicules the ICP’s derisive name for him, “Slim Anus,” by arguing  “At least I don’t get fucked in mine like you two little flaming faggots.”  This is perhaps the most offensive homophobic reproach in his music, and while it is aimed at two heterosexual males, it nevertheless reveals the extent to which homosexuality has become the abject, the source of [un]defining horror for Eminem.

Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject is helpful in understanding Eminem’s exaggerated revulsion to homosexual activity or effeminacy in males.  The “abject is the object of primal repression” (12); it is akin to “repugnance” and “disgust” (11), the Other that we repress in order to define ourselves as subjects (10).  The unprovoked hostility that Eminem maintains toward gay men may constitute a reactionary violence to the manifestation of that which he has stifled in order to become the sexual subject that he perceives himself to be and particularly that he wants others to perceive.  Adolescence is the period when these impulses are the most volatile since this is the time when individuals define themselves sexually. Eminem’s lyrics reveal a clamorous and voracious adolescent sexuality that proclaims to the world its conformity to gender norms by reviling homosexual practice. Thus, whether or not he consciously hates gay men, he has certainly demonized queer sexuality, designating it as the humorous and sometimes hateful unthinkable.

Since Eminem has received such withering criticism, he has begun to perceive his Slim Shady persona as the abject of white America. He imagines himself to be the poster child for that which middle class America does not want its children to become. Shady is the specter of the nefarious and the depraved. In the song “White America,” he embraces the idea that he is the source of corruption for American youth, polluting young Erica’s character. He taunts, “I could be one of your kids . . . Little Eric looks just like this . . . Erica loves my shit I go to TRL look how many hugs I get.” He describes the youth of America who identify with Shady as an “army marchin’ in back of me,” and he imagines leading the discontented youth up to the “steps of congress” to “piss on the lawn of the white house,” and to “spit liquor in the face of this democracy of hypocrisy.” Shady represents the propensity of all people to rebel against restraints: “And every single person is a Slim Shady lurkin’/He could be workin’ at the Burger King/Spittin’ on your onion rings.”

Eminem has a very grandiose image of his impact on American youth, imagining himself to be the fountainhead of dissolute adolescent culture. While he certainly is a phenomenon, selling ten million albums and starring in a hit movie all in 2002, I wonder to what extent he understands the very conservative role that his lyrics play in the consolidation of traditional power, and not just because his petty rebellions are an impetus for the dominant culture’s displays of hegemony by repressing dissent, but conservative in a much more direct fashion. Masculine protest is an exaggeration of traditional masculine attributes; it is not revolutionary. Eminem’s abuse of women and gay men reinforces the social processes that attempt to guarantee women’s continued subordination and objectification and gay men’s ostracism and forced conformity to binary gender norms.

James Keller

Honors Program

Mississippi University for Women

Columbus, MS 39701

Works Cited

8 Mile. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Universal, 2002.

Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1995.

Eminem. The Eminem Show. Aftermath Records, 2002.

—. The Marshall Mathers LP. Interscope Records, 2001

—. The Slim Shady LP. Aftermath/Interscope, 1999.

Horrocks, Roger. Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture. New York: St. Martins, 1995.

—. Masculinity in Crisis. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.

Huxley, Martin. Eminem: Crossing the Line. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.

Morgan, David H.J. Discovering Men. London: Routledge, 1992.

Kenyatta, Kelly. You Forgot about Dre: A Tale of Gansta Rap, Violence, and Hit Records. Los Angeles: Busta Books, 2000.

Kristeva, Julia. The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1993.

Weiner, Chuck. Eminem . . . In His Own Words. New York: Omnibus, 2001.