An exploration of hip hop and feminism by five Feminist Debates students at the University of Minnesota. Hip-hop feminism was born out of a need to understand the many cultural, social and political conditions that afflicted women of what Baraki Kitwana called the hip-hop generation, comprised of people born between 1965 and 1985. Black feminism, a wave of thought and activism largely influenced by the civil rights and black power movements, was not equipped to consider the issues of women belonging to the hip-hop generation. For some, the term “hip-hop feminism” offers up quite the enigma. Critics position misogyny as hip-hop’s cardinal sin, which raises the obvious question: How do women actively participate in a culture that seems to hate them so vehemently? For self-described hip-hop feminists, attempting to answer that question is not their only task, since understanding what hip-hop feminism is and isn’t goes far beyond responding to women-bashing sentiment.