Ca$h App Connectivities: High-Maintenance Feminism and Payment as Praxis

Abstract

This article studies how contemporary Black southern cultural production undermines racial and gendered structures of exploitation and foments radical sites of relation by claiming worth under alternative schemes of value that center Black life and demand payment — “cash app me.” The analysis reads with scholar-artist Chaz Barracks's ($Chaz-Antoine) 2020 film Everyday Black Matter and rap duo City Girls’ 2020 antiwork anthem and video “Jobs.” This writing performs an audacious gathering as it is submitted in tandem with Barracks's article for this issue, which offers “con-artistry” as a theory of queer Black joy. This text joins Barracks's con-artistry with my conception of high-maintenance feminism, which describes a contemporary cultural movement in which Black femmes assert their value beyond the confines of respectability and demand what is due to them financially and otherwise within the exploitative context of racial capitalism. The article draws from the standard definition of high-maintenance as “needing a lot of work to keep in good condition” and extends this meaning to describe the depleting physical, mental, emotional, economic, and metaphysical strains placed upon Black femmes under anti-Black conditions, and the considerable care work and remuneration required to survive these strains and access enjoyment.

What does it mean for Black femmes to require labor instead of reproducing it? What if the economy worked to resource Black femmes rather than the other way around? How can we collaboratively maneuver the culture industry and academia to support the radical worldmaking of Black artists and intellectuals? Recent Black southern cultural production addresses these questions by creating fugitive routes of relation through an alternative economy of value that centers Black femininity. In so doing, Black artists access resources that fulfill their creative ends, material desires, and visions of social transformation. I call this cultural movement high-maintenance feminism.

This article studies how contemporary Black queer and femme cultural production undermines structures of exploitation and foments radical sites of relation by claiming worth under alternative schemes of value that center Black life and demand payment—“cash app me.”¹ My analysis reads with scholar-artist Chaz Barracks's ($Chaz-Antoine) 2020 film Everyday Black Matter and Miami rap duo City Girls’ 2020 antiwork anthem and video “Jobs.” Bringing together two theoretical formations, Barracks's theory of con-artistry as a Black queer joy practice and my conception of high-maintenance feminism as a radical framework of value, this essay thematizes the demand for payment as a praxis and form of gathering. Our projects emerged from mutual excitement over our parallel approaches to studying femme and queer-of-color deviance, which led to text messages (fig. 1), voice notes, Zoom calls and an Instagram Live (fig. 2) where we shared the process of conceptualizing our manuscripts for liquid blackness with our social media communities.² Thus, through our shared processing of institutional violence as first-gen Caribbean scholars and our ongoing study of the political strategies that emerge from Black queer and femme popular culture, Barracks and I perform a similarly audacious gathering in this special issue, where submitting and publishing in liquid blackness in tandem has also occasioned a dynamic and enriching point of gathering with the editors.

Together, Barracks and City Girls open productive paths for studying gathering as they engage in collaborative cultural productions that emphasize paying Black femmes as a radical act and position Black queer and femme scammers as architects of this radical praxis. City Girls enact high-maintenance feminism and con-artistry by refusing exploited labor and extracting value from an erotic economy. Barracks's Everyday Black Matter enacts Black cultural autonomy by demanding resources for art in institutional spaces of racial exclusion. It is noteworthy that their works were created in 2020, when the gradually increasing stress placed on Black lives made a catastrophic jump. Equally notable, these cultural creators hail from and center the South, which L. H. Stallings identifies as “the epicenter of neoteric sex wars, technologies, and economies,” arguing that “issues of reproductive freedom, criminalization of sex practices, HIV/AIDS, partner rights and marriage equality, and transgender rights reveal how southern states have entered into another era of reconstruction centered on sexuality and gender.”³ Although Stallings and scholars such as Lindsey Stewart acknowledge that Black joy and sexual resistance have always met such conditions, I share both scholars’ contention that southern cultural production creates frameworks that can reshape art and politics in addition to “the terrain of sexuality and gender studies.”⁴ Even in a global pandemic, we look to the South because it is where responses to such ruptures have been innovated. Despite and in spite of the extreme conditions of the moment, Barracks's film Everyday Black Matter documents the “middle that apocalyptic thinking always forgets” by centering the worldmaking relationships and creative practices of Black people in Richmond, Virginia, while City Girls’ 2020 video “Jobs” illuminates the potential of high-maintenance feminism for getting over on racial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy and looking pretty doing it.⁵

Pay for Pretty

The hip-hop duo Yung Miami and JT came to mass popularity as the City Girls right as JT was being imprisoned for credit card fraud in 2018. Their songs profess transactional relationships with cis men that are centered on the woman's material and erotic desires. In a pop culture context that privileges the single star, City Girls had insisted upon remaining a group up until their recent breakup in the summer of 2024 due to strains from management issues. Yet, even as both artists increasingly pursued solo endeavors, JT's 2023 single “No Bars” reminded listeners that “Even when you think it ain't City Girl shit, I'm a City Girl, bitch.” While JT was locked up, Yung Miami, who was pregnant for some of that time, continued to labor to keep the group's work visible by performing, conducting media interviews, and circulating the “Free JT” slogan on social media. Black femme relation and labor out of love, necessity, and the pursuit of riches was a lifeline amid Black capture.

The “Jobs” single dropped in 2020, the same year that JT was released from a halfway house following nearly two years in federal custody and at the same time the world was reckoning with anti-Black violence and the exploitation of laborers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which raised widespread conversations around antiwork politics, the failures of the state, and mutual aid. The video for the song finds Yung Miami and JT working at a chicken wing shop. A customer arrives to place an order while they are in the midst of a conversation, and they do not hide their annoyance. The scene cuts to find them outside behind the restaurant continuing their dialogue in what appears to be an unsanctioned break when their supervisor approaches them to say that the customer complained about the service (fig. 3). When he admonishes them to change their behavior, the City Girls respond by describing how exhausting and demoralizing their work is: “The problem is I'm tired of this motherfuckin’ job. Bitch is smelling like collard greens. It's hot behind that register. Like—I'm tired.” They are then fired.

Following their dismissal from “respectable” work, the video advances a narrative around how Black femmes can pursue more pleasurable routes to make a living. The next scene shows the duo discussing the fallout with their friends, queer rapper Saucy Santana among them. As they think through their next move, a friend suggests aesthetic entrepreneurship as a possible alternative to exploitative labor, “Y'all need to start a business, hair, nail, or whatever.” Saucy Santana follows, “Y'all don't work jobs—bitch y'all is a job.” The video then follows JT and Yung Miami as they glam themselves up to work their beauty for remuneration. In what appears to be a paid ad placement for the OnlyFans erotic content platform, the video shows Yung Miami in S&M-inspired lingerie posing erotically in a bedroom under the glow of a ring light while her Black queer friend takes photos (fig. 4). The action is playful and fun. When she checks her OnlyFans app, the rapper sees graphics depicting her rapidly increasing income. This scene showcases Yung Miami engaging in what Mireille Miller-Young would call, drawing on Robin D. G. Kelley, “play-labor,” an activity that commodifies sexuality and blurs the lines between work and leisure.⁶ JT does not appear to engage in labor at all and instead practices the alchemy of gold digging (fig. 5). Her verses center on how she extracts resources from her lovers, “This pussy talk to him (what's up?), it make him give it up (cash), It make him back-back, then spend racks in that Lam’ truck (skrrt).”

A makeup vanity is the center of gathering and action (fig. 6). It is the place where City Girls and their queer femme crew joke around, beautify themselves, and recite the chorus, “I'on work jobs, bitch, I am a job (period), You ’on't like it? Take a hike, Pay me for a suck and slop (bitch), I'm a rich ass bitch with a attitude (haha), Pipe it down ’fore I whoop you like your mama do.” City Girls articulate a politics that rejects work culture and femme-of-color exploitation by making oneself the arbiter of value via sexual desirability.

The song's lyrics position body aesthetics as a terrain of community building, power brokering, and pleasure:

While they assert the individual desire for cosmetic dental work, the lyrics quickly shift back to address an imagined collective of “bad bitches” looking for wealthy men to cash app them and pay for similar things. In privileging access to luxury consumption as a politic, City Girls take up the abjection and deviance associated with Black queer and femme sexualities that Jennifer Nash examines through the trope of Black anality. In reading the visibility of sneakers in Black anal porn, Nash notes, “The ubiquity of the sneaker as an accessory of blackness, as a way to further racialize the black body, only furthers the connection among ‘black,’ ‘anal,’ and wasteful, shoring up the notion of black sexualities not only as nonproductive but also as wastefully (or improperly) consumerist, drawn to fetishize status objects, and improperly desirous of trivial signifiers of wealth.”⁷ Nash argues that despite these negative inscriptions, Black anality can be “a space of play, pleasure, desire, and delight for black subjects . . . in the never-ending quest for sexual freedom.”⁸ Contemporary Black femme hip-hop shows how freedom can be sparked by the feel of quality leather or the visibility of a logo on one's body, as these practices center on resignifying existing schemes of value and challenging notions of excess, respectability, and austerity.⁹

High-Maintenance Feminism

Works like City Girls’ “Jobs” have led me to create high-maintenance feminism as a framework for interpreting contemporary cultural politics. City Girls are part of a constellation of artists and social media creators such as the gold-digging guru Shera Seven, whose similar messages I am tracing in a larger project. I draw from the standard definition of high-maintenance as “needing a lot of work to keep in good condition,” and extend this meaning to describe the depleting physical, mental, emotional, economic, and metaphysical strains placed upon Black femmes under anti-Black conditions and the considerable care work and remuneration required to survive these strains and access the fullness of life that Audre Lorde named the erotic power, autonomy, and creativity, in all aspects.¹⁰ I play with the deviant connotations of high-maintenance that vilify femmes as demanding, calculating, vain, and wanton to center how Black femme cultural producers embrace and perform these tropes as a radical practice. The denigration of high-maintenance femmes is steeped in misogynoir, as it relies upon a notion of Black femininity as perpetually in the service of others. High-maintenance feminisms reject the trope of the good woman/sanitary citizen and instead operate with transparency around the transactional nature of racialized and gendered economies of labor, care, and sex under current regimes of power.¹¹

High-maintenance is a mode of valuation that begins with the self and sets the terms for the politics of exchange between Black femmes and institutions and individuals with access to patriarchal, economic, and racial power. The video for “Jobs” demonstrates how high-maintenance feminism negotiates Black femininity and sexuality in ways distinct from existing notions of transactional sex and sex work.¹² First, high-maintenance is not a form of labor but rather an economy of value that is enacted to mediate social, cultural, sexual, and economic exchanges. It is animated by visions of a pleasurable life and critiques cisheteropatriarchal, anti-Black, and capitalist impediments to it by enacting alternative forms of gathering. Black queer vernacular uses gathering as a term to describe a response to attack that deploys shame and belittlement as a tactic. For instance, when Black queer and femme rappers disparage “broke dick” in their songs, they perform gathering through a public humiliation that refuses the systemic withholding of resources and enact this shaming together. Thus, high-maintenance feminism underscores how racist patriarchy simply can't afford Black femmes and enacts its own forms of withholding.¹³ The fulfillment of high-maintenance demands may or may not result in labor of any kind from the Black queer/femme subject making them. Sometimes, payment simply provides the possibility of access with no promise of sexual relations or work performance. High-maintenance strategies are often deployed prior to initiating a relationship or institutional contract, typically by withholding corporal access and labor (affective, creative, and sexual) as leverage. Withholding is a low-effort mode of refusal.

Body aesthetics and erotic acts are often found in high-maintenance cultural production and as we saw in “Jobs,” they are mobilized by Black femmes to circumvent labor exploitation. High-maintenance feminism thus gathers with ideas such as Stallings's funky erotixxx, “a concept of art as experience instead of sex work to define why black men and women have used sexual expression to survive in the New World,” and joins with James Boggs's and Kathi Weeks's discussions of antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries.¹⁴ All situate work as a political site that can be radically transformed to end exploitation and create space and time for lives of social abundance. This ethos is vividly depicted in the City Girls’ juxtaposition of the chicken wing shop and bedroom as distinct sites of labor. Both “Jobs” and, as we will engage below, Barracks's Everyday Black Matter make demands for resources to patriarchy, the academy, and arts institutions through antiwork (refusing the call to offer oneself for labor exploitation), postwork (imagining other modes to sustain life), and funky erotixxx positions (artistic and sexual means of survival and thriving). These projects demand grants, gifts, and cash apps through a recognition of inherent worth and a requirement that this worth be recognized materially. This is a substantially different modality than drawing upon a logic of deservingness via work ethic.

High-maintenance feminist strategies are shared among Black femmes explicitly through cultural production, generating knowledge and relationships that make it possible to navigate the “catastrophic continuities” of anti-Blackness such as mass incarceration, digital misogynoir, and educational, health, and economic disparities.¹⁵ While Black femme artists mobilize high-maintenance feminism to navigate their personal affairs, these negotiations often occur in relation, as seen in the “Jobs” video where JT and Yung Miami navigated work politics together and shared their antiwork messages with a community of “bad bitches.” Thus, high-maintenance feminism is in conversation with ideas circulating in Black/queer/gender studies, such as Sesali Bowen's concept of trap feminism that “acknowledges the ways in which Black girls [and women] might benefit from and enjoy performing racialized gender in ways that have been deemed inappropriate, reductive, and unproductive.”¹⁶ Bowen describes trap feminism as part of a “tool kit” she uses to “survive, thrive, and be able to tell somebody else about it.”¹⁷ In noting the motivation to “tell somebody else about” the trap tool kit, Bowen underscores the interest of contemporary hip-hop feminisms in sharing strategies as a form of mutual aid.

Mutual aid is also a central aspect of scholar-artist Chaz Barracks's theory of con-artistry, inspired by persons “who engage outside of normative and law-abiding societal practices and instead perform deviance and trickery as a source of pleasure and joy-seeking.”¹⁸ Inspired by his experiences of aliveness with his late mother, who scammed the system to provide him with things like major-label clothes and a taste of a life of material abundance, Barracks views con-artistry as a “worldmaking practice to secure Black joy and pleasure by any means necessary.”¹⁹ For Barracks, the gathering and relationship fomented through shared moments of scamming or being high-maintenance are an integral part of the motivation for, and pleasure in, these practices. Barracks's analysis shows how scamming is often undertaken with loved ones (and/or with loved ones in mind) and how its fruits are often recirculated via a Black femme ethic of redistribution. This mutual recognition is performed by gathering in Barrack's film Everyday Black Matter, which, unlike hip-hop videos backed by major record labels, required Cash App praxis and collectivity to materialize.

“Everyday Black Matter”

Everyday Black Matter (Barracks, 2020) is a twenty-two-minute moving-image love song to Black people in Black time. It moves from music video–style montages of dancing and posing to B-roll of Black people going about their daily lives in Richmond, to interviews with folks who the director describes as making up his “Black Matter.” Referencing the “matter” in “Black Lives Matter,” Barracks points to both the materiality and aliveness of Black life and the quotidian and mundane aspects (“black life matters”) that are overlooked in frameworks that emphasize Black suffering or Black excellence. The film evokes the scientific definition of matter as something that takes up space and “possesses rest mass,” through chemistry labs and beakers (figs. 7 and 8), and, more significantly, by “slowing the camera down and positioning the viewer to attend to the quotidian.”²⁰ In this way, being distinct from energy, which may be linked to labor, Barracks's Black Matter instead rests and takes up space. Overall, the aesthetics and diegesis of the film paint Black Matter as a cosmic material and center of gravity that maintains Black relation so that the individual and the collective are continually tethered. As Barracks states, the artists, friends, and cultural workers featured in the film “make up what Black Matter is in my own body. I see myself in every collaborator.”²¹

Therefore, with the movement for Black lives in 2020 still in focus, rest appears in Everyday Black Matter in images of Black aesthetics. For example, the film uses the monument of Confederate general that was transformed into a ready-made political art object by Black folks and their accomplices as the backdrop of several scenes. Adding to the already layered image, a mother and daughter pose for the camera in front of the sculpture (fig. 9), and later the filmmaker rides his bike around it while wearing a nine-foot-long du-rag that ripples in the breeze and extends his body into space—creating a kinetic sculpture. The extravagantly long du-rag art pieces (fig. 10) created by Sasha Williams ($sashawilliams1449) serve as talismans for Black refusal of codes of respectability and as ritual objects. At certain points the clothdrapes over the Confederate monument, enacting containment by smoothing over its edges, bringing softness to the once-imposing hard stonework (fig. 11). In others, it takes up institutional space.

The du-rag and its movements form a visual through line in the film, weaving in and out of the interviews, performances, and B-roll scenes, signaling Black mattering as a queer project that shows, as Barracks describes, “a type of love that exists outside and beyond the hetero-centered containers which try to suppress or define us while failing to accept that all of us have something about us that will make ‘the normal folks’ clutch their pearls.”²² The film opens with a close up of bright orange du-rag. The camera tilts down a string of beads attached to it that spell out ♥ DON'T ♥ TOUCH ♥ MY ♥ HAIR while a Black femme voices a warning to whiteness that it does not have access to Black beauty aesthetics or culture. “You don't think I see you? . . . Trying to co-opt, cash-in, to take, WHAT IS MINE.” This scene is followed by footage of Black hair being washed by Black hands at the salon: the camera lingering on the movement of the water swirling around the drain in the shampoo bowl; the client's eyes closing softly as they enjoy the feeling of a scalp massage; a Black femme tossing her long crochet twists, her twinkling eyes hinting at the smile hidden by her face mask. Here, Barracks's film aligns with Cathy Cohen's description of queerness as a position occupied by those perceived as outside heteronormative bounds so that Black femmes and queer people are those uninvested in assimilationist projects.²³ The juxtaposition of a callout to whiteness with footage of Black people in states of care and enjoyment performs the multivalence of gathering that operates in the film.

In this way, gathering in Everyday Black Matter is an open archive that, crucially, keeps track of and discloses both the times Black people and art are denied the necessary resources and the rich relationships and creative abundance that are nevertheless accessed under these constraints. Barracks thus turns to auto-theory and storytelling to challenge the respectability politics and academic value systems that marginalize collaborative Black femme knowledge. For example, early in the film a conversation between Barracks and Everyday Black Matter videographer and creative director Nicholas Taylor ($Nicctayy) takes the form of undulating bright green sound waves, giving visual texture to their voices against a Black sky dotted with stars (fig. 12). The conversation occurs about two minutes into the film and brings critical attention to the material conditions of Black cultural production. We learn that the creators had only $3,500 to make the film, that they discussed the limitations of what this devaluation presented in terms of completing Everyday Black Matter, and that they, through frank conversation, negotiated within the context of relationship and artistic vision to undertake “working for free” together because this was labor that was performed to bring wreck to racial capital, not to serve it. On the decision to share this call, Barracks writes,

Simply put, Barracks makes this conversation matter and the transparency that the film affords around it shows how working for free in this instance is not another form of exploited Black labor as individuals are making considered decisions around their participation.

Instead, investments of time and resources are taken up by Barracks's community in the pursuit of autonomous Black gathering for cultural production. These dynamics highlight what Barracks notes are the contradictions that attend Black joy “because we all have to navigate our existence in these spaces yet some of us decide to formulate our own ways of supporting folks’ work.”²⁵ Thus, the film's graphics display collaborators’ names on the lower left side of the screen and share their Cash App and Venmo handles, to give “viewers a direct way to recognize us and contribute to us for the ways we've overcome the system's gaps and blind spots, and still managed to rise as shown in the film.”²⁶ As a result, as the film began to circulate via screenings, collaborators would receive money transfers at random. Thus, the incorporation of the Cash Apps and the foregrounding of financial challenges into the film produces an iteration of the demand for resourced Black art that is repeated at every screening.

The manner in which Barracks's collaborators commit to making the film despite the funding gap problematizes binaries of labor and leisure. In a scene featuring artist, scholar, activist, and educator Dr. Aurora Higgs ($otterhausen), Higgs enters the backseat of Barracks's car and he hands her the film funding check to look at (fig. 13). Gazing at it disdainfully, she responds, “Um—girl. You have a PhD and this is all they gave your Black ass to make the film? [sighs] It'll do, it'll do . . . ” She appears to participate anyway because doing so brings her joy. Abundance is hers.

Access to leisure is a primary interest of high-maintenance feminism as seen in “Jobs” and the pleasure garnered from money and femme materiality are pictured in the segments with Higgs where she is filmed in a dark parlor in lingerie. The camera lingers on her skin and moving hips as she caresses her body in erotic self-study and bliss. Money rains upon her as she performs on a table. She presses it against her and throws it into the air (fig. 14). The slow music, warm lighting, and glittering eye shadow give her the aura of a goddess. In her interview she states,

Higgs invokes smell, sight, taste, and feeling as part of her Black matter, recalling Stallings's framing of funk as “a multisensory and multidimensional philosophy capable of dismantling systems of labor that organize race and sexuality for commercial profit.”²⁷ In referencing the repressed sexuality of her ancestors, Higgs performs multidimensionality by engaging with a past/present that informs her personal aesthetic (fake/real gold from the beauty supply store) and the pleasure garnered from her gender.

Still, payment is a praxis; and it's dramatically performed at the close of Everyday Black Matter in a nighttime scene staged at a parking lot with a brightly lit pay station illuminated by a spherical “PAY HERE” sign that looks like a celestial body (fig. 15). Barracks and his collaborators begin to gather at the pay station. They pose and then shift into dancing as the rhythm of the chopped-and-screwed soundtrack steadily picks up. After a graphic appears in large font that reads “REPARATIONS BITCH (PAY BLACK ARTISTS NOW)” the money transfer handles of all of the film's collaborators begin to scroll down the screen in a neon-colored font that pops against the late-night footage. The steady momentum of the handles streaming on the screen visualizes the sheer number of people who were needed to make the work possible and points to the considerable resources required to sustain Black life and creative practice (fig. 16). As the Cash App handles roll, members of the dancing community at the pay station make eye contact with the camera and start to perform make-it-rain and dolla-bill hand gestures. Their body language conveys both seduction and an attitude of confrontation with the viewer. As Barracks described to me in a text message, “Folks gathered and collaborated in this film, knowing they would not get paid but brought ALOT to the camera under those conditions. They did it for Black joy while STILL using their bodies to control the gaze of PAY ME MY MONEY.” Barracks's point cautions us to avoid romanticizing shared gathering in exploitation for communal Black love and instead to view the performance of art/work in the film as theory in practice, showing how Black queer cultural production faces what the director describes as both “a toxic cycle and a claiming of agency.”

This toxicity is worked through what Stallings would call a funking of the erotic through which “sacredly profane sexuality ritualizes and makes sacred what is libidinous and blasphemous in Western humanism so as to unseat and criticize the inherent imperialistic aims within its social mores and sexual morality.”²⁸ Funking the erotic is performed by collaborator Aurora Von Bliss ($AuroraVonBliss), who pole dances on a column at the pay station, elevating the vibration of this resource ritual in the undercommons (fig. 17). In this scene, Black matter is depicted in a dark celestial place where material abundance and joy in gathering is accessed. Barracks is among the group and gives a knowing look to the camera as the picture fades out and a voice-over mantra commands, “Don't do anything for them, unless they overpay you. Don't do anything for them, unless they overpay you. Don't you do a motherfucking thing for them—unless they overpay you.”

Through the centering of trans and queer community and the burlesquing of the du-rag, Everyday Black Matter articulates an imaginary that I see expressed in broader high-maintenance feminist cultural production. Namely, the notion that upsetting violent economies of value requires an engagement with and valuing of the Black feminine. High-maintenance imaginaries are communicated through ornamental aesthetics, like Black feminist scholar Dr. Kalyn Coghill's ($kalyncoghill) long, decorated nail set that Barracks's camera lingers on (fig. 18). Such feminine signs open an engagement with histories of embodiment and labor that have framed Black femme hands as instruments of labor and service rather than as fine art objects. By valuing Black femmes and making payment a relational practice, high-maintenance feminism and con-artistry invite the enactment of modes of refusal and care that preserve Black energy and create cultures of joy.

Acknowledgments

I thank Chaz Barracks for a generative and fun collaboration and the editors for their deep engagement with our ideas. Ceci Luna and Cynthia Hinderscheid provided crucial assistance. Comments from peer reviewers enhanced this essay in important ways.

Notes

Works Cited