Marrying Up

Abstract

Against the backdrop of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, this chapter interrogates hypergamy or marrying up and the figure of the gold digger in urban fiction novels/street literature such as Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) , Omar Tyree's Flyy Girl, (1997) and Teri Woods' True to the Game (1998) alongside hip hop lyrics by Public Enemy. This portion of the book establishes how these influential texts champion patriarchal control as they highlight the relationship between state violence and intimate partner violence.