article Divas and deviance: Hip-hop feminism and black visuality in Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006) Polo Belina Moji abstract Through a study of Lauren Ekué’s Icône Urbaine (2006), touted as France’s first Hip-hop feminist novel, I argue that Hip-hop aesthetics can be used to find a language, re-negotiate the deviance and pathologies associated with black femininity as either diva-hood or deviance. Using the Hip-hop feminist theory and the critical cultural analysis of black visuality in Nicole Fleetwood’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public (2015), I frame Ekué’s portrayal of Flora D’Almeida, the novel’s heroine, as a negotiation of public images of black femininity in popular culture. I firstly read Flora’s pathological narcissism through Nicole Fleetwood’s association of racial iconicity – diva-hood – with hyperbolic consumption. I then use Hip-hop feminist theory to unpack the consumption practices of Hip-hop culture through the notion of “bling” and the “deviant” image of the video-girl. My final section then examines how denigration and veneration inform Flora’s negotiation of her sexual desire. Throughout the analysis I pay close attention to the novel’s hyperbolic narrative style, sampling of musical and literary references, as well as the re-mixing of linguistic codes to simultaneously represent the particularities of black France in relation to a globally mediated (African American influenced) public image of blackness. keywords Hip-hop, feminism, Lauren Ekué, black France, celebrity culture Introduction Dans mon ouvrage, j'ai voulu proposer un livre d'expression française avec une héroïne noire, forte et loin du misérabilisme. Les films, c'est Fatou la malienne, excisée, violée et cliché... Ce n'est pas le cas de toutes les filles [noires] nées en France. On n'est pas toutes des cas sociaux .1 In my work, I wanted to present a French language book with a black heroine, strong and far from pathos. In the films, it’s Fatou the Malian woman, genitally mutilated, raped and cliché… It’s not the case of all [black] girls born in France. We are not all social welfare cases. Lauren Ekué (D, 2006)