“I’m Just Playin’, But I’m Sayin’”: Performing Power in Nicki Minaj’s Barbie Dreams
Bailey Griffin, Doctoral Fellow in African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University
Disclaimer: While this article focuses on the rhetorical significances of Minaj’s creative performance(s), we recognize the harm that she and many others in the entertainment industry have caused in using their platforms to promote anti-trans rhetorics and Christian nationalism. We assert and affirm that while the examination of this work proves fruitful, we do not endorse or support Nicki Minaj in any capacity.
Within sexist racist iconography, black females are most often represented as mammies, whores, or sluts. Caretakers whose bodies and beings are empty vessels to be filled with the needs of others. This imagery tells the world that the black female is born to serve—a servant-maid made to order. She is not herself but always what someone else wants her to be (97).—bell hooks, 1996[1]
Welcome to Barbie’s Dream
Rapper Nicki Minaj’s “Barbie Dreams” begins on a stage draped with thick red and blue curtains that glow beneath spotlights. A fuzzy yellow puppet waddles across the stage, its felt body swaying as it cheerfully welcomes the audience/spectators to the spectacle of "Barbie Dreams" (2018), then the echoing sound of applause fills the space. As the music swells and we transition to Nicki Minaj, who bursts onto the screen with back-to-back clips of intense gazes into the camera, deliberate groping, licking, imitating sex positions, and flamboyancy, mixed with puppet-like dancing. Her gestures are jerky yet precise, a choreography that feels mechanical and sensual. The clash of neon hair—multi-colored, yellow, green, and red—against the solid color-blocked backdrops creates a dizzying tension between chaos and control. Rather than losing focus in the visual overload, our eyes are pulled toward her, the spectacle’s centerpiece.
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Figure 1: Collage of screenshots from the Barbie Dreams music video. Engage with the Official "Barbie Dreams" Music Video (2018) by Nicki Minaj. |
In addition to her vivid presence, the scene includes lyrics that mock rappers Quavo, Drake, Future, and more, and introduces lifeless puppets dressed as rappers Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Meek Mill, and 6ix9ine. Their plush, cartoonish bodies sag under heavy jewelry, their mouths frozen mid-smile, eyes stitched open in permanent awe. The soft plush of their faces and their stiff, clumsy movements mirror the artificial world they inhabit. Their lack of mobility turns them into props within her performance, a satirical reversal of Hip-Hop’s usual power dynamics. She animates the stage while they dangle lifelessly inside her dreamscape. After three minutes and thirty-nine seconds of puppeteering, the video abruptly shifts. The puppets vanish, and for the first time, it is just Nicki Minaj. The stage remains the same with the backdrop of neon colors that feels childlike and charged; yet the air thickens, and the humor is drained from the imagination. The beat drops into a darker, heavier rhythm, and Minaj carries a different flow. Without the distraction of puppets, Minaj commands the frame alone. Her delivery sharpens with every line, and the tone is less playful. There’s no longer a need for props or proxies. The camera tracks her abrupt movements of a slight head tilt, a smirk, a hand tracing down her thigh as she spits lyrics that are seductive and identify Nicki as the creator, in control of Barbie’s Dream. This tonal transformation marks a transition in narrative, as the playful spectacle of puppetry gives way to a performance of dominance, signaling a shift where the energy moves from Barbie’s Dream to Barbie’s Dreamhouse.
Theorizing Barbie’s Dreamscape
Through a rhetorical engagement with “Barbie Dreams,” I seek to identify how Nicki Minaj performs dominance within a Dreamhouse designed to contain her, revealing that aesthetic power for Black women in mainstream popular culture is often staged as spectacle rather than enacted as agency. Positioning Minaj and “Barbie Dreams” within a broader lineage of hip hop, I first identify the history of the song’s sampling and how Minaj utilizes this history to harness what Dr. K. Allison Hammer calls female phallicism. I continue this analysis of “Barbie Dreams” by reading it alongside Qualeasha Wood’s Deus Ex Machina (What Was I Made For?) to trace how digital environments structure Black feminine visibility through programmability and conditional empowerment (2024). Drawing on Dr. Hortense Spillers’ distinction between the body and flesh and Dr. Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, I identify how Minaj’s performance stages a collision between flesh, fantasy, and manufactured visibility. The video’s puppet sequences and lyrical strategies further reveal how dominance is enacted through parody, emasculation, and excess, producing the appearance of authority while remaining structurally contained and stagnant. Engaging Dr. bell hooks and Dr. Tiffany E. Barber, I situate this performance within ongoing struggles to achieve representation, desirability, and legibility for Black women. Attention to the camera, staging, and spectatorship, informed by Dr. Terri Kapsalis, shows how Minaj’s visibility is organized through regimes that transform visibility into voyeurism. I conclude by reflecting on tools for reading culture from within its own illusions, referencing Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos’ work on iconoclasm. In this reading of Nicki Minaj’s “Barbie Dreams,” I ask:
1. If the Dreamhouse is designed to showcase Barbie rather than to free her, then how much power can Minaj truly claim inside a spectacle that profits from her performance?
2. Does Minaj’s dominance over the puppet rappers represent agency, or merely the appearance of control granted to her by the very machinery that objectifies Black women?
3. When a Black woman’s visibility is structured by systems that commodify her body, can performing power ever escape becoming another form of constraint?
In light of these questions, I argue that the rhetorical significance of Minaj’s “Barbie Dreams” lies not in Minaj’s intent but in how her performance reveals the fragility and opacity of power and agency afforded to Black women operating within white, mainstream popular culture.
In this essay, I use Black feminist theory, multimodal rhetorical analysis, and performance studies to conduct a close reading of “Barbie Dreams.” As scholars such as hooks demonstrate, representation functions as a political terrain in which pleasure, sexuality, and desirability are inseparable from systems of oppression. Within this tradition, performance theory is not understood as self-expression alone, but as a site where historical violence and institutional power take form in mainstream media. Bringing these traditions together allows this essay to approach “Barbie Dreams” as a multimodal rhetorical performance in which meaning emerges through the seen and unseen: sound, color, movement, costume, editing, authorship, and spectatorship.
Puppeteering, Performance, and the Illusion of Power
The first Barbie Doll was released in 1959[2], and in 1962, Barbie’s first Dreamhouse was released. Whitney Mallett, co-writer of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey (2022), traces the Dreamhouse’s evolution, showing how it has long aestheticized feminine autonomy, independence, leisure, and status into consumable design marketed to youth. Across its iterations, containment is reframed as progress and visibility as empowerment, permitting freedom only within market-approved scripts. When Minaj enters this symbolic space, she does not step into a neutral fantasy but into a regulated architecture of spectacle designed to stage femininity for consumption, surveillance, and pleasure. Her performance exaggerates and disrupts this logic, yet remains mediated by the same regimes of display and commodification that govern Barbie’s world. This historically disciplined space forms the ideological backdrop against which “Barbie Dreams” operates, shaping how Minaj’s performance can be read and circulated.
Nicki Minaj’s “Barbie Dreams” debuted on her 4th studio album Queen, showcasing her ability to reinterpret and innovate within a well-established Hip-Hop tradition. In the track, Nicki raps over The Notorious B.I.G.'s sample “Just Playin (Dreams),” a song released in 1994 as part of B.I.G. 's debut album Ready to Die. In the original, B.I.G. humorously detailed his sexual fantasies about prominent Black women entertainers, using the song as a “playful” yet provocative commentary on celebrity culture, stating “Dreams of fuckin' an R&B bitch / I'm just playin', but I'm sayin'.”[3] The track quickly became iconic for its mix of humor, audacity, and unabashed portrayal of men’s desire. Two years later, Lil’ Kim, B.I.G.’s protégé and ex-girlfriend and frequent collaborator, flipped the script with her own version, “Dreams,” on her 1996 debut album Hard Core. In her rendition, Lil’ Kim details her own sexual fantasies, reversing the power dynamics of B.I.G.’s original and setting a precedent for women in Hip-Hop to “(re)claim” narratives often dominated by men’s voices. This trend of reimagining “Dreams” continued in 1999 with 50 Cent’s track “How to Rob,” where he humorously fantasized about robbing prominent celebrities, again using the methodology of name-dropping and parody to spark controversy and attention. By situating herself within this lineage of blending humor, celebrity critique, and creative expression, Minaj’s use of “Dreams” becomes an intervention that connects her performance to broader cultural debates about gender dynamics in the rap genre.
In the song “Barbie Dreams,” and as part of the album Queen, Minaj uses visual symbolism, blending sensuality with cultural and regal imagery, to evoke a performance of dominance, divinity, and femininity, aligning her persona with the authority of a Queen. One way Minaj asserts this dominance is through explicit references to sexual fantasies with rapper peers (predominantly referencing men), most of whom she’s previously collaborated with, dated, had friendships with, or are signed to the same label (Young Money). Nicki presents her version of “Just Playing” by titling the song "Barbie [her fanbase nickname] Dreams [continuing the recurring name]," using rumors, personas, jokes, and other provocative language to play on the idea that she wanted to have sex with these men, or she has, or would absolutely not. The puppet sequence literalizes K. Allison Hammer’s notion of female phallicism in their analysis of Josephine Baker’s “Banana Dance,” Hammer argues that “the body of a woman with a phallus connotes simultaneously the threat of castration, which Butler observes is a way of “being the phallus,” as it is thought that women “are” the phallus, and the male fear of castration anxiety, which stems from “having the phallus” and fearing its loss.” (2020, p. 167). Within Western patriarchal and heteronormative gender structures, women are permitted to embody desirability but denied authority. Female phallicism emerges when a woman appears to occupy both positions at once: she remains sexually visible and feminine while simultaneously exercising symbolic control and dominance.
This dual positioning destabilizes gender hierarchies by suggesting that power is not naturally tied to masculinity. As a result, it produces castration anxiety, understood not as a physical threat but as fear of losing social authority, masculine legitimacy, and possession over women. The woman with a symbolic phallus thus becomes a disruptive figure who exposes the fragility of patriarchal power by demonstrating that dominance can be performed, transferred, and temporarily occupied without abandoning femininity. In the music video, Nicki is seen with puppet versions of the rappers that she mentions in the song. This expands the idea of female phallicism[4] because the puppets are at her disposal, under her control, and are lifeless with no sexual power, mimicking the concept of castration as related to female phallicism. Nicki flaunts her sexuality through her wardrobe and movement, carrying out a performance of dominance and control over the space. Her lyrics, “Dreams of fucking one of these little rappers / I’m just playing, but I’m saying,” the word “little” works as deliberate emasculation, shrinking her male peers in stature, talent, and sexual power. Minaj reduces the men to miniature caricatures who exist only within her fantasy. In other lines, she exposes potential insecurities and rumors surrounding male rappers, including speech impediments, weight, relationships, or internet memes, weaponizing the same forms of mockery that social media uses to humiliate them:
B-beat the pussy up, make sure it's a K-O /
Step your banks up like you're movin' that yayo
Drake worth a hundred mill, he always buyin' me shit /
But I don't know if the pussy wet or if he cryin' and shit
Used to fuck with Young Thug, I ain't addressin' this shit /
C-caught him in my dressing room, stealin' dresses and shit
I used to give this nigga with a lisp tests and shit /
How you want the pu-thy? Can't say your S's and shit, uh
Talkin' 'bout, "Yo, why you got these niggas fightin' and shit?" /
On the, on the real, I should make these niggas scrap for the pussy
Had to cancel DJ Khaled, boy, we ain't speakin' /
Ain't no fat nigga tellin' me what he ain't eatin'
These lyrical choices perpetuate fatphobia, homophobia, and ableism, and must be recognized as harmful even when used in the context of comedic wordplay. Minaj is attempting to transform harmful rhetoric into a performance of lyrical control. What we might call lyrical pegging emerges here: the act of using language to invert sexual hierarchies, claiming the penetrative voice that rap historically reserves for men. Yet her dominance remains performative. Minaj’s dominance depends on the same devices that exclude her. The puppets and the rigidity of her movements remind us that the performance itself is a constraint. Minaj’s “humor” doesn’t dissolve these contradictions; it exposes them. Minaj’s control, while alluring, might be the most elaborate illusion of all.
To further my argument, I refer to the textile artist Qualeasha Wood’s exhibition code_eden, specifically looking at the piece titled Deus Ex Machina (What Was I Made For?). The woven fabric is overwhelming to unpack at first, but with further observation, the piece depicts Woods squatting beneath a tree, holding a tan Telfar bag in one hand and an image of a snake wrapped around an apple in the other, displayed at the center of a MacBook home screen with multiple tabs open. A halo surrounds her head, accompanied by emojis such as a heart on fire and a Black angel, along with images of clouds, which draw connections to the technological element of the iCloud. Together, these details merge symbols of technology, spirituality, and contemporary Black identity, and much like Minaj’s Dreamhouse, Wood’s digital-ecological setting functions as a manufactured environment in which Black feminine presence appears empowered while remaining structurally programmed.
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Figure 2: Qualeasha Wood, Deus Ex Machina (What Was I Made For?). Woven jacquard, machine embroidery, and glass seed beads. 2024. 157.5 x 213.4 cm, 62 x 84 in. |
Qualeasha Wood’s decision to subtitle the piece Deus Ex Machina with “What Was I Made For?” directly references Billie Eilish’s song from the Barbie Movie (2023) soundtrack titled “What Was I Made For?” that tells the story of the crisis of purpose within white femininity while ultimately resolving that crisis through a Pinocchio-type ending. In the Barbie movie, the question “What was I made for?” emerges as an existential inquiry prompted by Barbie’s confrontation with mortality, sadness, and meaninglessness after leaving Barbieland. The film presents this moment as a rupture in an otherwise seamless fantasy of perfection. White femininity, in this narrative, is allowed to experience crisis without being destroyed by it, transforming into a vessel toward becoming more fully human. Wood’s use of this question fundamentally eradicates its original meaning. When asked of Black subjects, and particularly Black women, "What was I made for?” requires reflection on the long-standing treatment of Black flesh, valued for what it can produce, repair, or stabilize. The same question does not offer the same freedom across racialized positions. White femininity is permitted to experience fragility without being made responsible for stabilizing the social order. This distinction emphasizes the significance of Deus Ex Machina as a title. The English translation to the Latin saying Deus ex machina means “God from the Machine,” is “a person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty…first used in ancient Greek and Roman drama…” (Britannica, 2025). Contemporarily, when thinking about Black women, they are repeatedly positioned as such forces. Within this framework, Black femininity is not permitted unstructured uncertainty but is continuously formatted through demands for legibility. Like Minaj’s Dreamhouse, Wood’s digital paradise offers the appearance of sanctuary while operating within regimes of visibility and usefulness.
Woods' exhibition title code_eden (2025), which, in Christian theology, refers to Eden as a paradise created by God for Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2–3, God forms a man from the dust and breathes life into him (Adam), then plants the Garden of Eden and places the man there to care for it. Eden is a living paradise filled with nourishing trees, rivers, and the tree of life, alongside the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God later creates a woman (Eve) from the man’s rib, so he is not alone, and they live in the garden without shame. The fall occurs when the serpent deceives the woman into eating the forbidden fruit, which she also gives to the man. Their disobedience brings awareness, judgment, and hardship, and they are expelled from Eden so they cannot access the tree of life. This is the story of Adam and Eve as told in the Christian Bible. Medieval texts such as The Alphabet of Ben Sira (c. 700-1000 CE) identify Lilith as Adam’s first wife, created from the earth and therefore his equal. The only reference to Lilith in the Christian Bible appears briefly (unnamed) in Isaiah 34:14[6] where she is said to be among “the wild beasts of the island.” After refusing sexual and social subordination, she leaves Eden and is subsequently recoded as demonic, dangerous, and illegitimate. Though created by God, she is denied divine protection and exiled to the wilderness and the sea (Gaines, 2025). By naming Eden as code, Wood suggests that femininity is not natural but programmed through inherited symbolic systems. Black women are repeatedly positioned within this grammar as figures closer to Lilith than Eve. This framing echoes Dr. Frank B. Wilderson’s (2016) claim that “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness… there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life.” If Eden presumes an origin of fullness, Blackness is defined by its absence from that origin. Within the Eden narrative, Eve establishes femininity as the site where blame is assigned to “the woman.” White womanhood inherits this position as protected subjecthood, one whose fall can be redeemed, while the Black “woman” inherits it as permanent failure, excluded from redemption. Together, Wood’s work helps clarify how Minaj’s performance demonstrates a managed aesthetic of control through spectacle, iconography, and image control, while remaining embedded in systems of capitalism and white supremacy, allowing Black visibility and participation only under conditional and disciplinary terms.
Minaj, and the Barbie persona she inhabits, occupies a historically sanitized space and transforms it from a site of presumed innocence into one of erotic authorship, positioning herself as both doll and architect, inviting us into her fantasy. The Dreamhouse, once a space where the doll is played with, now becomes the elusive stage where Minaj asserts dominance and she plays with others. However, the distinction between body and flesh becomes crucial. Hortense Spillers describes flesh as the “zero degree of social conceptualization,” the site where Black personhood was stripped under enslavement (Spillers, 1987, 445-446). The historical Barbie doll body represents the opposite, where whiteness and femininity coincide, to create an ideal of perfection. Minaj's performance of autonomy inside a pre-fabricated Dreamhouse carries a tragic irony, falling inside the lineage of pop imagery where Black womanhood is rendered legible through commodity and erotic display, inviting spectators and voyeurists to consume her while pretending she is fully in control. As Saidiya Hartman in the article “Venus in Two Acts,” explains, “critical fabulation” is a practice that pushes against the limits of the archive by using speculation and the subjunctive to “tell an impossible story” (2008, p. 11) while simultaneously being comforted with the impossibility of fully representing the lives erased by violence. Reading this performance through critical fabulation means refusing the comforting story that her dominance resolves the violence of representation. In that tension between spectacle and authorship, between “I’m just playin’” and “but I’m sayin’,” the video becomes a counter-history of Black feminine performance as a way of exposing its machinery. Minaj appears to control the stage, but the camera, lighting, and design remind us that she remains a product of white mainstream capitalist media, a pop spectacle. The fantasy of control exists inside a machinery that scripts her every movement. The Dreamhouse, like the music industry itself, offers her the illusion of power inside a system that profits from her performance.
To understand the visual and lyrical world of “Barbie Dreams,” we must think about what it means for a Black woman to perform inside a fabricated world. In Art on My Mind, bell hooks writes that “the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle,” where domination and resistance take shape (1995, p. 57). Minaj’s performance embodies that struggle. In Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation, Tiffany E. Barber helps situate this tension by critiquing the expectation that Black women’s art must be redemptive or healing stating, “Black women are expected to advocate for themselves, diversify the institutions in which they live and labor, and denounce and remedy their own subjugation” (2025, p. 19-20). Yet Minaj’s performance complicates this claim. While she appears to reject respectability and moral uplift, she also stages a different kind of redemption. Within the male-centered machinery of Hip-Hop and pop spectacle, Minaj makes her Barbie persona perform the fantasy of female phallic dominance so completely that it begins to fracture under its own allusion. By demanding control while simultaneously performing fungibility—becoming a body that can be consumed like a product—Minaj complicates her message of empowerment. If the Mammy once represented moral labor and self-sacrifice, Minaj’s Barbie persona is its hyper-sexualized inverse. Both figures serve as cultural scripts for controlling Black women’s visibility. As Barber argues, the “undesirable” Black woman disturbs white comfort and feminist redemption (25). Minaj’s Barbie is too loud, too sexual, too self-possessed to be useful to respectability politics but too commodified to be free. Minaj’s fame depends on the same systems that demand her spectacle. She has built her Dreamhouse on a foundation designed to contain her. Even her defiance becomes part of the show. Minaj’s power, then, is not absolute. It is what might be called a performance of will within confinement.
In the book Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum, Terri Kapsalis reminds us that making a spectacle of women’s bodies can be harmful because “visibility can be oppression or liberation or both or neither” (1997, p. 7). Whether or not Nicki Minaj intends to critique the Hip Hop industry, her body becomes the site where power exposes itself: she appears to command the gaze, but remains the object that is being gazed upon. Like the patient under examination, Minaj’s visibility is directed by a larger apparatus. The stage of Barbie’s Dream functions like the speculum that Kapsalis discusses, opening her up for examination under the guise of agency. It is the camera, the industry, and the audience that ultimately decide what is seen and how. This uncertainty is the point. Minaj may not be crafting a masterful subversion; she may simply be participating in a system that profits from her spectacle. And still, the performance reveals the boundaries of her enclosure. We witness a Black woman celebrated as a queen but is positioned as a product, framed as sexually dominant but restricted to performing a role designed for others’ consumption.
Conclusion
To read “Barbie Dreams,” then, is to practice the very form of cultural literacy that hooks calls for that pays attention to what is shown and what is obscured, to how Black womanhood is staged, consumed, and (re)imagined. Minaj’s Dreamscape leaves us questioning: Can liberation exist inside the spectacle? Can performance undo the gaze, or only mirror it? The significance of “Barbie Dreams” doesn’t depend on Minaj’s intention. Its power lies in showing us what is already true: that Black women are under surveillance. This structure becomes even more legible when placed alongside Minaj’s recent public appearances alongside Donald Trump and her repeated public defense of her husband despite his status as a registered sex offender for a 1995 attempted rape conviction (BBC, 2022). These moments cannot be dismissed as merely “personal choices” or political affiliations. Minaj's allegiance to violent men and violent systems exposes how Black women's celebrity operates within systems that reward proximity to power. Alignment with white nationalist politics and the minimization of gendered violence function here as avenues for institutional protection. Engaging with Charles Athanasopoulos’s theory of Black Iconoclasm critiques the demand that Black people’s cultural production must be evaluated through a binary “yes/no” framework, stripping it of its complexity and nuance (2024, p. 10). Athanasopoulos argues that “iconoclasm exists in a reciprocal logic in which the breaking of old icons leads to the creation of new icons, which leads to new iconoclasms in a recurring cycle” (p. 6), naming figures and movements such as Barack Obama, Trayvon Martin, Black Panther, and Black Lives Matter murals as examples of how even sporadic empowering visibility is often absorbed back into Western norms of acceptable Blackness, destabilizing the expectation that Black performance must be inspirational or legible. Reading Minaj’s Dreamscape through a multimodal rhetorical analysis shifts the question away from creative intent or moral judgment and toward what the spectacle itself reveals about the systems that demand Black women’s visibility while disciplining it. The most provocative question the video poses is not what Minaj meant, but what her spectacle teaches us about the system that scripts her. Minaj does not answer this; she performs the tension. In doing so, she makes visible what mainstream popular culture would rather we never see, demonstrating how performance itself becomes a form of critique, a method of reading culture from within its own illusions.
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[1] From hooks' Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. In this passage, bell hooks uses the term “black females” to critique the racialized and gendered stereotypes imposed on Black women. I retain hooks’s original terminology to preserve her critique’s historical context. Throughout my own writing, I use Black women and capitalize Black.
[2] It wasn’t until 1980 that the first Black Barbie, created by Kitty Black Perkins, entered the scene and was the start of a legacy of Black Barbies (Wakeman, 2024).
[3] The quoted lyric contains harmful and misogynistic language. It is reproduced here only for critical and analytical purposes within the context of discussing representations of gender and sexuality in Hip-Hop culture.
[4] I use the term “female” here specifically to maintain continuity with Hammer’s theoretical framing of “female phallicism.” This usage does not intend to reduce womanhood to biological sex, but rather to reflect the rhetorical and historical context in which these ideas about embodiment, sexuality, and power were constructed.
[5] While this essay analyzes Minaj’s use of parody and inversion, it does not condone the fatphobic, homophobic, or ableist language that appears in portions of the song. These elements reflect broader patterns of harm within Hip-Hop and popular culture that warrant critique even as we study their function rhetorically.
[6] “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.” —Isaiah 34:14 King James Version (KJV); Lilith appears only once in the Bible, listed among desert creatures and demons inhabiting a cursed wilderness. Translated in the King James Version as “screech owl,” associating her with night and exile.