Cardi B Shuts Down “Queerbaiting” Claims by Reminding Everyone She’s Bisexual

Okay children, let’s have a talk about how you’ve been treating bi women, because some of this policing is getting old.

Last week saw the long-awaited release of Normani’s new single “Wild Side,” featuring Cardi B and sampling Aaliyah’s iconic “One in a Million.” The video was lush and sensual, with Normani serving look after look after look (that white gauzy outfit is a personal favorite) before joining Cardi in a nearly nude embrace while the “WAP” rapper performed her verse.

And that’s where the trouble started.

After the video dropped, a fan commented on Instagram that the two were “queerbaiting” and perpetuating the trope of women performing sapphistry for the male gaze. This comment made it to Twitter via Jezebel staffer Ashley Reese, who aptly snarked: “I love how queerbaiting has devolved into ‘women touching on camera.’”

Before we go further, it’s important to note that this commenter seems to have been one of very few denizens of the internet who would publicly allege that Normani and Cardi were queerbaiting their fans. In the current digital media landscape, it’s easy for people to latch onto a viral Tweet or post and extrapolate too far, assuming that one person speaks for a silent crowd.

Indeed, there’s no evidence of a crowd here, given that the replies to Reese’s tweet were universally dismissive of the notion that Cardi B was “queerbaiting.” But generally speaking, accusing individual artists and performers of “queerbaiting” is becoming kind of a thing, as Rolling Stone noted in a recent article which linked to Reese’s tweet as a recent example.

When Cardi read that article, though, she saw red. “You do know we was trying to hide a whole baby bump right?” she tweeted on July 23. While she is married to a man, rapper Offset, she added that she has shared a great deal about her “bisexuality and my experiences wit girls.”

Cardi followed that up with deeper thoughts. “I don’t like this new ‘queer baiting’ word,” she said, adding that she feels as if it pressures musicians “to talk about their sexuality or their experiences that they don’t feel comfortable speaking about.” Would an artist, she wondered, be forced to prove their sexuality to express their queerness in a music video?

However you feel about Cardi otherwise, in this case she’s got some good points. While responding to criticism over using transphobic slurs she’s in the past (which she’s since apologized for), Cardi came out as “a whole bisexual” back in 2019. Last year she went a little further, tweeting: “I don’t support the LGBT community because I have ‘gay fans.’ I support because of the confused feelings I had growing up,” namely wondering whether it was “normal to like girls?”

We don’t know how Normani identifies, but that’s kind of Cardi B’s point here: The “Wild Side” artist deserves to be left alone and to express her sexuality however she likes, without a bunch of people assuming she’s a straight woman trying to cynically make money off of The Gays.

Just because someone hasn’t officially and publicly announced their preferences doesn’t mean any queerness they choose to display is “baiting” fans for clout or sales. And it’s especially heinous when bisexual women like Cardi are accused of just performing love between women for the benefit of men — an age-old biphobic trope that trivializes the struggles queer women go through to understand their own desires.

What makes this even worse is that “queerbaiting,” in its original context, referred to something wholly different. Developed via fandom bloggers mainly on Tumblr in the early 2010s, “queerbaiting” was a term used to critique TV shows, movies, and other narrative media for the common practice of playing up gay subtext to string along LGBTQ+ viewers, with Supernatural and the BBC’s Sherlock receiving much ire for such gambits.

“When we’re only getting crumbs while heterosexual characters run the full gamut of romantic storylines, viewers should definitely hold writers accountable and ask why this is the case,” wrote one Autostraddle contributor in 2013. “Yet, expanding the ‘queerbaiting’ debate to include subtext in general makes it a bit troubling…. intention should be considered if one is going to accuse show creators of homophobia for including subtext.”

Years later, it seems like we’ve strayed far from what “queerbaiting” was meant to criticize. This is complicated stuff, to be sure, but let’s back off Normani and Cardi and ask: What is all this discourse really accomplishing? Cardi B — a “whole bisexual” — can take whoever she wants to the dance.

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