Why Cardi B's pregnancy is such a beautiful thing

The rapper’s Coachella set was a defiant sign that pregnancy doesn’t slow a woman down – and can be sexy as hell

Rapper Cardi B revealed her pregnancy on Saturday Night Live this month after weeks of speculation. The Bronx native showcased her growing belly while performing Be Careful, the second single from her debut album, Invasion of Privacy. The song interpolates Lauryn Hill’s Ex-Factor, a woeful groove about unhealthy love.

The two women are connected in more ways than one. Last year, Cardi became the first female rapper to have a solo record top the Billboard Hot 100 since Hill did it in 1998. And, soon, both Cardi B and Lauryn Hill will know what it’s like to mother young children while managing hugely successful rap careers.

On her first and only studio album, Lauryn Hill sings To Zion. It is a celebration of the child she had despite suggestions she terminate her pregnancy to save her professional ambitions. Of course a baby didn’t stop her. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold millions of copies and secured her a Grammy for album of the year.

Twenty years later, Cardi B is pregnant. And the stigma associated with carrying a child has not waned. In interviews, Cardi recalls her record label and inner circle warning her that the genre has never before embraced a woman who is a few months shy of giving birth.

But Cardi is a success story unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and the stripper-turned-television star-turned-hip-hop superstar is determined to chart her own path. She maintains that she has no plans to give up music to be a stay-at-home mom. “Why can’t I have both?” she asked the New York radio host Ebro Darden during an interview.

Since the announcement, Cardi B has carried on along the the same path that propelled her to stardom. Both her persona and music have remained raw and sexually explicit.

The 35-minute set she performed at Coachella last weekend should reassure any fans who feared she might succumb to the cultural expectations foisted upon pregnant women.

Cardi B doesn’t aspire to purity, and she is not looking to be placed on a pedestal. By remaining sex and sex-worker positive, Cardi B cemented her place as one of rap’s foremost boundary pushers.

Coachella was Cardi B’s first opportunity to make a statement post-album release, and she told the world that she will always be Cardi, a woman who is, among other things, a sexual being.

From the start of the performance, she proudly claimed her identity as a former stripper. This biographical detail is not a shameful one. She treats her old job as a mundane fact. And when it was time for Cardi to show off the moves she perfected in the strip club, she did not hold back.

The show’s most memorable moments came when she twerked, first with her hands on the stage’s white multi-level platform, then on the floor, and then with her hands on her knees, to the hit song No Limit and the new release She Bad. After the second selection finished, she yelled, “That’s how I got pregnant, y’all” with typical effervescence.

The display was jarring because it is a sight we rarely see. Though pregnancy and sex are inextricably linked, pregnant women are not given space to acknowledge the connection. Sensual photos of expectant mothers baring their baby bumps are increasingly common, but Cardi B defied the boundaries of social acceptability by forgoing “tastefulness”.

In doing so, she tapped into what the scholar LH Stallings calls the Black Ratchet Imagination where “the performance of the failure to be respectable, uplifting, and a credit to the race” forces spectators to consider new possibilities.

A reserved presentation is the expected response to racist caricatures of neglectful black motherhood. Instead Cardi B uses hip-hop, a genre defined by resistance to mainstream social mores, to contest the constraints of gender roles.

As she delights in a sexuality that is not for the male gaze, Cardi B opens up space for pregnant women who are not famous to be their full selves.

• Kimberly Foster is the founder and editor of the blog For Harriet