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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