Tunisian rap, like its Western counterpart, remains deeply marked by sexism. Despite the growing visibility of women artists, many segments of society continue to resist their presence in the scene. Early Tunisian rap, often associated with criminality, drugs, and sex, was branded as vulgar and deemed unsuitable for women. Male rappers’ casual use of sexual slurs further entrenched these prejudices, while women who dared to enter the genre faced additional stigma—branded as either “masculine” or morally suspect.

This gendered hostility is deeply rooted in the narratives constructed by male rappers themselves. While some men have supported their female colleagues and collaborated with them, many portray women through a rigid dichotomy: either virtuous or promiscuous, madonna or whore. Obscene language often serves to degrade “fallen” women who transgress patriarchal norms, even as rappers express reverence and gratitude toward mothers and sisters. In contrast to Western rap, where maternal figures are often peripheral, the mother holds a sacred place in Tunisian hip hop, celebrated as a symbol of sacrifice and virtue. This sharp division between respectable and unrespectable women reinforces toxic masculinity and helps sustain a cultural environment hostile to female rappers like Lully Snake.

Pioneering artists such as Sabrina, Medusa, Queen Nesrine, Nesrine Mokdad (a.k.a. Anonymous), FBK, and Altaf have all encountered fierce misogynistic opposition. Lully Snake stands out for the particular path she has carved across two patriarchal musical worlds. Reflecting on her long and difficult journey, she often underscores the contempt directed toward women who rap—especially those unafraid to use “bad words.”

While sexism pervades Tunisia’s rap scene as a whole, Lully Snake’s experience is distinct: She navigates not only rap but also mahraganat, a street genre born in the slums of Cairo in 2008. Like rap, mahraganat is a masculine sphere, dominated by self-taught young men from lower-class backgrounds whose songs, laden with insults, sexual innuendo, and drug references, are often accused of degrading public morals. Long viewed by elites as vulgar and corrupting, mahraganat artists have been policed not only for their gender but also for their class background, facing accusations of undermining moral respectability. In this context, women’s entry into mahraganat compounds the perceived threat: not only challenging gender boundaries but transgressing deeply entrenched social hierarchies. Egyptian women began performing it publicly only in 2017, and even today, female rappers venturing into mahraganat remain rare.

It is within this doubly charged terrain that Lully Snake emerged, becoming the first Tunisian female rapper to operate at the intersection of rap and mahraganat. This synthesis is evident in her debut song “Zabatna Kida,” released in 2024, which boldly blends Tunisian rap’s cadence with the festive, boisterous beats of mahraganat. The song’s success emboldened her to pursue this hybrid style further, culminating in subsequent tracks like “Biid Alia” and “Hannah Montana,” both released in 2025. Through this musical fusion, Lully Snake pioneered a novel sound that aligns Maghrebi hip hop culture with Egyptian mahraganat, in both rhythm and language. Her multilingual approach—effortlessly moving between Tunisian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, English, and Moroccan Arabic—defies rigid linguistic hierarchies and enacts a form of creative solidarity across borders. By refusing to limit herself to a single dialect or tradition, she opens her music to a broader Arab and African world, offering a vision of identity as fluid, plural, and insurgent.

Lully Snake’s  innovative fusion of rap and mahraganat is not confined to her sound alone but also displayed visually through her fashion and performance. In the video for “Zabatna Kida,” she juxtaposes Egyptian traditional bangles and a headscarf with a snapback hat and golden rap chain, blending two cultural aesthetics into a single style. Here, snapbacks and bling—emblems of rap fashion—coexist with the jewelry and loose veils typical of mahraganat street weddings. The sonic marriage between an Arabian Nights–style background music and a rap rhythm is mirrored by her performance, as she combines the sensual arm movements of belly dance with the assertive hand gestures of rap. Despite the video’s orientalist decor, the rawness of her hand gestures and the truck setting from which she raps stave off the danger of self-orientalization.

This strategy is further developed in “Biid Alia.” Although the video unfolds within the gilded fantasy of a One Thousand and One Nights palace, the narrative refuses easy exoticism. Instead of reproducing the figure of the submissive North African woman, Lully Snake flips the script: She appears dressed as Scheherazade, but armed with a dagger, threatening her lover and asserting her capacity for vengeance. While her costume and some gestures flirt with self-exoticization, her lyrical posture resists objectification. In “Biid Alia,” she chastises an unfaithful partner, proclaiming her indifference to the breakup and warning him of retribution. Far from perpetuating the cliché of the hypersexual North African male patriarch presiding over a passive harem, Lully Snake’s defiant tone challenges both local misogyny and Western stereotypes about Maghrebi women.

Through her innovative blend of Tunisian rap and Egyptian mahraganat, Lully Snake opens a new space of cultural and political expression. Her performances expose and contest the sexism embedded in Tunisia’s music industry, while also subverting the lingering orientalist fantasies that deny North African women their agency. Across her growing body of work, she emerges not as a victim, but as a fiercely independent artist determined to shape her own narrative. In doing so, she models a broader cultural refusal—an insistence that creativity, identity, and resistance need not fit the inherited scripts of nation, genre, or gender. Lully Snake’s emergence signals not only a feminist breakthrough but a new experimentalism in Tunisian and Maghrebi popular culture: one that is at once rebellious, syncretic, and defiantly alive.