Imagining Beyoncé
A Case Study in Female Superstardom
Annelot Prins (10203192) Master thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Dr. J.W. Kooijman 10-02-2016, Words: 20.826
Contents
Acknowledgements
3
Introduction
4
1
Race And The Post-racial
19
2
Performing Feminisms
30
3
Family As Value
46
Conclusion
65
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Dr. Gaston Franssen, who was willing to teach the tutorial "Introduction to Celebrity Studies and Fan Studies", even when I turned out to be the only participant. Many thanks for his guidance during my first research project about Beyoncé, and his stimulating mentorship that subsequently led to my debut as presenter during an academic conference with this article.
My deepest gratitude goes out to Dr. Jaap Kooijman, who was kind enough to supervise my thesis, even though I was stationed in a different department. I thank him for teaching the tutorial "Star Studies Revisited", which he carried through although I again turned out to be the only participant. Many thanks for his support in preparing my research presentation for my first academic conference, his constructive feedback on my thesis and the inspiration he gave me through his own research.
Thanks to all participants of FTM13 and Sibéal15 for all their critical opinions, insightful remarks and encouraging words. Thank you for adopting me into your networks, they inspire me and give me a deeper understanding of feminist research.
I need to thank Lotte Hordijk and Britt Brons for their biased views on Beyoncé, and Thirsa van Dam en Sophie Rutenfrans for all their unbiased and critical views on Beyoncé. I thank all four women for their support and the interest they take in everything I do. I am lucky to call you my friends.
Last but not least, I thank Bram van Dijk for his patience with my stringent work ethics. Thank you for all the critical readings. Thank you for the endless affirmations of your belief in me and my work.
Introduction
It was around 2001, when I was thirteen years old, that I started spending my after school hours in my bedroom instead of downstairs with my parents. I was a young White girl, growing up in a middle-class household in a small village in the Netherlands. A lot of the time spent in my room was used to listen to popular music and to practice poorly executed dance routines that I imitated from video clips. Often, these video clips were from Destiny's Child, who were at the height of their career at the time. Beyoncé Knowles was clearly the most important member of the group. Apart from always singing solos and dancing in the middle and front positions, she also wrote songs for them and quickly became the sole producer of most tracks on their albums (O'Brien 2012: 248).
In 2003, Beyoncé pulled what Lucy O'Brien calls "a Diana Ross," and started pursuing a solo career. This went very well: she won numerous Grammy's and other awards, and had dozens of hits. Her career has been expanding for over two decades, and the demise of her popularity is nowhere in sight yet. Forbes editor Zack O'Malley Greenberg notes that Beyoncé had one of her best years in 2013, earning $53 million. "How did she follow that feat? By more than doubling that total in 2014" (O'Malley Greenberg 2014: par. 1).
Last year I went to Antwerp to see "The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour." For a research project I later interviewed my friends about this experience and asked them what Beyoncé means to them. Their answers were passionate. "She makes me want to be the best possible version of myself, she empowers me", my friend Lotte said (Prins 2015: 1). She continued that Beyoncé is the ideal woman to her: "She comes across as a good mother, a good wife, and a talented artist – what more can you wish for! She is sexy and works
incredibly hard" (Prins 2015: 3). Beyoncé clearly functions as a role model to her, and the ways in which she does so are based on ideological gender assumptions that resonate in society. My friends' feelings about Beyoncé are not exceptional. Cornell Sandvoss argues that fans often appropriate icons like Beyoncé "as meaningful resources in their everyday lives" (Sandvoss as in Cashmore 2010: 138).
Phillips et al. argue “Popular music, as the folk music of the modern and postmodern eras, articulates the stories, philosophies, and yearnings of the masses” (2005: 259). Alicia Durham adds to this that “Beyoncé is a key figure for contemporary feminist media studies because she represents the production of celebrity, gender politics presently defined by hip hop, and the complex negotiations of self image and sexuality for young women coming of age during postfeminism” (2012: 36) In her book She Bop, The Definitive History of Women in Popular
Music (2012), O'Brien mentions that almost all female artists she spoke with expressed an
awareness of their responsibility as role models to their (female) fans (12). Beyoncé herself mentions her responsibility as female artist towards her fans in the documentary Beyoncé: Life Is
But A Dream (HBO, 2013). She explains she remembers being a little girl herself and looking
up to other artists, and adds that she hopes to be an example to young girls around the world. Nevertheless, while Beyoncé is known as a role model for young girls and can probably call herself the most well-known celebrity feminist on earth, she does not involve herself with political stances. Ellis Cashmore argues “Her considered silence on social and political issues ensures that she avoids controversy and endears herself both to advertisers and a mainstream audience. It also assures her a reputation as a ‘safe’ figure: unlike some other African American celebrities in recent years, Beyoncé is prudent, unadventurous and not prone to commenting on issues other than her own products or endorsements” (Cashmore 2010: 137). With these mild stances towards the political side of identity politics, she ensures her global success. Yet, while she claims herself to be universal and calls herself a feminist, she does slide “comfortably into a familiar discourse of exoticism essayed by earlier Black female
performers” (Cashmore 2010: 135). In the following thesis, I will critically analyse the complex narratives in Beyoncé's star text that have such an effect on my friend, and possibly other fans. What does Beyoncé tell us about the world today?
Researching celebrities
When Beyoncé is discussed in this thesis I never refer to the actual person Beyoncé, but always to the star text, the persona, of Beyoncé as pop star. In order to research this persona, I made a selection of all sorts of publicly available material. This means that I look at music, images, videos, written work and critical opinions. As Dyer notes: "Star images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual" (Dyer 2004: 3). I am not concerned with the true person behind the musician -- I am interested in what Beyoncé as a commodity signifies. Her main goal as commodity is, of course, to make profit. But in order to do this the manufactured nature of her star text needs to be disguised (Dyer 1998: 20). The fans need to believe that they see Beyoncé as she “really” is, there has to be a certain trust in the truthfulness and authenticity of the star. According to Goodwin, this shows us that the aesthetics of pop music are tied to a "Romantic discourse of self-expression" (Goodwin 1992: 104). Pop stars need to appear "real" about their intentions and feelings, they need to come across as sincere (Goodwin 1992: 104).
Whether or not they are sincere is not important here. Andrew Goodwin explains:
The content of any given persona may or may not be 'true' (i.e. actually built on the real-life circumstances of the performer); the point is that it involves a massive degree of manipulation on the part of the culture industries (not just the music business, but also the media commentators and critics who collude in these constructions). This suggests less a parallel with drama (self-evident fictions) or documentary (mimetic reflections) than with the only area of contemporary culture that is thoroughly legitimated (for reasons having to do with economic
power) in its deliberate confusion of the two – advertising (that is, fictions presented as if they were mimetic reflection) (Goodwin 1992: 106).
We are thus not looking at persons, but at media phenomena. What is important to keep in mind when researching musical celebrities is that there is an economic investment at play; their main goal is to make more money. There is thus a tension between the star as a person and the star as persona, as commodity. The star as commodity always needs to make more money, but at the same time needs to disguise her or himself as an authentic person who just wants to transmit her or his talent, whatever it may be. Of course, we all know that stars are products that are being sold to us, and that this happens through manipulation, insincerity and inauthenticity. Nevertheless, stars still need to disguise this the best they can in order to give us the impression that they are "real", they have to make it possible for us to choose to believe in them and look beyond, or even temporarily forget, the production and manipulation involved in their persona.
As Dyer argues: "The general image of stardom can be seen as a version of the American Dream, organised around the themes of consumption, success and ordinariness" (1998: 35). We need to believe that stars are just like us, and that success is possible when one works hard enough, regardless of class, gender, sexuality and so on. Stardom is thus connected to the ideological values of the United States, and especially to the importance they lay on the American Dream. A star can be seen as the quintessential American citizen, and indirectly becomes a symbol of the nation through stardom. The ordinariness of a star, however, always needs to be combined with extraordinariness (Dyer 2004: 22). Stars need to be special in a way, they need to have a surplus value that separates them from non-famous people, while at the same time remaining "one of us" with whom we can identify as spectator or fan. The contradiction between these two opposing poles of "stars-as-ordinary" and "stars-as-special" is irresolvable and very important for the success of a star (Dyer 1998 43).
Record companies know that the creation of a persona for a musician can create career longevity. This is significant, since they are invested in the human body in which the pop star resides and need to make as much money as possible of this specific body (Goodwin 1992: 105). Through the creation of an image for a pop star, additional meanings are attached to musical pieces. It enables audiences to go beyond singular artefacts and provide a point of identification. It gives the audience a persona to relate to. As aforementioned, this increases the use-values for consumers: it allows spectators to create a personal connection to the image of a musician that can grow and evolve over time (Goodwin 1992: 105). When one becomes aware of this, it becomes a bit redundant to analyse narratives or motifs in videos individually without looking at the bigger picture. Together and individually they are part of a metanarrative about the persona, about the crafted identity of the pop star. This is exemplified through the discrepancies that appear between the visuals and lyrics in video clips: the imagery often shows something unrelated to what is actually sung by the artist. "The explanation here is of course that the essential narrative component of the music video lies not in the song lyrics, but in the star-text that frames it" (Goodwin 1992: 108). The star text thus exists outside of individual songs and utterances; everything comes together in the persona of the pop star (Goodwin 1992: 103).
The star-as-ordinary is important when we look at the relation between stars and society. As Dyer notes, "Many writers see the stars, in general and in specific instances, as giving expression to variously conceptualised inner wants on the part of the mass of the people" (Dyer 1998: 18). Stars relate to ideas about personhood, about what it is like (or should be like) to exist in contemporary society: "They express the particular notion we hold of the person, of the 'individual'" (Dyer 2004: 7). There is thus a relation between stars and societies: stars live out -- and expose the tension in -- the accepted ideologies that reside in a specific society (Dyer 1998: 31). As Dyer puts it: "Work, sexuality, ethnicity and sexual identity themselves depend on more general ideas in society about what a person is, and stars are
major definers of these ideas" (Dyer 2004: 7). Therefore, being interested in stars is thus similar to being interested in society, similar to being interested in what it means to be human today. Dyer elaborates:
We're fascinated by stars because they enact ways of making sense of the experience of being a person in a particular kind of social production (capitalism), with its particular organisation of life into public and private spheres. We love them because they represent how we think that experience is or how it would be lovely to feel that it is. Stars represent typical ways of behaving, feeling and thinking in contemporary society, ways that have been socially, culturally, historically constructed (Dyer 2004: 16).
Stars thus reveal the constructed nature of (ideological) convictions in society through their star texts. They make the social categories in society visible since they embody them in one way or another, and in this way they present us with issues of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on (Dyer 2004: 16).
This does not mean that they present us with a coherent set of ideas that can be unilaterally interpreted. John Ellis explains:
Star images are paradoxical. They are composed, like narrative images, of elements which do not cohere, of contradictory tendencies. They are composed, like narrative images, of clues rather than complete meanings, of representations that are less complete, less stunning, than those offered by cinema. The star image is an incoherent image. (Ellis 1982: 2-3)
This ties in with David Marshall's notion of celebrities as discursive battlegrounds. He, like Ellis, notes that the celebrity sign can never be fully determined. They are constantly being (re)negotiated and (re)signified (Marshall 1997: 57). Stars have no final point of arrival; there is
no definitive meaning or interpretation that can be assigned to them since they are inherently unstable. The star phenomenon "constantly jogs these questions of the individual and society, the natural and artificial, precisely because it is promoting ideas of the individual and the natural in media that are mass, technologically elaborated, aesthetically sophisticated. That central paradox means that the whole phenomenon is unstable, never at a point of rest or equilibrium, constantly lurching from one formulation of what being human is to another" (Dyer 2004: 16). When one researches star texts, one thus researches the paradoxical ideological ideas that reside in society today.
Intersectionality
The focus in this thesis lies in critical analysis of the discourses around social categories I see as the most important aspects of Beyoncé's star text, namely 'race', nationality, gender and sexuality, and the way these aspects interact. This focus on social categories and the power relations and discourse formations within them, is intersectional. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw stressed the importance of intersectionality in her famous essay "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" in 1989. Crenshaw eloquently called for new ways of thinking about social categorizations, with consideration for "the mutual co-construction and simultaneous operation of gender, 'race'/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other axes of signification, such as age, nationality and religion" (Wekker 2007: 63). The term intersectionality itself is a metaphor that alludes to a crossing point within identity where different categories intersect. These categories interact and determine either the marginalization or privilege one endures or holds as a person. "The intersectional approach, in other words, entails that gender is always furnished with ethnic and class significance and that 'race'/ethnicity always already has a gendered and class content" (Wekker 2007: 63). Hence, intersectionality not only attracts attention to groups that
are marginalized on multiple axes (like African American women) but also points out that people in minority groups (like for example women) can be privileged on different axes (for example when they are White) (Hochreiter 2011: 50). These crossings and their meanings are of course contingent: different contexts assign different meanings to them. Whenever intersectionality is used, it is thus "necessarily particularized and therefore provisional and incomplete" (Carbado et al. 2013: 304). Intersectionality thus problematizes the idea of a universal feminist "we".
Intersectionality has no a priori place in the academy (Carbado et al. 2013: 204). It travels through disciplines and countries, and it is hard to pin the constantly transforming concept down into a solid definition. Because of this, Susanne Hochreiter questions the workability of intersectionality. She points out that "the problem of how to 'handle' all these aspects, categories, disciplines and levels in one survey or article has not been solved yet" (Hochreiter 2011: 52). Sirma Bilge on the other hand argues that this is what makes it a useful concept: "The strength of intersectionality lies precisely in being sufficiently vague as to bring together two of the most important strands of contemporary feminist thought that have been, in different ways, concerned with the issue of difference: Black feminist theory and
postmodern/post-structuralist feminist thought" (Bilge 2010: 60). The aspect that "makes an analysis intersectional – whatever term it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline – is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing – conceiving of categories not as distinct but always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of
creating and being created by dynamics of power – emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is" (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013: 795).
I will use an intersectional framework to analyse the relation between the social categories Beyoncé embodies in her star text. I will focus mostly on gender, sexuality, race and nationality. Intersectionality is of use here, since it "adds the specificity of sex and gender to
race and ethnicity, and racial and ethnic specificity to sex and gender" (MacKinnon 2013: 1020). Moreover, Beyoncé's star text is clearly posited in American culture. The significance of this will return throughout this thesis. I am not trying to make universal claims or singular interpretations. Rather, I am taking a very specific star text to show the many meanings attached to social categories and the mediations of these categories in American culture today. The meanings of these categories in Beyoncé's star text will be "separately" discussed in the following chapters. Of course, they are not easily separable at all: they intertwine and overlap. For the sake of both clarity and workability, I nevertheless tried to break them down into more or less separable aspects of her star text. They will be brought back together in the conclusion, to crystalize the complex interactions between them.
Imagining Beyoncé
In 2013, Beyoncé released her documentary Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream (HBO). This documentary is the starting point of my thesis, and will be used to exemplify how discourses of 'race', nationality, gender, and sexuality are entwined in her star text. The documentary uses multiple visual tools and techniques: an elaborate interview with Beyoncé on a couch, intimate webcam confessions, nostalgic home videos of both Beyoncé's youth and her life with Jay-Z, and observations filmed by an external camera that resemble a reality-TV technique. We get the impression that we get a multi-faceted view of Beyoncé's life. I especially focus on the webcam confessions in my analysis. Sean Redmond notes that the confessional text “the celebrity attempts to speak openly and honestly about where they have come from – their humble beginnings; … who they really are underneath their fame gown; and how alike they are to everyday people who watch their films, buy their records [and so on]” (2006: 37). These confessions thus help to mark the star as ordinary.
Beyoncé confesses that she always battles with how much she reveals of herself in the media, which can be seen as one of the grand narratives of her star text: the simultaneous separation and amalgamation of her private and public life. Beyoncé is known for rarely giving interviews, something that became very obvious when she was on the cover of the September issue of Vogue in 2015, but did not give an interview. The New York Times' journalist Schneier notes: "she is the only celebrity cover star not to submit some type of interview" (Schneier 2015: par. 6). He continues that somewhere between 2013 and 2014 Beyoncé stopped giving face to face interviews all together: "A member of her team told a reporter in May that despite numerous appearances, she had not answered a direct question in more than a year. … (When Beyoncé does answer questions, it tends to be in writing or, for TV, taped.)" (Schneier 2015: par. 7). In the documentary, Beyoncé speaks openly about her relation with the media:
When I first started out there was no Internet – people taking pictures of you and putting your personal life, or exploiting your personal life, as entertainment. I think people are so brainwashed. You get up in the morning, you click on the computer, you see all these pictures and it's all you think of – the picture and the image you see all day every day. You don't see the human form. And I think when Nina Simone put out music, you loved her voice. That's what she wanted you to love, that was her instrument. But you didn't get brainwashed by her day to day life and what her child is wearing and who she's dating and all the things that is really… It's not your business you know. And it shouldn't influence the way you listen to the voice and the art. But it does (Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream 2013).
On the one hand she thus opposes to the immense media circus that is built around contemporary musicians, since it takes attention away from the art. On the other hand, she admits that life narratives do matter: the creation of a persona that mimics a human form is
necessary to maintain a career nowadays. It seems like she fixed this troublesome impasse through the micromanaged crafting of her star text. Her documentary for example, revolves around her life as artist, daughter, wife, mother and woman, but is also directed, produced and distributed by herself. Her image is controlled as much as possible.
Several social categories are embodied and discussed in the documentary. The first I want to discuss is race. The fact that Beyoncé refers to Nina Simone in the aforementioned quote is significant since Nina Simone was strongly aligned with the civil rights movement and intertwined her racial identity with her star text. In other words: Beyoncé consciously places herself in a line of African American female performers. The racial discourse in her star text is made very visible through the different hairstyles Beyoncé wears. Her hair varies from racialized cornrows to long blonde straightened wisps. There is also a focus on her dance routines in the documentary. Beyoncé is known for the incorporation of a lot of African dance in her choreographies. In Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream we meet two dancers from Mozambique who were flown in by Beyoncé solely to teach her dancers their techniques. Their moves are described as highly authentic and hard to copy. Through focusing on the nationality and authenticity of both the dancers and their moves the choreographies appear to gain a kind of Black authenticity that is added to Beyoncé's star text.
The second and third social categories that play important roles in the documentary and Beyoncé's star text alike are gender and sexuality. Although these themes are distinct and different, Beyoncé often connects them in her star text and they will therefore be discussed jointly. Her femininity is emphasized through sexualized imagery. She seldom wears pants and directs most attention to her breast, bottom and legs – body parts often connected to signify Black female sexuality (Durham 2012: 38). Her dance routines are sensual, sexual and militaristic but interestingly enough never include physical contact with others. Sexuality is often equated with female power in her star text.
Beyoncé has made feminism part of her star texts through performances, songs and interviews, and emphasizes the importance of gender issues in the documentary. She explains: "I'm always thinking about women and what we need to hear. It's difficult being a woman – it's so much pressure" (Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream 2013). She later adds that although she has travelled the world and is happily married, nothing compares to "a conversation with a woman that understands you" (Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream 2013). It is significant that we do not see Beyoncé interacting with female comrades at all in documentary.
Later on, she discusses the gendered experience of performing while pregnant:
It absolutely proofed to me that women have to work much harder to make it in this world. It really pisses me off that women don't get the same opportunities as men do. Or money for that matter. Because let's face it: money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define our values, and to define what's sexy and what's feminine. And that's bullshit. At the end of the day it's not about equal rights. It's about how we think. We have to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. We have to step up as women and take the lead, and reach as high as humanly possible. That's what I'm going to do, that's my philosophy (Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream 2013).
Here we see a neoliberal kind of feminism that will be further discussed in the second chapter. Beyoncé often emphasizes the importance of financial liberation for gender equality. As we have seen Beyoncé posits gender and feminism as important parts of her star text in the documentary.
The final theme in her star text I want to discuss is the notion of family as American value. Beyoncé's star text reveals the difficulty of the public/private dichotomy. Through the incorporation of her parents, husband and daughter into her public image she blurs the line between public and private, between "real" relationships she has as a human being to other
human beings and the micromanaged construction of her "fake" star text. The importance of this part of her star text is clearly detectable in the documentary. The documentary opens with the enormous mansion Beyoncé grew up in, that Beyoncé calls "her foundation" (Beyoncé:
Life Is But A Dream 2013). The house returns throughout the documentary, it is the setting for
various home videos and the documentary ends with shots of the garden that surrounds it. Family members like her nephew and her parents are both shown and discussed in the narrative. Beyoncé talks about the difficulties she had with her father whom always had a special place in her star text (listen for example to the song "Daddy" on her debut album
Dangerously In Love (2003)) but whom she recently fired as her manager. In the documentary
she tells us he says she had to let him go as her manager because she needed him to be her dad. According to Beyoncé, they had different ideas about her career path. This is a great example of the complex relation between the public/private dichotomy in her star text: she here tells us she needed her father to be less present in her public narrative and retreat into her private life, but at the same time tells us these private affairs in her very public documentary. Unfortunately, she tells us, she did not get her dad back. "I had to sacrifice my relationship with my dad", she concludes. The conversation about the troubles she had with him is deepened in a scene right after the discussion, in when we see Beyoncé singing the song "Listen" from the movie Dreamgirls (2006). This song is used in the movie when Beyoncé's character Deena Jones tells her controlling husband to let her go in order for her to further her career. The reference is clear – Beyoncé uses the song to strengthen the idea that she had to let her father go in order for her career to keep flourishing. She had to sacrifice her private life with her father him for her public life as an artist. Her bond with her mother is nevertheless still shown as strong and loving. During the documentary we see her mother visiting sets before performances and handing out the Billboard Millennium Award to her daughter. When Beyoncé receives this award she responds with again a confirmation of the importance of her family: "I would like to start off by thanking my foundation which is my
family" (Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream 2013). She subsequently thanks another important part of her star text: Jay Z.
In the documentary, we see Beyoncé and her husband in 'intimate' home videos on holidays, laughing and singing together. Beyoncé says Jay-Z taught her how to be a woman, and she explains their love as so intense they almost feel like one person. "It's every woman's dream to feel this way about someone", she concludes (Beyoncé: Life Is But A Dream 2013). A central part to the narrative of their relationship is the difficulty they had when they tried to get pregnant. Beyoncé talks about her miscarriage, and also speaks about her successful pregnancy afterwards. Throughout the documentary, Beyoncé is shown as a hard-working sensual wife, caring mother and strong woman. She is portrayed as mature, responsible, stable, and loving.
I have taken several aspects from Beyoncé's star text to analyse in the chapters to come. In order to do this I have selected a series of objects from Beyoncé's oeuvre that are, as aforementioned, of various natures. I have chosen the objects because of the diverse and unmistakable ways they have characterized Beyoncé's star text. Each of the chosen objects has put Beyoncé on the map in significant ways; they have effected the foundations of her star text in complex manners. Moreover, many of the objects have caused strong responses and societal debates. In the first chapter, I discuss the role of (post-)racial discourses in her narrative. The second chapter will elaborate on Beyoncé's (post-)feminist identity. The third and last chapter will examine the American family as highly valued discourse in her narrative, with most attention for the imagery around the relationships with her husband Jay-Z and her daughter Blue Ivy.
As aforementioned, star studies taught us that there is always a relation between stars and society: stars show us how to be a humanbeing today. Therefore, stars, and in this case Beyoncé, may serve as a focal point for researching the complex discourses within naturalized social categories that circulate in society. I use an intersectional lens to analyse how Beyoncé
embodies different social categories and critically dissect the complex discourses surrounding them. I will use Beyoncé to show the fragility and complexities of these social categories in contemporary American culture.
1. Race And The Post-racial
Race, like gender, is a concept without intrinsic meaning. Race is no biological given but should be understood as a contingent social position tied to time and place (Haslanger 2005: 162). When questions of race are asked we have to consider the context in which these questions exist. In the United States of America, race functions in complex manners, which I cannot fully determine within this thesis. What I can do, however, is elaborate on the ways in which race functions within the star text of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
Beyoncé is light-skinned, identifies as African American and is known for using her Creole heritage for marketing goals (Griffin 2011: 137). Moreover, she makes use of various racial discourses in her star text. Griffin explains: “The mixed race or ethnically ambiguous woman is considered at once beautiful because of her proximity to whiteness and sexual because of her black ‘blood’” (Griffin 2011: 139). In other words: the use of various racial discourses enables Beyoncé to be a crossover symbol appealing to diverse audiences. This chapter will discuss the racial discourses in Beyoncé's narrative. I first shortly introduce the functioning of the (post-)raciality of American culture today. Afterwards I discuss the use of race as a commodity in Beyoncé's star text. Lastly, I analyze the use the artist makes of racial stereotypes.
(Post)-raciality in American culture
On 20 January 2009, Beyoncé performed Etta James' famous song "At Last" at the inaugural Neighborhood Ball. Freshly elected President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama
opened the ball with their first dance on the song. Jaap Kooijman comments on this performance in his book Fabricating The Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture:
Originally from the musical film Orchestra Wives (Archie Mayo, 1942) starring Glenn Miller and his orchestra, "At Last" is best known in its 1961 R&B version by soul singer Etta James and as such has become part of the soundtrack of the 1960s civil rights movement. The song's title evokes a connection to the spiritual words quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" (Kooijman 2013: 147).
In this line of thinking, the song may be interpreted as celebrating the election of an African American President, and even as celebrating the dawn of an era of post-raciality.
Because of her iconic status Beyoncé is the perfect artist to deliver this message. As aforementioned, she is a crossover symbol that speaks to large audiences that cannot be defined within racial parameters. In an interview with Vogue magazine, the singer herself claims to be universal: "No one's paying attention to what race I am. I've kind of proven myself. I'm past that" (Knowles-Carter as in Cashmore 2010: 144). Ellis Cashmore argues that Beyoncé is "The actualisation of the American Dream so long denied black people", and argues that the artist embodies America's new racial order (Cashmore 2010: 136). Kooijman takes Cashmore's argument a step further when he argues that Beyoncé not so much represents a post-racial reality but rather signifies "its possibility in the shape of reality, as a hyperreality" (Kooijman 2014: 148). He continues: "Beyoncé and Obama function as a 'utopia achieved,' as Jean Baudrillard would say, in which the fictional character of the American Dream enables a seemingly paradoxal moment of 'post-raciality' that can be pursued through the visualization of its achievement" (Kooijman 2014: 148). The performance by Beyoncé did ultimately not show us a post-racial reality but rather presents
both Beyoncé and Obama as epitomizations of the possibility of Black success, no longer held back by racial inequality.
While Obama got re-elected for his second term, America's racial issues reached an apex in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore. With the murders of unarmed Black men like Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Walter Scott, all shot by police officers, several cities revolted. While the murders of these men can be seen as the immediate cause for these revolts Louis Hyman, assistant professor of history at Cornell University, reminds us the riots are above all "an expression of anger at another aspect of a system that has exploited the black community in subtler, more insidious, but similarly tragic ways" then fifty years ago during the riots in the 1960s (Hyman 2015: par. 8). While race functions different than it used to, we are by no means living in a post-racial era (Griffin 2011: 132). Racial issues are omnipresent in America: institutionalized racism and racial inequality remain a persistent feature of American society.
Although Beyoncé celebrates the possibility of post-raciality in her performance of "At Last", she at the same time uses her Instagram to express her solidarity towards specific Black experiences of inequality. In figure 1 we read a statement made by the family of earlier mentioned Michael Brown, in figure 2 we read a quote by Martin Luther King.
Figure 1 and 2: Images from Beyoncé’s Instagram
While figure 1 calls for peaceful protest, the quote of Dr. King Jr. demands justice. Beyoncé thus aligns herself with the protestors, but her protest remains abstract and distant. It is not discussed in interviews or anywhere else in her oeuvre. There is no reference to Beyoncé's personal experiences as a Black woman in America. Instead, we are provided with quotes of authorities: the parents of a victim of racial violence and the most famous civil rights activist that ever lived. Moreover, both images are grounded in a legal understanding of racism, with references to moderation and justice. Although Beyoncé thus acknowledges the racial problems in American society, she does so in abstract manner terms that remain separated from the rest of her star text. The narrative of the post-racial utopian possibility of Black success remains the most important part of her star text.
Race as commodity
In late capitalism race is often reduced to a commodity in the entertainment industry. Although the media includes non-White narratives in its landscape, they often market these as
"cool", "authentic", and "urban" (Banet-Weiser 2007: 204). The message that America is post-racial, that race is nothing more than an interesting feature of the successful multicultural melting pot society that makes the United States of America both unique and diverse, is mediated through these representations. “Despite the material realities of poverty, unemployment, and general institutionalized racism in the United States, a contemporary ideology about race casts it as a style, an aesthetic, a hip way of being” (Banet-Weiser 2007: 205). The issue thus becomes depoliticized through this vision of race as commodity.
In 2011, Beyoncé participated in a photo shoot for L’Officiel Paris with an “African Queen” theme, in which she paid tribute to Nigerian human rights activist and musician Fela Kuti. One of the pictures taken can be seen in figure 3.
Figure 3: Beyoncé for L’Officiel Paris
As one can see, Beyoncé's face is covered in dark paint in the image. The magazine released the following statement about the photos: “[It is] A return to her African roots, as you can see on the picture, on which her face was voluntarily darkened” (Stewart 2011: par. 1). Many conceived the pictures as offensive. Then Jezebel editor Dodai Stewart argues that “It’s fun to
play with fashion and makeup, and fashion has a history of provocation and pushing boundaries. But when you paint your face darker in order to look more ‘African,’ aren’t you reducing an entire continent, full of different nations, tribes, cultures and histories, into one brown color?” (Stewart 2011: par. 2). She continues: “It’s one thing to feel moved by Fela Kuti, and quite another to treat blackness as a fashion accessory, like a pair of glittery heels you put on because it looks cool” (Stewart 2011: par. 2). The issue of race is reduced to a mere accessory in the shoot.
A similar controversy arose in 2008, when Beyoncé was criticized for the L’Oreal advertisement in which she promoted hair color products, which can be seen in figure 4. Some of the pictures were clearly “whitewashed”: “Beyoncé’s skin color was significantly lighter in the advertisement printed in Elle magazine then the very same one in Essence, a glossy targeted at African American woman” (Kooijman 2015: 2).
Figure 4: Beyoncé’s L’Oreal advertisement in Essence (left) and Elle (right)
impression that race can be used as “merely expressions of fashion, free from politics” (Kooijman 2015: 10). In these instances skin color becomes a neoliberal marketing tool: it is used to speak to certain publics and enforce or repress racial associations. This use of race as commodity can either enforce or weaken racial associations and strengthens Beyoncé's position as crossover symbol, as iconic artist free from a specific background.
Racial stereotypes
In the final part of this chapter I will discuss two music videos: "Diva" (2008) and "Grown Woman" (2014) to exemplify how commodified racial stereotypes are used in Beyoncé's star text. Both videos emphasize Beyoncé's “Blackness” in clichéd manners. The first video relies on racialized hip hop tropes like the backwards gaze, bling and braggadocio. The second video seems to show us the "authentic Africanness" of Beyoncé's star text through mixing home videos of Beyoncé's youth with contemporary displays of the star performing a song that has an African feel to it. Her Black roots and history are naturalized in the video. That a feeling of authenticity is transmitted does, however, by no means mean that we get a real look into Beyoncé's history: it has been revealed that all home videos of Beyoncé as a teen were filmed in the present day, with help from hair, costume and art direction to make it look convincing. I will now discuss the use of three specific stereotypes that are present in Beyoncé's star text and that appear in both these videos: the Diva as Angry Black Woman, the Black Superwoman and the Hypersexual Black Woman.
The title of the song "Diva" immediately links Beyoncé to the racial image of a Diva. Kimberly Springer defines Divas as "Black women with attitude" (Springer 2007: 254). They are "immensely talented but selfishly driven and difficult to deal with … Today's divas are unreasonable, unpredictable and likely unhinged" (Springer 2007: 256-7). The Diva is thus closely related to the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman. This notion is omnipresent in the
video, in both the dancing and clothing of not only Beyoncé but her dancers as well. The Black female body is presented as a weapon with movements that are abrupt, grotesque, aggressive and powerful. This attitude in choreography is present in most of Beyoncé's work. Her star text conveys that she is in control and will not be messed with. In her metanarrative she presents herself as the Black Superwoman that has it all: the career, the husband, the child and the looks. I will elaborate on this in my final chapter but for now I want to quote bell hooks who is highly critical of this stereotypical image of the Black Superwoman. She asserts that these images "are operative myths in the minds of many white women, allowing them to ignore the extent to which black women are likely to be victimized in this society and the role white women may play in the maintenance and perpetuation of that victimization” (hooks 2005: 67).
Her clothing emphasizes both the aggressiveness and strength of the Black woman through accentuating her broad shoulders. Aside from this, her sexuality and desirability are confirmed through the emphasis that lies on her buttocks. The attention to her "hip hop booty" can be seen as an indication of her heightened sexuality. "The buttocks of African women have come to represent exotic beauty and primitive sexuality in the Western imaginary since slavery" (Durham 2012: 38). While this is a racist stereotype, bell hooks analyzed the symbolic value of Black buttocks in the film School Daze (Spike Lee 1988) and argues that these butts are not merely a form of sexist and racist imagery but also display resistance to these interpretations:
The black "butts" on display are unruly and outrageous. They are not the still bodies of the female slave made to appear as mannequin. They are not a silenced body. Displayed as playful cultural nationalist resistance, they challenge assumptions that the black body, its skin color and shape, is a mark of shame (hooks 2015: 63).
The same could be said about Beyoncé's use of her "Black butt": the dance routines do not look submissive. Beyoncé and her dancers rather come across as aggressive, determined and in control. Although the imagery can be interpreted as stereotypical, bell hooks rightfully notes that a lot of Black female stars have appropriated and exploited these stereotypes and in this way both gained control over the imagery and reaped the benefits of it (hooks 2015: 65).
These stereotypical images could thus also be interpreted as subversive. Alicia Durham argues that through performance, “Beyoncé calls attention to intersecting discourses of racialized sexuality and gender, and she highlights the particular constraints that exist for Black girls and women who also want to express their sexuality in a society where Black bodies are always already marked as deviant” (Durham 2012: 37). Durham continues that Beyoncé’s celebration of her “bootylicous” body has transformed the beauty industry that is mostly focused on skinny White bodies (Durham 2012: 36). This is significant, since “[i]n this moment, a particular brand of whiteness is disrupted. Both ideal beauty and sexual desirability are mapped onto the curvaceous, ethnically marked female body" (Durham 2012: 36-7). Black sensuality and sexuality are thus in tension with at the one hand enforced racism and on the other hand they present us an anti-racist and subversive movement at the same time.
A third interpretation of the stereotypical imagery in Beyoncé's star text is to see them as a post-modern, post-feminist, post-racial form of pastiche. Because of the overtly clear use of the different racial stereotypes like the Hypersexual Black Woman and Black Superwoman, one could argue that these notions are neutralized through their humorless repetition. Fredric Jameson introduced the notion of "Pastiche" in his article "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." Pastiche is connected to the idea of parody, both concepts "Involve the imitation, or better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles" (Jameson 1983: 1962). The stereotypes displayed can be seen as a style of representing Black women that is often used in the media. It seems unlikely that the stereotypes present in Beyoncé's star text are parody. Parody always seems to mock the
original; it ridicules the style that is imitated (Jameson 1983: 1963). The goal of parody is to cause laughter, but there is nothing funny about the racial stereotypes in Beyoncé's star text. Pastiche, however, is
[…] like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody' ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor […] (Jameson 1983: 1963).
Through the humorless reproduction of these racial stereotypes, Beyoncé's use of them in her videos seem to fit the idea of pastiche as explained by Jameson. I concur that while the meaning within pastiche is deferred, through its undeterminable motives, this does not make the display of these stereotypes meaningless or innocent. Their meanings simply become mystified: it is unclear if they are meant to subvert or enforce racist convictions. Pastiche opens up the possibility to interpret the images in multiple manners, since it abandons the idea of a norm or center from which true meaning derives. The use of stereotypes in Beyoncé's star text then seems to present us with a blank parody that does not show the audience a particular normality, nor does it try to humor or criticize a possible reality. Rather, it is the ultimate commodification of racial tropes.
Aside from this, it is highly problematic that Blackness is linked to nature iconography in the clip for "Grown Woman". The video is filled with images of trees, plants and animals, and Beyoncé even gets down on her hands and knees to twerk while a zebra print is projected over her body. The body of the artist is visually made animalistic. This enforces the stereotype of the African woman as closer to nature, wild like an animal with a disproportionate and distinct sexuality. This racist stereotype stems from the times of slavery and colonialism, in
which the exotic was often merged with the erotic and should be critiqued whenever it appears.
Stereotypical images of Blackness are used to lay claim on "authentic" Black popular culture, while the artist also calls herself universal and claims a status as crossover symbol. This shows that, as Griffin concludes, "Beyoncé's enormous success heralds an America where race no longer necessarily bars achievement but where old mythologies continue to resonate and sell" (Griffin 2011: 140). Most problematic is probably that Blackness here is often equated with authenticity, while Whiteness is seen as artificial (Kooijman 2015: 14). With this, race is given a specific meaning as additional value that can be added and taken away when necessary, depending on the message that needs to be transmitted. As we will find out in the next chapter, a similar neoliberal commodification is visible when we look at gender and feminism in Beyoncé's narrative.
2. Performing Feminisms
Beyoncé's star text has a problematic relation with feminism. Her narrative displays the tension between the personal and the political, and between female desire and sexual objectification. In the words of Alicia Durham, Beyoncé "represents the production of celebrity, gender politics presently defined by hip hop and the complex negotiations of self image and sexuality for young women coming of age during postfeminism" (Durham 2012: 36). When gender and feminism are discussed, we get stuck with two important theoretical problems. First of all, gender itself is a problematic concept when one tries to define it. It is questionable "whether there is anything social that females have in common that could count as their 'gender'" (Haslanger 2005: 158). Sally Haslanger, in her article "Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?", names this problem the commonality problem. She argues: "If we consider all females – females of different times, places, and cultures – there are reasons to doubt that there is anything beyond body type (if even that) that they all share" (Haslanger 2005: 158). The second problem we come across is that every time we do name something an aspect of the female gender, these statements always bear a normative component: they include some women and exclude others. In the words of Haslanger: "The normativity problem raises the concern that any definition of 'what women is' is valueladen, and will marginalize certain females, privilege others, and reinforce current gender norms" (Haslanger 2005: 158).
In what follows, I will analyse the gendered discourses present in Beyoncé's narrative and especially the artist's relation with feminism. Just like in the previous chapter, I will not try to determine the meaning of these discourses, but rather reveal the complexities and
inconsistencies of them in Beyoncé's star text and by extension in society. I will do this through three different but overlapping angles: the neoliberal feminist focus on financial liberation as gender equality; the post-feminist discourse in her narrative; and the concept of feminism as a commodity.
Neoliberal feminism: the power to buy stuff
In January 2014, Beyoncé wrote an essay in the Shriver report: "A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink". On its website, the Shriver report is explained as a report that "examines the rates of financial insecurity among American women and the children who depend on them, investigates the impact of it on our nation's institutions and economic future and promotes modern solutions to help women strengthen their financial status" (shriverreport.org). Beyoncé wrote an essay called "Gender Equality Is a Myth!" and in it asks for equal pay:
Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change. Men have to demand that their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters earn more – commensurate with their qualifications and not their genders (Knowles-Carter 2014: par. 1).
The first thing that needs to be said here is that Beyoncé is not really a financial insecure woman. Nevertheless, it is clear that Beyoncé thinks men and women should earn the same amount of money for the same amount of work. However, she mostly asks men to stand up for their women, instead of relying on women's capabilities. This could be said to steer us away from "the women asking questions" towards a male solution to The Woman's Question. Again, she presents us with a universal female subject, and even though this issue of the
Shriver report is about classicist problems, Beyoncé's essay remains void of considerations of class and race.
Oppression can take various forms, of which economical oppression, described here by Beyoncé, is one form. It is clear that Beyoncé is most concerned with gender inequality related to both sexual freedom and financial liberation. However, the idea that merely the power to buy things would produce gender equality is of course a simplification. Nevertheless, it returns over and over again in the feminist discourses in Beyoncé's star text. Another good example of this is one of the first feminist anthems Beyoncé helped creating when she was still a member of Destiny's Child: "Independent Women Part I" (2000).
Throughout the clip that accompanies the song, women are dressed in sexualized attire while performing masculine activities like fighting, riding a motorcycle and skydiving. There is on the one hand a disruption of gender norms, and on the other hand a celebration of girl power present. Men in the clip are shown to be evil crooks that are defeated by the women of Destiny's Child. The clip shows us a fantasy world in which Charlie, the male boss who calls in with the girls near the end of the video, has ultimate control. This is in line with Mulvey's conclusion in a different research project that men are often portrayed as controlling the fantasy world of the music video (Mulvey 1975: 384).
The girl group sings:
Question, tell me how you feel about this? Try to control me boy you get dismissed Pay my fun, oh and I pay my own bills Always 50/50 in relationships
The shoes on my feet: I've bought it The clothes I'm wearing: I've bought it The rock I'm rocking: I've bought it
Cause I depend on me ("Independent Women Part I" 2000)
This is again a very neoliberal view of feminism. The message we receive here is that women can gain independence through buying stuff, through paying for their own things: through financial liberation. However, the things mentioned here that they can buy with their earned money are superficial, and mostly things that make women physically more appealing. It is noteworthy that most of Beyoncé's oeuvre discusses the appealing to and pleasing of men. It seems like the male gaze is never contested.
Post-feminism: Do girls truly run the world?
In 2014 Beyoncé was featured on the cover of Time magazine's "100 most influential people" issue (see figure 5). Beyoncé herself was thrilled with her presence on the cover: "because it is not about fashion or beauty or music; it's about the influence I've had on culture" (Beyoncé as in Driscoll 2014). However, the cover sparked quite the controversy. Beyoncé looks into the camera with a glary look in her eyes, wearing a bathing suit with a see-through top over it. Beyoncé is dressed in a way that is part of her star text: not wearing pants and showing of her legs has become part of her persona. Her body is often emphasized through similar apparel on stage and in videos. Nevertheless, this was not her stage nor video: this was Time's "100 most influential people" issue. The mixture of influence and objectification is complex and continues to dazzle feminists. Can self-objectification be used as a tool to voice other issues or does it always render women into voiceless, passive objects that can be consumed by all? Should women cover up to be taken seriously?
Figure 5: Beyoncé on Time's "100 most influential people" issue
Beyoncé self-objectifies throughout her narrative -- part of her star text relies on the display of her body in sexualized manners. This is nothing out of the ordinary for a female pop star. Lucy O'Brien argues:
Throughout history, the female body has been objectified as a source of sexual arousal or suggestion. Women have always felt the pressure to look decorative or pleasing, but within pop and rock, when the star is the focus of a mass gaze, this expectation is increased tenfold. In the face of the pop orthodoxy that a woman is there first and foremost to look attractive, female artists have consistently had to negotiate the Image issue (O'Brien 2012: 168).
Laura Mulvey uses the concept of the male gaze to theorize female objection in the media. She argues:
and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkely, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire (1975: 383).
The idea that Beyoncé merely tries to please the male gaze however becomes troubled when we turn to the important presence of female spectators. It has been said before that Beyoncé's main fan base consists of women and gay men (Berlatsky 2014: par. 1, Lamere 2014: par. 6). Evans et al. argue that the female gaze might even have supplanted the male gaze on some level in society as a whole. “In a culture where women now increasingly gaze at both other women and at themselves, the male-gaze has sometimes apparently been removed all
together. In terms of reinstating women as the objects of sex, therefore, sexualized culture has been of concern for both reproducing the male-gaze and, simultaneously, producing a
narcissistic neo-liberal self-policing gaze, in which the contemporary woman does not seek male approval for her apparently ‘freely chosen look’” (2010: 116).
Beyoncé nevertheless visually conforms to the portrayal of women as spectacle. Beyoncé seems to follow in Madonna’s footsteps, and equates “pleasure with power, sexuality with control” (Mandziuk 1993: 168). Just like Madonna, Beyoncé claims individual ownership of her sexuality, and just like Madonna she conflates sexual pleasure and political freedom (Mandziuk 1993: 170). The question here is how a liberatory sexuality would look. Treva B. Lindsey remarks that African-American politics of respectability continue to influence how Black feminists, and more broadly, how African-American communities, delineate what constitutes hypersexuality and objectification (Lindsey 2013: 55). In a different article she explains how this "often results in the identification of sexually explicit videos as reifying
racial-gender-sexual stereotypes and controlling images and myths about black women" (2015: 63). This mode of interpretation "continues to predominate analysis of contemporary, popular culture images of African-American female sexuality" (Lindsey 2015: 63). Lindsey calls for a more positive view of Black female sexuality: "Foregrounding a sex-positive, black feminist analysis, while acknowledging the importance of historical legacies and stultifying stigmas makes available a dynamic lens with which to examine the sexualized performances of contemporary African-American women popular entertainers. This cadre of entertainers obliges feminist scholars to theorize sex-positivism among Black women in popular culture and to question the concept of hypersexuality as it pertains to Black women-authored narratives and performers (2015: 63). To call Beyoncé’s performance hypersexual instead of sexual may just as well in itself perpetuate a racist view of Black female sexuality. Weidhase, in line with Lindsey, contends that: “Beyoncé’s body does not contest her feminist status, but instead her body contests the whiteness of mainstream feminism” (2015: 130). This
interpretation makes the display of her Black body in sexualized manners a politically subversive and feminist action in and of itself. It means that the singer defies notions of hypersexuality and creates a space for Black female sexuality on its own terms.
At the same time, this discussion can also be linked to post-feminism. Angela McRobbie explains post-feminism as "an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined" (McRobbie 2004: 255). Post-feminism, like the post-racial, sees feminism as taken into account, it presents feminism as something "decisively aged and made to seem redundant" (McRobbie 2004: 255). It suggests that equality is already achieved and we therefore no longer need feminism: "women, according to post-feminists, are able to make their choices out of free will" (McRobbie 2004: 259). Post-feminism is highly individualized, it is "all about how the individual feels right here, right now, rather than the bigger picture (Viner as in Gillis and Munford 2004: 174).
Post-feminism can be positioned next to other "new feminisms", like third wave feminism, lifestyle feminism, commodity feminism, victim feminism and power feminism. These "new feminisms" “ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics were slowly removed from feminism” (hooks 2000: 5). Feminism became something personal, and the success of some women became the ruler against which the state of gender equality was measured. These women came to signify a gender “utopia achieved”. Liberation here became synonymous with social equality with the ruling class of White men. This liberation, as bell hooks points out, is a false one: it is built on the continued exploitation and oppression of others (hooks 2005: 67). Audre Lorde’s famous critique “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” rings true once again (Lorde 1984: 110-3).
The post-feminist discourse is present throughout Beyoncé's star text. A great example is the 2011 Billboard Awards performance of "Who Run The World (Girls)". This particular performance was preceded by words of affection by amongst others Stevie Wonder, Bono, Barbra Streisand and Michelle Obama. These authorities called Beyoncé an iconic musician, someone who made history. At the end of the clip, first lady Michelle Obama says: "I'm very proud of her, very proud of the woman that she is, the role model that she provides to so many women, and I truly congratulate her tonight on all her success. Thank you so much." The entire clip is a celebration of Beyoncé's success, which here serves as proof that Black women are no longer held back by society and can achieve anything they want as long as they work hard enough. With this message, both racism and sexism are depoliticized and we are once again left with a post-racial, post-feminist utopia that does not align with reality.
In the beginning of the actual performance we hear Beyoncé's voice: "Men have been given the chance to rule the world, but ladies – our revolution has begun. Let's build a nation. Women everywhere – rule the world!" Her dancing is, as always, aggressive and fierce. She is wearing a kind of bathing suit made of silver strings, with a large fur collar on top. This is the
same look as we have seen before: bare legs in high heels, and an emphasis on both her broad shoulders and buttocks. At the climax of the song, the stage is overrun by dozens of female dancers that perform a synchronized dance with Beyoncé. The dance looks like a revolution: all the dancers wear quasi-militaristic – but highly sexualized – outfits, firework surrounds the stage and the dancers wave with enormous red flags.
Figure 6: The climax of Beyoncé's performance of "Who Run The World (Girls)" during the Billboard Awards 2011
Although this performance comes across as very empowering, it is quite deceptive in its message. In the song Beyoncé's personal success gets again conflated with a socio-political reality that does not exist. Girls do not run the world. The revolution that is shown in the performance is therefore confusing. It seems unlikely that Beyoncé calls for a feminist revolution since the lyrics enforce the idea that the revolution already took place by repeating that girls run the world. Nevertheless, she does state that a revolution has just begun at the same time in the aforementioned quote. The song thus reinforces a post-feminist 90s notion of
girl power that celebrates female success but depoliticizes gender issues. In other words: the performance creates a utopian fantasy world in which feminism is completed and no longer necessary -- girls run the world. Apart from the falsehood of this image, it gives the wrong idea about feminism. Feminism is not about "girls" ruling the world but about ending sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression (hooks 2000: 1).
It must be said that sexism never fully determines the destiny of all women in society. As bell hooks argues, oppression is a term that often confuses people because of this notion of totality and absolution, the idea of the complete absence of choice that is connected to it. "Many women in this society do have choices … therefore exploitation and discrimination are words that more accurately describe the lot of women in the United States" (hooks 2005: 62). According to hooks this is the reason that many women do not join feminist organization – they do not recognize discrimination on the basis of sex as oppression because these issues often make way for celebrations of specific female success. Beyoncé is an embodied example of the possibilities for (Black) female success. Nevertheless, this does not mean that she proofs that sexism and racism do no longer matter. To conflate her personal success with the chances for women throughout the United States (or even globally) is a sophism. This individualistic view of society does not only make it hard to fight sexism, it also makes the female individual responsible for her own status in society. Critiquing sexism then becomes a subterfuge for not using one's potential to the fullest, for not working hard enough, and ultimately: for personal failure. McRobbie argues:
[T]he new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom. There is quietude and complicity in the manners of generationally specific notions of cool, and more precisely an uncritical relation to dominant commercially produced sexual representations which actively invoke hostility to assumed feminist positions form the
