the beyonce effect essays on sexuality race and feminism

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The Beyonce Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism Paperback – 30 Oct. 2016

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Since her late-1990s debut as a member of the R&B trio Destiny's Child, Beyoncé Knowles has garnered both praise and criticism. While some consider her an icon of female empowerment, others see her as detrimental to feminism and representing a negative image of women of color. Her music has a decidedly pop aesthetic, yet her power-house vocals and lyrics focused on issues like feminine independence, healthy sexuality and post-partum depression give her songs dimension and substance beyond typical pop fare. This collection of new essays presents a detailed study of the music and persona of Beyoncé--arguably the world's biggest pop star. Topics include the body politics of respectability; feminism, empowerment and gender in Beyoncé's lyrics; black female pleasure; and the changing face of celebrity motherhood. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Print length 230 pages
Language English
Publisher McFarland & Co
Publication date 30 Oct. 2016
Dimensions 15.24 x 1.17 x 22.86 cm
ISBN-10 0786499745
ISBN-13 978-0786499748
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"This collection provides innovative, and necessary, analyses of an icon, her life and work, and the systemic contexts and relationships associated with black womanhood, black femininity, and black feminism."-- Journal of American Culture

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ McFarland & Co (30 Oct. 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 230 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0786499745
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786499748
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 1.17 x 22.86 cm
694 in Soul Music
3,470 in African American Studies

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The Beyoncé Effect

Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism

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About the Book

Since her late–1990s debut as a member of the R&B trio Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé Knowles has garnered both praise and criticism. While some consider her an icon of female empowerment, others see her as detrimental to feminism and representing a negative image of women of color. Her music has a decidedly pop aesthetic, yet her power-house vocals and lyrics focused on issues like feminine independence, healthy sexuality and post-partum depression give her songs dimension and substance beyond typical pop fare. This collection of new essays presents a detailed study of the music and persona of Beyoncé—arguably the world’s biggest pop star. Topics include the body politics of respectability; feminism, empowerment and gender in Beyoncé’s lyrics; black female pleasure; and the changing face of celebrity motherhood. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here .

About the Author(s)

Adrienne Trier-Bieniek is the chair of sociology and anthropology at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. She is the editor of numerous books on popular culture.

Bibliographic Details

Edited by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek

Format: softcover (6 x 9) Pages: 228 Bibliographic Info: bibliographies, index Copyright Date: 2016 pISBN: 978-0-7864-9974-8 eISBN: 978-1-4766-2558-4 Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction 1

Feminists Debate Beyoncé (Janell Hobson) 11

Beyoncé as Intersectional Icon? Interrogating the Politics of Respectability (Marla H. Kohlman) 27

Beyoncé as Aggressive Black Femme and Informed Black Female Subject (Anne M. Mitchell) 40

Policing Beyoncé’s Body: “Whose Body Is This Anyway?” (Noel Siqi Duan) 55

I’m Not Myself Lately: The Erosion of the Beyoncé Brand (Kristin Lieb) 75

The Visual Album: Beyoncé, Feminism and Digital Spaces (Jamila A. Cupid and Nicole Files-Thompson) 94

Beyoncé and Social Media: Authenticity and the Presentation of Self (Melissa Avdeeff) 109

Flawless Feminist or Fallible Freak? An Analysis of Feminism, Empowerment and Gender in Beyoncé’s Lyrics (Tia C.M. Tyree and Melvin L. Williams) 124

Birthing Baby Blue: Beyoncé and the Changing Face of Celebrity Birth Culture (Natalie Jolly) 143

Beyoncé and Blue: Black Motherhood and the Binds of Racialized Sexism (Sonita R. Moss) 155

BDSM, Gazes and Wedding Rings: The Centering of Black Female Pleasure and Agency in Beyoncé (Evette Dionne Brown) 177

Creole Queen: Beyoncé and Performing Plaçage in the New Millennium (Kimberly J. Chandler) 193

Sex(uality), Marriage, Motherhood and “Bey Feminism” (Elizabeth Whittington Cooper) 203

About the Contributors 215

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“This collection provides innovative, and necessary, analyses of an icon, her life and work, and the systemic contexts and relationships associated with black womanhood, black femininity, and black feminism.”— Journal of American Culture .

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The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race, and Feminism AdrienneTrier-Bieniek, Editor. McFarland, 2016 [Book Review]

2018, The Journal of American Culture

Related Papers

Sheila Schvarzman

Academia Letters

Middle Black Sea Journal of Communication Studies

As the independent production increased and factory-like production receded in 1950s, filmmakers were soon in greater control. The studios could no longer dictate all the terms and were forced to meet halfway so that both sides could profit. However, filmmakers were still dependent on the studios when it came to finance and distribution. Elia Kazan, being a former Hollywood contract director, became one of those independent filmmakers and established his own production company. By the time he first got to Hollywood in the mid-1940s, producers were already dominating the film industry. Kazan, believing the director should come first and be independent in financial, politic and aesthetic terms at all costs, refused to be a studio-contract worker. He was determined to assert greater control over the films he made, and his way of filmmaking would be less about profits and more about gaining artistic freedom. He produced and directed all his subsequent films of the 1950s and 1960s. In this study, one of these films, America America will be analyzed through analysis of narrative. As Kazan became more personal and independent; the director’s ability to define the aesthetic and narrative spines of the text and the sub-text became evident. Hence, it is possible to say that the mise-enscène started to come forth in Kazan’s films starting with America America.

Anastasia Stefanidou

Elia Kazan’s stage and film work is primarily related to American society while his novels mostly deal with cultures and histories with which many American critics and readers are not familiar. Kazan often felt at war with the Anatolian culture he was raised in, but was just as critical of the American practices and ideologies he had to interact with. The lack of critical interest in Kazan’s fictional work does a disservice to his overall creative achievement. The essay discusses Kazan’s novels America-America (1961), The Anatolian (1982) and Beyond the Aegean (1994), which draw on Kazan’s family history of subservience and persecution under the Ottoman rule in Asia Minor and their subsequent psychological and cultural traumas in America at the beginning of the 20th century. With the complex view of both participant and observer, I argue that, in these novels, Kazan questions the unlimited opportunities that the dream of America offers and envisions new spaces of sociocultural resistance and alternative forms of happiness, which, however, usually come with the inevitable loss of one’s personal integrity and free will, and which leave the individual stranded within a liminal world where redemption and belonging seem to be always postponed.

Journal of Modern Greek Studies

Itinerarios Revista De Literatura

José C . Felix

ROLLET Sylvie

America, America occupies a unique place in the work of Elia Kazan who had already, by 1964, made fifteen films in the context of Hollywood. It is, in effect, the first film for which he wrote the entire screenplay1, as if it were necessary for him, at the age of fifty-five, to finally bring to the screen the stories he had been told by his grandmother, as well as the accounts of tens of other Greek people coming from Anatolia, and listened to as a child. More precisely, the film seems to seek the answer to an enigma : that of a lost identity, a ‘subject’ which cannot be found whose history lies elsewhere, in another place but also in other lives than his. The origin of America, America is to be found, therefore, in the haunting fear of a lost, forgotten, Anatolia whose ghostlike presence represents the reverse side of an incurable absence.

Littera Aperta 6 (2018), 63-77

International Journal Littera Aperta , Hossein Aliakbari Harehdasht , Zahra Nazemi

is among the first directors who adapted Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for the cinema. Kazan's film adaptation was almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams's words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, the alterations that take place in the process of trans-mediation cannot be disregarded, since the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, the present study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2013), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie to assess how the film adaptation has incorporated the ideas of femininity, which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the literary text to film have contributed to the development of female identity.

Manuel Betancourt

Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

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This article examines the language of clothes in Elia Kazan's 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire, focusing on the outfits of the main character, Blanche DuBois, portrayed by Vivien Leigh. Represented in contrast to the garments worn by other characters and especially her nemesis, Stanley Kowalski, Blanche's clothes express complex messages with regard to social class and cultural identity, which feed into broader midcentury controversies around fashion in America, the performativity of clothing and its potential uses as a passing device. Another line of enquiry concerns the differences between Tennessee Williams' descriptions of Blanche's appearance in the play and their realization on screen, the “translation” of the playwright’s remarks into cinematic images, and the resulting visual narratives, which give weight to specific readings of the plot. Finally, the article approaches the image of Blanche as a reflexive commentary on the nature of film and a critique of Hollywood glamor. By emphasizing the constructedness of Blanche’s appearance: her “dressing for the part,” the use of setting, lighting and even music to enhance her social performance, the film questions its own artifice, while Vivien Leigh simultaneously embodies and deconstructs the image of blonde femininity, which dominated the cinema of the era.

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Pop Culture

Flawless: 5 Lessons in Modern Feminism From Beyoncé

W ith her new album, Beyoncé has become the embodiment of modern feminism for a generation that has been reluctant to claim the word. Forget the angry cries of sexism. Millennials have grown up admiring a woman who says she’s “Crazy in Love” with one of the most powerful men in music and expresses her desire to please him while still projecting a fierce, independent persona.

Why should my generation adopt the traditional “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” version of feminism? Even as modern day pundits like Hanna Rosin, Maureen Dowd and Sheryl Sandberg have picked up the baton, speculating about the “end of men” and the perils of letting your career be derailed by family, Beyoncé has managed to become the biggest female pop star in the world while cultivating her marriage , her role as a mother, and her sexuality. And in doing so, she’s ushering in a new wave of feminism.

In fact, Beyoncé is one of the few superstars who’s actually claimed the scary title of “feminist.” Nonetheless, she hasn’t always had the feminists on her side. Their biggest critique of the pop icon’s work before this album was that she sang about men…almost exclusively — from “Love on Top” to “Halo.” Let’s be honest, even the girl anthem songs about breakups made our eyes roll: it was hard to dance along to “Irreplaceable” or “Single Ladies” without remembering that Jay Z had “put a ring on it.” And it didn’t help that the name of her latest tour was “Mrs. Carter.”

But she does something new on Beyoncé — a collection of music and videos which has already broken an iTunes record by selling 823,773 copies in its first three days. Men and love are a focus, but she makes sure to let us know that those songs are also about empowerment: there’s even a spoken word passage in “Flawless” from a Nigerian feminist that calls for young girls to “lean in” and be more than someone’s wife. She sings about love and sex more boldly than ever, peppering those songs with messages about independence and motherhood. And we’re eating it up.

Maybe the reason my millennial generation feels so entitled is partially because Beyoncé told us we could be. We can have it all. But don’t take my word for it. Look at the lyrics of Beyoncé . There are feminist lessons for every woman entwined among the usual addictive musical riffs.

1. “Pretty Hurts” — Obsessing about your looks is destructive.

Pretty hurts Shine the light on whatever’s worse Perfection is the disease of a nation …It’s the soul that needs surgery

Okay, yes, you have to get past the fact that this is being sung by one of the most beautiful women on the planet. But after Britney Spears’ “Work B****” from earlier this year — which told women they had to look hot to get what they wanted — it’s comforting to know that the problem is with society, not with us. Even perfect Beyoncé, who tried to clear the Internet of unflattering photos of herself after her Super Bowl performance and who has openly spoken about struggling with body image issues, feels the pressure of unfair expectations.

2. “Blow” — Sexual pleasure should be a two way street.

Keep me coming…Keep me humming, keep me moaning… Don’t stop loving ‘til the morning… Can you lick my skittles? That’s the sweetest in the middle Pink that’s the flavor Solve the riddle… I can’t wait til I get home so you can turn that cherry out

We hear a lot about oral sex in rap songs (“She lick me like a lollipop,” anyone?). But when’s the last time you heard a song about a woman being on the receiving side? Women of the world, Beyoncé is telling you to get yours too.

3. “ Partition” — It’s important to please your man (yep, that’s feminist).

Driver roll up the partition please I don’t need you seeing ’yoncé on her knees Took 45 minutes to get all dressed up We ain’t even gonna make it to this club… Oh he so horny, yeah he want to f*** He popped all my buttons, and he ripped my blouse He Monica Lewinsky-ed all on my gown… Take all of me I just wanna be the girl you like, girl you like

“I just wanna be the girl you like” isn’t the most feminist message — especially compared to the rest of the album. It’s not a give and take like “Blow.” It’s simple submission. How do you reconcile being a proud, independent woman and wanting to be desirable and please to your man?

But wait! Beyoncé has an explanation. You might have missed it because it’s in French, but it’s there.

Est-ce que tu aimes le sexe? Le sexe, je veux dire l’activité physique, le coit, tu aimes ça? Tu ne t’intéresses pas a sexe? Les hommes pensent que les féministes détestent le sexe mais c’est une activité très stimulante et naturelle que les femmes adorent

The translation, thanks to one of my French-speaking co-workers:

Do you like sex? Sex, I mean the physical activity, coitus, do you like it? You’re not interested in sex? Men think that feminists hate sex, but it’s a very stimulating and natural activity that women love.

The Dude fans might recognize this as Julianne Moore’s monologue in The Big Lebowski . The message: feminists like sex too. So brush up on your French, haters.

4. “ Mine” — Motherhood and relationships aren’t easy — even for Beyoncé.

I’ve been watching for the signs Took a trip to clear my mind… Been having conversations about breakups and separations I’m not feeling like myself since the baby Are we even gonna make it? Cause if we are, we’re taking this a little too far… All that I can think of is, we should get married We should get married Let’s stop holding back on this and let’s get carried away

Beyoncé doesn’t reveal too much about her relationship with Jay Z. She has sung before about breakups and possible infidelity (“Irreplaceable” in 2006, “Jealous” in this album), but who knows about whether that’s about Jay Z or a past boyfriend or nobody at all? What we can take away is that it’s okay to want to get married as a feminist. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s okay to have problems with and doubts about your love life. Plus, unlike so many feminist icons, she admits that you can’t just pick up your life as usual after having a child.

5. “Flawless” — Be more than someone’s wife.

I took some time to live my life But don’t think I’m just his little wife Don’t get it twisted, get it twisted This my shit, bow down b*****s

The message is pretty clear. But then there’s the interlude by Nigerian-born writer and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The song excerpts the author’s TED Talk on feminism:

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller We say to girls: “You can have ambition, but not too much You should aim to be successful, but not too successful Otherwise, you will threaten the man.” Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is most important Now, marriage can be a source of joy and low and mutual support But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing But for the attention of men We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are Feminist: a person who believes in the social, Political, and economic equality of the sexes

Those feminist words can seem at odds with Beyoncé’s videos. Are we supposed to have a problem with the fact that Beyoncé is advocating that our society stop thinking of women as wives and sex objects as she grinds up on her husband in a leotard? I think we are. I think she wants us to think about how much of what she does is empowerment and how much is driven by the norms of popular culture. And, again, she wants us to think that you can be both sexy and a feminist. (Feminists like sex too, remember?)

Maybe I’m giving her too much credit, and it’s just hypocritical when she sarcastically sings, “I just woke up like this” with her perfectly manicured outfit and makeup. But Beyoncé’s resume is so full, that being married to Jay Z probably wouldn’t even make the cut. And after a year of Miley Cyrus’ tongue-wagging and naked “Blurred Lines” backup dancers, it’s sure nice to have a pop star return who wants to be a role model.

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