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‘Beyoncé feminism’ and the contestation of the black feminist body

Article  in  Celebrity Studies · January 2015

DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2015.1005389

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 Celebrity Studies

ISSN: 1939-2397 (Print) 1939-2400 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcel20

‘Beyoncé feminism’ and the contestation of the

black feminist body

Nathalie Weidhase

To cite this article: Nathalie Weidhase (2015) ‘Beyoncé feminism’ and the contestation of the
black feminist body, Celebrity Studies, 6:1, 128-131, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2015.1005389

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 Celebrity Studies, 2015
Vol. 6, No. 1, 128–131, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.1005389

FORUM SPECIAL
‘Beyoncé feminism’ and the contestation of the black feminist body
Nathalie Weidhase*

Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, London, UK

(Received 11 November 2014; accepted 29 December 2014)

At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, black American pop superstar Beyoncé not only
led nominees with eight nominations (taking home awards in three categories), but was
also scheduled to receive the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, also known as
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MTV’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Before the award was presented to her by her
husband, hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, and her daughter Blue Ivy, she performed a medley of her
entire most recent album, Beyoncé (2013). Within a performance not lacking in visually
stunning moments, the most striking image (judging by the subsequent avalanche of ‘gifs’
and pictures used in articles) was Beyoncé’s body in front of the word ‘feminist’ in bright,
capital letters during the song ‘***Flawless’.
Her MTV Video Music Awards performance in general, and her claiming of the word
‘feminist’ in particular, triggered an ongoing debate as to whether she was indeed a
feminist, or, due to the sexualised nature of the performance and her prominent champion-
ing of her marriage, whether she was not. Possibly the most prominent reaction was from
feminist pop icon Annie Lennox, who claimed that Beyoncé’s use of the word represented
what she dubbed ‘feminist lite’ (Azzopardi 2014). Alongside black feminist academic bell
hooks’ description of Beyoncé at a panel discussion at New York’s New School in May
2014 as a ‘terrorist’ who potentially harms black girls with her sexualised performances
(Sieczkowski 2014), this constituted a media backlash that questioned her feminism
through the voices of older, more established, and presumably more authoritative, feminist
voices. This essay will not question Beyoncé’s self-identification as feminist, but rather
will attempt to draw out the tensions between the (black feminist) audiovisual discourse of
Beyoncé’s performance and the (white feminist) rhetorical discourse of Annie Lennox’s
reaction to it.
Musically speaking, Beyoncé’s engagement with feminism or issues aligned with
feminism predates her Video Music Awards performance. Although she did not publicly
identify as ‘feminist’ until recently, songs with her former band Destiny’s Child, such as
‘Independent Woman Pt. 1’, display a basic, if perhaps naïve and postfeminist, ‘girl
power’-inspired feminism. And in Beyoncé’s second solo album, B-Day (2006), an
album concerned with the politics of romantic, sexual, emotional, and economic labour,
Ann Brooks identifies ‘a particular kind of black feminist surrogation’ (2008, p. 183) that
articulates Beyoncé’s control over and ownership of her own work, body, and property.
Furthermore, this album marks the introduction of her all-female band, the Sugar Mamas,
which she formed in order to inspire young girls to pick up and learn instruments, having
lacked such role-models in her own childhood.

*Email: weidhasn@roehampton.ac.uk

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 Celebrity Studies 129

With an implicitly feminist back catalogue, her self-titled Beyoncé album marks her
public ‘coming out’ as a feminist. Released without any preceding PR, secretly produced
and tightly controlled, the album features a sample of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ speech on the song ‘***Flawless’. Additionally,
she published an essay entitled ‘Gender Equality is a Myth!’ (Knowles-Carter 2014) for
the Shriver Report on gender inequality, produced by the Center for American Progress, a
non-profit institute concerned with progressive public policy research. The album there-
fore serves as a catalytic moment that frames the themes of bodily and monetary control
evident in her earlier work as explicitly feminist.
In this context, Annie Lennox’s reaction to Beyoncé’s MTV Video Music Awards
performance is significant, particularly due to her own feminist credentials both off and on
the stage (Rodger 2004). Asked about the use of the word ‘feminist’ by Beyoncé, Lennox
states that:

I would call that ‘feminist lite’. L-I-T-E. I’m sorry. It’s tokenistic to me. […] I see a lot of it as
them taking the word hostage and using it to promote themselves, but I don’t think they
necessarily represent wholeheartedly the depths of feminism – no, I don’t. I think for many
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it’s very convenient and it looks great and it looks radical, but I have some issues with it. Of
course I do. I think it’s a cheap shot. […] What can I tell you? Sex always sells. And there is
nothing wrong with sex selling, but it depends on your audience. (Azzopardi 2014)

Perhaps due to the generational difference, her statement reveals an unease with the
conflation of a (possibly postfeminist) sense of empowerment through sexuality and
feminist politics, which becomes more evident in Lennox’s subsequent elaboration of
her controversial statements. Asked by the US-American radio station NPR to clarify her
comments, Lennox explained that she placed Beyoncé on a spectrum of feminism, where
Beyoncé represents the tokenistic end and feminists working at the grassroots represent
the other. Pressed further, she stated: ‘Listen. Twerking is not feminism. That’s what I’m
referring to. It’s not – it’s not liberating, it’s not empowering. It’s a sexual thing that
you’re doing on stage; it doesn’t empower you’ (Leight 2014). This rhetoric is reminiscent
of the 2013 Miley Cyrus/Sinead O’Connor ‘feud’, during which O’Connor criticised
Cyrus for her sexualised performance at that year’s Video Music Awards. Their dispute
gained a similar degree of attention, hinting at a lasting media interest in the feminist
‘catfight’ (Douglas 1995) between women. Moreover, these comments shift the focus to
Beyoncé’s body, which in itself is not surprising, considering the very embodied perfor-
mance she delivered. But this focus on the body here is used to question Beyoncé’s self-
identification as feminist, and by implication her feminist body of work.
Lennox’s critique not only ignores the more practical feminist work Beyoncé has
done, it also foregrounds Beyoncé’s body as a site of contestation and, by extension, her
body as a site for the contestation of her feminism and her feminist credentials. This kind
of critique becomes particularly problematic when one considers the historical (and
ongoing) victimisation and dehumanisation of black women on the grounds of their
perceived hypersexuality (Collins 2005). The limitations of Lennox’s critique reveal the
urgent need for more explicitly intersectional thinking about celebrity and feminism in
order to account for this kind of marginalisation. The fact that, up until the release of her
most recent album, Beyoncé chose to perform her more sexually adventurous routines as
her alter ego ‘Sasha Fierce’ is indicative of the continuing regulation of black female
sexuality (Durham 2012). Assuming this alter ego served to disassociate Beyoncé to some
extent from the history and present of the ‘controlling image’ (Collins 2005) of the
hypersexual black woman. Therefore, Beyoncé’s juxtaposition of her sensually and
 130 N. Weidhase

sexually suggestively dancing body with Ngozi Adichie’s words ‘We teach girls that they
cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are’ can be read as a negotiation of that
marginalisation, and a reclaiming of the black female body and sexuality. Placing
‘Flawless’ and its sampled speech as the interlude between the two parts of ‘Partition’
works to emphasise the song’s message of female sexual agency. ‘Partition’ also uses a
surrogate voice to express explicitly feminist statements, in French, which translate into
‘Men think that feminists hate sex, but it’s a very stimulating and natural activity that
women love.’ Arguably, this juxtaposition of voices serves to elevate both the lyrical
female protagonist and Beyoncé from self-sexualising pop star to female sexual agent.
With this in mind, the same points of critique (too much sex, too little ‘actual’ feminist
work) that removed her from the discourse of feminism place Beyoncé firmly in the
discourse of hip-hop feminism and its motivation to move feminism beyond the walls of
academia through the privileging of popular culture as ‘space for a new generation of
feminist theorizing’ (Durham et al. 2013, p. 722). Within its pro-sex framework in the
context of the lingering legacy of respectability politics, Beyoncé’s performance can be
understood as an exploration of the potential of hip-hop feminism: her combination of
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explicitly feminist content with performances of sexual agency signifies an exploration of

black female sexuality beyond respectability politics. Locating Beyoncé in hip-hop
feminism rather than mainstream celebrity feminism therefore accounts for an intersec-
tional approach to self-sexualising pop performances by black female artists in a way that
the majority of popular feminism does not. With its insistence on ‘living with contra-
dictions’ (Durham et al. 2013, p. 723), hip-hop feminism would also give space to explore
the contradictions and tensions in Beyoncé’s work and public persona – as the post-racial
poster girl (Cashmore 2010) of a global music industry, Beyoncé operates from a position
of privilege that should not go unexamined.
Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to argue that the dismissal of Beyoncé’s feminism is
more indicative of a lack of intersectional thinking in the current celebrity feminism
discourses and dialogues that are largely shaped by white women such as Annie Lennox,
Emma Watson, and Lena Dunham. In this context, Beyoncé’s body does not contest her
feminist status, but instead her body contests the whiteness of mainstream feminism.

Notes on contributor
Nathalie Weidhase is a PhD student at the University of Roehampton, London, UK, where she
researches postfeminist representations of femininity in popular music.

References
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Source. Available from: http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=68228 [Accessed 11
Nov 2014].
Brooks, D.A., 2008. ‘All that you can’t leave behind’: black female soul singing and the politics of
surrogation in the age of catastrophe. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 8 (1), 180–204.
Beyoncé. 2006. B’day. New York: Columbia Records.
Beyoncé. 2013. Beyoncé. New York: Parkwood Entertainment.
Cashmore, E., 2010. Buying Beyoncé. Celebrity Studies, 1 (2), 135–150.
Collins, P.H., 2005. Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New
York: Routledge.
Douglas, S., 1995. Where the girls are: growing up female with the mass media. New York: Three
Rivers Press.
 Celebrity Studies 131

Durham, A., 2012. ‘Check on it’: Beyoncé, southern booty, and black femininities in music video.
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Durham, A., Cooper, B.C., and Morris, S.M., 2013. The stage hip-hop feminism built: a new
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