Beyonce and the Many Faces of Feminism
With the release of Beyonce’s newest self-titled album in December of 2013, the Internet has been a buzz. There have been more than a few contentious debates of Beyonce’s portrayal of feminism and whether or not she is serving the community as a good role model or not. From what has been published within the blogosphere there seems to be a real riff between two forms of feminists, the second wave academic feminists and third wave “choice” feminists. Anna Holmes, the founder of feminist website Jezebel, has been quoted as saying, “For women who are in their 20s and early 30s, her [Beyonce] performance of her sexuality does not feel as kind of icky as it might to someone who’s a little bit older and, dare I say, a little bit more conservative, like me.”(Qureshi 2013) This generational divide becomes apparent and problematic, especially when discussing matters of pop culture.
When first hearing Beyonce’s newest album through a feminist lens, one might be confused. Listening to Beyonce’s heavy handed feminist manifesto “Flawless”, which some find incredibly empowering and exciting, and then hearing “Partition” which sounds like it’s coming from a completely different point of view, one that is much more submissive, could leave someone with a sense of contradiction and misunderstanding. In the song “Partition,” Beyonce sings, “I just wanna be the girl you like,” multiples times, in comparison to “Flawless” where she sings things like, “I took some time to live my life, but don’t think I’m just his little wife.” Understandably some were flummoxed by the apparent contradiction between these two songs, is she a strong independant feminist, or a submissive “yes” girl?
Feminists that disagree with Beyonce’s tactics make valid points concerning the contradictory nature of the new album. The blog “Real Colored Girls” wrote an article addressing the quote by Jay Z in the song Drunk in Love, “Catch a charge ,I might, beat the box up like Mike..I’m like Ike Turner. Baby know I don’t play, now eat the cake Annie Mae. Said eat the cake Annie Mae.” This quote, referencing the extremely abusive relationship of Ike and Tina Turner gained quite a few criticisms by feminists on the web. The writers of “Real Colored Girls”, Christa Bell and Mako Fitts Ward, made an amazing point about the problematics of this quote when they wrote, “ When elements of the feminist community rise up to applaud your [Beyonce] simplistic, pro-capitalist, structurally violent sampling of feminism, the metaphor becomes even more relevant.”(Bell and Ward, 2013) To release one song that is blatantly feminist and in the next song slip in a line that is totally violent to women definitely does poke holes in Beyonce’s feminist image. To read this critique of Beyonce by other women of color also highlights that different perspectives will gain different readings of Beyonce’s album. In his essay “The Relevance of Race for the Study of Sexuality” Robert Ferguson writes,
As the study of sexuality as a racial formation necessitates investigations of the dense and heterogeneous formations that make up sexuality, this particular engagement with sexuality retheorizes the problematic of power/knowledge and sexuality’s commence- ment from it. (Ferguson 2007,114).
Beyonce is straddling the line between two different faces of feminism, an older stricter form of feminism, one where women are urged to break from everything feminine, everything that was set up by the patriarchy to serve them; and the newer more open “choice” feminism, where women can do whatever they please, as long as they do it with feminist intentions. In an essay by Claire Snyder-Hall, she addresses the struggle for feminists to live up to their political ideals, she writes,
Even women who embrace feminism, she [Lori Marso] argues, often find their attempts to achieve liberty and equality stymied by their own feminine attraction to things that bolster patriarchy, as well as by the dominant gender norms imposed on them.(Snyder-Hall 2010, 256)
This is an issue that I hear many of my female peers struggle with; can we still be feminists if we like to have a door held open for us or we like to put on lipstick occasionally? In her album, Beyonce navigates around these issues in an incredibly interesting way, she is letting people know that she’s having her cake and eating it too. She’s a grown woman and she will portray herself and her different facets of feminism in a multiplicity of ways. She’s letting people know that she’s complex, that she enjoys her sexuality and her empowerment. Mikki Kendall represents this idea well in her article for The Gaurdian when she writes,
Beyoncé’s critique of mainstream feminism may be musical, but it is still incisive, valid, and incredibly cogent right now. It’s a lyrical explanation of what’s wrong with assuming that being feminist requires one to follow a script, and not your own heart.(Kendall 2013)
Whether you agree with Beyonce’s version of feminism or not, a dialogue was still started, and months after its release, it’s still happening. Overall, the release of Beyonce’s album exemplified the various ways that feminists diverge from one another. It really showed that feminism is not an identity politics, it is something that changes its definition depending on who you are talking to. We have to form our own opinions and lifestyles, and that’s what makes something like feminism so hard to pin down, while it is an organized movement, it is also something extremely subjective and personalized. Laina Dawes, a writer for Bitch Magazine exemplifies Beyonce’s shifting attitudes well when she writes, “ She [Beyonce] can change her personae on a dime. This time around, she appears in different roles in 14 music videos and successfully seems authentic in each one”(Dawes 2013). We must learn through our differences in order to remain in solidarity. So, I applaud Beyonce for giving us a common platform for these conversations to occur, whether or not a consensus is reached is hardly the issue.
The generational riff that has been occurring for decades now among feminists is not solely based on ideological differences. The real issue at hand is the way that feminism is broken up into waves in the first place. In her essay “Grrrls and Women Together in the Third Wave: Embracing the Challenges of Intergenerational Feminism(s)” Jennifer Purvis brings to light the point that by portraying feminism as a linear historical movement is to miss the point completely and is a way to make cracks within the social movement itself, “…It does not seem reasonable, or politically savvy, for feminisms to abide by artificial boundaries, such as age brackets, or any other marker of linear history”(Purvis 2004, 94). To use Beyonce, a pop culture icon, to create more boundaries between different sets of feminists seems frivolous at best, and politically damaging at worst. There is also the issue that a political group where the main goal is something as broad as equality for women. This inevitably will draw in a multitude of ideas as to how this group should function. In Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” she writes, “In distinguishing sex from gender, feminist theorists have disputed causal explanations that assumes that sex dictates or necessitates certain social meanings for women’s experience” (Butler 1988, 520). Can’t the same be said for how a woman experiences feminism?
Works Cited:
Bell, Christa and Ward, Maco Fitts. 2013. “The Problem with Beyhive Bottom Bitch Feminism” Real Colored Girls, December 15. http://realcoloredgirls.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/the-problem-with-beyhive-bottom-bitch-feminism/comment-page-1/
Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. Theatre Journal Vol.40 No.4: 519-531
Dawes, Laina. 2013. “On Her Surprise new Album, Beyonce is a Cultural Chameleon” Bitch Media, December 17. http://bitchmagazine.org/post/on-her-surprise-new-album-beyonc%C3%A9-is-a-cultural-chameleon
Ferguson, R. 2007. “The relevance of race for the study of sexuality”. In A companion to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies, Edited by: Haggerty, G.E. and McGarry, M. 109–123. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Kendall, Mikki. 2013. “Beyonce’s New Album Should Silence Her Feminist Critics” The Guardian Culture Blog, December 13. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/13/beyonce-album-flawless-feminism
Knowles, Beyonce. 2013. Partition. Beyonce. Columbia Records. CD.
Knowles, Beyonce. 2013. Flawless. Beyonce. Columbia Records. CD.
Purvis, Jennifer. 2004. “Grrrls and Women Together in the Third Wave: Embracing the Challenges of Intergenerational Feminism(s)”. NWSA Journal Vol.16 No.3: 93-123
Qureshi, Bilal. 2013. “Feminists Everywhere React to Beyonce’s Latest” The Record: News from NPR, December 19. http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/12/19/255527290/feminists-everywhere-react-to-beyonc-s-latest
Snyder-Hall, R. Claire. 2010. “Third Wave Feminism and the Defence of ‘Choice’.” Perspectives on Politics Vol.8 No.1: 255-261