In Opposition to Hooks: Violence in Lemonade
By Olivia Leshinski
Beyonce’s album, Lemonade, has been criticized for its visuals of violence coming from Beyonce herself whether it be smashing cars with a baseball bat, running them over with a monster truck, or setting the house in the film on fire. A well-know Black Feminist, Bell Hooks, says that “Contrary to misguided notions of gender equality, women do not and will not seize power and create self-love and self-esteem through violent acts. Female violence is no more liberatory than male violence” in Moving Beyond Pain. While I don’t disagree that violence can not solve the world’s problems, scenes in Lemonade expressed female violence, but the violence was not directed toward the physical body of a man or the relationship, it was directed towards cars and houses, things that are material. If we are to talk about feminism, we can’t criticize Beyonce for her use of violence, without acknowledging the intersections of other systems than the patriarchy like capitalism in which assets are more important than human life. The expression of rage by Black females is historic and granted as they are oppressed by multiple overlapping facets.
Lemonade uses visuals of Beyonce smashing car windows, taking partial inspiration from Jazmine Sullivan’s song, Bust your windows. This song has been pivotal in explaining the reasoning behind female anger. The violence is not going to “heal [her] broken heart”, but its about an expression of the anger after your partner is unfaithful. It is a visual representation of self reflection as shown through the line “I didn’t know that I had that much strength” in a world where women are put into a box of being weak. It also recognizes the minimizing of women’s emotions and how this large expression of anger is a weight lifted off women through the line “You’ll probably say that it was juvenile, but I think that I deserve to smile”. Thinking of Bell Hooks comment that “Female Violence is no more liberatory than male violence”, the questions is why isn’t it? Especially for black women. Being both black and a woman means managing in a system of both white supremacy and patriarchy, it means knowing everything about your oppressors from both the space of womanhood and being black. When no space feels free, why don’t we see this violence of a sign of how we treat our women? Why put this violence in the patriarchal perspective of domination or equality? It is not about either. It is not about the freedom to act like men or cause destruction like men. We are all human and we all feel and the repression of those feelings will come out. Why fault the woman for the use of violence and not fault the systems that cause it? Claudia Rankine describes this build up of Anger using Serena Williams career, particularly an instance in 2009 where she called out the judge for making an inappropriate foot fault call, in Citizen saying, “it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief- code for being black in America- is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules” (30). To criticize Beyonce or Jasmine Sullivan or any other woman relating to violence against property is to further repress the emotions and needs of black women and women in general. Violence is valid in a world where words don’t have value, where emotions are minimized, where respect is earned, and where it is not used for domination or equality, it is used as it is meant to be, an expression of an emotion after someone or something failed to “play by the rules”.
To say black women expressing rage or using violence is not progressive to the feminist movement is further silencing women as well as ignorant to human nature and the connection between mind and body. Where your mind may be in turmoil, the body has a need to express that physically. The women in the video above are describing their reaction to the phrase “angry black woman”. It offers a variety of opinions and interpretations, but one of the main things women said was that the anger often times came out of hurt. The system can hurt, a partner can hurt, but these women also described it as a way to minimize those who speak out against oppressions. While the phrase itself is twisted and interpreted and stereotyped within society, to say certain artistic works like Lemonade involve violence against property and therefore undermines feminism is ludicrous and further silences the pain and hurt of women who have repeatedly undergone stressors and trauma’s with no release on the basis of the capitalistic, white supremacist, and patriarchal systems at play in America.
