Beyoncé’s Self Titled: A Black Feminist Text
Beyoncé Knowles-Carter isn’t technically royalty, but one wouldn’t know that from reading Tumblr. “Queen Bey,” as she’s colloquially known, is recognized as one of the top female recording artists in the nation, if not the world.
Besides her vocal and performance prowess, Beyoncé has legions of fans dedicated to every aspect of her identity: her style, her family, and her unique brand of feminism. One of Beyoncé’s pointed publications of this feminism was Self-Titled, a web series she released on YouTube in 2013, following the release of her visual album, Beyoncé. Self-Titled consists of five parts, each a few minutes long, mixing interviews with Beyoncé herself alongside behind-the-scenes clips of her recording studio sessions and music video filming for her iconic 2013 album.
Self-Titled serves as a modern Black feminist text in the ways that Beyoncé distinctly reclaims aspects of her Black female identity: her motherhood, her public and private performance of sexuality and femininity, and her role as a music professional. In staking claim to these identities through Self-Titled, Beyoncé uses her visual and musical creativity to contribute to the growing landscape of Black feminist thought. She stands on the shoulders of the great Black feminists before her, such as Audre Lorde and Harriet Jacobs, and in doing so, re-imagines classic experiences and ideologies.
In Self-Titled specifically, though throughout the performance of her public persona, Beyoncé makes the tenets of feminism accessible to a wider audience by claiming them as her own. In her role as a Black woman, professional, mother, and proud feminist, Beyoncé effectively has shifted mainstream feminism towards a more intersectional practice. Rather than dissociate from mainstream feminism, as many Black feminists of the past have done (due to its exclusionary practices and ignorance of racism and patriarchy’s intersection), Beyoncé changes the conversation and mainstream feminism to better suit her own needs. In Self-Titled and her 2013 album, Beyoncé also creates a space to empower other Black feminists, like Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, by contributing to her work.
As a widely revered public figure, Beyoncé influences cultural understandings of power and privilege in regards to race and gender, and in claiming feminism as her own, she combats many pervasive stereotypes. And, in speaking out against these hierarchies in the widely popular Self-Titled, Beyoncé contributes to Black feminist discourse in an impactful way.
Feminist theorists, however, are somewhat divided on whether Beyoncé’s impact on the field (and truly, the world) is positive or negative. Scholar Aisha Durham perceives Beyoncé as crucial player in modern feminist studies, and thus her publications (like Self-Titled) to be inherently worthy of a feminist reading for a number of reasons: “Beyoncé is a key figure for contemporary feminist media studies because she represents the production of celebrity, gender politics defined by hip hop and the complex negotiations of self-image and sexuality for young women coming of age,” Durham explains (Durham, 36). She goes on to explain how “since the confessions of Harriet A. Jacobs… who recounted her performance of femininity to safeguard against probably sexual assault under chattel slavery, Black women have theorized ways in which femininity and its attendant categories, beauty and class, police mobility” (Durham, 37). Beyoncé’s specific performance of femininity, in the ways it does and does not question already-held beauty standards, thus directly addresses the policed mobility of Black women’s bodies. Beyoncé’s fame and fortune (i.e., her “beauty and her class”) have allowed her some agency in deciding how she performs her femininity, as compared with Black women of decades past, and many women today.
However, other feminist theorists feel that Beyoncé’s public performance of sexuality and her adherence to dominant beauty norms is more problematic than empowering. In a 2014 discussion panel at The New School, feminist author and leader bell hooks famously referred to Beyoncé as “a terrorist in terms of her impact on young girls.” Sensationalist or not, hooks’ point is valid, and speaks to greater issues within the Black feminist movement: as previously mentioned, Beyoncé reclaims her sexuality and her performance of femininity from a position of extreme privilege which is not afforded to the majority of Black, American women. Regardless, Beyoncé’s contribution to the re-imagination of mainstream feminism as an intersectional practice has meant an incredible expansion and furthered understanding of the movement. While Beyoncé certainly may not be perfect, she isn’t striving to be: “I’m trying to rebel against perfection,” she states in Part 3 of Self-Titled.
