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I Ain’t Sorry: Beyoncé, Serena, and Hegemonic Hierarchies in Lemonade Sarah Olutola

English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

ABSTRACT This article examines the politics of Beyoncé’s Lemonade-era brand- ing, which, in subsuming a message of black female resistance within a Eurocentric framework of neoliberal competition, elevates Beyoncé’s exceptional body above the bodies of other black women in her orbit. By closely reading not only Beyoncé’s live performances, but also her “Sorry” video, this article exposes a political tug-of-war between black female empowerment and black female hierarchy to be found throughout Beyoncé’s Lemonade era. These ideological tensions necessitate a closer exam- ination of Beyoncé, whose strategies of success in a white patriar- chal music industry complicate her status as a radical figure.

Introduction

One could say that the famous phrase “bow down bitches,” uttered by Beyoncé Knowles in her 2013 song “Bow Down,” has come to represent the singer as a cultural icon. She is, after all, “Queen Bey,” an American pop music monarch credited by Time magazine as “the heir-apparent diva of the USA – the reigning national voice” (“The 2013 Time 100”). Her celebrity capital, which has given her a platform to spur frenzied national debate,1 and her quasi-deification in contemporary popular culture as “Queen” have taken on particular significance in the post-Obama era that has seen a “spillover of racialization” into mass political and popular culture (Tesler 6). By the time Beyoncé released her sixth studio album and second visual album, Lemonade, in 2016, highly publicized stories of police brutality against black bodies and consequent black protest movements had permeated an intense, racially polarized public sphere. In an era that has seen an increase in debates concerning racism and racial privilege, Beyoncé has become a symbol for many of unapologetic black resistance – and icon of black power.

The phrase “bow down,” on the other hand, also represents the central conundrum this article seeks to address: Can Beyoncé’s explicit overtures towards communal black feminism and black female equality coexist harmoniously with the subtle hierarchal coding inherent in the cultural fantasy she embodies, particularly for her black female consumers?

I mention her black female consumers specifically because Beyoncé’s recent work holds particular importance for this consumer base. Her persistent success in the face of

CONTACT Sarah Olutola [email protected]

POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY 2019, VOL. 42, NO. 1, 99–117 https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2019.1555897

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racist backlash can be thought of as a kind of white bourgeois nightmare for those Americans who would rather the singer be stripped of her political power. Particularly in Lemonade, Beyoncé’s exposure of the violent workings of white supremacy, her display of pride in her African heritage, and her subversion of patriarchal power (“when he fuck me good,” she says, “I take his ass to Red Lobsters”) has allowed her to occupy a unique space within the pop cultural milieu as a transgressive, powerful figure. With her strengthened appeals to explicit black feminist activism, she re- emphasizes her status as an aspirational ideal for especially her black female fans, who are invited to feel empowered by the unrelenting celebrations of blackness, Afrocentricity, and black womanhood that have come to define her Lemonade era. Lemonade outwardly assures her fans that the cultural space created by Beyoncé’s musical and visual offering is for them to enjoy. As Inna Arzumanova argues,

Beyoncé not only centralises black fans and the diversity of black lives, she also makes herself unavailable to white fans, white pleasure, and whiteness as an ideology of domina- tion and exploitation, prodding at its assumptions of access, of universality, and of active subjecthood. “This isn’t for you”, Beyoncé seems to say. (423)

There is a danger, however, in mythologizing Beyoncé as a radical black political figure whose work is “unavailable” to oppressive frameworks. While it is certainly true that “Lemonade creates a space in which Black women’s experiences can finally be acknowl- edged and affirmed, rather than ignored” (Washington 6), Beyoncé, as a pop star working for blockbuster fame, wealth, and success in the competitive American music industry, cannot be extricated from – and should not be decontextualized from – the larger white patriarchal heteronormative capitalist context within which she, her work, and her success exists. We must then consider her image and actions as they operate in an American entertainment industry whose aims of producing “idols of consumption” (Lowenthal 115) have certainly, since the industry’s inception, been oriented around white leisure and pleasure.2

It is this tension that this article seeks to explore. Beyoncé is not simply an artistic figure of black resistance; she is also a celebrity who must work tirelessly to remain relevant in a pop music industry with increasingly limited space for black female superstars. For all pop stars of Beyoncé’s caliber, part of the work of remaining relevant involves consistently delivering “pitch-perfect brand narratives . . . that resonate far and wide,” narratives meticulously constructed to stay abreast of changes to the cultural climate in which both celebrity and consumer exist (Lieb 35). The unresolved tensions within Beyoncé’s status as not only a “Queen” to whom others must “bow down,” but also a political, “dynamic and aspirational black everywoman” (Lieb 36) become clear if we dare to contextualize Beyoncé and her transformation into a black resistance figure within the complex and oppressive realm of mainstream celebrity stardom, consumer consumption, and the modern music industry. Such a reading reveals Beyoncé’s radical black feminism as contra, yet still inextricable from “whiteness as an ideology of domination and exploitation” (Arzumanova 423). Lemonade may not be for white consumers, at least not explicitly. But is it truly for all black consumers?

This is what makes tennis star Serena Williams’ appearance in Lemonade analytically significant. Serena, who has long fought against reductive stereotypes of black savagery while displaying athletic supremacy in the predominantly white sport of tennis, appears

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in the “Sorry” video to dance provocatively in front of – and at times at the feet of – Beyoncé who sits before her in a throne-like seat. In this video, we see uncomfortable tensions arising from Beyoncé’s productive alignment with African identity and black feminism appearing sub-textually throughout Lemonade. While Beyoncé surrounds herself with dancing dark-skinned African women, we see amidst the celebration of Africanness a retold Western fantasy of the dark African female body. This article, thus, considers both axes of analysis from recent critical work on Beyoncé’s Lemonade era focused primarily on Beyoncé’s recentralizing of the radical black perspective (Hobson; Arzumanova; Workneh), and her commodification of blackness for capitalist ends (Baraka; hooks, “Moving”). In putting these analytical points of entry in dialogue with each other, I interrogate the ways in which Beyoncé’s transgressive celebrity is produced through the differential framing of black female bodies that, while giving voice to black resistance, also produces Beyoncé as a figure skirting the edge of white capitalist palatability. By including an analysis of “Sorry’s” representational politics along with a broader interrogation of Beyoncé’s socioeconomic and cultural positioning in relation to the black women (fans, dancers, and stars) in her celebrity orbit, I argue specifically that Beyoncé and her Lemonade-era’s displays of black feminism, existing simultaneously within the spheres of activism and commercialism, often subtly under- mine what could otherwise be powerful examples of black female solidarity. As Eurocentric logics of race, capitalism, patriarchy, and biopolitical control mix uncom- fortably with the pervasive message of black power, the film exposes the inconsistencies that have ultimately arisen in Beyoncé’s public persona as she has attempted to absorb social justice movements into a radical, but consumable brand – a brand that both challenges and placates the demands of a neoliberal and white supremacist music industry.

“Bow Down Bitches”: Neoliberal Aspirations in Beyoncé’s Brand

Feminist blogger Brittney Cooper’s repudiation of the very act of critiquing Beyoncé’s politics contains intriguing slippages that invariably emphasizes the need for any examination of Beyoncé to re-situate both the singer and her work within the consumer capitalist context in which both operate. In her article, “5 Reasons I’m Here for Beyoncé, the Feminist,” Cooper frames such scrutiny as a form of misogynoir, unpro- ductive anti-black woman displays of respectability policing that must be replaced with celebration and acceptance of Beyoncé’s self-definition as feminist. “[M]arginalized groups have the right to self-define,” she writes in one instance, further noting: “Time’s out for the WOC feminist meangirls shit. Sometimes folks just be hating. Real talk. Cuz if you ain’t critiquing Katy Perry and Pink an alla dem for being pro- capitalist . . . then back up off Bey” (Cooper). Cooper is correct in that analyses of Beyoncé should not completely divorce her from the context of other (white) pop stars and indeed, this article’s examination of Lemonade ultimately re-situates Beyoncé, her image, and her work alongside that of other female popular music celebrities. However, if we take Beyoncé as part of the industry that produces successful stars like Katy Perry and Pink, then we also have to understand her work, and its political undertones, as emerging from the same system. In other words, this re-situation of Beyoncé requires a de-mystification of the singer troubling her reading as a black feminist auteur. Indeed,

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by labeling the critical interrogation of Beyoncé as “mean” and constructing the singer’s cultural image as “self-defined,” Cooper ironically speaks to the existence and success of Beyoncé’s brand – a brand that, like every pop star brand – is deemed a success upon its ability to manage perceptions of its message to particular, intended readings and to encourage affective investment in this message from fans, while simultaneously hiding its constructed-ness.

This article posits that it is integral to consider the tensions in Beyoncé’s black feminism as relating to her branding specifically because contemporary music stars exist as part of a communication complex consisting of executives, marketers, and consumers, which involves the sending and receiving, coding and de-coding of messages. The relationship between music stars and music consumers is managed and mediated within modern social space, which, since the Industrial Revolution, has been organized by capital accumulation (Harvey; Lefebvre). Therefore, to read Beyoncé as solely a radical auteur seeking to deconstruct patriarchy and white supremacy misses glaring elements in the production of her work. Seminal celebrity theorists (Gamson; Dyer, Heavenly Bodies) have discussed stardom, spectacle, and branding, emphasizing that “the celebrity” can never exist outside of the processes of production. This includes media industries and mass technologies, which must continually respond to social contexts to produce legible stars. According to Nicholas Carah, “In a rapidly changing music industry, bands and musicians find that they no longer just commodify their musical recordings. They also earn an income by connecting their image, meanings, values and performances to corporate brand-building activities” (xv). This brings into view the work of pop stars as a “contested terrain” (xvi) of art and commodification, necessitating that interroga- tions of Beyoncé and other female pop stars take seriously branding as part of their ongoing challenges and strategies of achieving longevity in a brutal, competitive industry. According to Kristin J. Lieb, a cultural theorist who formerly worked in the music industry, “a star’s signature narratives, personas, and looks may operate, strategically, within the context of her overarching brand theme to keep her brand stable at a meta level, while also allowing her the operational flexibility and fluidity to change with the times throughout her lifecycle” (35). Thus, although as Nathalie Weidhase points out, Beyoncé often articulates her “control over and ownership of her own work” (128),3 Beyoncé, as a top-tier female pop singer, cannot be considered as singularly creating and defining herself outside of capitalist and industry man- dates. Indeed, as Lieb argues, many variables play a part in the navigation of the careers of Beyoncé and her similarly blockbuster peers, including agents, publicists, and executives; music, lifestyle, trade, and fashion publications; fragrance and cloth- ing opportunities; production studios, video game designers, and marketers; music supervisors, venue owners, retailers, tour promoters, and so on (97). Though their brands may grow organically as part of their personal politics and present concerns,4

they are crafted at least in part through beauty, management, and marketing teams. Ellis Cashmore further reinforces this viewpoint of Beyoncé’s work by pointing out the “businesslike purpose even in [Beyoncé’s] first venture” of Girl’s Tyme and its follow-up Destiny’s Child, which “was an operation – a systemic activity in which business organization is involved. Beyoncé later reflected that her father had studied the factory-like operations used by Motown” (139). It becomes clear upon these

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considerations that Beyoncé’s work is beholden to more than just herself and her personal politics. Like other top-tier contemporary female music artists, she must produce commercially viable work that engages consumers on a massive scale for the benefit of not only herself, but also the conglomerate of individuals, organizations, and so on profiting from her success.

This is important insofar as studying the tensions in Beyoncé’s present brand reveals the ways in which the contradictions evident in her overtures to black power and black feminism are indebted to the nature of the industry within which she works. A female music star’s success depends on her remaining relevant, and a celebrity remains relevant “only so long as he or she is living out an interesting narrative . . . when an individual loses his or her narrative or the narrative becomes attenuated, the celebrity vanishes – the equivalent of a movie or novel that bores you” (Gabler, qtd. in Cashmore 138). Ellis Cashmore argues that a decade ago, Beyoncé avoided heavy politicization to maintain a safely consumable brand5 and thus could be seen as part of a bevy of black mainstream stars who symbolized for black consumers the achievement of an American Dream, the actualization of which culminated in the mainstream through the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency. These black celebrities reinforced the narrative that racism could be overcome through relentless consumerism, developing themselves as individuals and bettering their qualities of life through economic success in a way that would make racism unimportant (137). Such is the narrative of neoliber- alism that, in its emphasis on individual responsibility and economic competition, operates ideologically as a formative culture (Harvey; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Giroux). As Cashmore writes, Beyoncé once symbolized a world

in which blacks not only shared facilities with whites, but had actually risen to promi- nence in all areas of society including, as Obama evidenced, the political arena. . . . Beyoncé was glamorous, ostentatiously rich, enjoyed a sybaritic lifestyle and had a partner who could lay claim to be the world’s most successful rap artists. In almost every way, she was the actualization of the American Dream so long denied black people. The ideal of equality, of opportunity and of material success that had for long been abstract and unattainable was given human shape. (136)

Beyoncé’s shift in brand towards more radical black feminist politics coincides with the increasingly mainstream politicization of social life in the 2010s and particularly, as stated earlier, the post-Obama era. However, the vestiges of the American Dream persist in her text; even as she uses African writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech in the song “***Flawless” to foreground her “coming out as feminist” (Weidhase 129), Beyoncé injects into her anthem of female equality references to her own astronomical wealth, including her “diamond[s]” and rock[s],” further alluding to her combined worth with Jay-Z in the remix in which she claims: “Of course sometimes shit goes down when it’s a billion dollars on an elevator.” Daphne A. Brook’s analysis of her 2006 B-Day album points towards the neoliberal subtext of her work, claiming that while the album speaks to black women’s hardships, “it imagines a language of socioeconomic autonomy that is, in every way, troubling in its fixation on materialism” (201). Likewise, as Beyoncé subverts patriarchy 10 years later in Lemonade’s “Formation,” her claims that “[i]f he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper, ’cause I slay” sells a kind of black female power fantasy couched in the kind of materialism that most of

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her black female fans will never achieve even as they are taught by a continuing formative neoliberal culture to emotionally invest in the fantasy.

Beyoncé’s more radically political and visually powerful work coincides not only with the mainstream visibility of black politics, but also with the changing needs of the industry. Today, the process of producing stars often involves the strategic creation of pop spectacle, regardless of its content. We can relate the production of Beyoncé’s visual aesthetics to Victor P. Corona’s discussion of Lady Gaga, another of Beyoncé’s top-tier industry peers. Taking from Cornelius Castoriadis’ discussion of social ima- ginary, Corona argues that the unprecedented level of cultural exchange and connec- tivity due to social media in this present era of “hypermodernity” or accelerated capitalism has forced entertainment industries to respond by “generat[ing] expectations of ever grander spectacles” (726). These spectacles are linked to the anxieties of historical and social contexts of the consumers – social imaginaries that are “known to be fictional and yet, like fiction in literature, theatre, or movies, we [as consumers] lend ourselves as willing accomplices to the worlds they offer hoping they can somehow transform the real through a utopic vision” (Mandoki, qtd. in Corona 726–27). As her shocking lyrics and powerful visuals are retweeted and blogged about, the Beyoncé of the present decade has emerged as a more powerful icon of black female power, a powerful black queen, and her black female fans in particular are invited to partake in her regal display of powerful black feminism through consumption.6

I extend Brooks’s and Cashmore’s arguments further to note that as Beyoncé’s brand comes to incorporate more explicitly radical black feminist politics, the neoliberal wish- fulfillment left over from her earlier eras becomes radicalized and re-emphasized; Beyoncé’s materialism becomes part of her radical black feminist resistance. But the economic success obtained through neoliberal competition, which is articulated in Beyoncé’s work as a means through which black women can resist white patriarchal supremacy, is closed off to many. Beyoncé’s brand, in addressing present social con- cerns and anxieties, helps her to stay culturally relevant, but her overtures towards her own status, wealth, and power only re-inscribe the exclusiveness of her celebrity category and her separation from – and socioeconomic elevation above – other black women. These hierarchal undertones are present within the very nature of her fandom’s name, “the Beyhive,” a play on the word “beehive,” which ultimately invokes the image of her consumers as belonging to a caste below that of the protected “queen bee.” Beyoncé’s brand must continuously communicate sociopolitical meanings to a receptive target audience to stay competitive; these meanings have come to carry major contra- dictions as the brand juggles empowering black feminist politics, and the politics of white patriarchal Western capitalism, the latter of which forms part of the legible and enjoyable fantasy of her work and successfully sells her to a market of consumers. The tenets of this fantasy, however, certainly go beyond wealth in ways that will be elaborated upon in the next section.

Less Like Macy Gray: Hierarchy and Competition in Beyoncé’s Black Resistance

The tension between Beyoncé as a symbol of black feminist equality and Beyoncé as an exclusionary symbol of power to be singularly worshipped and celebrated by fans

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carries over into the politics of Beyoncé’s framing in relation to other black female bodies and celebrities. Furthermore, this framing is invariably tied to the ways in which Beyoncé’s powerful Lemonade aesthetics aids in her industry competitiveness while exposing the contradictions in her message. Lieb points to the competitiveness of the industry even for top stars like Beyoncé when she notes that “[t]here are precious few top-tier female recording artists at any given point in time” (105). Both African- American pop singer Tinashe, in her 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, and Gabrielle Union, in her speech at the 2013 Essence Black Women in Hollywood event,7 speak to the crushing competitive reality for black entertainers particularly when they mention the many ways in which black women fight for limited space.8 To maintain top-tier success, Beyoncé’s black feminist brand must remain legible to a current cultural climate politicized but nonetheless unmistakably inflected by the white, heteronorma- tive patriarchal capitalist ideologies that not only affect consumer’s social spaces in insidious ways, but also continues to structure the limited, competitive space of the mainstream music industry. These tensions, evident in Beyoncé’s framing within her own staging as radical black feminist, may be what accounts for the interruptions in the communication process of her brand narrative: that is to say that, as Beyoncé sells herself as a black feminist figure, the contradictions inherent within her text produces instabilities through which even black feminist audiences can decode a meaning differ- ent than the one intended (Lieb 28–29). As I argue here, the management of Beyoncé’s narrative as a black female activist involves the careful management of the coding of her blackness.

For conservative white audiences, Beyoncé’s blackness is – especially in this current cultural moment – too visible, its visibility emphasized and exploited for the racist ends of many cultural critics.9 In 2016, during her Super Bowl halftime show performance, Beyoncé seemed to embrace this interpretation by powerfully challenging white society with her performance of “Formation.” As she sang the aforementioned lyrics surrounded by dark-skinned black female dancers dressed in Black Panther-style black berets and black leather jackets, she deftly invoked fears of black civil unrest, arousing anger from police groups who, in response to her critical references to police brutality, threatened to boycott various concert dates on the Formation Tour (see Rogers).

Beyoncé’s present claims of blackness in an entertainment industry with limited space for black women and even less space for politically transgressive black women are daring and powerful. However, the threats of boycott made by police departments, which were essentially threats upon the safety of Beyoncé, her staff, and her largely black female concert-going audience, make clear the stakes of this daring re-centering of blackness. The attempts by American police to re-subject Beyoncé and her fans to the country’s violent disciplinary apparatus make clear the dangers that visible blackness still poses to black entertainers. This blackness, as Fanon has argued, acts as a uniform that enables the continued subjugation of the black body under the sociopolitical legacies of colonial knowledge-production and biopolitical management (95). Beyoncé, despite being Queen, is still visibly a brown-skinned woman, and indeed, her status as “Queen” is only dependent upon her continued survival in the entertain- ment industry. Closer inspection of her Super Bowl performance gestures towards strategies of negotiation around her blackness, troubling Beyoncé’s construction as

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a symbol of black resistance by revealing the ways in which the burden of blackness on her body is eased by its association with other black female bodies.

Beyoncé and her team chose, after all, specifically dark-skinned black women as her back-up dancers for her Super Bowl performance. While her dark-skinned dancers wore black berets upon their large Afros hairdos, which, as Angela Davis has stated, forms part of “a symbolic visual representation of Black militancy” (41), Beyoncé stood apart as visibly the lightest of the group, her light skin accentuated by the long blonde weave that has now become her trademark. It is important to interrogate the representational politics at work in this performance beyond simple celebrations of black resistance. As bell hooks argues in Black Looks, contemporary representations of blackness are always rendered by a white supremacist lens that rewards the mimicry of white ideals. She writes of the dark-skinned daughter of friends:

Her skin is dark. Her hair is chemically straightened. Not only is she fundamentally convinced that straightened hair is more beautiful than . . . natural hair, she believes that lighter skin makes one more worthy . . . she has internalized white supremacist values and aesthetics, a way of looking and seeing the word that negates her value. (3)

Matthew Knowles himself admitted in a 2018 interview with Ebony magazine that internalized colorism led him to reject “nappy-head Black girl[s]” as per his mother’s request. Instead, he courted Tina Knowles because at the time he thought she was a white woman perhaps owing to her mixed French, European, Black, and Indigenous ancestry: “In the deep South . . . the shade of your Blackness was considered impor- tant. . . . I used to date mainly White women or very high-complexion Black women that looked white” (Knowles, qtd. in Bennett).

Though Beyoncé has no control over her heritage, the casting of back-up dancers was a specific choice on the part of Beyoncé and her team, as is the insistence on making long blonde hair part of her brand even in a performance carefully designed as a homage to black militancy. Of course, as Noel Siqi Duan has argued, criticizing Beyoncé’s blonde weave as an “affirmation of whiteness” (hooks, Black Looks, qtd. in Duan 56) falls dangerously into the colonial logics of possession with respect to the black female body, a body already over-burdened with negative symbolic meaning and heavily policed within the biopolitical institutions of domination (56). At the same time, one cannot ignore the fact that the dark-skinned black body is affected differentially by legacies of these institutions. In their study of colorism in the United States, Ekeoma Uzogara and James Jackson have argued that the socioeconomic and cultural hierarchy of light-skinned African-Americans over their dark-skinned coun- terparts during the period of slavery (in which dark-skinned slaves were expected to do hard labor in the fields as opposed to light-skinned house slaves) has persisted into the contemporary era (156). As actress Viola Davis divulged in her 2015 interview with The Wrap, the privilege of light skin intensifies the competitive conditions black women face in the entertainment industry:

That being said, when you do see a woman of color onscreen, the paper-bag test is still very much alive and kicking. That’s the whole racial aspect of colorism . . . in the history of television and even in film, I’ve never seen a character like Annalise Keating played by someone who looks like me. My age, my hue, my sex. (qtd. in Kapsch)

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To ignore the ways in which white supremacy continues to mark black bodies differ- entially and to uncritically support Beyoncé’s image and bodily agency (“it’s her body”) is to reinforce neoliberal discourses of personal choice that efface the sociopolitical dimensions of such choices. Indeed, her Super Bowl performance of “Formation” is not the only instance in which dark-skinned black bodies strategically surround and high- light Beyoncé’s body. During her early days as the lead singer of Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé stood out as the lightest among the members, which as former member Farrah Franklin alleged was not by coincidence. As she told Vibe magazine in 2001, she was instructed to darken her skin in tanning salons before she could be a member of the group as she was replacing LaTavia, who “was darker than her,” an allegation confirmed by Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles (Knowles, qtd. in Ogunnaike 80). Returning to Cashmore’s assertions, Girl’s Tyme and Destiny’s Child were business operations managed by a team well aware of Motown structure and politics.10 In these cases, Beyoncé’s inclusion into black female groups was specifically designed to facilitate her elevation above other black female bodies as the breakout star.11

The effect of Beyoncé’s framing as she is surrounded by darker bodies is akin to what Tom Engelhardt calls the encirclement trope. The encirclement trope is a cinematic technique used in Western films such as Stagecoach (1939) designed to force an empathetic, subjective connection between the audience and the white protagonists. This identification is typically encouraged by placing the white body at the center of a larger group of racialized bodies whose numbers strip them of subjectivity. In Western films, this visual placement of the white body enables the construction of the racialized bodies surrounding them as threatening (Shohat and Stam 119–20). The logics of this filmic visual trope can be applied to Beyoncé’s “Formation” performance. Her lighter body and blonde weave stand in tension with the dark-skinned bodies and Afrocentric hairstyles of her back-up dancers; and in fact, while Beyoncé’s dancers wore clothes iconic of the Black Panther’s militant resistance against white supremacy, Beyoncé’s own clothes, as she told Extra, were an homage to Michael Jackson’s 1993 Super Bowl halftime show outfit (“Beyonce Says”). Underlying Beyoncé’s employment and display of dark-skinned beauty in the form of her dancers is the reification of her body as exceptional through the eyes of a culturally constituted white gaze. A contentious exchange between music producer Elijah “Young Hollywood” Sarraga and Dominican-American singer Amara La Negra on the show Love & Hip Hop: Miami astutely exemplifies the tension between Beyoncé’s adherence to white beauty standards and her radical Afrocentric politics. As an Afro-Latina, dark-skinned Amara La Negra chooses to don an Afro as part of her brand image. On the show, this image is repudiated by the music producer who, in one scene, tells her that to become more successful in today’s market, she should look “a little more Beyoncé, a little less Macy Gray” the latter of which refers to a darker-skinned, less conventionally beautiful, older black singer who often revealed her natural African hair on stage (Sarraga, qtd. in Moreno). As Lieb argues, “those building and managing female artists brands tend to make beauty and sex central elements” (99), speaking to the inescapability of beauty standards. “[T]he stakes are higher for female pop stars,” she writes, “who arguably set a standard of femininity for the rest of us by amplifying and celebrating pre-existing societal gender norms through highly feminized performances of gender” (186). If according to Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd’s theory of “black liminality,” Beyoncé, like

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other black popular figures, is “perceived as acceptable and unacceptable, insider and outsider” (429), then the cultural acceptability of Beyoncé’s beauty forms part of her status as insider, which, along with the implicit plutocratic elements of her brand, destabilizes the singer’s image of black female equality by further separating her from and elevating her above other black women. The fashioning of Beyoncé as an exceptional celebrity body through knowledge regimes of whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism transfers much of the burden of her radical blackness upon the militant, un- individuated dark-skinned bodies designed to more powerfully symbolize the conser- vative white nightmare.

That is not to say that Beyoncé herself does not share in this burden. As the face of the Super Bowl performance, she has become the target of white conservative panic, as exemplified by the police boycott threats. However, in a political climate where certain black female bodies have advantages over others, one must question whether or not Beyoncé’s monumental success as a singer would be possible if she had adopted as her trademark image the visual references foisted upon her Super Bowl dancers. Her proclamation in “Formation” that she “slay[s] all day,” coupled with “bow down” as the underlying theme of her image as Queen Bey, necessarily invokes the kind of exceptionalism required to remain, as Tinashe complained to Rolling Stone, one of the two black female singers allowed to exist in the mainstream pop industry (Chen). This dimension of competitiveness brings back into the narrative of her radical blackness the controversy surrounding her 2015 Grammys performance of the slave spiritual “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” In a last-minute switch, Beyoncé performed the song in place of black R&B singer Ledisi, who had been expected to sing since she had performed it in the civil rights film Selma (2015). As singer John Legend explained, “You don’t really say no to Beyoncé” (qtd. in Ng), suggesting Beyoncé’s strategic use of her celebrity social capital to deny a darker, larger black woman a career opportunity to bolster her own success. By stealing Ledisi’s moment, Beyoncé provided a way to ensure her continued success, not only by performing at a highly visible event, but also by strengthening her own brand association with the black resistance movement for a Post-Obama, Post- Ferguson era of black fans hungry for such a symbol. All the while, her strong association with the Western cultural and economic values of neoliberal self- achievement, capitalist competition, and Eurocentric beauty sands down the edges of her figuration as a black power role model, paradoxically producing her as a figure more palatable to the socioeconomic dimensions of white supremacy than is imme- diately obvious. If “[r]eal fearless and fierce women,” as Union stated in her Essence speech, “stand up and . . . use [their] voices for things other than self-promotion” (qtd. in Bush), then how do we tease apart the ideological contradictions of those black women for whom their construction as fearless and fierce is itself a form of promotion that demands that they use their voices for “other things,” presumably “things” in relation to social justice? In the following section, I continue to examine how the instabilities and contradictions in Beyoncé’s branding can affect how the black female bodies can be read in proximity to hers. By offering a reading of Serena Williams in the “Sorry” video that contradicts the celebratory meaning intended, I expose the inherent difficulties of communicating black female solidarity through the ideologically layered fantasy of Beyoncé.

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Sorry, Not Sorry: Serena Williams and the Dancing Black Body

Despite her massive success in the field of tennis, Serena Williams and her body have been subjected to white patriarchal policing. Controversy surrounded Serena’s Crip Walk after her 2012 Summer Olympics victory as white conservative reporters con- structed the celebration as a kind of “humiliating” show of urban blackness on a world stage (Sieczkowski). Journalist pieces on her tennis matches have also tended to relegate her body to the realm of the grotesque, such as Ben Rothenberg of the New York Times’ attribution of her athleticism to her “large biceps and a mold-breaking muscular frame,” which her rivals “could try to emulate” but “choose not to.” The fascination with the black female body is one of both sexualization and revulsion over its difference, empowered by the assumption of the white right to gaze upon, judge, and own it (hooks, Black Looks 62). While dancing the Crip Walk, however, Serena claimed agency over her body, inviting the white gaze to dare to look upon her while she weaved the blackness of the poor inner-city into her celebrity image as the best player of her generation and used this blackness to transgress upon the kind of upper-class white social space black bodies have historically been denied. Serena’s transgressive dance seems to mirror a scene in Spike Lee’s film School Daze (1988), in which young African- Americans perform the dance, “doing the butt” in swimsuits. As hooks argues in Black Looks, these dancing black bodies invoke, but cannot be fully contained by the Eurocentric discourses seeking to degrade them: “The black ‘butts’ on display are unruly and outrageous. They are not the still bodies of the female slave made to appear as mannequin. They are not a silenced body. Displayed as playful cultural nationalist resistance they challenge the assumptions that the black body, its skin color and shape, is a mark of shame” (63). Likewise, at the 2012 Olympics, Serena’s dancing body was not a silenced body. On a world stage, it loudly articulated its homage to those policed, disciplined, and impoverished African-American youths on the margins of urban society.

It is difficult to read Serena’s inclusion in Beyoncé’s “Sorry” video without consider- ing how the framing of her dark black body works as a response to the conservative backlash towards its transgressive potential. The theme of the song, and indeed the explicit theme of the Lemonade album and film, is the mistreatment of black women by their unfaithful black male partners. It is a response, one could say, to the ways in which black patriarchy can transform black women into “de mule uh de world” (Hurston 20), but as with the rest of Lemonade, the video also acts as a kind of power fantasy within which black female audiences can vicariously rebel. If the song “Sorry” is the black woman’s revolution, Beyoncé leads the charge. However, during the opening poem, Beyoncé does not readily appear. Set to a music box version of the principal theme of Swan Lake, which in its reference to the cursed Odette frames the scorned black wife’s frustration, the opening seconds of the video feature two rows of dark-skinned black women sitting in a bus. Like the women of Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance, they are draped in unapologetic blackness – though their blackness reflects specifically African identity. Their hair is styled in various types of braids and their bodies are adorned in Nigerian artist Laolu Senbanjo’s Sacred Art of the Ori, which he describes as a sacred Yoruba ritual in which he interprets one’s soul by painting on their bodies (Klein).

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Among these black bodies, Beyoncé appears only for a short moment, her own blonde weave braided, her own face yet unpainted.

However, it is Serena’s entrance that marks the beginning of the track. After an establishing shot of the Madewood Plantation House in Louisiana, the camera pans inside the house to follow Serena wearing a black leotard with a black couture cape following behind her as she seductively walks down the stairs. The black and white color scheme of the music video sets her black body and outfit against the white interior and exterior of the plantation house. We can consider here Richard Dyer’s argument in White that Western film and photography apparatuses have developed around the privileging of white skin. The saturation of color worked to enhance the white skin of the subject in way that transformed him or her into a representation of whiteness as ideal. In Dyer’s own words, “In the history of photography and film, getting the right image meant getting the one which conformed to prevalent ideas of humanity. This included ideas of whiteness, of what colour – what range of hue – white people wanted white people to be” (90). However, there are no white bodies present in the plantation house. The lighting technique of contrasting whiteness and blackness serves in this context to highlight Serena’s dark black body.

Once again, this body is unruly; as the camera follows her she defiantly returns its gaze with her own as if daring the viewer to criticize her. Defiance marks Serena’s dancing as twerks to Beyoncé’s repeated chanting of the refrain, “Sorry, I ain’t sorry.” As she twerks in the video, she announces her unruly black body, reclaiming the African-American posterior-focused dance, which had been appropriated and commo- dified famously by Miley Cyrus three years prior (Gaunt 250–51). Her dancing can indeed be interpreted as a powerful societal challenge to a white American society that would, on one hand, denigrate blackness, and, on the other, commodify and appro- priate it for profit. It can also be read as a personal challenge to the same society that has continuously denigrated her body and achievements. Serena suggests as much in her interview with Grazia when she responds to criticisms of her body, as well as criticisms surrounding her dancing in “Sorry.” Channeling the lyrics of the song, she tells Grazia: “I am not sorry for who I am . . . I am not sorry about anything. I really connected to those lyrics and felt good about that” (qtd. in Flint).

Serena’s dancing in relation to Beyoncé and her complex brand of black feminism and Eurocentric neoliberal power, however, complicates this celebration of unapolo- getic blackness. Serena’s dancing takes place in the foyer, of which the camera shows just enough for the viewer to watch her dance in front of Beyoncé sitting on a tall dark throne. Once again, Beyoncé’s discursive framing as “Queen Bey” comes into play. Beyoncé, a black woman, sitting on a throne in a plantation house that would have been her prison as a slave, is radical in its own right. Beyoncé lounges across the chair rather than sitting straight, like the healthy, self-regulating white body prized by the modern state, as Foucault has argued in The History of Sexuality (139). Sprawling across the throne with her leg up on the armrest, Beyoncé seems to spite the demands of self- disciplinary conformity, intruding, like Serena’s Crip Walk, into bourgeois upper-class white space with her blackness. The video seems focused on emphasizing her blackness by surrounding herself with dark African bodies in African paint, by reciting the words of African British poet Warsan Shire to frame her piece, and by styling her hair visually after the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti before adorning her painted body in a Yoruba

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Ankara at the end of the video. However, during those moments in which she is sitting on her throne, the video cannot escape the implications of the way it frames Serena’s dancing. Serena, a large, muscled, dark-skinned woman dances for a comparatively more slender light-skinned woman wearing a braided blonde weave while sitting on a throne. Once again, Beyoncé’s important work of prioritizing blackness and African identity falls in tension with the implicit subjugation of dark-skinned bodies to her own exceptionalness marked as such by a Eurocentric neoliberal regime of competition. Although the song begins with Serena walking down the stairs of the plantation, defiantly trailing her hand along the white banister almost in a show of possessiveness, the plantation is not hers. It is Beyoncé’s, or so the video seems to suggest when Serena bends down low to dance at Beyoncé feet for her pleasure. Although the two black women enjoying themselves in the white master’s house signifies as a co-conspiratorial reclaiming of this site of white biopolitical power, the video never quite allows Serena to stand on equal footing to Beyoncé, who consumes her dancing dark-skinned body as entertainment.

While it is true that Serena herself had no issues concerning her role in the video, Saidiya Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, warns us of the complex meaning of black agency under unequal social conditions. Situating her analysis in the antebellum period of American history, she reads scenes of the black slave body dancing for white consumption in slave quarters or vaudeville stages as insidiously aligned with scenes visible anti-black brutality. As she writes,

fun and frolic become the vehicles of the slave’s self-betrayal and survival. By stepping it lively and “acting smart,” the captive was made the agent of his or her dissolution. The body of the slave, dancing and on display, seemingly revealed a comfort with bondage and a natural disposition for servitude. Those observing the singing and dancing and the comic antics of the auctioneer seemed to revel in the festive atmosphere. (37)

The slaves dancing, in other words, can be reinterpreted as a display of biopolitical control over their bodies. Hartman’s discussion of black agency is relevant here not insomuch that we can characterize Serena as a metaphorical slave, though it is a mistake to assume that a black Creole woman such as Beyoncé could not possibly occupy the role of master. As others (Foner; Halliburton) have noted, historically many of the freed, largely mixed African-Americans in Louisiana, from which Beyoncé’s maternal heritage derives, owned slaves themselves.12 What is useful about Hartman’s work, however, is that it asks us to interrogate displays of symbolic violence often disguised as benign.13 Serena’s celebration of her black body, while empowering, cannot be sepa- rated from her subordination to Beyoncé in the scenes they share together. Never in the video, for example, does she sit on the throne unless Beyoncé is not there. In Beyoncé’s presence, the throne, and the house as a reappropriated cultural space of resistance, is Queen Bey’s alone.

This, highlighted by Serena’s dark skin, seems to repeat damaging discourses of the ownership of dark-skinned body and brings to the fore its exoticization and animal- ization called into manifestation through the unequal sociopolitical context of the video. Once again, Beyoncé has chosen to surround herself with black bodies darker than hers. Once again, she is framed strategically in a way that allows her to stand with but apart from – and in the case of Serena, literally above – those dark bodies. Surely, Beyoncé’s

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performances and videos must highlight her as the star, necessitating the emphasis on her difference. This is necessary in a capitalist industry that, in producing stars for consumption, cannot allow those stars to simply blend into the background. However, this underlying mandate of celebrity production only highlights the conceptual diffi- culties of representing communal black female power within such an industry, parti- cularly when subtly colorist and racist representational strategies are corralled for the purpose of framing Beyoncé as the sole exceptional body. To craft her exceptional body, Serena must “bow down,” subordinating her wealth, achievements, and celebrity capital to Beyoncé’s own. Dancing at Beyoncé’s feet, she becomes the receptacle for the negative Western representations of blackness – subjugation, primitiveness, animality – that the video attempts to subvert; more importantly, Serena takes on the burden of these representations in the singer’s place. The persisting element of white patriarchal capitalist self-elevation embedded deep within Beyoncé’s brand thus destabilizes the video’s intended message of black female solidarity, re-inscribing an aesthetic space in which black female bodies are called to participate in her celebrations of black identity – but not equally.

Conclusion: The Untouchable Queen Bey

The presence of Serena in the “Sorry” video highlights the ideological tensions through- out Beyoncé’s Lemonade in which she seems simultaneously transgressive and regres- sive. “Sorry,” for example, rails against the black patriarchal oppression of black women and yet the solution Lemonade offers is one of acquiescence. The film suggests, as part of the solution, a kind of acceptance of this burden as an expected part of the black female experience. In "Moving Beyond Pain," her online dissection of the piece, hooks writes that

[i]n this fictive world, black female emotional pain can be exposed and revealed . . . but it does not bring exploitation and domination to an end. . . . If change is not mutual then black female emotional hurt can be voiced, but the reality of men inflicting emotional pain will still continue (can we really trust the caring images of Jay Z which conclude this narrative).

The romanticization and normalization of the black woman’s seemingly inevitable forgiveness of black male transgression calls to mind Beyoncé’s support of husband Jay-Z’s lyrical references to Tina Turner’s spousal abuse. Despite criticism of Jay-Z for making light of Turner’s abuse through the line “eat the cake, Anna Mae,” on stage Beyoncé made the decision to say the words with her husband in a show of solidarity during their performance of “Drunk in Love” at the 2014 Grammys (Mokoena). Her support of Jay-Z in this moment, much like her displacement of Ledisi at the 2015 Grammys, exposes the contradictions of black female empowerment and black female subjugation that Beyoncé cannot readily resolve by draping herself in African and African diasporic culture and iconography, or using the words of black female writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Warsan Shire to frame her music and politics.

The chronicling of the birth of her twins, Rumi and Sir Carter, through an elaborate photoshoot series posted on Instagram further reveals the difficulties of maintaining a coherent message of black female empowerment. The photoshoot,

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taken by Ethiopian American Awol Erizku, frames Beyoncé as the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, while also alluding to mythological figures such as Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty and love (Grady). While the figurative deification of a black woman powerfully contradicts old colonial discourses of black female degra- dation and animality, the shoot itself is a symbol of Beyoncé’s exclusive experience of wealth and celebrity power, an experience worshipped by fans. Embodied in her exceptional body, made more ethereal through the white lighting of the photoshoot, is a display of Afro-diasporic appreciation packaged within white patriarchal neo- liberal ideals that privileges certain bodies over others based on their proximity to white ideals of beauty, femininity, and economic class. If the photoshoot is meant to cement Beyoncé as Queen, then perhaps the current popular culture landscape is better for it; society is always in need of public figures brave enough to give voice to black struggle and black beauty. However, to overlook Beyoncé’s continual displays of self-elevation in favor of celebrating her radical progressiveness is to risk ignoring those unresolved tensions that ultimately reinforce a society of winners and losers, barely subverted, with the same bodies fulfilling their historical role at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Notes

1. Indeed, at the end of her song, “Formation,” Beyoncé confirms this sentiment her own words: “You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversations.”

2. See Shin, “If It Be Love Indeed, Tell Me How Much,” and Dyer, White, especially chapter 3, for ways in which actors have been framed and filmed for white pleasure.

3. Beyoncé released Lemonade, for example, through her own label, Parkwood Entertainment.

4. Sonitra R. Moss’s assertion that Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy has inherited a black female legacy of “undeserved hatred, revulsion, marginalization, and hyper-scrutiny” (156) opens up the possibility that Beyoncé’s turn towards radical feminism and black power in her subsequent albums, Beyoncé and Lemonade, is in part her response to these criticism as a mother. However, Blue Ivy, as “the link of two living legends, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who are arguably two of the most celebrated artists and entrepreneurs of this century,” does not exist in social space similarly to other marginalized African-American girls. As Lieb suggests, she is also part of Beyoncé’s star text and, as such, not only is she celebrated within Beyoncé’s fandom as an extension of Beyoncé’s brand (69), but as an emerging brand herself; she is also entangled in legal and economic strategies of brand protection, as evidenced by the ongoing legal dispute between Beyoncé’s team and female entrepreneur Veronica Morales who has used the name “Blue Ivy” before the child’s birth (Morgan- Smith).

5. Nathalie Weidhase specifically mentions the creation of the alter ego Sasha Fierce as a way for Beyoncé to separate herself from performances of hypersexuality, though she goes on to say that the reincorporation of this performance into her personal brand during her Beyoncé era demonstrates her embracing of the radical potential of black female sexuality (129).

6. On 29 March 2018 Beyoncé dropped a handful of merchandise bearing her image as the Egyptian monarch Queen Nefertiti, once again reinforcing the connection that must be made between Beyoncé’s black feminist politics as part of a larger brand that centralizes her own queen-like power and wealth.

7. See Chen and Bush for Tinashe’s interview and Gabrielle Union’s speech in full.

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8. Contrary to her brand construction as existing outside of the industry as a political figure, Beyoncé can also be situated in the limited space for aging female stars in a patriarchal industry. This may explain, as Lieb points out, the evolution of her sound and image after 2013 to incorporate aspects of black music stars Nicki Minaj and Rihanna’s brands (40).

9. See Tatum, for examples of conservative panic surrounding Beyoncé’s non-bourgeois displays of blackness played out in the mainstream political sphere.

10. Barry Gordy’s image-making in regard to the Supremes comes to mind, his policy of “brown-skinned but not ‘too dark’ ” aiding in the group’s – and especially Diana Ross’s – crossover into the mainstream by “conforming to mainstream standards of beauty and desirability” (Woldu 125).

11. Indeed, we must consider that the fashioning of Beyoncé as star includes various parties, which itself reveals the inescapable capitalist nature of celebrity. In the introduction to his work Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Richard Dyer insists that stars, who function as textual images, are “produced by the media industries, film stars by Hollywood (or its equivalent in other countries) in the first instance, but then also by other agencies within which Hollywood is connected in varying ways and with varying degrees of influence” (4). Furthermore, he makes explicit the implicit metaphor of stars as raw material by recogniz- ing their own involvement in the process by which they are made. “Stars are involved in making themselves into commodities,” he explains, and as such “they are both labour and the thing that labour produces” (5). Beyoncé does not appear before the world by accident, but as the result of a process of capitalist production designed to create her as exceptional.

12. See Collins for a more in-depth theorization of intersectional violence. As she argues, African-American women’s experience cannot be understood solely in terms of gender and race because of the multiple dimensions of power that make possible multiple experiences of violence within black communities.

13. See Zizek, especially chapter 1, for a discussion on subjective (visible) forms of violence and objective (less visible) forms of violence. Symbolic violence, a form of objective violence, includes language and semiotics. As Zizek argues, denying objective violence is itself a politically violent act.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sarah Olutola is the Gordon F. Henderson Postdoctorate Fellow at the University of Ottawa and a graduate of the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her current research concerns representations of race in popular media culture, African cultural studies, postcolonialism, and global capitalism. She has edited special issues and published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice. She has also written novel-length fiction for independent and trade publishing houses for a global market.

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