Beyonce

Cet article entend rendre compte des controverses liées au positionnement féministe de Beyoncé depuis 2013. Il s’agira d’abord de retracer l’évolution féministe de Beyoncé, depuis son album éponyme en 2013, dans lequel elle se déclare féministe pour la première fois, jusqu’au plus récent Lemonade (2016). Cela afin de montrer que la politisation récente du féminisme chez la chanteuse, qui apparaît moins « pop » et moins « fun » que par le passé, coïncide avec l’intégration d’un discours antiraciste dans le sillage du mouvement Black Lives Matter. Aussi, il sera question de la réception du discours de la chanteuse, tant dans les médias qu’au sein du féminisme africain-américain, les premiers s’étant notamment fait l’écho des débats internes au Black feminism afin de mettre en doute la légitimité de Beyoncé à se réclamer du féminisme.

Written in 2014, my senior thesis explores permutations in visions of skin and embodiment within works by U.S.-based women of color (Theresa Cha, Toni Morrison, Beyoncé Knowles). Drawing on queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory as well as continental philosophy, my project examines the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of this fluctuating corporeality within discourses of U.S. racialization.

I teach courses such as “Black Popular Culture in D.C.” and “Beyoncé,” and other topical courses in race, gender, sexuality, class, spatial politics, and language using popular culture. This is a lesson plan I've designed for use in Sexuality Studies, Gender Studies, or Africana Studies courses.

As a result of inscriptions informed by slavery and colonialist ideology, the Black woman's body bears the narrative of hypersexuality, a legacy the enslaved Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman epitomized in both life and death. In an attempt to rewrite and reimagine their narratives, some Black women have created spaces and performances to reclaim their sexuality. Th e spaces created by juke joints and Black female artists, especially performers like Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B, try to resist the historical narrative but are still challenged and judged by body and respectability politics that sometimes make feminism marginalizing. Hip-Hop feminism emerged to give articulation and set free the limiting binary of feminism by extending and interrogating intersectionality across diff erent spectrums to create a new praxis of female liberation.

Grounded in the field of celebrity studies and analyzed through an intersectional lens, this paper untangles the seemingly incongruent discursive knot that constitutes Beyoncé’s feminist identity. I claim that the divergent discourses circulating through her star text tell us something about the state of feminism today. As such, she does not merely display the tension within her own star text, but, as celebrity feminists perforce do, also the tension within the (post-)feminist debate in American society.

The popular arts industry demands the fulfillment of a set of standardised criteria by both women and men in order to achieve success, whether social or occupational. Not to disregard the pressures faced by men, it is on women’s struggle with such pressures that this dissertation is focused.
The music industry presents both a platform and a problem for women. Whilst providing them with the opportunity for creativity and a public voice, it insists on reinforcing phallocentric ideals and stereotypes of how they should perform and present that creativity. In 2012, 67.8% of all music-industry related jobs were male and 32.2% female,  and, according to the UK Music Producer’s Guild, 95% of record producers and sound engineers were male.  The patriarchal nature of the industry has consistently suppressed and marginalised those women who have a feminist agenda. Along with playing a significant role in the Civil Rights movements from the late 1800s, feminism has been subject to internal troubles, specifically the division between Black and White women and their differences in definition. The lack of academic evidence and closure on these issues has left the representation of women in the public sphere equally indeterminate, and ultimately under patriarchal control.  What women are seeking to achieve is a reformed unity of their gender, a lifeline that extends to all who are struggling with gender inequality in social, economic, and political fields.
Beyoncé is an example of a woman who, at the height of her career, is taking control of her artistic integrity, creating music that is personal and agentic, whilst simultaneously advocating gender equality and women’s rights. Her recent work has received much criticism, demonstrating the turbulent nature of feminism and gender equality within today’s mainstream consumer culture. A discussion of women and feminism within the late twentieth century and present day music industry, followed by an investigation into the controversy surrounding Beyoncé shall offer a contemporary contribution to the burgeoning field of Feminist Media Studies and Popular Musicology.

In this essay, I explore how Nicholas Hytner's 2019 immersive production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Bridge Theatre incorporated popular music, cultural references and anachronistic textual  additions to Shakespeare’s play in order to respond to issues of contemporary gender politics and questions of desire, and to update the play for a modern audience.

interview for Billboard magazine. 5 While the Cardi B interview specifically is most relevant to this analysis, the other two interviews demonstrate the dearth of discussions by hip hop artists and #metoo. They also clarify that the discussions within the genre are just beginning. Of the three interviews, the Cardi B interview, especially, received a lot of playback. In it, she took a strong stance that criticized mainstream feminism, but supported both #metoo and women whose work relies on their sex appeal. She complained that #metoo excludes women's claims if their profession utilizes their sexuality, and also scrutinized the selectiveness of feminism aligned with the #metoo movement as predominately white and wealthy. She did not accuse anyone of sexual misconduct by name, but she identified with the movement by recounting her time as a video vixen when she was offered chances to be on magazine covers in exchange for sex. 6 She implied that this type of quid pro quo is pervasive in the field, but any claims of sexual misconduct would fall on deaf ears. She doesn't stop there, offering her opinion that producers and directors who claim to support #metoo, are "not woke, they're scared."

Using the figure of the anamorphosis, this essay explores the critical labor of the music video for The Carters' "Apeshit" (Ricky Saiz, 2018, United States). By playing off the canonical artefacts of the Louvre collection, "Apeshit" stages a stunning array of lessons in contrast, thinking through blackness in relation to ontology, capitalism, and aesthetics. With "Apeshit," The Carters claim blackness as an aesthetic and affective force of sociality incompatible with canonical archival methods. Instead, the genre of the contemporary music video emerges as a form of radical archival practice.

This essay advances from Erica Edwards' theorization of “sex after the black normal” to understand the confined insurgency of Beyoncé's racial and gender lyricality. That is, Beyoncé is situated within the “Black normal,” but, while amid its tempered normality, she fissures its purported seamlessness. What this essay seeks to do is demonstrate Beyoncé's insurgency within the Black normal. Using her early solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003), as a benchmark for her initial immersion in the tenets and “terms and conditions” of the Black normal, then juxtaposing the Beyoncé of Dangerously in Love to her latest album, Lemonade (2016), which captures her full-fledged insurgency and hostile takeover of the Black normal, this essay will make clear that Beyoncé has utterly fractured the continuity of the Black normal in order to incite revolutionary de- and reconstruction of (valid) racial and gender inhabitation.

With the release of Beyoncé’s 2013 eponymous album, culture critics charged all in on whether Beyoncé is a feminist figure or an antifeminist product of capitalism, and yet, no one has asked younger people how her music resonates with them. This study examines the attitudes of young girls (aged 11–16) towards Beyoncé. They viewed “Girls Run the World” and “Flawless” in focus groups and were asked about their impressions of Beyoncé and her relationship to feminism. Through a grounded theory thematic analysis of the data, a relationship among the emergent themes manifested as follows. When Beyoncé highlights the girls’ physical, race, class, sexual, and gender vulnerabilities, they counter with sexual respectability politics that result in an ambivalence toward Beyoncé who may be a feminist but is not the girls’ role model.

Faced with the technological, economic and cultural evolutions of the entertainment world, the music industry has to engage with new business models and consumption habits-suffice it to consider the drop in album sales and the rise of subscription streaming services, such as Spotify. In the meantime, industrial and cultural convergence has opened up new creative and commercial possibilities, allowing single industries to become part of larger networks of synergies that can create value from multiple businesses, outlets and audiences by spreading one core idea, or concept, across different media. This is most evident in franchises based on audiovisual products, where the characters, along with the storytelling they generate, are the foundation of a transmedia storyworld. However, the music industry too has embraced not only cross-media distribution principles, but also world-building and transmedia storytelling models, mixing and remediating itself with other media languages in order to produce narratives and experiences that are centered on music. Thus, this chapter explores the ways the music industry can generate cultural and economic value through transmedia projects, and seek to assess the role of music in the diverse transmedia storyworlds that these projects generate.

Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African American literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance through the period of the Black Arts Movement to the present. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the various ways in which African American literature both shapes and is shaped by the changing conditions under which it is produced, including segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among others. Students develop critical thinking and communication skills through discussion and exams as they cultivate knowledge of texts covering a wide range of genres, themes, styles, and points of view. Key topics to which the course returns throughout the semester include the representation of race and gender, social and economic mobility, freedom, community, identity, and nationalism, among others. Students will also reinforce analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills; build content knowledge; and expand computer and information literacy by pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, digital humanities project culminating in the presentation of a research paper. A blog will be used to host course-relevant internet resources discovered and annotated by students. The research paper will incorporate one or more texts from the syllabus, internet resources from the blog, and at least one non-literary primary text (film, painting, photograph, song, etc.) so as to illuminate relations between literary works and the social, political, economic, and artistic culture as a whole.

Tesis dirigida por Amparo Lasén.
Desde hace varios años algo ha cambiado en el panorama mediático, el feminismo como mensaje político ha venido diseminándose en diversas plataformas, medios y ha formado parte de las declaraciones de celebridades de muy distinta índole. Marcas de ropa y productos asocian sus valores al feminismo y movimientos como FEMEN, Pussy Riot o el #MeToo han ocupado portadas internacionales y debates profundos. En esta tendencia insertamos el trabajo que la cantante Beyoncé está desarrollando desde hace varios años, utilizando sus shows y videoclips como escenario para lanzar determinadas consignas políticas que tienen que ver con su género y su raza: sampleando el discurso feminista de la escritora nigeriana Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie en su show de la gala MTV Music Award 2014, homenajeando a las Panteras Negras o haciendo guiños al movimiento #BlackLivesMatter y a la cultura afroamericana. Su caso ha recibido elogios y críticas muy duras por distintos sectores de la sociedad y desde diversas esferas. Muchas mujeres -cis y trans-, especialmente negras, se han identificado con su discurso reconociendo en él un carácter empoderante; otras voces han señalado su falta de autenticidad por diversos motivos...

Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a 56-minute film composed of twelve music videos with interludes comprised of spoken-word poetry, concrete sound, and visual tableaux. Lemonade focuses on difficulties with marriage and monogamy; the popular press has described it as a commentary on Beyoncé’s marriage to Jay-Z. But it is equally about African American history. It’s a call to action.

I’ll focus on three key aspects. First, Lemonade draws viewers in. While Beyoncé appears in every music video and many of the interludes, the film never devolves into autobiography. Instead it incorporates its viewers as well as the performers depicted in the frame and heard on the soundtrack. Second, Lemonade encourages the listener-viewer to make sense of a complex whole. Its elaborate structure demands we discover sonic and visual connections across sections. Finally, by drawing on music-video and avant-garde aesthetics, Lemonade showcases multiple story lines and strands simultaneously.

Two overlapping genres—music video and experimental film—provide Lemonade with a means to hold the past, present, and future together. Besides the narrative of Beyoncé’s marriage (expressing anger, fear, grief, reconciliation and reintegration), Lemonade develops historical strands about Africa, the Middle Passage, slavery, reconstruction, lynching, neo-liberalism and the disinvestment of black neighborhoods at the beginning of the 1970s, Hurricane Katrina, and the police murders of African-Americans. Lemonade embodies opposites: love and hate, engagement and alienation, forgiveness and revenge.

Beginning with the example of Beyoncé's music video for her song "Countdown," which copied movements from Anna Teresa De Keers-maeker's early choreographic work, this article explores the role of plagiarism, reconstruction, and recreation in contemporary dance. With regard to theories of repetition (such as those of Søren Kierkegaard and Giorgio Agamben), a particular focus is placed on the ephemerality and corporeality of movement, arguing for the convergence of copying and repetition in dance. While, due to the restrictions of human anatomy and the responding characteristics of movement, dancing is always already interwoven with the process of copying, it is, however, the inevitable inexactitude of these copies that guarantees the non-iterability of dance, as well as its alteration and innovation.

Beyoncé’s most recent visual album, Lemonade, presents itself as a Black feminist text exploring the impact of infidelity on Black women. Through the explicit use of diasporic African cosmology, iconography, and aesthetics, Beyoncé and her team of creatives masterfully craft a narrative upholding a central thesis taken from a 1962 Malcolm X speech in which he asserts:  “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman” (X, 1962). Lemonade upholds this argument by exploring infidelity as a by-product of the sustained and persistent denigration of the Black family through systemic racism and offers an afro-futurist response through a distinct focus on the complex inter-play between Black history, culture, and human emotion. Beyoncé’s position, however, as a hyper-capitalist sexualized pop star has rightly opened this work to critique. In as much as Lemonade makes a compelling intellectual statement worth exploring, some of its central arguments are underpinned by significant short-comings that mark it as inherently problematic. Still, we assert that the contemporary post-modern era in which the text is situated denies Lemonade, and really any text, the ability to be “pure” and because of this, Beyoncé’s visual album can be both and at once an important statement by and for Black women even if its arguments are limited/limiting.

This essay appears in the book Enchanting David Bowie, edited by Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore and Sean Redmond and published by Bloomsbury Academic Press, July 2015.

Abstract :
Among all the fabulist baubles of five decades of David Bowie's work, is there one damn song that consciously tries to make us break down and cry, one that is uniquely political and uniquely emotionally real? Yes; there is his hit song 'Young Americans.'
By no coincidence, 'Young Americans' is also Bowie's singular foray into the rich tradition of the American Anthem, that long chain of storytelling songs that set out to portray the state of the nation. This great songbook opens with the classical American Anthem itself but of course the pro- nationalist tradition takes a critical, modernist turn in the 1950's as the U.S. folk movement writes Critical Anthems for the anti-war and civil rights movements. Suddenly the tree begins producing strange fruit; the Anthem's formal choral nature, featuring many people pursuing many objectives and faiths but all united by a certain pursuit of happiness, is suddenly ironically appropriated. In the resulting Critical Anthem, a myriad of American characters are all lost in a morally-empty American landscape, their naïve faiths shattered.
The pop-chart debut of 'Young Americans' in 1975 marks the withering end of the modernist Critical Anthem. Here Bowie's unparalleled skills as a vocal, lyrical and character menagerist peoples a materialist landscape with no myth left from the Ghetto, no hope to be found in marriage or sex, no way to tell emotion from alienation. But, whereas other Critical Anthems use many personal stories to express a political problem, Bowie brilliantly flips this to make the political personal, using the political exhaustion of the US after Nixon as itself a metaphor for the country's exhausted gender- roles and paralyzed pop-cultural hopes. And so, as the story ends in a swirling choral cacophony of unsatisfied desires, it also opens the Post-Modern chapter, the inner turn, of the Critical Anthem songbook.
This essay appears in the book Enchanting David Bowie, edited by Deakin's Toija Cinque, Christopher Moore and Sean Redmond and published by Bloomsbury Academic Press, July 2015.


For an earlier draft of this essay, please contact me at amedeo.dadamo@gmail.com.

Pornografie ist eine Tatsache der menschlichen Lebenswelt: wir begegnen ihr in der modernen Gesellschaft genauso wie in der Antike oder der Vormoderne. Sie möchte erregen, indem sie Sexualität und sexuelles Begehren offen, vielfach geradezu übertrieben und aufdringlich dar- und herstellt. Darüber hinaus ist und war sie zumeist ein höchst aufgeladenes Phänomen, dem hitzige Debatten über Moral und Sittlichkeit sowie Ästhetik und Abartigkeit anhaften. Allein dies macht sie für Geistes-, Sozial-, Medien- und Rechtswissenschaften nicht nur interessant, sondern in erster Linie zu einem wichtigen Untersuchungsgegenstand. Im Umgang mit dem Thema Pornografie spiegeln sich Einstellungen, Normvorstellungen und Wertungen einer Kultur und Gesellschaft hinsichtlich der Darstellung sexueller Begierde und Sexualität im Allgemeinen wider. So bleibt zwar das Kerngeschäft der Pornografie, d.h. die sexuelle Erregung, konstant, doch verändern sich ihre ästhetischen Mittel und Inhalte im Vergleich der Epochen teilweise erheblich.

Dieser Band vereint unterschiedliche wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven und aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse zum Thema, wobei die Beiträge Pornografie in ihrem gegenwartsrele-vanten Kontext beschreiben und untersuchen. Die multidisziplinäre Perspektive auf das Phänomen der Pornografie macht deutlich, dass sie selten nur einen gesellschaftlichen Bereich berührt und daher kaum mit den Fragestellungen und Methoden einer einzigen Disziplin begriffen werden kann. Aus diesem Grund versammelt der Band Beiträge, die von Rechts- über Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprach-, Medien- und Sozialwissenschaften reichen und wirft einen Blick auf unterschiedliche Epochen und Kulturräume, wie etwa europäische Kulturen der Gegenwart, die USA der siebziger Jahre, China und seine Pornografie im 16. Jahrhundert oder pornografische Darstellungen im Kino und Fernsehen der Gegenwart.

When global digital music fan communities dwell and consume
in heterotopic online spaces (e.g. Twitter and Instagram) they
appear to do so in a ‘free’ and deregulated space, where their
intentionality is to enact utopic desires of belonging in what
individual fans see as a collective community. However, in the
context of the digital economy, spaces of belonging such as
music fan communities have gone through a ‘neoliberal turn’
whereby these spaces become stratified by distinctions and
uses of social capital. Along with this reconfiguration,
mainstream media outlets actively produce competitive and
hierarchical discourses in which fannish ways of being are
inscribed with competitive individualism by harnessing
expressions of enthusiasm. In turn, such discourse places
cultural value on right and wrong ways of practicing fandom.
Based on my own primary research, this paper will determine
the extent to which practices of consumption, uses of language
and reciprocal orders of interaction with the object of fandom,
have culturally stratified the ‘fan’ identity to suit the neoliberal
ecology of popular culture.

In today’s racially charged climate there is an expectation that black celebrities cry out #BlackLivesMatter, get on the field to #TakeAKnee and be #UnapologeticallyBlack whenever they are in the spotlight. This climate transcends what was once seen as a post-racial America— a time where the media portrayed race as no longer being an issue— and encourages black celebrities to address racism. Prior research on black celebrities by Sarah J. Jackson, Ellis Cashmore, bell hooks, James Baldwin and others acknowledges the historical burden placed on black celebrities to publicly discuss racism and represent blackness in order to challenge dominant narratives. Today, this expectation manifests differently than it has previously due to the affordances of social media and the need for celebrities to brand themselves as “woke” in order to appease their black fans. This thesis analyzes how the system of black celebrity works to bring issues of race into the mainstream public sphere and situates the current climate as post post-racial because of the emergence of discussions around existing systemic racism. Utilizing theoretical celebrity studies research by Richard Dyer and P. David Marshall, I perform a critical discourse analysis of media coverage and online discourses surrounding Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance. What I discover is that Beyoncé integrated activism into her brand and public image as a tactic to highlight the tenants of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement —a movement emerged to bring attention to continued systemic racism. This tactic is indicative of a larger cultural shift in the system of American black celebrity in the post Obama era. This research furthers an understanding of how black celebrity and the public sphere converge.

This essay explores the contributions of Beyoncé to what I call “the New Niggerati,” a cadre of Black cultural producers engineering American popular culture.  eir pro- motion of individual economic improvement is a discursive shi  in Black music, a “dap” to advanced capitalism. Beyoncé’s hegemonic power to move the culture places her at the apex of the New Niggerati. With the simultaneity of her privilege and a perceived Black southern realism, she represents a new frontier for Black feminist cul- tural studies. I examine a selection of her work to demonstrate the complicated nature of her manipulations of protest iconography within an apparatus of capital designed to suppress revolutionary consciousness. Beyoncé’s fetishized Black feminist radicalism has transformed the politics of social movements into a set of commodities that ulti- mately sustain her personal empire.

If forging identities from the long dead of the past can be perilous, it can also enable explorations into the nature of social revolt. Like hagiography, fictions that seek to retell history can reconfigure the past, overcoming its transient, ephemeral nature. But these stories can also draw legitimate attention to the struggles faced by historically oppressed political movements, and redress the anonymity of their principal agents. Rachel Kushner's 2013 novel The Flamethrowers approaches the history of 1970s feminist art in precisely this way, unearthing a range of forgotten feminist artists of the period, assuag-ing and even correcting their historical dispossession. But the novel does more than this by enmeshing this group of imagined artists, which are associated with feminism's second wave, with the overt masculinities of the Futurists of the 1920s and '30s. It gathers together these young Italian Fascists and New York feminists and ensconces them in an abstract bubble of time. To be sure, Kushner places these two movements in counterposition.

Emma Watson is often regarded as a 'game-changer' in modern feminism, and an icon for the movement within our pop-culture. However, upon further inspection, we learn that her strides in the realms of feminism have been short-sighted. In this paper, I take a look at her HeForShe campaign. I also take a close look at other icons in modern feminsim, including Beyoncé, Roxanne Gay, and bell hooks.

Beyonce calls Lemonade a “visual album.” There’s been buzz about the image of Beyonce smashing up cars, and a lot of talk about the autobiographical themes of the lyrics (lines like “better call Becky with the good hair” have been getting attention for the way they call out Jay Z’s mistress). But this 65-minute film’s songs, text and sound design haven’t been talked about in relation to its images. Lemonade’s unusual form—a long-play music video—gives it the capacity to draw connections between the personal pain of infidelity and America’s terrible history of racism. Twelve video clips are linked by brief passages comprised of poetry, visual tableaux and sound collage. These interludes lean toward avant-garde aesthetics. One thing avant garde aesthetics and music video share is the capacity to hold several vantage points in suspension. In Lemonade this capacity allows the work to embody opposites: love and hate, engagement and alienation, forgiveness and revenge.

In this special issue of Taboo, the authors use Beyoncé's album, Lemonade, to introduce the concept of the Bad Bitch Barbie, a term used to identify a woman who embraces her body while simultaneously using it as a commodity. Representing a Black body ideal in Lemonade, Beyoncé uses images of Black women's bodies to express empowerment, boldness, and resilience as Black women struggle to live in a racist and sexist society. There has been recent interest in the ways Black women have been portrayed in current media and popular culture, and many individuals have taken the opportunity to honor Black women's beauty, power, and resilience in the era of #BlackGirlMagic by paying homage to women who use music, sound, and the arts to tell their stories (Wilson, 2016; also see Jessica Care Moore's website, " Black Women Rock " [http://www.blackwomenrock.com]). In this article, our aim is twofold: first, we offer a historical review of the ways Black women and their bodies have been portrayed in music as well as in the political, cultural, and social spaces associated with Black women's worldviews. Second, we review songs from Lemonade to describe the Bad Bitch Barbie, who welcomes glamorization and embraces the profitability associated with the racialization, sexualization, and subjugation of Black women's bodies. This information is vital in discussions about how young African American girls emulate the likes of Beyoncé, and represent themselves in a mainstream culture whose beliefs are informed by socio-historical experiences concerning sexual imagery. The Bad Bitch Barbie figure recognizes—and, to some

Underpinning this essay is my assertion that Beyoncé’s Lemonade is the most perfect example of political music that I know. I believe that, unlike more ‘generic’ political music, Lemonade revealed itself to be the ideal tool for a targeted intervention into a very specific terrain of struggle, so as to transform that terrain permanently. I discuss this idea in terms of Alain Badiou’s notion of the Event, arguing that the terrain on which ‘the Lemonade Event’ occurred was none other than that of music discourse itself, as a domain within the public sphere more generally.

The bulk of the essay constitutes a thematic review of the online discourse surrounding Lemonade—as led and curated by black female commentators, critics and academics—on the premise that writing about a musical phenomenon involves making a decision regarding what that phenomenon ‘is’. I attempt to demonstrate the political stakes of such a decision, both for the minoritarian group excluded from full membership of a ‘universal’ public sphere (i.e., black women) and for the class of professional critics whose claim to authority relies on the concealment of such a decision.

I conclude by arguing that Lemonade facilitates the strategic construction of a meta-discourse, equating music writing with public speech more generally. The legitimisation of this discourse allowed black female writers to lay claim to the centre of the public sphere, and thus—via the construction of Beyoncé as star, artist and individual—to the ‘universal’ category of generic, rational human subject, from which black women are routinely excluded.

This paper defines Beyoncé as a Black Feminist based on definitions of the movement as opposed to the first, second, and third waves of feminism and also the alternative postfeminism. The analysis focuses on the music videos for "Partition" and "Jealous", as well as the lyrics, and how she uses the Black stereotypes of the Jezebel, Mammy and Saphire. Furthermore, the paper discusses sexuality and "Sexual objectification theory", and how Beyoncé is able to define herself as a feminist while promoting such a liberated sexuality.

This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd; (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions; (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces.