Oh Bondage, Up Yours!: Rihanna's "S&M"

When I first heard Rihanna’s “S&M” track on the radio, I was unsure how I felt about hearing a black woman say “Sticks and stones can break my bones/But chains and whips excite me.” Sure, this is about BDSM, but, you know, black women—especially American and West Indian black women, who are likely the ancestors of slaves—professing a love of chains and whips means something than white women professing the same desire. Similarly, a black woman’s desire for “kinky” sex could be viewed as fitting all-too-well within stereotypes about black women’s hypersexualization. But the more I thought about the song, and the more thought I gave the video, it was clear to me that my initial unease was unfounded.

Rihanna has a long history of playing with the racialized virgin/whore dichotomy. Her third album’s title, “Good Girl Gone Bad,” makes this more than clear. Black women are subject to the “controlling image” of the “bad girl”—regardless of their actual behavior, desires, etc., black women’s sexuality will always be read through the stereotype of hypersexualized black femininity. So, if Rihanna will always-already be read as a “bad girl,” she decides to positively value the bad girl. She’s not trying to prove that black girls can also be “good;” instead, she’s calling into question our very concept of “good” itself. Rihanna’s “bad girl” is a deviant, but this deviance is a critical departure from hegemony (and not irrationality, hedonism, etc.). In the context of Rihanna’s oeuvre, “S&M” is not the mere glorification of kink (say, the use of it for shock value), but part of an established critique of hegemonic notions of femininity and the systematic revaluation of virgin/whore dichotomies. (I actually talk a lot about this in my “Robo-Diva R&B” article in The Journal of Popular Music Studies.)

The video makes the song’s critical function even more overt. First, let’s take a look:

From the very beginning of the video, it is clear that Rihanna is parodying and critiquing the desire to represent black women as sexual deviants. There are 2 main scenes in the first part of the video—a party scene and a press conference—and the video flashes back and forth between them. The press conference setting positions Rihanna as the slave to the mainstream media’s image of her (resonances with Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks are intentional). Dressed in a frock made from a montage of press clippings, held both by her wrists and under plastic by photographers’ assistants (who first kidnap her!), Rihanna presents herself as subject to the controlling image of the hypersexual black woman. She is held in bondage by the racialized virgin whore dichotomy; key, here, is the fact that Rihanna was kidnapped—while actual BDSM privileges consent above all else, she did not consent to this sort of “slavery.” When she utters the first line of the song, “Feels so good being bad,” the press (both black and white) nod enthusiastically, happy that Rihanna lives up to their expectations of her. If you can catch it, there are quick glimpses of the reporters’ notepads, on which terms like “slut” are scrawled. However, when we get to the third setting—the one on the suburban lawn—Rihanna responds to these controlling images with a loud and clear, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” Here, it is Rihanna who is in the dominant position, and Perez Hilton, (in)famous celebrity gossip curator (or new media Michael Musto) is her slave. Then, around 2:03, we see that the same reporters who tried to subject Rihanna to controlling images are themselves subject both to the power of surveillance (the CCTV cameras) and bondage. Around 3:04, Rihanna calls on the visual aesthetic of two white female pop divas: the colorful latex, balloons, and general cartoonish feel of the costumes evokes Katy Perry’s California Gurls, just as the turquoise telephone evokes Gaga’s telephone hat in Telephone. These references point precisely to the racialization of the virgin/whore dichotomy: when Rihanna does the exact same things white female pop divas do, she gets labled a slut, and these white women get called “America’s sweetheart” (as Perry has) or “serious artists” (as Gaga has).

Finally, the song, “S&M” resonates with X-Ray Spex’s feminist punk anthem “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” Sung by mixed-race black Briton Polly Styrene, the song calls on BDSM imagery to critique patriarchy and misogyny. It begins with: “Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard, but I say: OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!” As I have shown above, Rihanna more subtly makes this same move, critiquing and resisting the bondage controlling images would keep her under. The influence this song has had on “S&M” is even more clear when you consider the first line of “Oh Bondage.” It goes, “Bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall/I won’t be your victim anymore.” In “S&M’s” press conference scene, Rihanna is bound and tied to the wall. Similarly, she rejects victimhood and asserts her dominance—both consensual and non-consensual—over the very media apparatus that wants to use here merely as their fetish. It is also noteworthy that Rihanna’s costuming, particularly her hairstyle, around the 2:16 mark in the “S&M” video, strongly resembles Poly Styrene’s costuming and hairstyle in the photo shown at 2:30 in the following slideshow someone has made to accompany “Oh Bondage”:

With these strong and overt ties to a recognized feminist-of-color punk anthem, it should be even more clear that Rihanna’s “S&M” is not about sex, but about the bonds forged by controlling images. “Controlling image” is Patricia Hill Collins’ term for the way that stereotypes overdetermine the perception that people have of subaltern subjects, and, in turn, feed into their everyday experiences of both oppression and resistance. To be subject to a controlling image is to be, as Fanon puts it, “a slave to the idea they have of me.” Rihanna shows us that she will most emphatically not be the slave to the racialized virgin/whore dichotomy in which black women’s sexuality is always-already presumed to be excessive, deviant, or abnormal.

Born This Way: The Birth of Little Monsters From The Spirit Of Music

In my previous post about Gaga’s BTW, I argued that the song’s ultimate position on identity—whether sexuality is genetic/biologically determined, or socially constructed—was hard to determine. There was a tension between the general spirit of the “born this way” rhetoric evoked in the lyrics, and the way that the music showed its clear debts to earlier artists and tracks. When I wrote that piece, the video had yet to be released. Now that we have the BTW video, I’m not so sure I’d reconsider my initial argument. This tension between “nature” and “nurture,” or between more hegemonic notions of “reproduction” and more queer/Afrofuturist notions of “replication,” persist throughout the video. What this tension shows us is that Gaga’s “monster” is somewhere between human and cyborg...monsters aren’t fully human, but they retain some “human” features that the cyborg lacks. Monsters are both born and made; monsters have a Benjaminian “aura,” cyborgs do not. This video is indeed, as Gaga says near the beginning, “the manifest of Mother Monster,” because it offers us a more fully-realized concept of “monstrosity” itself. This concept is certainly present in her earlier works, but this video clarifies some of the distinct, constitutive features of Gagasian monstrosity. In what follows, I’ll enumerate some of these features, making specific reference to evidence from the video.

• Monsters are both born and made—which is to say, they complicate any strict binary between sexual and “mechanical” reproduction (what I would call “replication”). The video clearly shows us the vaginal birth of little monsters. These monsters come from a mother, but we’re not sure if there needs to be a father; in fact, it apparently “doesn’t matter if you love capital H-I-M,” so perhaps fathers (eternal or genetic) don’t really matter. The voiceover clarifies that Mother Monster is asexually reproducing, via “mitosis” (splitting). So this birth is in fact a sort of cloning: Mother Monster replicates—like bacteria. This language of mitosis complicates the status of MM’s motherhood, because in mitosis there is no parent and child, no “original” and no “copy”—there are two identical halves, which then develop into complete “individuals.” The voiceover further indicates that Mother Monster “herself split in two, rotating in agony between two forces”—i.e., the forces of good and evil. So, Mother Monster is a “mother” only metaphorically; she “births” little monsters by replicating…she makes an “infinite” number of copies, as we see in the grid of “little monster” dancers around the time the actual song lyrics begin. A process of replication, MM’s “birthing” is actually a “manufacturing” of little monsters. Monsters are both born and made. This logic is evident even in the genesis of classic monsters: Frankenstein’s monster is composed of parts of humans who were once born, just as zombies and vampires are generally individuals born as humans but “infected” or “turned” by their monstrosity.

• As both born and made, monsters stand between liberal humanism and posthumanism. Most notably, monsters have a Benjaminian “aura,” a unique, individual identity. As individuals, monsters can still have a traditionally liberal “self” (i.e., autonomous, free willing, self-present, rational, unique, etc.). Some of the song’s lyrics reinforce the idea of a unique, inherently valuable individual “self” (“My mamma told me when I was young, we’re all born superstars,” “I’m beautiful in my way,” etc.). These radical posthumanisms reject liberal notions of the self, of autonomy, etc. Gaga calls her monsters “a race within the race of humanity” who are very tolerant, good, peaceful, etc. So they’re the subset of humans who are distinguished by their commitment to the values of political/philosophical liberalism: liberte, egalite, fraternite, so to speak. You could say that Gaga’s little monsters are liberal posthumans. I would contrast this liberal posthumanism with radical posthumanisms along the lines of Haraway’s cyborgs, Beyonce’s robots, and Afrofuturist aliens and robots generally. Whereas Gaga’s liberal posthumans do not fully reject liberal humanism, radical posthumans do reject liberal humanism.

• Monsters are scavengers; they plunder indiscriminately, regardless of contradictions or incompatibility among resources. Gaga’s references are all over the place. I talked about the musical references in my earlier post on the song. The video, both as a video and as a manifesto, draws from a range of sometimes seemingly incompatible sources. First, as a manifesto, the video calls on concepts from theoretical/activist positions that generally seem to compete with and contradict one another. The Mamma Monster figure and imagery calls on second-wave gynocentric or “goddess” feminism, while the inverted pink triangle, the circuit-y music, the Madonna references, and the opening line of the song (“It doesn’t matter if you love him…” also, there’s the elision of drag kings in the “don’t be a drag, just be a queen” refrain) call on more male-centric gay political and aesthetic positions. There’s also the aforementioned tension between liberal humanism and posthumanism, or between replication and reproduction. As a video, the visual references are all over the map. There are the obvious Madonna and LaChappelle references. More subtly, there’s the Orlan reference: around 1:07 and again at 4:40, Gaga’s bob-coiffed persona resembles the feminist performance artist Orlan’s work. Similarly, Gaga’s use of facial/shoulder “implants” resonates with Orlan’s own “horn” implants. Gaga’s skeleton tuxedoed persona calls on both Thriller (the skeletal face) and on Klaus Nomi (the exaggerated shoulders on the tux). I'll post some photos at the end of the entry.


• Somewhat of an aside: Monsters are idealists, they think this is the best of all possible worlds, and that “evil” exists for a reason. I’m a little—not a lot, but a little—interested by the fact that the Monster Manifesto is, at some level, a theodicy—i.e., an account of/apologia for the existence of evil in a world that’s supposed to be good. In the same way that medieval philosophers tried to explain away evil by saying that either God didn’t create evil (evil is lack, God is full presence, so evil is merely the lack of God), or that God created “evil” for a reason, BTW suggests that Momma Monster created evil to protect her baby monsters. Now, I’m not sure what she means by “evil”—she could mean the fact of monstrosity itself; but evil could also mean normativity, the normativity that casts her babies as monsters.

• Something I need to think more about: Unicorns. The video begins and ends with a unicorn. Unicorns are not even made, they’re entirely made-up. Unicorns are also key to the storytelling in Blade Runner: we know that Deckard is a replicant b/c he has the unicorn-in-a-field memory that EJ Olmos’s character knows was implanted/manufactured by Tyrell Corp. (That’s why he leaves the origami unicorn at the very end, to confirm to Deckard that D is a replicant.) Are unicorns meant to be a symbol of posthumanity? Is this a Blade Runnerreference, or is it more Lisa Frank?

• Also of note: The video participates in the well-established scifi tradition of scoring with both neo-romantic orchestral music and electronic music. Think Wendy Carlos’s (and Daft Punk’s) Tron soundtrack.