These are two polished-up versions of analyses that have already appeared here. I needed a 1k word writing sample, and nothing from my recently-in-print work could be cut to stand on its own. I'm using this material in manuscripts I'm developing, so it will "officially" appear in print eventually, and in a more comprehensive argument.
Queer Cyborgs
Many people understand Beyoncé Knowles’ 2009 single and video
“Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” as a clichéd
paean to marriage and traditional gender roles. [i] The refrain, “if you like it, then you shoulda
put a ring on it” leads people to hear this as the anthem of single women who
wish they were married. People wrongly hear this song as an endorsement of the
marriage-industrial complex and the commodification of women.
But this song isn’t about women, single
or otherwise. The song is about robots;
careful attention to the video and to the instrumental track provides ample
evidence of this. The video clarifies
that the refrain is to be taken sarcastically, not literally. Here, we see that
Beyoncé wears a jointed metallic glove on her left hand—the hand on which
wedding and engagement rings are worn. When she sings “put a ring on it,” she
literally means “it”, the cyborg hand—she doesn’t say “put a ring on ME”. The refrain is a criticism of the narrator’s
ex-boyfriend who treated her like a thing to be owned—an “it”—not like an
autonomous subject. Beyoncé’s cyborg may not be “genderless,” per se, but she
is certainly not stereotypically feminine, nor does she willingly accede to
traditional female roles. The song’s first and second verses challenge the
narrator’s ex-boyfriend’s authority over her and her sexuality. They say, in not so many words, “you don’t
own me.” Other lyrics reinforce her
critique of the idea that women can be bought and/or owned: “Don’t treat me to
the things of this world, I’m not that kind of girl,” she assures us. Like Levi-Strauss, Irigaray, and Gayle Rubin, Beyoncé
argues that traditional hetero marriage treats women as property. Beyonce sings
to “all the single ladies,” because even
and especially in the 21st-c marriage-industrial complex, women are little more
than “Stepford wives,” objects men purchase as status symbols and as care
workers. The song is a critique, not an endorsement, of hetero-capitalist
marriage. Instead of humanist marriage, Beyoncé says she wants an
extraterrestrial relationship, one that, like Buzz Lightyear (the astronaut
figure in Pixar’s Toy Story), can
transport her offworld, “to infinity and beyond!” Preferring robots and extraterrestrials to
traditional hetero-capitalist gender roles, “Single Ladies” uses Afrofuturism
to queer white heteropatriarchy.
The song’s compositional form and
instrumental track reinforce this Afrofuturist interpretation. Compositionally, this piece is rather
avant-garde for a hit of its size. There
is no real harmonic or melodic development, nor building up to a harmonic
and/or dynamic climax. The song is
mainly a clap track with sound effects and vocals. Interestingly, the main pitched instruments
(what I just called “sound effects”), both high and low, resemble the sounds of
a robot’s joints moving; they certainly qualify as the “electronically
engineered sounds” that Edelman identifies with sinthomosexuality. In this song, “all the single ladies” seem to
be having a fabulous time out on the town on their own; the “meaningless
jouissance” of a night out dancing with one’s
girlfriends seems to be far preferable to the (re)productive duties of
hetero-capitalist marriage. “All the Single Ladies” is Afrofuturistically
queer.
Counting Down, Queering Up
Feminists tend to
laud Lady Gaga’s queerness by comparing
her positively to a
one-sidedly-heteronormative Beyoncé. This gesture is problematic for a
number of reasons, but I want to concentrate only on the most complicated and
important one: race and its manifestations in/through queerness.
Racialization
occurs through (de)queering, and (de)queering occurs through racialization.
This is Jasbir Puar’s point in Terrorist Assemblages, where she argues
that Muslim “terrorists” are racialized as unruly, non-white bodies via
their association with a specific kind of “queerness”—a queerness that is more
anarchic, less “civilized” than the homonormativity displayed by “good”
American gays and lesbians. I take Puar’s framework to argue that Beyoncé’s
work uses race to intervene in discourses of sexuality and queerness.
Gaga has license to
queer femininity—to make her body monstrous, either through monster-drag or
king-drag—because she is white. In
other words: her gender identity is not already qualified by
non-whiteness. In the hegemonic, mainstream eye, Beyoncé’s blackness already
qualifies her femininity. She often plays around with femininity by
adopting stereotypically white
feminine iconography, e.g., in “Why Don’t You Love Me?” (where she does
the 60s housewife thing), or in “Video Phone” (where she does the 40s
pinup/Betty Page thing). Beyoncé critically adopts white het-fem
identities and images, gender-troubling them through blackness. If race
and queerness are mutually (de)intensifying, then Beyoncé’s play with
femininity via race is also an experimentation with its sexuality. Beyoncé
works in a climate where there’s a new “Why
Can’t (Middle Class) Black Women Find a (Good Black) Man/Get Married Already?”
article every day, and in a culture that frames black heterosexuality as always
already broken. In this context, her “Countdown,” which is about her
long-term relationship with a successful black man who also happens to be the
father of her soon-to-be-delivered child, is actually pretty radical. If the homonormativity of whites is
conditioned upon the always-already “queered” status of non-white/black
sexuality (i.e., it’s fundamentally, irreparably broken, black people can’t
ever maintain boring, white-bread hetero relations), then “Countdown’s”
apparently square het story actually undermines white homonormativity.[ii] The music
supports this interpretation. “Countdown” specifically critiques “catalog”
songs, in which male singers (from Don Giovanni to Lil Wayne) “count up” the
women they’ve seduced. Beyoncé counts down rather than up: "My baby is a ten / We dressing to the
nines…I’m trying to make a three / From that two / He still the one."
While a child-producing heterosexual monogamy might seem like the
definition of heteronormativity, when it’s a black woman talking about her
black partner and their baby, blackness queers the normativity of this hetero narrative,
changing its sexual-numerical orientation. The song’s inverted numerical
direction reflects this racialized queering of reproductive hetero monogamy.
While Gaga has the racial privilege to directly address sexuality,
Beyoncé’s superficial avoidance of queerness is actually more critical and
radical. Throughout her work, Beyoncé attacks race and sexuality together.
[i]. Beyonce. “Single Ladies (Put a Ring
on It)” on I Am Sasha Fierce. New
York: Columbia Records, 2008. Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVEGfH4s5g
[ii][i] I wonder if the Beyoncé
Knowles/Sasha Fierce split isn’t also relevant here, and worth examining
further. In interviews about “I Am…Sasha Fierce,” Bey indicated that she
herself is pretty “boring”—square, “white-bread” even. She invented Fierce as a
character or persona through which to channel a more “extreme” performative
identity/effect. So Bey might not at all be excessively sexual, excessively
confrontational—she might just be, as Touré’s recent article suggests, the
nicest little blonde girl ever. But that doesn’t sell when you’re a black
female artist, because you’re always already read through the controlling
images of your excessive sexuality. So Bey invents Fierce to intervene in
“misinterpretations” of her performances of her “self.” But she doesn’t use
Fierce to facilely reproduce stereotypes—she uses this character to exacerbate
the misinterpretations, to make arguments ad absurdam that critique the
very stereotypes she seems to traffic in.
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