800 word intro lmao fucking kill me

1 Ain’t I A Diva?: Politicizing Beyoncé —————— Chapter 1 (Sample): Ain’t I A Diva?

The names Beyoncé Knowles Carter and once-enslaved abolitionist activist Sojourner Truth rarely get uttered in the same breath. They come from two different worlds, two different times. But what kindred associations become apparent when their words and actions are viewed as part of an ongoing conversation rather than separate traditions? Beyoncé herself has begun to allude to this conversation with the 2016 release of Lemonade, but the conversation in her work can be traced back at least a decade prior. Since the release of B’Day in 2006, Truth prominently echoes. As does a radical political legacy of black women’s writing, speaking, and activism. Beyoncé has meticulously layered political resonance and resistance into her work that sounds in multiple frequencies. Like so many before her, Beyoncé seeks to simultaneously celebrate her own black feminist position and experience while also offering a blueprint for broader audiences to connect across differences that often seem unbridgeable. But she’s not going to do all the work for them. She wants her audience to sweat, prove they’ve got the coordination to make sense of all that information. When Beyoncé sings “I wanna leave my footprints on the sands of time / Know there was something that meant something that I left behind” in the opening lines of “I Was Here” from her album 4, she perfectly articulates the desperate need so many have: to believe their life matters. For someone. Somewhere. That their existence has changed something for the better. For those who are marginalized, Beyonce’s articulation of those stories, dreams, and hopes is the greatest act of defiance to a system that would rather they suffer in silence. Beyoncé’s art represents those stories in the same way activists in the streets appear in newspapers and the political realm. People across a wide array of differences identify with Beyoncé — whether women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, or at any of the various intersections of those identities, or claiming membership to none. Beyoncé creates hope; and it’s a radical hope. Although she has access to enormous amounts of class privilege, money, and fame, she is still a black woman navigating the streets of America…and that has never been easy. To leave a mark on history beyond merely surviving is not something most believe possible despite a deep hope. To be remembered in the future is a fantasy for the vast majority — especially when racism, sexism, economic opportunity, and homophobia collude to mark lives. Today’s world still embraces and celebrates the most normative white, cisgender, heterosexual bodies. Beyoncé’s “I Was Here” resonates so powerfully across differences because it counters that traditionally accepted narrative of what kinds of bodies matter. Like Sojourner Truth standing up in a room full of (mostly) white women and men and exclaiming “Ain’t I a woman?” and forcing the audience to truly see her for all she was, Beyoncé unapologetically declaring that she is and was here illustrates possibility that the traditional ways of doing things are changing. Or at the very least, she’s locating some wiggle room. Both Truth and Beyoncé ground that possibility in the subject position of black woman, one that has never been included in American society’s construction of “citizen.” As black women, a group Malcolm X famously called the most “disrespected, unprotected, and neglected” in America, their claims can also extend outward to prove that other marginalized groups can live, matter, prosper, thrive. The same can’t be said of political claims moving in the opposite direction. As Beyoncé repeatedly sings “I was here,” she transports herself and us as listeners into a future where we have mattered. The construction of the lyric as multitemporal (past-present-future all merged) mimics a ghost speaking from beyond the grave, looking back on a life and smiling for all they have accomplished. The lyric creates and fulfills our greatest hopes, an essentially affirming move for those who have been repeatedly beaten down by society in any number of ways. It’s a message we crave; a message we deserve. It may not immediately change material conditions in the world, but it makes us feel better while navigating a hostile climate. It affirms the importance of individual happiness and joy amidst constant brutality, and it promises a future where things are better than they are now; a future the lyric cites as possible. By declaring she was here, that we are also here, Beyoncé urges us to contemplate our own roles in a changing society and promises that we can upset the status quo. And if we believe, we can make society better. The ghost of Sojourner Truth stands beside her. While Beyoncé sings to a stadium of tens of thousands, Truth stands in a crowded room and challenges her own audience to expand their understanding of race and gender with the repetition of her battle cry “Ain’t I a woman?” Despite the time that has passed since that initial cry, the urgency of the claim persists. Beyoncé reworks it and has access to the loudest megaphone yet. Seeing Beyoncé stand in Truth’s shoes poses a lot of questions. And it forces us to look at all her work differently, not just at the more explicit black feminist statements she includes in “Formation” and Lemonade in 2016. Not only does this comparison reinvigorate feminist debates generally, it calls out mainstream feminism’s tacit tendency to skew white through a careful analysis of the layers of meaning placed within Beyoncé’s songs and videos. Solange Knowles subtly reinforces the potential comparison between Truth and Beyoncé in a 2016 interview stating, “As far as I’m concerned, she’s always been an activist from the beginning of her career and she’s always been very, very black.” Sojourner Truth and Beyoncé stand side-by-side; their politics have always intimately touched. Ain’t I A Woman? When Sojourner Truth asked “and ain’t I a woman?” at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, she was attempting to focus attention on black women’s struggle for recognition in the face of complete erasure in the (white) women’s rights movement. Truth’s statement was intersectional politics, now commonplace in social justice circles, before the language of intersectionality existed. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black feminist legal scholar, introduced the term “intersectionality” to the popular lexicon. The term initially sought to redress the inadequacy of the legal system in recognizing sexual harassment and employment discrimination claims from black women. The justice system worked on an either/or logic: black women were forced to choose either gender or race as the basis of discrimination or harassment. In reality, a black woman’s experience was a complex combination of the two, not reducible to either. And Crenshaw said a black woman shouldn’t have to choose; she devised a way to move forward where there was no previously acceptable legal recourse. Intersectionality as a theory uses the example of a traffic accident at the exact mid-point of an intersection. Who is at fault? Usually, a driver should yield to the car furthest into a given intersection, meaning the further a car is into the intersection at the point of impact signifies right-of-way. If impact is in the absolute center of the intersection, it’s impossible to discern fault. By extension, one can’t claim gender or race separately when black women face harassment or discrimination because to do so invalidates one or another piece of her experience. In other words, we simply cannot understand a black woman’s particular political struggle by adding the negative effects of racism to the negative effects of sexism in a list. One is not more at play than the other. Black women face the world as black women, not as women first and then black, or vice versa. It’s not a simple addition problem, and identity and experience can’t be easily parsed, subtracted, or divided. Even multiplication fails to do justice. Math has its limits. Sojourner Truth articulated this claim nearly 150 years earlier, and black women lived it even longer before that. “Ain’t I a woman?” forced white women to think about race within their exclusive definition of womanhood. Since then, Truth’s question has been used and paraphrased everywhere from the title of bell hooks’ first book (Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism) to Laverne Cox’s University speaking tour. Cox’s use also inflects the statement with new meaning given her visibility as a transgender activist and actress. While trans (women’s) visibility and representation has become more common in pop culture, there has been an ever increasing number of incidents of antitransgender violence on the streets, most heavily targeting trans women of color. This contradictory reflection is evidence of just how relevant Truth’s query remains on a number of urgent intersectional levels — even levels Truth herself might not have imagined in 1851. In the 1800s, the central issue fueling women’s rights was suffrage. Even if white women received the right to vote though — to empower themselves through the political system — where did that leave black women? Black men and women were still enslaved in 1851. How was this contradiction justified in the minds of these early white women’s rights advocates? How could one fight for herself and the white woman that lived next door but still ignore the black women working in her home, whether for pay or as property? And, quite literally, how could the crowd look upon Truth’s body and deny the fact that she was a woman just because she had black skin? The question exposed the hidden truth that the categories of female and femininity were constructed specifically through whiteness to begin with. That racist categorical conflation was the object of Truth’s fury. She posed her question repeatedly to challenge the easier thinking of single-issue politics; a challenge still prescient for feminist organizing and coalitional politics today. Whose concerns take precedence? It’s ironic that the women’s rights movement throughout the years has always tended to ignore questions of race since the women’s rights movement itself was an offshoot of abolitionist politics and organizing. Activist and writer Angela Davis highlights this fact repeatedly in her Women, Race, and Class. Situating these movements against each other is a tactic those in power utilized in order to pit marginalized groups in opposition rather than coalition. The fear of the powerful is that, once combined, these marginalized groups will be too strong to continue to hold down. Similar divisive strategies are used today. It’s a shame many white women’s rights advocates and male abolitionists in the mid-1800s were not more susceptible to Truth’s cajoling. The lessons of history remain unlearned. Truth dared place her body and her lived experience as central to political debates of the time, showing that race and gender could not be separated. To be sure, this was already something that black women themselves knew all too well. But Truth put her own body on the line for the benefit of those in the audience that were yet to be convinced. Even the construction of her statement/question is confrontational — it dared the audience to disagree. It also confronted the audience and the public as complicit. One of the most interesting facets of Truth’s landmark speech though, is that this watershed moment might not have happened the way it is often recounted. Does that change the power of the sentiment? Nell Irvin Painter has written the definitive account of Sojourner Truth’s life — both as a chronology of what happened to the actual woman, and the ways she is revered as a myth or a symbol for things much larger than her. Painter uncovers additional details that previous historians neglected and weaves together multiple accounts and stories in an attempt to get to the truth of Truth. But even Painter can’t definitively say for certain how the speech occurred. Two published reports exist — one by Marius Robinson in 1851, a straightforward account included in an overall report on the conference in Ohio; and another by Frances Dana Gage in 1863, a lengthened, sensationalized version of the speech recounted twelve years after the fact strictly from Gage’s memory. Gage’s account also utilizes what can easily be labeled racist dialect, especially since Truth was brought up speaking Dutch and would logically not have used the speech patterns Gage inserts. Probably neither account of the speech does justice to Truth’s message completely, yet those two recorded versions and the countless secondary sources attempting to excavate meaning are all that remain. It’s not dissimilar to how we receive misinformation about celebrity today. Truth left no first-person writing or records of the “Ain’t I a woman” speech as she never learned to read or write and it was reportedly delivered extemporaneously. She did publish the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, as transcribed by a friend, but her speeches don’t appear, only her life-story. Painter says most people prefer to cling more heavily to the later, probably embellished version of the speech because they crave the symbol of a strong black woman confronting and challenging the establishment, though even that symbol recreates a racist mythology. “I Was Here,” delivered by Beyoncé, provides a corrective counterpoint to Gage’s retelling while still exposing the fact that the message of Truth’s speech remains inadequately addressed. Written by Diane Warren, a white woman, “I Was Here” is much more traditionally structured and written than a typical Beyoncé song, devoid of the heavy R&B and hip-hop influence characteristic of most of her music. It’s also one of the rare songs in her catalog on which she doesn’t share a writing credit. Rather, she’s taking the words of a white woman and retelling her own story through them just as Truth’s story was retold through the dialect Gage exaggerated. Beyoncé creates the same dynamic, but in reverse. Truth and Gage are mirrored in Beyoncé and Warren, but with power flowing in the opposite direction. Beyoncé is a contemporary Sojourner Truth. Their various affective performances blur together and situate Beyoncé within a deeper political context that only recently got celebrated post-Lemonade, but one she’s espoused all along. While this claim is controversial and (playfully) hyperbolic, Beyoncé’s contributions to black feminist history and thought are equally important as those of Sojourner Truth or any other traditionally-accepted black feminist thinker — they just utilize different contexts and strategies. Truth’s initial painstaking attempts to disrupt racism and sexism while capturing the oppression black women faced in her day echo through many of Beyoncé’s lyrics, visual images, and performances. Historical circumstances certainly differ — Truth worked adamantly against the system of her time from an outside position, Beyoncé works firmly from within a capitalist apparatus (but challenges it just the same). Opportunities and privileges diverge greatly, yet much remains the same. Truth’s ghost haunts. Beyond metaphoric connections, Sojourner Truth and Beyoncé have other things in common. They lived different lives, certainly, but were Sojourner Truth alive today, who can say that she might not be a successful entertainer? Accounts of her always describe and prize her in relation to charisma, charm, and commanding presence. Isn’t that exactly why people flock to Beyoncé’s concerts and purchase her music? The self-adopted name Sojourner Truth means traveling or walking truth-teller. Beyoncé does much the same thing, as her various world tours and concerts present a kind of “preaching” to audiences near and far. Truth was also said to have a distinctive singing voice that stopped those around her. Whenever she sang people listened, according to Painter. At this point in her career, when Beyoncé speaks, the entire world stops to listen. Both women crafted public images for themselves divorced from personal histories and private lives. Truth took on the persona of Sojourner Truth, a wandering truth teller, in contradiction to her prior life born enslaved as Isabella Baumfree (though she later adopted the surname van Wagenen). Beyoncé has adopted various alter-egos to distinguish herself as a performer on stage from her personal life as a mother, wife, sister or daughter. These alter-egos include Sasha Fierce, Yoncé, King Bey, and Mrs. Carter to name a few. As much as the public may be disappointed, we know very little about Beyoncé personally, while believing we know much more given her persona as a performer in the public eye. In this way, both Beyoncé and Truth perform for their respective audiences, and they both work(ed) diligently and tirelessly to maintain these images. Taking into account the differences created by time, technology, and political and social change, the two women aren’t all that different: they are symbols of their times. Sojourner Truth was a Beyoncé of the midto late-1800s and Beyoncé is a Sojourner Truth of the early 2000s and beyond. As previously mentioned, Sojourner Truth could neither read nor write, which is why we have no first-hand accounts of her speeches or life other than the Narrative transcribed by a friend. In a similar vein, Beyoncé never formally finished high school due to the demands of her career and people have used that fact to criticize the idea that her career could be a site of knowledge worthy of study or producing political commentary or critique. Their shared uncredited forms of education, however, expose ways in which they both engaged in a practice of “Schoolin’ Life” as a 2011 Beyoncé song title puts it. Education, intellect, “smarts” are not just the domain of official institutions or the Ivory Tower in America; instead, knowledge can come from anywhere —life experience, struggle, political positioning. Both women speak to this fact. Truth was not able to attend school as young girl because she was enslaved; Beyoncé left official schooling as a girl to earn capital in the entertainment industry, having been primed for that career since before she could make the decision for herself. Beyoncé’s songs may not always rely on an explicit “Ain’t I A Woman?” battle cry, intentionally calling out blatant racism and sexism — although “I Was Here” is one faint echo, and songs like “Flawless” or “Run the World (Girls)” certainly invoke similar statements. A general black feminist impulse can be located in most all of her music nonetheless. She may not have always spoken as brazenly as Truth in her early career because her personal strategy involved infiltrating the capitalist apparatus to ultimately influence the largest number of people. Thus, she was more constricted by the very industry she worked within in the beginning, but progressively began to break the rules as she gained power and control. Race, gender, sexuality and class have increasingly become central to her music. Even when she’s not voicing her position and complaints audibly, those same political positions appear visually in her music videos as layered counterpoint to the lyrics. She’s constantly and bravely demanding an answer to Truth’s iconic query “Ain’t I a woman?,” while simultaneously updating and inflecting that query with her own unique contemporary spin. Ain’t I A Diva? In today’s vernacular, embracing your inner (or outer) diva is not usually seen as a positive attribute. But that’s exactly the reframing Beyoncé attempts in her 2009 single from the high-concept album I Am…Sasha Fierce. As much as the idea has been countered by LGBTQ+ culture, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and performance specials on cable network VH1, to be a diva is most often still (mis)understood as being a woman who is a bossy, difficult, entitled prima donna. A diva has enormous amounts of privilege and that privilege is usually taken for granted. A diva may command respect but not for noble reasons. More often than not, contempt and ridicule meet the diva stereotype, whether from jealousy or some sort of moral high ground. Interestingly though, the word “diva” was imported into popular culture from the world of opera where the diva is the most coveted role of a performance, given to highly talented female performers that work extremely hard to prove their worth and dedication to the craft. There is a parallel here to Beyoncé’s work with the “Ban Bossy” campaign in 2014 that attempted to reposition women as bosses (as opposed to bossy), along with all the negative attributions so often unfairly applied to women in leadership positions. However, “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” was definitely not Beyoncé’s first foray into women-in-work-gendered-doublestandards territory. In the opening shot of the “Diva” music video, Beyoncé gives us exactly the definition of “diva” she wants understood as central for the song: The definition of diva here is altered slightly from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition. Beyoncé completely leaves out Merriam-Webster’s first definition of “prima donna” and then alters the second definition somewhat, parsing it in two to fit her purposes. While the dictionary’s definition begins “a usually successful and glamorous female performer or personality (my emphasis),” Beyoncé insists on the success and glamour of her diva. Those attributes are prerequisites to becoming a diva, not possible side-effects of being considered a diva. And then she makes the second clause of the dictionary’s definition a separate second definition. Again, Merriam-Webster reads “a popular female singer,” while Beyoncé reinforces themes of achievement and the work involved in becoming a diva: “a female singer who has achieved popularity (my emphasis).” Anyone can be popular and not deserve it. Beyoncé is specifically throwing down a gauntlet to those who may receive notoriety or fame without putting in hard work, and showing respect for those that work to achieve their status versus having it handed to them, challenging the implicit privileges of the diva category. When Beyoncé calls out “so-called” divas via a lax work ethic, there exists a surprising reflection of the way Audre Lorde constantly confronted her various audiences, letting them know that she was vigilantly doing the difficult work of challenging all forms of oppression on a daily basis, and demanding to know if the audience was doing their own version of that work. Beyoncé is astutely mirroring Lorde from her own vantage point by foregrounding the various ways that the word “work” works. Audre Lorde and Beyoncé both hold themselves to the highest standard, as well as demanding a high standard of their audience. It’s easy to equate work here with just achievements within a capitalist enterprise. And that traditional sense of work is certainly central, evidenced in lyrics that make “getting paid” a priority. But to stop there would be to abandon the power of the connection with Lorde. Next to Lorde’s invocation of work, the word takes on a double meaning: the traditional meaning remains, but added is the more implicit notion of doing our political work to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Beyoncé herself is also expanding the dimensions of what counts as work throughout the song, stating that “a diva is a female version of a hustla’.” This is not just a gendered distinction marking who gets credit for what work where Beyoncé keeps gendered associations of male=hustler/ female=diva intact. Rather, the formulation of her claim exposes the insidious ways that power works unidirectionally — we would never say a hustler is the male version of a diva. Yet, Beyoncé equates the two implicitly, showing that women are always defined through men in work, never vice versa. She creates a complicated equation that exposes the absurdity of insisting on gendered distinctions in work, while then also reworking the overall concept of what counts as work. For instance, Beyoncé makes no differentiation between accepted legal forms of work — like singing in exchange for money — and nontraditional and sometimes illegal labor. A “hustler” is commonly known as someone who makes money dealing in stolen goods or drugs, nontraditional exchanges. Playing off that primary definition of hustler is also the notion of someone always working the scene; someone constantly keeping an eye out for any available opportunity, questionable or not, to move up the social ladder. In the song, Beyoncé makes it clear that she’s out to “get the money” or do the work by any means necessary, resisting the reduction of different kinds of work as “good” or “bad” regardless of the law. She refers repeatedly to the song as “a stick up” — she’s wearing a mask and she wants that money. She’s taking the money and respect and no one can stop her. The work of radical politics is also positioned here as a stick up through mirroring Lorde. In fact, Audre Lorde repeatedly performed a similar kind of “stick up” by announcing herself into every room she entered as a speaker with the various pieces of her identity front and center — as a “black, lesbian, feminist, warrior, poet,” but also as various configurations of those same markers in addition to others in different orders. She confronted the audience, essentially sticking up the crowd, to claim each space as her own. “Diva” also has specific racial connotations in common parlance. As a negative attribute, it gets associated with black women in music much more than white women, tacitly labeling them difficult. It should be stated that “difficult” however is almost always a matter of opinion. What appears difficult to work with from one vantage point is confident and assertive regarding one’s vision and performance from another. Usually race, gender, and sometimes sexuality, are contributing factors in these distinctions. In mainstream music, women are more likely to be called divas, and women of color — black women especially — are more often referred to negatively as divas than white women, whether they have worked to achieve the title or not. The cable music network VH1 reinvigorated the concept of the diva in the late 1990s when they launched their Divas Live franchise. Out of twelve concert aired since its premiere in 1998, black women have made up a majority of the “divas” in nine concerts. When you take into account women of color of other races and ethnicities, eleven concerts featured a majority of women of color. Only one sole Divas Live special featured a majority of white divas. As a question of representation and talent, these numbers seem positive and affirming, but if being a diva is implicitly seen as negative in popular society — something Beyoncé is trying to rewrite — then it becomes telling that women of color, and black women specifically are pigeon-holed as the divas VH1 celebrates. It’s a catch-22: celebrated and derided simultaneously. Which unfortunately is not a new experience for black women in America. While challenging the negative, gendered dimensions of the diva, Beyoncé is also challenging the term’s negative racial implication as a black woman caught within that catch-22 herself. So much of Beyoncé’s catalog has been devoted to empowering women, and since 2013, feminism explicitly. However, as mentioned earlier, folks of many different identities and backgrounds and experience find empowerment through Beyoncé and her music. And “Diva” has associations beyond just gender or race. RuPaul’s Drag Race is another significant way “diva” has been catapulted into the pop culture mainstream, as reflected though a certain kind of queerness and gender performance. The show itself is a celebration of the excess of drag divas — queens who go above and beyond to compete for the title of next drag superstar. The portrayals on the show are often far from the most nuanced or political representations of cultural resistance possible through drag, and they certainly celebrate commercialization; but, for better or worse, they remain the most visible and most circulated among the largest number of people. Beyoncé plays with queerness and stereotypical “rules” of gender with “Diva” as well by performing the song as Sasha Fierce, one of her central alter-egos. The song appears on the “Sasha Fierce” side of the I Am…Sasha Fierce album — the side in which the stereotypically normative categories of gender and sexuality easily recognized by mainstream American society are thrown into question. Over the course of eight songs, the Sasha Fierce side of the album details the inability of traditional norms and binaries of gender and sexuality to create happiness and fulfillment: for example, relationships falling apart (“Single Ladies”); sexual relationships with radios and technology (“Radio,” “Video Phone”); and being scared of the concept of “lonely” rather than the actual feeling (“Scared of Lonely”). Sasha Fierce, these claims, and much more are the explicit focus of an entire chapter later. Suffice it to say now though, Sasha Fierce’s eccentricity, performance of overblown confidence, and drastic make-up choices, point to the likelihood that Sasha Fierce is meant to be read as a drag performance. We cannot read Beyoncé-as-Sasha-Fierce as simply “female” when she appears, including during the music video for “Diva.” Sasha Fierce is a complex alter-ego that confounds our expectations — a cisgender female body (Beyoncé) performing feminine drag (Sasha Fierce) but funneled intermediately through society’s traditional construction of masculinity (since drag “queens” are usually cisgender male-identified individuals). And that’s a lot of work. Beyoncé is doing the absolute most performing as Sasha Fierce and for good reason. Sasha Fierce’s appearance creates pause for us to ask: what exactly do male and female or masculine and feminine even mean? The confusion created by our inability to understand gender outside of normative binary either/or terms creates the very space where Sasha Fierce can confound us. Sasha Fierce doesn’t just deconstruct gender, she explodes the limited notions we have of gender. Sasha Fierce is confronting her audience with Sojourner Truth’s very same “Ain’t I a woman?” query, with no valences. Sasha Fierce is fiercely working it and also working to break down the exclusionary ways we categorize people in the world. A diva here is damn well politicized. For her 2015 live performance of “Diva” at the Made In America Festival in Philadelphia, Beyoncé added yet another layer to the political work her diva was doing. She included snippets of Ronda Rousey, a white female MMA Fighter, speaking about criticism she’s received from the public on her body appearing too masculine for a woman. In reclaiming and celebrating the power of her own body beyond masculine and feminine signifiers, Rousey does so in opposition to the kind of person her mother always taught her not to be: a “donothing bitch.” In Beyoncé’s celebratory reworking of Rousey’s words, the do-nothing bitch stands in as the opposite of her diva: a do-nothing bitch is the one not doing any of the necessary political work, allowing status quo gender categories, along with their racial and sexual inflections to stand without question. Beyoncé’s diva will never be a donothing bitch. Sojourner Truth also exposed how the concept of women, men and the work they each do being inherently differentiated is certainly borne out of whiteness. Enslaved women did the same work as men in the fields — separate spheres were a luxury only white women could afford. In the “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech, Truth shouts and also performs the words: “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?” She exposed that gender categories themselves have been used as a racist tool throughout history, that gender categories and expectations have been a tool of power used to separate white and black and not just male and female. Demanding the audience look at her actual body — both strong and obviously female-identified — forced them to stretch their understanding of what those categories mean, much like a Sasha Fierce performance. In “Diva,” Beyoncé sings, “Since 15 in my stilettos, been strutting in this game / ‘What’s your age?’ was the question they asked when I hit the stage / I’m a diva, best believe her, you see her, she’s getting paid / She ain’t calling him to greet her, don’t need him, her bed’s made.” Reenacting the things Truth said about work but through her own experience as an entertainer, Beyoncé centers age as yet another intersectional component. She’s been doing this since a young age. She has been working, in an industry that has sometimes been likened to slavery especially by black performers, where the reality is a disproportionate number of white men making millions off of the creative output of black artists. And hasn’t Beyoncé made it? Hasn’t she achieved what most, if not all, rich white men can only even dream of, let alone bring to fruition? Ain’t she a woman? And ain’t she a diva on top of it all? She grew up working, and now that she’s grown all she’s asking is for a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, just like Truth (and Aretha Franklin). In the final scene of the “Diva” music video, Beyoncé-as-Sasha Fierce throws a lighter into the trunk of a car stuffed full of mannequin parts after lighting the cigar she holds in her mouth (another stereotypically masculine symbol). These mannequin pieces also represent sanitized and normative notions of gender and sexuality, disassembled. The very notions Sasha Fierce seeks to confuse. The car explodes. She blows up our expectations and assumptions — in all the senses listed above: expectations and assumptions based on gender, race, sexuality, class, work, and respectability. Via the mannequins, she literally blows up conformity to a system that does not make space for her humanity just as Truth shook the Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. Then, just like a 15-year-old girl in stilettos who has grown into a woman, just like a diva who knows she has put in her necessary work (in all its myriad forms), Beyoncé simply, but confidently and defiantly, walks away. Ain’t I A Grown Woman? The whole world watched Beyoncé grow up as an entertainer, from teenage girl in Destiny’s Child to the grown woman she is today; and “Grown Woman” finds Beyoncé further echoing Sojourner Truth. Like Truth originally did in 1851, “Grown Woman” is calling for a revolution in the way the world sees black women, and the way black women perceive the world; a call that continues to be necessary because it remains unheeded. “Grown Woman” was released as a bonus video on BEYONCÉ and as such it provides overarching commentary to all the songs on the album, as well as a rebuttal of the general criticism Beyoncé anticipated she would (and did) receive regarding the more mature content of her fifth solo album. It’s Beyoncé’s (and BEYONCÉ’s) musical and visual version of an epilogue. Initially, “grown” and “woman” seem redundant when placed next to each other in the title of the song. As they’re repeated together though, they begin to remind listeners of the reality that age does not equal maturity or vice versa. Hearing Beyoncé deliver the syllables “I’m a grown woman / I can do whatever I want,” in slightly different variations each chorus, we hear equal parts empowerment, assertiveness, and an undercurrent of subtle desperation — which is to say that being seen as a “grown woman” or independent might not yet be a reality for Beyoncé as much as she is unapologetically attempting to make it one. Paradoxically, Beyoncé is never allowed agency as a grown woman or artist at the exact same time that black girls are always seen as older than they are in our racist society — already women, never girls. Someone somewhere is always questioning Beyoncé’s position as a grown woman and at the same time inferring that black girls are already grown women accountable for way too much. Through Beyoncé’s repetition she is undoing that incongruity in both directions, asserting her independence and artistic maturity while also articulating that young black girls shouldn’t be burdened with the weight of the world. Beyoncé’s not just a diva, she’s grown, so back the fuck off. Listening to Beyoncé almost turn the word “grown” into two syllables through her lengthened and guttural delivery of the second half of the word, Alice Walker’s definition of “womanism” — her own articulation of black feminism — which incorporates the black folk saying “You trying to be grown” comes to the fore. Walker elaborates, also in traditional (imagined) dictionary format like Beyoncé did for her “diva” definition: Womanist 1. From womanish. (Opp. Of “girlish,” i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, “You acting womanish,” i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered “good” for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: “You trying to be grown.” Responsible. In charge. Serious. In Walker’s definition, racial inequality creates a space in which some children are allowed to have a childhood, and some children are forced to grow up much faster than others. Walker alludes to the fact that, for black people and black girls especially, a sexist and racist society both labels and stereotypes young black girls as older than their actual age, thus erasing their childhood, as well as creating the material conditions that force a young black girl to grow up before her “childhood” is formally over or has had a chance to exist. In other words, the luxury of being able to act as a child while still physically being of a young age is a privilege largely reserved for white girls (and boys to an even greater extent). Zora Neale Hurston alludes to the realization, while a young black girl, that she was losing access to her own childhood as getting a “conscious hint that the world didn’t tilt under my foot-falls, nor careen over one-sided just to make me glad.” Privilege is, in fact, the luxury of being able to believe the world is organized to make you glad. Absence of that privilege can be a harrowing and painful realization for a child, one that parents would usually like to protect their own children from. So acting grown becomes a sort of insult as well as a stereotypical assumption. But in Walker’s, and Beyoncé’s, formulation it becomes a backhanded compliment, a reclamation of an insult that gets wielded back toward the very oppressive society that takes childhood away. And, while it refers to coming face-to-face with some hard truths about the society in which one lives, it also implies a wisdom that not everyone can claim. Beyoncé takes this “acting grown” and uses it to her advantage. She’s not just grown, she’s defiant, resilient, tenacious. Her acting grown is her survival strategy, as it is for many within marginalized groups. She acts grown to survive in the face of a system that seeks to destroy her; a system founded on slavery and that continues to profit off of people’s coerced labor. A system set up to protect the few at the expense of the many. Beyoncé bridges the few and the many — speaking back to the “many” from her hardwon position of privilege as one of the “few” despite her marginalized identity. The “grown woman” claim once again echoes Sojourner Truth in stating that black women rarely get to be seen as black women — only one thing or another: black, woman, old, young, etc. Beyoncé attacks the listener with the first line of “Grown Woman:” “I remember being young and so brave, I knew what I needed.” Rather than equating being grown with precocity as the folk saying does, Beyoncé links it to bravery. She celebrates it rather than disparages it and claims her youth as a formative and important experience. As an aside, she also calls out the fact that older individuals might not always understand the resistance tactics of younger generations by referring to her own childhood knowledge as being different from what those calling her “grown” assumed of her. Melissa Harris-Perry brilliantly uses a “crooked room” metaphor to describe the way black women experience the world due to pervasive stereotypes in society. The crooked room references both the structural and constructed quality of oppression through the idea of a built room, and the disorienting ways oppression affects an individual through the crooked way the room appears while one faces it head on. Picture it: You walk into a room and everything is tilted. Everything looks off, wrong. You might even get dizzy. Vertigo. In order to make sense of what you’re seeing, do you tilt your body to align with the room? Do you continue forward standing straight, arms outstretched, trying not to bump into anything though its all at an odd angle? What kind of toll do either of these strategies take on an individual body and psyche? This metaphor can be applied more widely to any marginalized group but of course the distinct stereotypes encountered, or the contents of the room, change with each different scenario. To be safe, to be recognized, to be understood — to survive — many black women bend themselves so the room makes more sense, according to Harris-Perry, and that means conforming to a stereotype for recognition. And why wouldn’t they? It’s not the individual’s fault; the blame lies with the room itself. Harris-Perry writes, “Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to the distortion…To understand why black women’s public actions and political strategies sometimes seem tilted in ways that accommodate the degrading stereotypes about them, it is important to appreciate the structural constraints that influence their behavior.” Who are any of us to judge the various ways some find to survive in a hostile, violent world? Privilege and freedom of movement play into how any individual person can confront oppressive systems. It’s another catch-22. Although Audre Lorde has instructed us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” or room to mix metaphors, taking part in the same systems that oppress, even while resisting, is almost inevitable. What’s the alternative? Is it possible to rebuild the entire room? Beyoncé’s strategy of infiltrating the capitalist apparatus can be considered tilting, just enough and over enough years to build up the power and privilege necessary to expose the same thing Harris-Perry exposes through her crooked room metaphor. It’s Beyoncé’s own long con in order to demolish the crooked room — something most can’t do to be sure, but an example that offers life-affirming images of what could one day be possible all the same. In the “Grown Woman” video, she literally rewrites her own childhood from the vantage point of herself as grown woman. She digitally alters old home videos spanning childhood and teenage years to make it appear that footage of a younger Beyoncé is singing a song that didn’t exist when the home videos were originally recorded. If you’re unfamiliar with the origins of “Grown Woman” as a song, seeing the video might lead you to believe Beyoncé is performing a cover. Which, of course she isn’t — but Beyoncé’s reworking of the footage is so genius that “Grown Woman” confuses many into thinking the song was a past relic remade anew. Beyoncé creates her own hidden history to counter the way much of black women’s history has been eclipsed or occluded from most normative accounts. She rewrites her own past. The crooked room of the present is shown throughout the first half of the “Grown Woman” video. Beyoncé sits, slightly off-kilter, in what appear to be a young girl’s pageant outfit, surrounded with trophies and drinking whiskey in a hi-ball glass. She’s literally tilting her body in the chair, one leg thrown over the chair’s arm to heighten the absurdity of joining references to both childhood and maturity. Her body stretches diagonally across the frame. She appears to be a child with a curved upper lip, inexplicably chomping on gum and drunk while competing in a beauty pageant. Either that, or she’s a disoriented grown woman. And despite the trophies, the money, the prestige, Beyoncé doesn’t seem happy. For black women, despite being grown and having relative autonomy, there are still things that remain unattainable due to obstacles racism and sexism have materialized, due to the crookedness of the room. Beyoncé does try to stand up straight, but she still falters. Her dancing seems off, lacking enthusiasm and precision. The scene still isn’t coherent. So, the room itself is the problem and it must be altered or destroyed. Toward the end of “Grown Woman,” Beyoncé does just that. She dismantles the room. Just as she confidently walked away after blowing up our expectations in “Diva,” she walks right off the set (out of the room) of “Grown Woman” and into a new foreground. In pieces, the constructed set she was previously standing in retracts and behind her is a green-screen on which different backdrops are projected: a lush jungle scene, complete with wafting neon smoke and gold automobile; a plain black background with alternating falling diamonds, zebra print, psychedelic patterns, and space nebulae, among other things. The parade of seemingly random images actually makes more sense than the incongruity of the previous scenes and eventually ends with Beyoncé, Tina Knowles, and various children on a bed floating through space. The images are so overblown we’re forced to see them as limitless. Here, Beyoncé celebrates a new room of her making, a room of her choosing, a room of one’s own remixed. Her room has no walls, no limits. An anti-room even. Significantly, at the grand unveiling of this anti-room, the audio track also changes drastically and shifts to Afrobeat percussion, complete with Guinean chanting vocals courtesy of Ismael “Bonfils” Koyaté. The costumes embrace African references and the choreography changes to feature nods to African styles as well. At this point, Beyoncé’s hair is also shown in more natural styles than her iconic blonde — brown, curly and gathered atop her head in one moment, straight and black in another. Given that Beyoncé is often criticized for that blonde hair as an attempt to mimic white ideals of beauty, the embrace of a darker color and natural styles associated with black women take on additional power in this anti-room she (de)constructs. The contradiction also encourages us to begin to see her adherence to white beauty standards at other points as part of her long-term strategy, tilting in a room in order to ultimately remake it anew. She’s drawing a stark comparison between the crooked room constructed by others in which she’s forced to tilt to belong and the anti-room she creates in which she feels more free. In the song’s final moments, she features generations of women — her mother, herself, and children — all while wearing an African headdress in the style of an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for life. All these things add up to define what was lacking from the previous crooked room: an affirmation of black lives, especially black female lives. Her new anti-room centers this affirmation, incorporating a powerful politics of gender, race, and sexuality through lyrics and visuals. And it rejects formal structure because formal structures and systems in the United States are often rooted in concomitant racism and sexism. By highlighting the room’s malleability instead of its inescapable crookedness, Beyoncé blurs the boundaries between tilting one’s body to fit the room and dismantling the room altogether. She’s reworking the room using her own black feminist experience. Another form of expressing the radical hope found in her unapologetic claim “I was here;” she was here and she tore the fucking walls down. Clearly, Beyoncé’s strategy is not livable for most watching. But it does provide possibility, a moment to imagine being able to live differently. The more these moments add up, the more empowering her music feels. And this is why Beyoncé’s music makes listeners feel so brave. She’s naming and offering certain possibility and hope for things to be different, again echoing Sojourner Truth by drawing on the intersections of her own black womanhood as blueprint. She’s planting the seeds of bigger ideas and ideals in her audience and expanding the ways we can and do think about the world around us. And surely Beyoncé knows that these radical changes are hopes and dreams in the present, as opposed to already being reality. And just as she advocated hope that one day change created today will be valued in “I Was Here,” she suggests that through hard work in the present, dreams of changing the world are within immediate reach. At the end of “Grown Woman,” Beyoncé sits on a bed — a place of rest, a place to cultivate dreams, a place where literal dreaming happens. She leaves viewers with their own dreams. Even though it’s an ending, it’s also a beginning. Sadly, an oppressive world teaches people to create only what’s acceptable for them to create, to imagine only what’s safe for them to imagine. To dream only what’s realistic (or more accurately, approved) for them to dream, which takes all the imagination and political capacity out of dreaming from the start. Beyoncé has temporarily removed us from that oppressive world though. For the moment, we float among the stars. For a moment, there are no limits. “Grown Woman” is Beyoncé’s actualized dream — a crooked room remade; a room of one’s own that reflects and affirms the lives of black women. A room that is torn apart and reimagined, and by offering this alternative possibility, Beyoncé encourages us all to imagine more, to dream more, to dream bigger. Like Sojourner Truth, she is confronting the audience: “Ain’t I a diva? Ain’t I a grown woman?!” And Beyoncé dream spreads. It begins to manifest in life the very changes that will create a better and more equitable society for the future. A society we might dream into existence; a society from which we can proudly assert the claim that we were here. Beyoncé shows living and dreaming aren’t so very far apart after all. She even tells us so through the title of her 2013 documentary: that “life” itself “is but a dream.” Anything is possible.