Written by Adeja Powell
Since her “debut” as a feminist at her 2014 VMAs performance, Beyonce has received an enormous amount of praise. Taking on the role as a feminist icon, Beyonce has demonstrated that being a mother, a wife, a vocalist, a mogul, and a black woman shouldn’t stop you from embracing your sexuality. But along with the overwhelming support, Bey has also received equal amounts of criticism. Many people are declaring that Beyonce’s feminism is not the brand of feminism we’re looking for, but I believe the exact opposite. Her main message is that women can fit into multiple different roles without being contradictory. Being a mother doesn’t stop Beyonce from being a self-made star in her industry. Being a famous vocalist doesn’t coincide with her ability to give back to her community and participate in the same activism we all participate in. And most importantly, being a wife doesn’t stop her from being confident in her own sexuality.
The main reason other “feminists” are in such an uproar over Beyonce’s feminism is that she’s apparently too sexual (sounds a bit like something a man would say). She shows her body too much. She’s “submitting to the male gaze” or whatever you want to call it, but at the end of the day, Beyonce is relaying to every woman out there that you can make choices about your own body regardless of how others view it. When she dropped her self-titled album in 2013, people went to work dissecting, critiquing and rejecting Beyonce as a feminist, despite the fact that Bey made a whole track featuring a large snippet of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” TED speech. Instead tracks like “Partition” and “Blow” got the short end of the stick, and think pieces conveniently ignored their feminist impacts as well; instead, focusing on the fact that Beyonce, a grown woman, dared talk about sex. I mean, who does she think she is? An adult with a husband and a child? By the way people, the first step in birthing your own child is having sex. But, besides that, videos like the one for “Superpower” and “Drunk in Love” convey the importance of black love and unity. The first track on the album, “Pretty Hurts” shows how harmful it is for women to conform to standards of beauty they may not necessarily fit into just for the approval of others. It also loudly declares that there’s more to being a woman than how you look. Women can have careers, build families, and ultimately make whatever choices make them happy. In the video for “Pretty Hurts”, when asked by the beauty pageant host, “What is your aspiration in life?” Beyonce hesitantly but firmly answers, “…to be happy.”
Sectional, or “white feminists”, have been the main people attacking Beyonce for her pro-sexuality message. Emma Watson, a feminist who, by and large, has had a ridiculously imperfect feminist message herself, commented on “Beyonce”, saying, “As I was watching [Beyoncé’s visual album] I felt very conflicted, I felt her message felt very conflicted in the sense that on the one hand she is putting herself in a category of a feminist, but then the camera, it felt very male, such a male voyeuristic experience of her.” Even more recently, French actress Lou Doillon said she was “appalled” by Beyonce and rapper Nicki Minaj’s feminism in an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais. She says that her grandmother “fought for something else than the right to strut in a thong.” I guess Doillon forgot that when her grandmother was fighting for feminism, it was exclusively for white women, which is why I think Beyonce’s feminism is important: it starts an interesting conversation about the importance of intersectionality.
(Lou Doillon posing for Playboy Magazine in 2008)
Intersectionality is the idea that many people fit into more than one oppressed group and that feminism must be all inclusive to be true feminism. For example, you can’t be homophobic and be a feminist because you’re excluding women who are a part of LGBT+. You can’t be transphobic because then you’re excluding trans, women. And more relevantly, you can’t be racist and be a feminist because then you’re excluding women of color. Beyonce’s feminism is important exactly for that reason. Women of color experience oppression at a varying degree from white women, and the criticism of feminists like Beyonce and Nicki do a good job of highlighting that. Those that were condemning Miley Cyrus’s “slutty” escapades on stage not to long ago were met with an onslaught of sectional or “white” feminists asserting that Miley had every right to do what she wanted with her body, but those same feminists jumped on the opportunity to attack Beyonce for that very same reason. So what’s the deal? The deal is that as a black woman, Beyonce’s body is sexually deviant. Black women showing their bodies has always been met with disgust and rage. It wasn’t too long ago that black bodies were property, which makes it even harder for us to reclaim them as our own. We have extra hurdles to jump over when it comes to sexual liberation, and Beyonce is the stepping stone we need to get there.
So, while a lot of feminists are out there asking themselves if Beyonce is a “real feminist” and if a neon sign and spandex is enough to make you a feminist icon, the answer is yes. The answer is yes because Beyonce, a black woman with a husband, a child, and an inarguably successful music career is telling hundreds of young black women out there that their body belongs entirely to them. If that’s not feminism, I’m not sure what is. Keep doing you, Bey.
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