My ancient "I Am...Sasha Fierce" 33 1/3 proposal that *almost* made it...
...but the discourse has moved on so here's an artifact from Beyonce criticism circa 2012
It’s 33 1/3 proposal season, and I’m working on one about The B-52’s Cosmic Thing. That work reminded me of the proposal I submitted in what I’m assuming is early 2012 (my CV still lists me as an assistant professor). This proposal was for Beyonce’s “I Am…Sasha Fierce.” It made it to the shortlist, but ultimately wasn’t accepted. I thought I’d post it here because Beyonce herself and Beyonce criticism has moved on (It’s been nearly a decade!), and a proposal whose opening line is “Is Beyonce a feminist?” would need significant updating to move forward today. I still think there are some important ideas in here—a number of them became part of Resilience & Melancholy. Anyway, enjoy:
“I Am…Sasha Fierce” 33 1/3 Proposal
Introduction
“Why don’t you love me, when I make me so damn easy to love?” (Beyoncé, “Why Don’t You Love Me?” on I Am…Sasha Fierce)[i]
Is Beyoncé a feminist? Many fans, feminist bloggers, and even music critics think that her work is hopelessly heteronormative, materialistic, sexually objectifying, and otherwise politically retrograde.[ii] But they’re wrong.[iii] Beyoncé, like many women of color, wants to re-configure mainstream understandings of what feminism is and who counts as a feminist. For example, her claim “I need to find a catchy new word for feminism, right? Like Bootylicious,"[iv] is not a rejection of feminism, but an attempt to reinvigorate and reinvent it. In fact, Beyoncé’s work is strongly and deeply feminist because it challenges the mainstream feminist assumptions about sexuality, race, performance, pop culture, pleasure, agency…and a whole lot of other things. So, mainstream feminists don’t recognize Beyoncé a member of their movement because she—or rather, her work—participates in a different sort of feminism. Mainstream feminism has difficulty finding the feminism in Beyoncé’s work because they have to listen for it. Beyoncé is a musician—singer who is extensively involved in the writing and production of her pieces. Mainstream feminist methods, strategies, and tactics focus almost exclusively on visual media and song lyrics—they are proficient at critically reading images and texts, but they’re not very good at or for listening to music.[v]
In this book, I use Beyoncé’s “I Am…Sasha Fierce” album to argue that feminists ought to love Beyoncé, because she makes it so damn easy to love her…if we can just listen to her music, and, in the process, get over some incorrect and ultimately racist and misogynist assumptions (what academics call “implicit biases”) about black female pop stars, and pop music in general.[vi] While feminist bloggers, feminist theorists, and music critics enthusiastically laud Lady Gaga’s and Madonna’s feminist politics, Beyoncé is often entirely overlooked or dismissed as retrograde; I hope to remedy some of this oversight and give Beyoncé some of the credit she deserves.[vii] “I Am…Sasha Fierce” is an entertaining, pleasurable listen, but it is also a work of art—that is, it is a nuanced, carefully-constructed creation that comments on, critiques, and otherwise engages ideas as such. Ultimately, this book is about the intellectual and political work Beyoncé does as an artist, and the critical-theoretical work her art allows scholars, and above all fans, to do.
This is a book about Beyoncé’s album, but it is also an argument about the role of pop music in society at large, in feminism, and in academic research or “theory.” I treat “I Am…Sasha Fierce” as a sort of “case study”: I use the album to ground specific claims, and then generalize from these claims to make arguments about broader social and philosophical attitudes toward popular music. I’ll get to those claims and arguments shortly. But for now, I want to clarify that this book is not a historical account, listening guide, or “interpretation” of “I Am…Sasha Fierce.” It is a critical analysis of the album as a work of art—or rather, it is a philosophical analysis of the ideas, concepts, and questions raised in and by the album. This book is about what “I Am…Sasha Fierce” tells us about gender, race, and sexuality, about feminism, about music aesthetics, and other ideas. I’m reading this album as a philosophical text—as critique, argumentation, etc.
Artworks engage ideas as ideas; this is a large part of what distinguishes art from decoration (e.g., wallpaper) or entertainment (e.g., the HGTV show “House Hunters”). However, we often demand that pop music not be art—that it be only decorative and/or entertaining. The most common form this demand takes is this objection, which I often hear when giving public lectures about pop music: “Well, OK,” the questioner goes, “So I see that there is this complexity to Pop Diva X’s work, but what about the children? They won’t see this complexity. They won’t understand the critique of [misogynist practice y], so they’ll just think the song is endorsing [misogynist practice Y].” This objection usually also includes an appeal to pity couched in the form of a reference to commenter’s own beautiful, innocent children. This objection is actually quite similar to 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s demand that women, though possibly capable of independent moral reasoning, have a moral duty torefrain from exercising independent thought (because if they did, then social upheaval would ensue.[viii] While we should be grateful that women ignored Kant’s argument and used their independent reasoning to overturn some neatly-organized patriarchy, Kant wanted to prevent precisely this). So, behind this question about “the children” lies this claim: though female pop divas possibly could make artworks with complex critical-theoretical agendas and progressive politics, they have a moral duty to refrain from making actual art. Like Kant’s demand that women not be full moral persons, we demand that pop divas not be artists. This is a misogynist demand, one that instrumentalizes children in order to police women’s behavior and limit their opportunities. The “What about the children?” objection demands that female pop stars—who are more often than not women of color—have a moral obligation to never make art, to never be particularly creative, innovative, or critical. Because pop music is one artistic medium and industry where women, especially women of color have significant cultural and economic influence and success, this “What about the children?” objection insidiously reigns in women in one of the few spheres in which women are widely recognized as having made tangible, historically, aesthetically, and politically important contributions. To claim that pop music shouldn’t be art is to claim that women shouldn’t use their intellect. Why couldn’t we have an artistically vibrant popular culture? Why should pop culture be dumb? Though it often is idiotic and/or politically retrograde, it can be and often is quite “smart.” Sometimes it is smart even in its apparent stupidity—as Jack Halberstam’s recent book argues quite convincingly (although about animated film, not about pop music).[ix] In this book, I take Beyoncé seriously as an artist in order to demonstrate why we (especially we feminists) ought to take commercial pop music seriously as art.
“Sasha Fierce’s” Afrofuturist Feminism
In this part of the introduction, I want to clarify my approach to “I Am…” I will first lay out some background context and define some terms; then, I’ll give a brief overview of each chapter.
Why this album?: “I Am…Sasha Fierce” is particularly significant to Beyoncé’s oeuvre because it is here that her Afrofuturist feminism first appears in a mature, developed form. Though she had called on Afrofuturist themes in earlier works—such as her performance of “Get Me Bodied” at the 2007 BET Awards—“I Am…Sasha Fierce” is her first Afrofuturist album.[x] Afrofuturism is key to understanding the artistic and political work Beyoncé does in “I Am…Sasha Fierce”, because she takes up issues of gender and sexuality through and in terms of race; if, as I argue, she understands race through the lens of Afrofuturism, then Afrofuturism also shapes her treatment of gender and sexuality.
There is no one orthodox Afrofuturism—but there are plenty of Afrofuturisms.[xi] At a high level of abstraction, Afrofuturisms do have some common assumptions and commitments. They critique the stereotype that blacks are somehow “primitive” or “closer to nature,” just as they critique the idea that blacks have a more immediate relationship with embodiment than whites, and thus a less adept relationship with technology, science, reason, and other things on the “mind” side of mind/body dualism. Afrofuturisms reject the linear, teleological conceptions of time and progress that situate Africa/the African diaspora as the “past” to which the West is the “future.” Afrofuturisms also “flip the script” on the Western dehumanization of blacks: instead of viewing dehumanization as disempowering, Afrofuturism critiques “humanism” itself, and positively values the non-human status of Afrodiasporic blacks in Western society. For example, Afrofuturism relies on two main metaphors: blacks as robots and blacks as aliens. “Robot” comes from the early twentieth-century term Czech slang term “robota,” which meant “worker” or, significantly, “slave.” Before white Westerners had mechanical-electrical robots, they used black slave labor to do the work now performed by farm equipment and household appliances. Similarly, Afrofuturists compare Middle Passage to mid-century alien abduction narratives: in both situations, dudes with funky skin colors, weird clothes, bizarre language, and insanely strange ships arrive out of nowhere, capture innocent people, imprison and experiment on them. Afrofuturists hold that in the West, blacks are robots and slaves—and that’s far preferable to being “human,” i.e., white…because look at all the awful stuff white people did, in the name of “humanity”!
“I Am…Sasha Fierce” engages various Afrofuturist values and practices: the musical composition of “Single Ladies,” the lyrics of “Radio,” the imagery in the videos for “Single Ladies,” “Diva,” and “Sweet Dreams,” and the entire premise of the “I Am…” half of the album all use Afrofuturist tropes and strategies to create a critical, political layer of meaning in addition to the songs’ and videos’ superficial, apparently apolitical content. Afrofuturism is the aesthetic strategy through which Beyoncé articulates the political content of her work.
Critical Doubleness as Black Feminist Strategy: I have argued, both more informally on my blog and more formally in my scholarly articles, that black American female pop singers use aesthetic-political strategies of “critical doubleness.”[xii] These techniques employ “with-and-against” methods that play a work’s “literal” or superficial layer of meaning against its “literary” or “aesthetic” dimension; these layers are put in tension with one another so that the literary meaning deconstructs the literal one. (Sarcasm is an everyday example of this strategy: how you say something changes the meaning of what you say.) The work’s aesthetic dimension doubles and critiques the literal/superficial interpretation. Mainstream viewers can take uncritical pleasure in the artwork because the literal level does not immediately challenge racism or sexism. However, as works of art, these pieces undermine the very stereotypes they might seem to affirm, if they were literal reportage and not, well, works of art. Critical doubleness uses and traffics in (often deeply) problematic norms, stereotypes, and images in order to subvert them. However, when we refuse to recognize or admit that black women can make complex works of art, or that commercial music can be subversive, we prevent ourselves from perceiving the critical, feminist and anti-racist work that is actually present in these works, and doom these works and their creators to our already-assumed low expectations of them.
Beyoncé uses critical doubleness more often than not, and it is key to understanding the underlying black feminist politics and aesthetics she adopts in “I Am…Sasha Fierce.” As I will argue in Chapter 4, the relationship between the two halves of the album—“I Am” and “Sasha Fierce”—hinges on Beyoncé’s use of critical doubleness: taken literally, the two halves seem like polar opposites; taken aesthetically, the halves are complimentary aspects of a single underlying project. This project uses aesthetic and political practices that center black women’s experiences to craft an Afrofuturist feminist critique of white heteroatriarchy.[xiii] Couching her radical politics in her works’ aesthetic dimension, Beyoncé can infiltrate the mainstream more easily and pervasively than artists who wear their counter-hegemonic politics on their sleeves. Beyoncé’s commercial success grants her access to ever wider audiences, and carries her message further into the American mainstream, to audiences who might be initially hostile to posthuman black feminism.
Reject the Biographical Impulse Artist/philosopher Adrian Piper argues that women artists of color are frequently discussed in ways that reduce their works to their biography: “The main subject of investigation is the person, not the artifact’…Not the work of art, but rather the artist often provides the content and themes of interviews, photomontages, conferences, and critical essays” (275).[xiv] Piper contends that this reduction of artwork to artists’ biography is both caused by and contributes to racism and sexism. For instance, this focus the artist’s life allows audiences to avoid talking about her work; this avoidance allows audiences to evade their own complicity in racist-sexist stereotypes about the intellectual and artistic inferiority of women of color, and allows these stereotypes to persist.[xv] Not only does the biographical impulse treat women artists of color as incapable of making art,“this tack, of changing the subject,” Piper continues, “is just another way to silence those for whom artistic censorship has been a way of life” (275-6). So, the reduction of artwork to artists’ biography is another way of silencing women of color: it’s a way to ignore their complex creative and theoretical work. Certainly biographical details can at times influence artists’ creative process. However, given the deeply problematic motivations for and effects of limiting critical engagement with women artists of color to their biographies, biography is something I will largely avoid. Though I Am…Sasha Fierce seems to offer itself as autobiography, I will argue that this interpretation is both objectively flawed and politically problematic.
Chapter Outline
Timeline: In addition to this proposal, I am about to send a proposal for an academic monograph out to publishers for review. So, the timing of this manuscript’s completion depends somewhat on how things play out with the other book proposal. However, if there are firm deadlines for this project, I can likely work the other project around this one. Also, given the pace at which academic publishing tends to move, I anticipate this process will be somewhat speedier; if this is so, I can prioritize this project over the other. If this project is prioritized, I anticipate the following timeline for its completion: (1) Ideal completion date for first draft: 15 January 2013. (2) Slightly more realistic completion date for first draft: 31 March 2013. (3) Late completion date for first draft: 31 May 2013. If I have to make a more extensive commitment to the other book project, I would move these dates back 6-9 months. I do think I can move relatively quickly through the writing of the manuscript, because the entire book is either a development on previously published articles, or revisions of posts I’ve already made to my blog.
1. Introduction
2. All the Single Ladies Are Robots
This chapter establishes Beyoncé as an Afrofuturist, both in her aesthetics and in her politics. I rework and synthesize several analyses of “Single Ladies” that I have done in published academic articles,[xvi] and include new analyses of album tracks including “Sweet Dreams,” “Diva,” and “Radio.” The underlying argument is two-pronged: (1) Beyoncé uses Afrofuturist understandings of blackness, and race generally, to queer white hetero- and homonormative discourses of coupling, kinship, marriage, and private property; and (2) Beyoncé adopts strategies of “critical doubleness” to convey radical messages in mainstream pop hits. I will also discuss how the Afrofuturist strategies she uses in “I Am…” are developed in her subsequent album, “4” (e.g., in “Run the World (Girls)”).[xvii]
3. Feminism Calling: Video Phone’s Posthuman Feminism
This chapter is an extended analysis of “Video Phone,” which I read alongside Gaga’s “Telephone” (on which Beyoncé appears, and which serves, I argue, as a thematic and ideological complement to “Video Phone”). I contrast Beyoncé’s Afrofuturist posthuman feminism with Gaga’s post-goth posthumanism, and argue that Beyoncé’s posthuman is more radically critical of (neo)liberal humanism, and more radically subversive of heteropatriarchal norms. Because Beyoncé’s feminism is posthuman, it is often not recognized as feminist by mainstream feminist bloggers, fans, and critics, because mainstream American feminism is informed by liberal humanism. So, I argue that Beyoncé is actually more radically feminist than the “feminists” who decry her work as sexually objectifying, etc. I plan on including an extended version of this chapter as a chapter in another manuscript-in-progress (which is more strictly academic/philosophical), which I am currently sending out for review. This chapter also plays off of and builds on my analysis of Gaga’s “post-goth” posthumanism, which has appeared on the Gaga Stigmata blog, and which is set to appear in the Gaga Stigmata edited collection, which is under review at the Feminist Press.[xviii]
4. If Beyoncé Were A ‘Boy,’ She’d Still Be Black: Racialization and Queerness
Here, I expand upon the claim I made in Chapter 1 about Beyonce’s use of race to queer hetero- and homonormative gender and sexuality. I focus on “Why Don’t You Love Me?” and “If I Were A Boy.” If white hetero and homonormativity depend on stereotypes about the dysfunctionality of black heterosexuality, i.e., if blackness already functions as somewhat queer, then Beyoncé can—and I argue does—productively intervene in, critique, and subvert heteropatriarchy even while apparently not discussing gender or sexuality, or treating them in apparently normative, conformist ways. Beyoncé’s work treats mainstream gender and sexual norms and identities as white humanist ideals. She uses black feminist and Afrofuturist strategies (e.g., critical doubleness, time scrambling) to perform subversive renderings of normative (white) heterosexual femininity.[xix]
5. “I Am…”: Critical Doubleness and the Illusion of Immediacy
The “I Am…” half of this double album is, at first listen, sonically and thematically more conservative than the “Sasha Fierce” half: it uses (what sounds like) acoustic instruments, traditional rock and adult contemporary song structures,[xx] and feels more intimate and confessional than the second, more spectacular half. In other words, “I Am…” seems, on the surface, to have nothing to do with Afrofuturism. In this chapter, I show how the songs on the first, “I Am…” half of the album treat “the human” as the most artificial, manufactured, post-human of all identities. Here, Beyoncé combines Afrofuturism and critical doubleness to performatively deconstruct the very “humanist” aesthetics she verbally attributes to it in interviews. To fully understand “I Am…” we have to listen to it as music.
Even though Beyoncé has encouraged the view that the songs on the “I Am…” half of the album are about her “true inner self,” these songs are not actually autobiographical—they are exercises or studies in singer-songwriter and (soft) rock aesthetics, which privilege intimacy, authenticity, and authorial confession.[xxi] Beyoncé has, throughout her career, experimented with widely different song styles; the first half of “I Am..Sasha Fierce” is her exploration of a specific genre. It is not an actual confession of her “true” inner life—she just needs to frame the songs in this way because intimacy, authenticity, and authorial confession are fundamental elements of the musical genre she has adopted. The narrator we hear on songs like “Smash” (which may be a riff on Dave Matthews Band’s hit “Crash”) and “Satellites” (which may be a riff on another DMB song of the same name) is the persona the artist Beyoncé has constructed in order to meet the requirements of the singer-songwriter/ adult-contemporary genre. So, the apparently “more human” narrator of “I Am…” is just as, if not more constructed than the avowedly artificial “Sasha Fierce” persona. “Disappear” tells us this quite clearly: though it uses the affect of musical intimacy (what sounds like stripped-down production) to create the illusion of immediate expression, the song itself is about the failure of immediacy. “When I think about it,” the narrator sings, “I know I was never there, or even cared/the more I think about it, the less that I was able to share with you.” What is presented as genuine, intimate, and immediate is actually very distant. Thus, neither the narrator of “I Am…” nor the narrator of “Sasha Fierce” is actually Beyoncé Knowles, private citizen. In fact, “Sasha Fierce” is more consistent with Beyoncé’s oeuvre: one would expect that a disc about Beyoncé Knowles personally would use a wide range of styles, because, as later releases like “4” indicate, she has a wide range of influences, tastes, and collaborators.
So, “I Am…” is not opposed to, but consistent with “Sasha Fierce”—both are Afrofuturist feminist aesthetic and political projects that subvert and critique white heteropatriarchal humanism, especially as it is manifested in gender, sexuality, and aesthetics.
6. Conclusion
“I Am…Sasha Fierce” is an Afrofuturist feminist text and practice. It is both exciting, entertaining pop music and black posthuman feminist theory/practice. Because Beyoncé’s feminism is both posthuman and couched in critical doubleness, it is often illegible to mainstream liberal humanist white feminist interpretive matrices or “lenses.”
In the four preceding chapters, I have unpacked the Afrofuturist feminist politics and aesthetics that Beyoncé uses in “I Am…Sasha Fierce.” In this concluding chapter, I address some of the broader questions raised by her political and aesthetic choices. In other words, after having worked through what Beyoncé actually does in this album’s music, I now want to situate her work—both musical and philosophical, as both entertainment and as art—in a more general context. In other words, this chapter is where I address the “So what?” question and argue why what Beyoncé says and does on this album matters. I focus on three main questions:
1. What’s so special about Afrofuturist posthumanism? Why does humanism need to be critiqued? There are two main reasons why Afrofuturism is important to the study, interpretation, and creation of contemporary US pop music, one musical and one political. First, the musical reason: Humanism is inadequate to the task of theorizing, understanding, and interpreting contemporary pop music. Second, the political reason: as Beyoncé’s work powerfully demonstrates, humanism is inadequate to the task of understanding and evaluating many black feminist positions and practices. To argue this latter point, I will put “I Am…” in conversation with Kelis’s “Flesh Tone,” which suggests that Afrofuturist posthumanism is a uniquely viable black feminist musico-political strategy.
2. Is critical doubleness really a viable pop music strategy—that is, will people “get” the doubleness? After all, this is pop music: it ought to be accessible, and the political message should be available in the literal, not the aesthetic, layer of meaning. This question is, I will argue, both humanist and racist: it denies the legitimacy of posthumanist frameworks (i.e., that immediacy is not always preferable), and black women’s strategies/practices of critical doubleness. As I explained in the introduction, this question is also racist and misogynist because it requires black women, and other pop stars (who are overwhelmingly female, WOC, or men of color) to not make art, even if we’re willing to “grant” that they’re even capable of doing anything more abstract than literal reportage. We are morally obligated to treat pop music as the art object it is—otherwise we have to maintain the undesirable position that in this one arena where women and people of color are actually allowed to make significant, influential contributions to society, in this one arena in which the glass ceiling and the color line are weakest, women and people of color have a duty to refrain from exercising their fullest capacities.
3. Why do the white divas get all the love from critics and academics? Or: a call for Critical Beyoncé Studies. Beyoncé is more commercially successful than, well, most other entertainers. She’s at least as artistically avant-garde and musically virtuosic as any other pop megastar. She has an extensive, decade-spanning body of work, which continues to grow. But she’s not granted the political and aesthetic significance that more politically and aesthetically conservative white female pop divas are granted. There is a “Gaga Stigmata” blog, and a volume of collected essays on the way—but no such blog or academic volume for a living black female pop diva. At the same time, while black feminist scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Davis do take the work of black female singers quite seriously, they limit their analyses to already-canonized performers and “classic” works (e.g., Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, etc.). While white feminist musicologists and queer theorists have developed some strategies and techniques for re-claiming the scholarly “rigor” of pop music and/or pop culture in general, they continue to overlook black women and distinctively black/Afro-diasporic feminist/queer practices. Both because of these multiple oversights, and because black feminisms are not identical or reducible to white feminisms, I will suggest some tools and approaches that will be helpful in the critical academic study of black female pop divas like Beyoncé.
The Competition
There are some trade biographies/haiographies of Beyoncé Knowles targeted mainly at teens and tweens, but this book is an entirely different sort of project: it’s a theory-based analysis of one of her albums that uses her work to discuss broader issues in feminism, pop music, politics, and aesthetics.[xxii] While the books on Beyoncé that are currently in print deal with her life, mine deals with her work. Also, my book is for adult fans who want a more substantive, intellectual approach to Beyoncé’s work. My research indicates that there are no books in print about Beyoncé that are in any direct competition with this project. Daphne Brooks has an article in The Nation and another in the scholarly journal Meridians, and this book is more in conversation with these works than with the books about Beyoncé that are currently in print.[xxiii] My work compliments Brooks’s, as she has focused primarily on Beyoncé’s pre-“I Am…” catalog. In addition to Brooks’s work, there is an unpublished dissertation on Beyoncé’s hip-hop feminism, body politics, and image.[xxiv] Though this dissertation may eventually be published as a book, the approach in this dissertation follows more from a media studies/communication focus on the visual and on representation, whereas my manuscript focuses on Beyoncé’s posthuman feminism, musical work, and aesthetic strategies.
In terms of Beyoncé studies, my manuscript’s “competition” is mainly a scattering of blog posts, internet magazine articles, and other short-form, web-based media. Which is to say: given the proliferation of informal Beyoncé-studies on the Internet, there is already a well-established audience for my book. The book is more likely to be in competition with something like Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.[xxv] The tone and approach of my project is similar to the one Davis adopts in that book, and her work obviously informs mine. However, Davis’s book is about early-twentieth-century blues and jazz vocalists, and my project is much more contemporary. The book will be a good compliment to books such as Lori Burns’s and Melissa Lafrance’s Disruptive Divas (Routledge, 2001), Dian Railton and Paul Watson’s Music Video and the Politics of Representation (Edinburgh UP 2011), and Shelia Whitley’s Women and Popular Music (Routledge 2000). These are all more general books that discuss some of the same issues and questions I address, but through different artists, genres, and/or eras of American pop.
In terms of tone and approach, my book is also similar to Simon Reynolds’s work. He often cites philosophical concepts or theorists in passing, and uses these concepts to speak to or illustrate some aspect of a song, album, genre, or scene. There’s a combination of theory and criticism, and the audience for his books is the educated music fan. That’s the audience I’m aiming for in this book, and it is also the audience for the 33 1/3 series.
Marketing
There are a number of ways I can help Bloomsbury promote the book:
1. Courses and academic use: There is a recently-publicized Rutgers course on Beyoncé, which I imagine will inspire other “topics” courses or first-year seminar and/or composition courses narrowly focused on Beyoncé.[xxvi] But the book will also be good for “Women & the Media” courses, “Women & Music” courses, popular music studies courses on gender, race, sexuality, courses in feminist philosophy & philosophical aesthetics, courses on black feminism or black aesthetics, and a range of undergraduate courses in performance studies, women’s studies, and African-American studies: for example, “Black Women & Performance” or “Gender and Performance,” etc. My work on Beyoncé is already taught in courses on Afrofuturism and in courses on gender and pop music, so I imagine this book would be of interest to these audiences.[xxvii]
2. Social Media: I actively blog (its-her-factory.blogspot.com) and tweet (@doctaj) and with a Klout score that currently hovers around 50 (which is about the same as Wire Magazine), a significant following of musicoloigists, feminist scholars, and non-academic journalists, writers, and fans, I have relevant and useful social media connections. I’m blogrolled at Simon Reynolds’s bliss blog, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music follows me, and I’m followed by the editors of The New Inquiry. So, my connections target exactly the audience the 33 1/3 series wants. I would be happy to tweet throughout the writing process, and provide sample/”teaser” passages on my own blog leading up to the release of the book. I have also had my work on Beyoncé cited by Dan Hancox in The Independent, so my work has been getting some uptake in the mainstream media.[xxviii]
3. Academic listservs, conferences, journals: The Journal of Popular Music Studies is a natural choice to review the book, as I’ve published there on Beyoncé. Similarly, I’ve reviewed articles for The Journal of Popular Music, so that would be another potential place to send a review copy, as would Meridians, which published the Daphne Brooks article on Beyoncé. Women and Music, and the “Feminist Theory and Music” conference would also be appropriate venues. I am actively involved in the American Society for Aesthetics (with the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism), the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the College Art Association, the Society for Women in Philosophy, and philoSOPHIA: a feminist society (with their journal philoSOPHIA). These are all organizations with listservs on which to promote the book, and with conferences where I can bring flyers for the book. The Feminist Philosophers blog is another place I would contact. I’m known among feminist philosophers, philosophers of race, continental philosophers, and aestheticians as the “gender/race/pop music” person. For example, Philosophy Compass invited me to write an article on “Oppression, Privilege, & Aesthetics,” which is forthcoming. So, I’d be happy and willing to exploit my professional and organizational contacts to promote the book.
4. My own university’s social media and PR departments. I have a good relationship with the people in these offices, so I can make use of my institution’s own networks with local and national media.
5. Colleagues at institutions where I have given lectures on pop music: I have given several lectures on pop music at colleges across the US (Coastal Carolina U, Guilford College, Rhodes College, University of Kentucky, etc.), and I assume that students who attended these talks would likely be interested in the book on I Am…Sasha Fierce. I would pass on info about the book to my colleagues who invited me to their institutions, and ask them to distribute the announcement to current and former students.
Fit with the Series
This is most similar, in overall tone and aim, to Carl Wilson’s Journey To The End of Love: in the same way he uses Celine Dion to talk about aesthetic taste, I use Beyoncé Knowles to talk about feminism, race, and music aesthetics. For example, he begins the book with a shout-out to Sartre and a philosophical question: “why, in fact, do each of us hate some songs, or the entire output of some musicians, that millions upon millions of other people adore?” (1). As you can see in my introduction, I also start out with a series of philosophical questions (and an eventual reference to Adrian Piper.) Unlike Wilson’s book, I focus primarily on the work itself and not on its reception. The approach is not archival, nor ethnographical. Thus, unlike many books in the series, my book does not focus on the historical or sociological details of the album’s production process, fan cultures, etc. It’s a philosophical argument made via the interpretation of “I Am…Sasha Fierce.” In a way, I’m treating the album as a philosophical text. I use close readings of Beyoncé’s album to discuss more abstract concepts. These concepts are relevant to the interpretation and impact of her album, but they also help us think about more broadly significant issues like feminism and the role of pop music in society.
This book is more scholarly and academic than many of the series’ current titles, but my approach is also more consistent with the new direction Bloomsbury is taking. That said, I still plan on adopting a tone that is accessible and engaging to the intelligent, curious general audience. I blog for an audience that is a mix of intellectually-inclined non-academics, non-specialist academics, and specialist academics from a number of different fields, so, I am experienced in writing for multiple target audiences.
[i] Knowles, Beyoncé. “I Am…Sasha Fierce.” Colombia Records 2008. [ii] See, for example: (a) Malcom Harris in The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/malcolm-harris/beyonce-accidental-femini_b_865812.html; (b) Dodai Stewart in Jezebel: http://jezebel.com/5827709/lets-invent-a-catchy-new-word-for-feminism; (c) Samitha in Feministing: http://feministing.com/2011/05/24/behind-every-strong-man-there-is-an-even-stronger-beyonce/; (d) a summary of quotes from scholars in various disciplines collected at Colorlines: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/smart_people_talk_beyonce_so_i_dont_have_to.html , and (e) Zoe Williams in The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/29/christine-lagarde-imf-feminism . [iii] Some examples of articles and blog posts that concur with my argument in this book, see (a) Daphne Brooks in The Nationhttp://www.thenation.com/article/suga-mama-politicized, (b) Arielle Loren in Clutch: http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2011/05/is-beyonce-the-face-of-contemporary-feminism/; (c) Natasha Thomas-Jackson in Alter Net: http://www.alternet.org/story/151064/is_beyonce%27s_new_video_feminist[iv] Originally in Harpers Bazaar, September 2011. Cited in Sheridan, Emily, “'Women singing Irreplaceable in burkas was amazing... but their men were upset': Beyoncé’s memories of her Egyptian concert” in Mail Online. 4 August 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2022023/Beyonce-remembers-Egyptian-concert-poses-Harpers-Bazaar-UK.html#ixzz1qdBTlImn Last accessed 30 Marc 2012 3:43pm. [v] For example, Intro to Women’s Studies courses often review concepts such as “the male gaze” or “body image,” but they do not talk about music as music (they may critically assess music videos as works of visual media). Or, people write about Madonna’s visual and lyrical performances of sexuality, but overlook the vocal performance. Certainly feminist musicologists and scholars of popular music attend to the music, but these conversations generally don’t have as much impact as visual/textual discourses have had on both mainstream non-academic feminism and academic women’s and gender studies. [vi] Project Implicit—a collaborative team of interdisciplinary researchers—defines “implicit bias” as “thoughts and feelings that exist outside of conscious awareness or conscious control.” For a clear, layperson explanation and demonstration of what implicit bias, or “implicit association,” is, see Project Implicit’s demo here: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/ Last accessed 30 March 2012 at 4:18pm. [vii] Interestingly, most of the feminist bloggers who do devote careful and extended attention to Beyoncé entirely overlook her actual music. They will focus on her image, her videos, and occasionally even her lyrics, but rarely is the actual music (the singing, the instrumental tracks, compositional form, songwriting, etc.) discussed. See, for example, M Dot in Racialicious: http://www.racialicious.com/2009/12/09/what-sarah-palin-taught-me-about-beyonce . I want to reiterate my admiration for Daphne Brooks’s work on Beyoncé, as she is one of the few scholars or critics to actually discuss Beyoncé’s music. [viii] Christine Battersby argues that “Kant’s women are thus not incapable of becoming ‘persons,’…but have no duty to do so.” (234). “The duty that Kant imposes on women to remain in the immediate, and to leave their powers of reason undeveloped” (231) See Battersby, Christine. “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality, and the Gendered Sublime” in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, eds Naomi Zack et al. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. [ix] Halberstam, Judith (Jack). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. [x] For more on Beyoncé’s Afrofuturist feminism, particularly in relation to the BET awards performance, see my article “Robo-Diva R & B” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Vol. 20, Issue 4, pages 402–423. [xi] It is impossible to summarize such a heterogeneous conceptual/practical orientation beyond the most general, abstract level. For a truly superb bibliography of various scholarly work on Afrofuturisms, see the list compiled at Afrofuturism.net: http://afrofuturism.net/criticism/. I also recommend the Social Text special edition on Afrofuturism (vol 20, no 2, 2002). [xii] See my “From Receptivity to Transformation: On the Intersection of Race, Gender, and the Aesthetic in Contemporary Continental Philosophy” in Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy eds. Davidson, Gines, and Marcano. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010. I have an article titled “Critical Doubleness as Vocal Performance Strategy” currently under review, and hopefully in print by the time the “I Am…” volume would be released. For blog posts, see these in particular: (a) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2011/03/oh-bondage-up-yours-rihannas-s.html and (b) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2011/12/beyonce-gaga-race-and-sexuality-or-11.html . [xiii] Ok, so what do I mean by this mouthful, “heteropatriarchy”? Heteropatriarchy is heteronormative patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system of social organization: it uses gender to structure institutions, relations, and identities. In a gender-based system of social organization, everyone and everything is sorted into one of two gender categories—man or woman, masculine or feminine. Patriarchy is a gendered system of social organization that centers and privileges men and masculinity. Heteronormative patriarchy is a type of patriarchy that uses sexuality with gender to organize society. Heteronormativity centers and privileges heterosexuality, just like patriarchy centers and privileges men and masculinity. [xiv] Piper, Adrian. “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, second edition ed. Ameila Jones. London: Routledge 2010. [xv] “When the art itself stymies the imposition of such stereotypes, the Euroethnic viewer is confronted with a choice: either to explore the singular significance of the art itself—which naturally requires a concerted effort of discernment and will for most Euroethnics—or to impose those tired stereotypes on the artist instead” (Piper, 275). [xvi] These include the aforementioned JPMS article and the article on “Critical Doubleness” currently under review. [xvii] This chapter builds on the following blog posts: (a) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/05/single-ladies-is-not-about-bling-and.html; (b) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2011/05/girls-do-run-world-but-patriarchy-keeps.html[xviii]http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/2010/11/from-dance-in-dark-little-monsters-on.html[xix] This chapter builds on these blog posts: (a) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2010/05/some-initial-thoughts-on-beyonces-new.html, (b) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/06/george-michael-fucks-gender-wonders-if.html and (c) http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2011/12/beyonce-gaga-race-and-sexuality-or-11.html . [xx] It’s also worth noting that this is white/rock adult contemporary, not African-American “quiet storm” adult contemporary. [xxi] See, for example, this 2008 appearance on BET’s 106 & Park (especially around :30), and this 2008 interview on MTV’s Total Request Live:
[xxii] There are a lot of easy-reading Beyoncé biographies targeted at teens and tweens. The Amazon search for “Beyoncé book” brings up several examples: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Abeyonce&page=1[xxiii] Brooks, Daphne. “All that You Can’t Leave Behind” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2008, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 180-204. [xxiv] “Homegirl going home: Hip hop feminism and the representational politics of location.” By Aisha S. Durham, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [xxv] Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. [xxvi] The course, titled “Politicizing Beyoncé,” is reported here in the Rutgers news site: http://news.rutgers.edu/focus/issue.2012-01-03.4307075525/article.2012-01-09.3710058680 . [xxvii] See Week 5 on this syllabus: http://queeringafrofuturism.tumblr.com/courseoutline .See also this syllabus for Hampshire College http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bDPkf0G_PkgJ:https://hampedia.org/wiki/Circuits_of_Power:_Music,_Race,_and_Theory+&cd=37&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a , and this syllabus for “Critical Approaches to Popular Music”: http://classweb.gmu.edu/bhawk/334/bib.html Commenters on my blog have also mentioned they teach the “Robo Diva” article in class. [xxviii] Hancox, Dan. “Let’s Talk About A Comeback” in The Independent 19 February 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/saltnpepa--lets-talk-about-a-comeback-1903850.html Accessed 3/16/12 at 1:26pm.