something secret

There's been a lot written online about Beyoncé in the last week and a half. Between the initial frenzy of the release of her new album, the delight over her overtly feminist messages and the almost instantaneous backlash that Beyoncé the woman (and the body of work) was both anti-feminist, or simply not feminist enough, we've all had Beyoncé on the brain. While I did write a essay about her song Partition and had plans to write another piece examining the album as a whole, I've realized that many other writers have already done a much better job than I ever could have. There is already an amazing canon of work that critically analyzes this new album. Here are a few of my favourite pieces in approximate publication order: That Time Beyoncé's Album Invalidated Every Criticism of Feminism Ever  by Christina Coleman Beyoncé's New Self-Titled LP Is The Feminist's Album Of 2013 by Hayden Manders Beyoncé's New Self-Titled Album Is A Manifesto of Black Womanhood ...

There is a longer  more fleshed out essay on  BEYONCÉ in the works, (which probably won't be published until next week at this rate) but in rewatching King Bey's magnum opus, I have been uncovering gem after gem of naked feminist ideology, and I can't get enough. The latest little gem I found is this subversive little quote cleverly inserted in French into Partition , a song about Bey getting it on with Jay Z in the back of a limo on the way to the club: "Est-ce que tu aimes le sexe? Le sexe, je veux dire l'activité physique, le coït, tu aimes ça? Tu ne t'intéresses pas au sexe? Les hommes pensent que les féministes déstestent le sexe mais c'est une activité très stimulante et naturelle que les femmes adorent." According to friends who are much smarter than me, the above translates to: "Don't you like sex? Sex. I mean sex, the physical activity. Fucking. You like that? You're not interested in sex? Men think feminists don't like sex, b...

I've been thinking about writing this post for a while. It was originally conceived as an examination of the "Stripper Anthem" as presented by Nicki Minaj and Rihanna in Beez In The Trap and Pour It Up, as it related to the sexuality and sexualization of black women, but after last week's post on Lily Allen, and some of the... ill-informed responses it received, I realized that there is a different conversation that needs to be had first. That conversation is about the distinction between the exploitation of black women's sexuality for the (white) male consumerist gaze, and a black female celebrity's reclamation of her own sexuality on her own terms. For whatever reason, there seems to some difficulty in grasping the concept that the most significant difference between these two scenarios is agency , and the way in which the presence or lack of agency determines how a display of sexuality is to be perceived and received. To that end, I want to examine the ima...