Sunday, December 15, 2013

Beyoncé's Beyoncé

I'm currently having an intense fan experience.

Listening to Beyoncé's surprise album, and watching the videos, I'm abuzz. It's a 'visual album' that was not hyped in the lead up to it's release, but in it's post-release (these last few days), with the feeling of "how the fuck did that just happen?" How is there now 14 songs and 17 videos to digest, in one huge pill? And they're intense and fierce and at this moment I know that this is the best work Beyoncé has ever created.

And I'm tempted to write thousands of words on why and how this moment is, but I won't. Instead I'll let this wash over me for the weekend and the years to follow.

One thing I want to say is that I love the feminism of this moment. There's a lot of symbols, gestures and overt claims to feminism and gender difference here, and it's as though this is a cultural/media/sexualities text whose complexity could probably never be captured by any scholar, but is best experienced through fandom; in one's responses, delights and engagements with this text. Because this is a feeling, pulsating, and beautiful moment that is contradictory, angry, desiring, seductive and fucked up. This is happening right now, and any historical or cultural overview is going to attempt to suffocate that.

This might be the most subversive feminist text I've read in a while.