Five Reasons I’m Here for Beyoncé, the Feminist
Brittney C. Cooper
On December 13, 2013, while we were all still trying to get back to our lives after part one of the Scandal season finale, Beyoncé stealth-dropped a self-titled, totally unpromoted album. The fact that she managed to pull that off undetected means we can conclude only one thing: #BitchBad!
Yes, I said, “Bitch bad.” Didn’t even do the watered-down version, “Bish.” Sometimes to make a statement you have to use all your vowels and consonants!
Since I usually be feeling kinda spent after the weekly rendezvous with Scandal, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning to news reports and a newsfeed filled with Bey’s latest feat. The thing that immediately drew my attention was the fact that Chimamanda Adichie was featured on one of the seventeen tracks, so I skipped ahead. Lo and behold, I found a remixed version of Beyoncé’s song from the prior spring. On the album it’s titled “Flawless,” but you might have known it is as “Bow Down, I Been On.” Some feminists I know had their panties all in a wad when the first version came out because Bey instructed some generally nameless bitches to bow down.
Look, I don’t generally get into debates about whether women can or should say “bitch” or Black people can say “nigga.” Because why? The bottom line is we do it anyway, and marginalized groups have the right to self-define. What I will say is that it took feminism to introduce me to real bitches (good and bad).
Anyway, folks said that Beyoncé’s choice to do something so demeaning killed her feminist street cred. But then, folks been pulling Bey’s feminist card from the beginning. Let us not forget how much folk acted a fool after the 2013 Super Bowl.
The reason I fucks wit Bey so deeply is that she had something for that ass.
The remix. The remix with Chimamanda Adichie spitting a very clear and succinct definition of feminism for the masses: “A person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” Yup. For starters anyway. And that interlude came right after Bey said, “Bow down bitches.”
Talk about crunk feminism—percussive, a refusal to fit into particular boxes, a willingness to “fuck with the grays.”
So here’s a few reasons that I’m here for Beyoncé, the Feminist.
1. She’s a work in progress, as are we all. In 2010 she gave an interview saying she was a “feminist in a way” because she valued her female friendships deeply. In the spring of 2013, she claimed she was a “modern-day feminist.” Then, by the end of 2013, she was straight up embracing the term in her music and claiming her right to both tell women to bow down and encourage them to be self-confident from the moment they step out of bed . . . in the same damn song! I rock with that because her feminism is complicated, and ours is too. Tell the truth. If your bed and the folks you shared it with were an indicator of your politics, your card might get pulled too. Moving on.
2. Sometimes bitches do need to bow down. Call that a hip hop generation feminist sensibility, but it’s true. It’s just like when Papa Pope gave Fitz the read of the century on Scandal: “Boy, I’m literally above your pay grade.” It’s like the swag I don when academic goons try to step to me even though they are clearly less qualified. Sometimes I’ve been known to tell folk, “You haven’t read enough to step to me. Go back and come again.” The world would be better if women would learn that we don’t have to take everybody’s shit. Not the White man’s, not the Black man’s, not the state’s, not the hating-ass next-door neighbor’s, not your frenemy’s. Nobody’s.
3. Academic feminism ain’t the only kid on the block. Confession: the first time I identified as a feminist, I was in grad school. I was able to come to an informed conclusion after reading Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought. But we need to stop acting like a radical feminist is the only kind of feminist. I mean look, I’m radical and committed to a robust structural critique, but I appreciate the good few liberal feminists in Congress who show up and actually fight for reproductive rights that can be on the books! As Meek Mill says, “There’s levels to the shit.” But news flash—everybody didn’t (or won’t) go to college. So when women of color start waxing eloquent about how our grandmothers and mothers were the first feminists we knew and many of them would “never” use the term, I wonder then why we don’t understand Beyoncé’s homegrown brand of feminism—one that honors female friendships, one that recognizes and calls out sexism and domination in her industry, one that celebrates the power of women. No, it ain’t well-articulated, radical social-justice feminism, but if you need a PhD to be a feminist then we’ve got bigger problems, folks. And I’ll take a feminist that knows how to treat her homegirls before one who can spit the finer points of bell hooks to me all day erry-day.
4. I’m here for anybody that is checking for the F-word, since so many folk aren’t. (Except Republicans. Ain’t nobody here for that.) What we look like embracing Queen Latifah and Erykah Badu even though they patently reject the term, but shading and policing Bey who embraces it? If Bey is embracing this term, that is laudable. If she’s figuring out her relationship to it, I embrace that. I will never let my politics be limited by folks’ identification with a label, but it is nice when folks are willing to take the risk that comes with the word. Especially when said folks are backing it up by living out feminism in the ways available to them—performing with an all-girl band with visibly queer members, for instance.
5. King Bey always brings her A-game and manages to have fun while doing it. I wish feminism could take some clues here. We don’t always bring our A-game, since we spend a whole lot of time trying to figure who’s in and who’s out, as if that is going to get us anywhere. Time-out for the women of color feminist mean-girls shit. Sometimes folks just be hating. Real talk. Cuz if you ain’t critiquing Katy Perry and Pink and alla dem for being procapitalist and in league with the establishment, then back up off Bey. Posthaste. (And yes, we can and should have a robust critique, and that in itself ain’t hating. But again, sometimes, folk are just being mean or contrary, and we need to be about building some shit, not tearing shit down. And sometimes folks need to go to therapy and heal from the shit the mean girls in your past did to you. Stop taking it out on Bey. She don’t know you. Seriously.)
More to the point, sometimes we take ourselves too seriously. If laughing and dancing ain’t a part of this revolution we’re building, then you can keep it.
In Beyoncé’s words, “Haters hate and I get better.”
There you have it. #AllHailKingBey