The Queen of Theory
I first encountered critical theory in graduate school. It scared me. Part of what I found so frightening was the ability of a name, like say Derrida or Foucault, to cast a spell over the classroom. I remember looking around, seeing the knowing nods, hearing the quiet murmurs of assent, and thinking to myself, did I accidentally walk through a portal into another dimension?
Eventually, I figured out why these names mattered so much to academics. I even managed to employ their theories, but in a perhaps more severe than normal case of imposter syndrome, I still don’t believe I fit into their world. It’s okay, don’t feel bad for me. I like being able to move freely between the academic and nonacademic worlds. In fact, I’ve been doing it so much lately that I’m beginning to think that the boundary between them doesn’t exist at all.
Case in point: on my drive home from classes, I love to blast Beyoncé. It’s how I unwind. But lately something’s happened. I’m hearing critical theory in Beyoncé. Probably some of you are not surprised by this, especially if you’ve seen Lemonade. The rest of you will have to take it on faith. If you don’t believe me, after you read this, spend some time with her oeuvre, but I need you to make the leap because we need to talk about what happens when we call Beyoncé a theorist.
First of all, what the heck is critical theory? In short, it’s a philosophical approach to observing and critiquing societal, cultural, and political structures, which at its core is primarily concerned with liberating people from ideology. Think Karl Marx: Workers of the world, unite and You have nothing to lose but your chains! Critical theory is most commonly associated with the Frankfort school. For our purposes, you only need to know that the Frankfort school was a group of German scholars, heavily influenced by Freud and Marx, who cared a whole lot about freedom and whose university was eventually shuttered by the Nazis.
Marx? Freud? Nazis? Are you wondering where Beyoncé fits into this? Good. You see, I have some problems with critical theory, and I think Beyoncé can solve them.
I can get behind liberation, don’t get me wrong. I, too, care a whole lot about freedom. Critical theory, however, has historically been dominated by educated, well-to-do, white men. It can be stuffy, elitist, and sometimes, frankly, downright unreadable. So an odd paradox emerges: critical theorists care deeply about liberating oppressed peoples, yet their work is largely inaccessible to the very people they seek to liberate i.e. oppressed people, people who are more likely to be poor, uneducated, non-white, female. That, to me, seems like a problem.
That’s not to say that we should just get rid of critical theory. Its value is immeasurable. I think, though, that we need a new kind of theorist, someone who knows how to communicate these important ideas about liberation to the oppressed peoples who need them. Because if critical theory remains locked up in the university, of what good is it?
Enter Beyoncé. Queen Bey. Beyoncé is accessible—in a literal sense. You can download her music for a nominal cost, or you can just watch her videos for free on YouTube. She is also accessible in that her fans can understand her music. Her ideas aren’t buried under layers of jargon. That doesn’t mean her ideas are simple. She critiques structures of racism and sexism. She calls out our capitalist system that compounds the suffering of oppressed people. Beyoncé, in other words, cares a whole lot about freedom.
Watch the below video for evidence:
In the spoken word poem that precedes this song, Beyoncé says, “I bathed in bleach. I plugged my menses with pages from the holy book.” Here she alludes to the ways women’s bodies have been stigmatized as dirty, I bathed in bleach, and that this stigmatization has been propped up by religion, I plugged my menses (menstruation) with pages from the holy book. from these lines we understand that Beyoncé bought into the dominant ideology about women’s bodies. She did everything in her power to fix her problematic female body by cleansing herself, even trying to inhibit her natural bodily functions with religion, but radically changing herself in order to measure up to an ideal standard of femininity wasn’t enough to protect her from a pain common to women—a cheating spouse.
The rest of the video is an extended meditation on feminine rage. “what’s worse”, she asks, “looking jealous and crazy, or like being walked all over lately?” This is the classic double bind women are placed in: remain silent and become a doormat, or speak up and be dubbed crazy. It’s a no-win situation. Ultimately Beyoncé rejects an ideology that seeks to control her. She expresses rage, smashing windshields and storefronts with a baseball bat, all while looking super hot.
It’s true Beyoncé is critiquing a society that demands women behave, but what does this video, this song, allow women to do? I would argue that it allows them to do the very same thing that a critical theory text written by a Frankfort alum would allow them to do: recognize an oppressive structure. Maybe they’ll question or even reject a patriarchal system that requires female silence. Maybe they’ll insist on making their voices heard in their interpersonal relationships. Maybe they’ll notice that when a woman express anger it’s shocking whereas when a man does it seems normal. Maybe they’ll wonder why that is. Maybe the answer will make them angry. Maybe they’ll express that anger. They can do all that, and they didn’t have to go to graduate school to get there.
Somewhere there are critical theorists rolling in their graves. Such disrespect! Sorry, guys, truly. Try to think of it this way: I think that your ideas about freedom and liberation are so great that I want them to get into the hands, heads, and hearts of as many people as possible. Beyoncé can do that. So set your ideas free. Let Beyoncé have them for a while. Let her share them with her millions of fans. Let’s all move between academic and nonacademic worlds as we wish. There is, after all, no boundry to stop us.