More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh solo album, offers a much different vibe and one that also represents an intergenerational inheritance engulfed in the pleasures of Black dance music vibrating across the various subcultures of Black communities around the world.
Black women—across genders, sexualities and communities—have been the blueprint, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance proves that.
Beyoncé returns on Renaissance to challenge listeners to ask a life-saving follow up question: Who taught you to love yourself? And she tells us: If you want to learn Black self-love, listen to Black queer and trans voices.
“I think people who dismiss her as somehow being a lightweight or a pretty girl with some lucky breaks—as if you can create at that level without thinking critically!—that is actually just another sign of misogyny and how women are discounted for what they create. When we make exquisite things, people assume there are fairies in the night who do it with magic dust instead of looking at the work and the research and the effort that goes into it.”
Given recent activism on the part of celebrity women—from the #MeToo movement to the Time’s Up Campaign—it’s easy to forget there was a time not that long ago when the link between fame and feminism was viewed with suspicion and even incredulity. Here, we chart the evolution—and increasing impact—of celebrity feminism over this millennium.
Kinitra Brooks and Kameelah Martin’s new collection adds to a growing list of works that comprise “Beyoncé Studies.”
These 10 feminist moments shifted the media landscape and echoed across the Internet this year—inspiring, empowering and mobilizing feminists across the country in the process.
Days before waking up in the wee hours to watch the wedding of American actor Meghan Markle and British royal Prince Harry, I was already pondering the meaning of a different service: “Beyoncé Mass,” held at the Grace Cathedral Church in San Francisco.
“Thank you for allowing me to be the first black woman to headline Coachella. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch.”
2017 certainly qualifies as the year of feminist resistance, punctuated with these memorable, quirky and provocative moments in pop culture.
Good news! We found your Day of the Girl anthem, and it’s chock-full of feminism.
