Intervention
Beyoncé's Second Skin (Part II): How to Be ***Flawless

Cross-posted to my blog.

I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale?

—"The Blanket," Moby Dick

In my previous post, I argued that Beyoncé: The Visual Album is a spectacle of occluded labor, putting on display not quite the labor nor its product but the hiding of that labor, the acts of partitioning (or what Emily Lordi called "boundaries") that make for Beyoncé's whiz-bang she-can-do-it-all appeal.

As I suggested earlier, this is not just a matter of demystifying care work, sex work, beauty work. It's not a Dove ad. All of this work is crucially bound up in time, from the "forty-five minutes to get all dressed up" to the ironies of the bonus track, "Grown Woman," wherein adulthood allegedly liberates you to do "whatever I want." This is particularly evident in the repeated references to Beyoncé's childhood hometown, Houston, and in footage of Beyoncé performing as a child, which all insist that one is not born, but rather becomes, Beyoncé.

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Josephine Baker

Here I want to draw on Anne Cheng's analysis of Josephine Baker, and especially of Baker's representation as a shiny, metallic object in her studio photographs:

This is indeed the first time that black skin is, and can be, glamorized. But the point here is not just that Baker assumes a look that has traditionally and ideologically been reserved for white femininity—an amazing and notable fact in itself—but also, and more important, they raise a nexus of intriguing questions about the surfacism of black skin at the turn of the twentieth century. ... Her seminudity is invariably accompanied by three visual tropes that have become her visual signatures: animal fur, that almost ubiquitous gold cloth, and dark shadows. We can dismiss these ornamental details as the clichéd conflation between animalism and dark, racialized female sexuality. But by now we are sensitive to the complications of skin and surface in Baker's art. Does human skin (both literal and displaced by the tropes aforementioned) in these images act as decoration or cladding? Is 'blackness' ornament or essence? ... From her famous lacquered hair, known as the 'Baker-Do,' to the expanse of gleaming skin in her studio photographs, Baker sheen is an integral part of her iconography. (110-12)

Cheng's reading of the modernist surface that Baker's skin epitomizes—both nakedness and decoration—helps to make sense of the surfaces in BEYONCE: The Visual Album.

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Beyoncé in "Partition." The nearly-nude body (but is that a leotard and tights? skin or cladding?) has the image of animal skin projected onto it. No attempt is made to suggest that this is "really" her skin: this is a surface among surfaces, subject to light.

The production of the glittering surface that is the Beyoncé-image is perhaps nowhere more ostentatiously performed than in "***Flawless," feat. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The very title announces the song's contradictions: flawless with asterisks, flawless with a footnote, with qualifications. Those asterisks are stars, too; they signify sparkle and shine, but the shiny thing here is "this diamond (flawless), my diamond (flawless), this rock (flawless), my rock (flawless)": the diamond ring that marks Beyoncé's marriage to Jay-Z, itself (regardless of the actual contents of their personal lives) its own kind of flawless performance. This is the song that announces Beyoncé's avowal of feminism. And one of its centerpieces is a gorgeous diamond wedding ring.

 

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Elie Nadelman, Man in the Open Air, c. 1915

Here, Bildung, marriage, and feminism explode—and are catchy. Contradictions act like glinting facets, throwing off light. As in the Elie Nadelman sculpture "Man in the Open Air," bare skin and clothing form one smooth surface. As Cheng describes the sculpture, "He is hermetically sealed in a flawless skin that pours down from his bowler hat through his lithe figure down to his toes sinking comfortably into the metallic ground: body, vestment, environment as one" (9-10). It's not for nothing that Beyoncé wears four pairs of pantyhose while performing. Patting her flawless thighs, she says: "you've got to keep it supported!"

The song is framed by footage/audio of a television competition in which a child Beyoncé, as part of a girls' ensemble, earns only three stars for her performance, thereby losing the competition to long-haired 80s superdweebs Skeleton Crew.*

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Long-haired 80s superdweebs Skeleton Crew

 

When the frame opens, we have only the child performance, which lays the ground for, and complicates, the opening lines: "I know when you were little girls"—this accompanied, in the video, by a comic Bambi-eyed blink—"You dreamt of being in my world/Don't forget it, don't forget it/Respect that/Bow down, bitches."

Who could be the addressee of these lines but Beyoncé herself? A Beyoncé, that is, who is not herself, one who is a (potentially plural) "you." Claudia Rankine has recently shown how mobile and activating the second person can be: here, self-estranging, Beyoncé addresses a plural "you" who has her history and who once aspired to become herself. "I know" becomes the admonishment to "you": "don't forget it/Respect that." Who are the "bitches" who should "bow down"? Whoever they are, they're being told to respect the past dreams of little girls.

When the song continues, it's to claim the right to "have it all": "I took some time to live my life/But don't think I'm just his little wife./ Don't get it twisted, get it twisted;/ This's my shit;/ Bow down bitches."

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In the video, at the word "wife," Beyoncé raises her left hand, in a gesture that is, for her, iconic; this is the hand of "Single Ladies," ostentatiously unsingle and, indeed, well populated with rings, too many to make any particular ring stand out. What is being shown here is not a wedding ring but The Hand: she may be married, but first she made what was famously called "one of the best videos of all time" (*shrug*). This is a classic "having it both ways" moment, one of many throughout the album.** And, I want to suggest, "having it both ways"—self-determining feminist artist and objectified Hot Wife, both "I" and "you" in the same sentence,—is repeatedly figured through a "flawlessness" that is not the less hermetically sealed for being explicitly and visibly constructed.

Sampling a TEDx talk in which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a celebrated Nigerian-American novelist, notes reprovingly that "because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage," Beyoncé piles on signifiers of respectable feminism mere seconds after calling no one and everyone and possibly herself "bitches." And once Adichie has done her part and pronounced a definition of feminism, the outlandish claims to flawlessness begin: oneself, one's diamond ring (four times), one's looks tonight. The slightly rushed, out-of-time "goddamn, goddamns" that end these verses, the injunctions to "tell him" and "say," the marginally too-energetic dancing in these citations of flawlessness reveal the seams while also showing how tightly and impermeably they are sutured shut.

Nothing could be more ironic, then, than the repeated avowal, "I woke up like this": we've just seen the footage of her long struggle toward becoming Beyoncé. Even being "so goddamn fine" is a constructed process rooted in the family: "My mama taught me good home training; my daddy taught me how to love my haters; my sister told me I should speak my mind; my man made me feel so goddamn fine." The video closes with the awarding of the three stars that lead to the girls' defeat on Star Search. Yet those three stars don't direct personal history toward psychologization or interiority; rather, they route it toward surface and sparkle: three stars that become the shine of being "***flawless." Thus, as Emily Lordi puts it, "If I never expected to see so much of Beyoncé’s own skin in all my life, [neither] do I experience her self-exposure as self-revelation." It's her (flawless) skin and it isn't (it's four layers of stockings). Bildung here does not lead to "Reader, I married him," although she does marry him, unrepentantly, and shows off the diamond to boot. Rather, it leads to something closer to Thea's magnificent and forbidding impersonality at the end of The Song of the Lark: consummate artist, you cannot tell what and where is her skin. You just see the shine.

 

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Beyoncé in "Ghost"

*No offense to the actual members of Skeleton Crew, who have gone on to haircuts and a better life.

**The album is sprinkled with strange intensified variations on being "barefoot in the kitchen"—inappropriate or reappropriated convergences of the kitchen and sex. In "Drunk in Love," "We woke up in the kitchen saying how the hell did this shit happen"; in the same song, Jay-Z's immortal and hilariously Seussian line "your breastesses are my breakfastes" turns sex back into feeding, even nursing. In "Jealous," Beyoncé sings, "I cooked this meal for you naked." Is that supposed to be sexy? Or just abject?

Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. Edited by Sherrill Harbison. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Cheng, Anne Anlin. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014.

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