Web Event Final Paper: Journey through Mantrafesto

I do not want to critique whether or not Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is a feminist or not.  As we have discussed in class “Feminism/Feminist” is a self-identifying term that too subjective due to the varied lived experiences and temporalities, in which women are stratified.  I wanted to write this paper given the exponential emergence of dialogues and opinions ((un-) expressed) within multiple spheres of feminist discourse, specifically between white feminists and black feminists, as well as intraracial dialogues within the black feminist community.  When I began to do my research I knew that I wanted to focus on the song “***Flawless”, IT IS MY FAVORITE SONG/VIDEO, but I also wanted to explore Beyoncé’s using Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDxEuston talk: “We Should All Be Feminists” on the track.  My favorite part about the song is the juxtaposition of the three different narratives: child/adolescent Beyoncé~ feminist mantra-festo~ Queen B, and her use of “criping time” by way of her somewhat cyclical, fragmented, segregated way of story telling: “I Woke Up Like This… Flawless”. 

By the time I had watched Adichie’s Tedx talk I had already memorized to her words on the ***Flawless track, once watching the reading I found it really interesting that Beyoncé had taken essentially all of those lines out of Ngozi’s specific context, in order to express hers.  This act of silence through one’s own language to enter discourse was reminiscent of our class discussions on silence and power within feminism.  I was also reminded of our use of mantrafesto’s.  I believe that Chimamanda Ngozi’s Adichie fragmented poem emulated our class’s use of mantrafesto—in order to possibly engage different lived experiences, temporalities, ideas, and voice through language and accessibility.  

As I have been adamant and practice active speech and utilization of my voice in our classroom, I wanted to practice silence for this mantrafesto.  As we had not come up with a universal definition of feminism, but instead received a plethora of different voices, ideas, images, etc that have guided, shaped, evolved our ideas and understanding of feminist discourse.  It is interesting how I decided to take this class in order to learn the “feminist” canon, but have left with an entirely different understanding of power, institutions and the ways in which different layers of identity can impact one’s journey. 

For my MANTRAFESTO, inspired by BEY & CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, I decided to take after their lead and create my own mantrafesto of the different voices that have impacted my understanding of feminism.  I also wanted the reader to experience “queer” time, in order to decentralize the reader into the realm of intersectional feminism, specifically black feminism.  I wanted to create a forum of voices, while still expressing my opinion—leaving all narrative in the original language and voice of the speaker, but shaping it to speak for me.  The pieces/voice’s are varied.  I have decided to allow you to view the speaker’s within my works cited section because this speech is of my own voice at this moment. 

Power and agency through various forms of emancipation and resistance is  what intersectional feminism and unbound feminism revolutions will look like.  I chose Beyoncé’s album because to me it represents the freedom of narrative and fixed roles—she choose to create a feminist mantrafesto on her own terms.  I think I am finally ready to call myself a feminist—a black feminist—because I realize now that I can speak in my own voice, in my own time, in which medium I choose: silence or speaking. 

 

 

Mantrafesto:

“…A central problem within feminist discourse has been our inability to either arrive at a consensus of opinion about what feminism is or accept definition(s) that could serve as point of unification.  Without agreed upon definition(s), we lack a sound foundation on which to construct theory or engage in overall meaningful praxis” (hooks, 238)…

“…Definitions are usually liberal in origin and focus on the individualistic women’s right to freedom and self-determination” (239)…

“… legally codifying a fragment of an insurrectionary discourse as a timeless truth, interpellating women as unified in their victimization, and casting the “free speech” of men as that which “silences” and thus subordinating women” (Brown, 91)…

“…It has also required an allegiance to essentialist narratives and ideologies that were imposed by privileged white women to represent ALL women.  Given that first and second waves of feminism were structured to predominately benefit white, (upper) middle class women, feminism “bound” has historically and ideologically marginalized and disenfranchised intersectional identities” (Wilkinson, 1)…

“…Culture is about preservation and continuity of people” (Adichie, 27:32)…

“As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist” (Lourde, 113)

“…the idea of feminism in a white liberal feminism—is actually opposed to what black feminism is and the boundaries that black feminism has stretched” (HPL:RC 4:43)…

“…Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power” (Lourde, 111)…

 “…Each time I try to read those books called the “feminist classics”, I get bored and I really struggle to finish them”  (Adichie, 3:24)…

 “…I’m trying to unlearn the many lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up, but I sometimes still very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations” (Adichie, 22:00)…

 “…It is one thing to know intellectually but quite another to feel it emotionally, each time they ignore me I feel invisible—I feel upset.” (Adichie, 09:51)…

 “…It seems to me that there is sometimes a kind of shame around including a Beyoncé type figure under the canopy of feminism because of a politics of respectability that says: that it shouldn’t look this way.  That pleasure and desire and sexuality don’t fit under this political praxical” (HPL: MLH, 20:10)…

“…Constructing her as anti-feminist… because as feminist we still have not done the work” (HPL: JM, 19:54)…

“… I haven’t heard a pop record that has had that level of explicit overt critical analysis in a very long time—if ever.  That seems to be the pretty compelling argument that Beyoncé is embracing something bigger… And again not just thinking about Beyoncé but something more broadly about what we want a feminist voice to sound like” (HPL: MLH: 17:05)… 

 

 “…Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists” (Lourde, 113)…

“…I don’t feel like I’m at any war with my any of my sisters here.  Even though we may disagree on some or this one issue” (HPL: RC, 3:12)…

“…It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.  For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” (Lourde, 112)…

 “…How do we exactly decide what feminism and particularly black feminism… what it even means” (HPL: MLH, 00:10)?

“…I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else” (5:24)...

“…See I think the issue here becomes—and this might be controversial to say but I’m fine with that—white women really have no role in this discussion for us.  That’s my belief” (HPL: RC, 3:58)…

 “…Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference” (Lourde, 113)…

 “…In the age of freedom, equality, and new beginnings, revolution emerges as the term for a continuous and inexorable push for the realization of these values against the old regimes that denied them both legitimacy and actuality” (Brown, 102)…

“…By repudiating the popular notion that the focus of feminist movement should be social equality of the sexes and emphasizing eradicating the cultural basis of group oppression, our own analysis would require an exploration of all aspects of women’s political reality” (hooks, 239/240)…

“…They know that many males in their social groups are exploited and oppressed.  Knowing that the men in their groups do not have social, political, and economic power, they would not deem it liberatory to share their social status” (hooks, 238)…

“…Race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism” (hooks, 340)…

“Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged” (Lourde, 112)…

“…My great-grandmother did not know that word feminists but that does not mean that she wasn’t one” (Adichie, 29:14)…

“…Feminism is so personalized… even the concept of black feminism is an individual journey and an individual enterprise” (HPL: RT, 10:25)…

“…Actually she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending” (Adichie 19:17)...

 

 “…The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are.” (Adichie, 19:12)…

 “…Girls grow up to be women who cannot see that they have desire.   They grow up to be women who silence themselves.  They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think.  They have grow up—and this is the worst thing we do to girls—they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form” (Adichie 18:19)…

 “…That is to say, it is not that my identity is not recognized, but instead there is a false sense of understanding imposed—which attempts to compare and contrast women of color narratives to Western ideology, instead of simply listening” (Wilkinson, 2)…

“…We have not forced black feminist/feminism to take on a pleasure politic.  We have not forced Black feminism to take on language of the erotic.” (HPL: JM, 19:17)...

“…Hyper-sexualized and objectified are just terms that get thrown out without literal meaning behind them.  That we have to haven’t discussed what hyper-sexual actually means” (HPL: TL, 22:50)…

“…Thus we have lost the capacity to imagine ourselves in power, self-consigned instead to the rancorous margins in which we are at best a permanent heckle to power” (Brown, 105)…

“…We [Black women] have limited entry points in the mainstream media to talk about feminism.  I mean Beyoncé is often giving us that entry point… but that within itself is a problem.  The issue is not whether or not Beyoncé herself is a feminist, it’s the fact that we latch on to these limited examples of feminism in the public sphere because outside of these entices all we really have is the academy” (HPL: RT, 27:30)…

“…Feminist revolution—which was never merely about sexual equality but, rather, carried the promise of remaking gender and sexuality that itself entailed a radical reconfiguration of kinship, sexuality, desire, psyche, and the relation of private to public—went awry somewhat differently” (Brown, 105)…

“…If you do not have a pleasure politic in your feminism—if your feminism does not embrace the erotic, or theorization about how other black women can become truly liberated through the erotic—and that is Audre Lourde feminism—then Beyoncé in many ways is illegible.  You have no language for her other than fear for what she might do.  You have no language for her “hyper-sexuality” (HPL: JM, 19:29)...

“…Our pleasure place that we are trying to find a way around, in a society in which as black women we carry historical baggage--who’ve been marked as lascivious and hyper-sexual and have been exploited—and have been the victims of extreme sexual violence” (HPL: TL, 21:49)…

 “…Now to say a particular individual is replicating that [hyper-sexual] for unabashedly celebrating her [Beyoncé] body by saying “I’m flawless” or “I Woke Up Like This” is problematic for me because it really denies agency” (HPL: TL, 23:09)…

“…But we also move with the historical luggage of a pleasure throughout our history… there’s a pleasure we derive from showing our bodies from exhibiting that—from pleasing and from being pleased.” (HPL: TL, 21:56)…

“…Actually she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending” (Adichie 19:17)...

 “Foucault insists, freedom is a practice (rather than an achievement, condition, or institution), the possibility of practicing freedom in the context of regulatory discourses occurs in the interstices of a given discourse as well as in resistance to the discourse” (Brown, 88)

“…Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression.  Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women.  It does not privilege women over men.  It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all our lives” (hooks, 340)…

“…So if it is true that the full humanity of women is not included in our culture then we must make it our culture” (Adichie, 28:15)…

“…Culture is about preservation and continuity of people” (Adichie, 27:32)…

“…Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative” (Lourde, 111)…

 

 

“…It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (Lourde, 112)…

 “…[Expressive and Repressive] both equate freedom with voice and visibility, both assume recognition to be unproblematic when we tell our own story, and both assume that such recognition is the material of power as well as pleasure.  Neither confronts the regulatory potential in speaking ourselves, its capacity to bind rather than emancipate us” (Brown 86)…

“… Why are we not allowing for a space to think about both of those tensions to exist simultaneously—of the pleasure, the visceral pleasure that I think made so many people react as it’s this or it’s not this” (HPL: TL, 21:14)…

 “…I think it’s very interesting, you have this black woman whose always reppin ‘Houston Texas baby’.  I mean she’s always reppin her roots and her family—and really showing culturally that she is very different than a lot of mainstream artists” (HPL: KS, 14:33)…

 “…She is in fact an Audre Lourde feminist, in the sense that when Lourde spoke she always made sure to identify herself with different identities” (HPL: KS, 14:57)…

 “…Actually she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending” (Adichie 19:17)…

 “…In other words, even as feminism aims to affirm diversity among women and women’s experiences, confession as the site of production of truth, converging with feminist suspicion and de-authorization of truth from other sources, tends to reinstate a unified discourse in which the story of the greatest suffering becomes the true story of women” (Brown, 92)…

 “…Freedom requires the capacity for a kind of public speaking that neither demands concurrence from others nor entails the establishment of new norms by which to live; rather this kind of speech willingly proffers ideas one would argue with and modify according to other characterologically public (as opposed to confessional) arguments” (Brown, 96)...

 

“…In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action” (Lourde, 113)...

“…Feminism defined in political terms that stress collective as well as individual experience challenges women to enter a new domain” (hooks, 239)…

 “…Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices” (Lourde, 114)…

“…Freedom is not merely paradoxical in its workings but self-canceling, and, finally, unachievable.  Hence Foucault’s warning that freedom lies neither in institutions not in ideals and proclamations, but only in practices” (Brown 83)…

“…Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival” (Lourde, 114)…

“…This is somewhat difficult to articulate, if feminism were to become unbound, white feminists (feminists in general) must move beyond just sex and gender, seeking refugee within the boundless existence of intersectionality.   However this is not be romanticized because it is a harsh reality.  For myself, it is a constant daily battle to be recognized as one’s unencumbered self in the face of an oppressive system that is often times resistant to give legitimacy and validation of marginalized narratives” (Wilkinson, 3)...

“...Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged” (Lourde, 112)…

“…Socialization exaggerates the differences” (Adichie, 19:38)…

“…In our class we have debated where power lies: in silence, narrative, or conversation—although I am still searching for that answer, I believe that power is inherent to the individual IF there is agency” (Wilkinson, 2)

“… Most of this speech confesses, pronounces, or declares, and practically none of it is aimed at developing community with others or with working through experience or transforming understanding” (Brown, 96)…

 “…What are safe erotic spaces for Black women to perform—to embrace, to embody” (HPL: JM, 19:22)…

“…The idea that you can use hip hop to engage and draw people into a conversation about feminism looked at was completely ludicrous and anti-feminist by many in feminist quarters” (HPL: JM, 09:10)…

“…Understanding feminism as a place of possibility” (HPL: TL, 20:45)…

“…The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political” (Lourde, 110).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

1)         Adichie, Chimamanda N. "We Should All Be Feminists: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie TEDxEuston." Reading. TEDxEuston. London, Euston. Apr. 2013. Tedxtalks.ted.com. TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design. 29 Apr. 2013. Web. 29 Dec. 2013. http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/We-should-all-be-feminists-Chim

 

2)         Brown, Wendy. "Chapter 5: Freedom's Silences." Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton University Press, 2005. 83-97.

 

 

3)        Brown, Wendy. Chapter 6: "Feminism Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics." Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton University Press, 2005. 98-115.

 

4)         Hill, Marc L., PhD, moderator/prod. "HuffPost Live: Album Sparks Black Feminist Debate." HuffPost Live. Huffington Post. New York City, New York, 17 Dec. 2013. HuffPost Live. Verizon, 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 29 Dec. 2013. http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/beyonces-black-backlash/52a9f01f78c90a6902000292

            Panelists:

(JM)Joan Morgan @milfinainteasy (New York, NY) Journalist, Author and Cultural Critic

(KS) Kaila Story @doctressstory (Louisville , KY) Associate Professor at the University of Louisville

(IU) Imani Uzuri @gypsygirlbliss (New York, NY) Vocalist, Composer & Cultural Worker

(RT) Rahiel Tesfamariam @RahielT (New York, NY) Columnist at the Washington Post; Founder of UrbanCusp.com

(RC)  Rosa Clemente @rosaclemente (Amherst, MA) Activist & Journalist; 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate

(TL) @divafeminist (Columbus, OH) Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University.

 

5)        Hooks, Bell. "Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression." Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center. Vol. 5. Boston: South End, 2001. N. pag. Classic.Www.mcc.osu.edu. Ohio State University. Web. 29 Dec. 2013

 

6)         Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984.  Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007. Print.

 

7)        Wilkinson, Kelly (2013). Web Event 2:  My Feminism Was Never Bound. Unpublished manuscript.