Brief Analysis of "freedom"

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Beyoncé has yet again captivated her audience with the release of her visual album, Lemonade. The album includes a song, “Freedom”, from which I would like to analyze both visual images and lyrics. The complete analysis of Lemonade would require 50 or more pages, so for the brevity of this analysis I will dissect three pieces from “Freedom”. “Freedom” challenges two cultural norms while still reinforcing one very evident social construction. It is important to understand Beyoncé is a cisgender, heterosexual, famous, wealthy African American female when analyzing the effects of her work.  

In the video for “Freedom”, Beyoncé is singing A Capella in a talent show. She is performing for an all black, all female audience. Beyoncé is wearing a dress that is not revealing and her audience is well dressed too. This scene compliments a quote from the Oppositional Gaze reading. “With the possible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is ‘white’ (Hooks 118).

To paraphrase this quote: historically in movies, women, and only white women, served the purpose of pleasing the male viewer, or the male gaze. Black females were not present in film. Therefore, black female viewers could not relate with actors in film. Nonexistent black female actors caused black female spectators to either not relate or relate by emulating the whiteness shown in the movies. That is, black females would aspire to be white by altering their bodies. This sends the message that black females are not valued and are below white females in society.

The scene from Beyoncé is a counter attack to the male gaze and nonexistent black females in film. All spectators are female and Beyoncé is not in revealing clothing, which tell us that the “A Cappella show” is not for the male gaze. It also shows that black females can be the center of attention in a show. By defying this construct which has historically appeared in film, Beyoncé sends this message to black female viewers: black females can be valuable for their talents and not just for their sexuality. Black females can also be the “main character” or subject.

This message in the “Freedom” scene, while great for black female empowerment, is not great at battling current female beauty standards. “Girls of all ages get the message that they must be flawlessly beautiful and above all these days, thin” (Kilbourne 260). In context, this quote explains that the media teaches women to seek beauty through light skin, lighter or “white person” hair, and thinness in order to be valuable. Consequently, if women do not meet these “standards”, they are not valued. In the scene from “Freedom”, Beyoncé is the center of attention. By the aforementioned conventional beauty standards, Beyoncé is also flawlessly beautiful. She has light, straight (almost blonde) hair in the scene. Black females in the audience wear hairstyles typical of their race, unlike Beyoncé.  Beyoncé has light skin, while the females in the audience have darker shades of skin. Almost all women in the video are thin, especially the stars of the show. Beyoncé is thin and the ballerina who performs after her is very thin. When the star of the film is conventionally beautiful and thin while her audience exhibits lesser qualities of conventional beauty, it teaches viewers to aspire to be her “type” of beautiful if they want to be valued.

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