Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender

Chapter 2: Understanding “The New Black”: Destabilizing Blackness in the New Millennium

Chapter 2 Understanding “The New Black” Destabilizing Blackness in the New Millennium Weeks before the historic election on November 4, 2008, of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States, another phenomenon took place. Here, I refer to the debut of the music video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it),” Beyoncé’s second single from her third solo album, I Am . . . Sasha Fierce. Not long after the video’s October release, numerous copycat videos emulating Beyoncé’s dance moves uploaded onto the social network site YouTube, thus beginning what could arguably be called the first Internet‑based dance craze. Significantly, Beyoncé’s video premiered on MTV’s Total Request Live, which ended its ten‑year run on television the following month. Giving way to the new demands of digital culture, MTV’s youth‑influenced show was ironically “killed by YouTube” in a similar way that MTV once bragged thirty years ago of “video [killing] the radio star.”1 That Beyoncé’s video found “second life” in cyberspace demonstrates her savvy sense of cultural relevance, as well as Big Media’s efforts in marketing pop stars through crossover multimedia platforms. As part of the origin narrative of the “Single Ladies” video, Beyoncé admitted on the show, 106 and Park, BET’s equivalent to MTV’s TRL, that YouTube provided the inspiration for her immensely successful music video. YouTube, a global social network of digital video file sharing on the Internet, begun in 2005, offers a vast repository of amateur videos, archives of film and television programming, popular music videos, and original short features and documentaries. In the vein of communal sharing and participation, YouTube 43 44 Body as Evidence also allows Internet users to engage in video remixes, audio “swaps,” video responses and comments, and inserted annotations. It is this same YouTube that contributed to Barack Obama’s iconic status among the “wired generation” during his 2008 presidential run, from Amber Lee Ettinger’s satirical, R&B‑inspired “I’ve Got a Crush . . . on Obama,” to the viral video2 mash‑up of Obama’s “Yes, We Can” campaign speech offered by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. This democratized and participatory “free speech” haven, which allows for any and every kind of video sharing—political and otherwise—serves the purpose of highlighting the inclusivity of “You,” whoever that universally imagined average Internet user might be. However, it was not long before Big Media began to encroach on this site. It is worth noting that the “Single Ladies” video became a phenomenon at a time when Google began to enforce copyright laws on YouTube after partnering with big business, which attached advertisements on various uploaded videos and throughout the Web site. The viral video sensation that inspired the choreography in Beyoncé’s video includes a remix of the rap group Unk’s “Walk It Out” with video footage of Gwen Verdon’s 1969 “Mexican Breakfast” dance, choreographed by Bob Fosse, on the Ed Sullivan Show. Because the original Verdon video was pulled from YouTube, due to copyright infringement, the viral remix that took its place swapped the original music featured on the show with Unk’s song and, thus, combined Fosse’s sixties choreography with millennial hip‑hop in a way that opened up creative possibilities for vernacular dance and musical reappropriations, which Beyoncé exploited spectacularly. Emulating the Fosse choreography, a leotard‑wearing Beyoncé and her backup dancers Ebony Williams and Ashley Everett reframed the moves through Ebonics‑style and queer‑influenced signifying of black femininity: from neck rolls to “talk‑to‑the‑hand” gestures to signature video‑vixen‑style gyrations of Beyoncé’s “bootylicious” body. Set against a white backdrop, the three black female bodies on display in this stark black‑and‑white video more than highlight black female sensibilities appropriated by black gay choreographer JaQuel Knight, who borrows from the J‑Setting dance, a then‑popular dance among Atlanta’s black gay club dwellers, which signifies on the choreography of the Prancing J‑Settes, an all‑black female dance troupe from Jackson State University in Mississippi. As a result, the video presents the black female body reappropriating black femininity even as it engages in queer subtext. Far from muting creative potential, Big Media redefined its parameters. The wider context for “Single Ladies” are the dilemmas of the contemporary “single black female” in the United States, who is the least 45 Understanding “The New...