Introduction: Who is Beyoncé?

Who is Beyoncé?

She is a self-proclaimed feminist who rose to fame in revealing outfits. She is a straight woman who samples the voices and adopts the aesthetics of queer artists. She leads dancers in attire reminiscent of the Black Panthers while running a marketing juggernaut that has transformed her name into a global brand at the cutting edge of technological self-promotion. She sings "I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils," but frequently dons blonde wigs and straight hair. She has stopped giving interviews yet appears to reveal her most intimate pain in the critically acclaimed 2016 visual and musical album Lemonade.

Beyoncé is the most popular living artist and performer, yet it is impossible to distinguish what is real from what is performance. Was Lemonade an elaborate play for wounded authenticity, a necessary image recalibration for a pop star who has long cultivated a flawless media persona of relentless perfectionism? Is her more pointed embrace of black cultural forms politically expedient in the age of Black Lives Matter or a reflection of the contemporary blueswoman she has always been? While I realize these questions establish false dichotomies for an artist whose career charts a remarkable evolution from Star Search contestant to global innovator, they point to the multiple paradoxes at play in Beyoncé's status as one of the most significant cultural and media icons of our time. Who is Beyoncé? A dizzying series of contradictions.

The essays gathered in this Close-Up explore how her influence has developed and expanded across a wide range of platforms, from the technological to the discursive to the entrepreneurial, as well as what meaning we may glean from her often paradoxical performances. What emerges is a supremely talented and complex figure who has merged popular desire with her own life story. She has ceased to reflect the singular experience of the woman born Beyoncé Knowles in Houston, Texas, in 1981. Her pregnancy transforms her into a fertility goddess; her heartbreak in Lemonade becomes the pain of a black woman collective; her videos and lyrics produce memes and slogans that become personal anthems. Lemonade even spawned a massive syllabus of literature, academic studies, and visual art compiled by black women eager to trace their own journeys in the works of others. Beyoncé is at once representative of every woman and transcendent of any binding narrative.

This malleability reflects the history of a performer who began her career in the late-nineties girl group Destiny's Child. Following a long line of crossover R&B artists, Beyoncé and fellow members Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams cultivated a racially mixed audience with its largely anodyne lyrics and mainstream performances. However, since her solo career began in 2003, Beyoncé has moved far beyond the familiar boundaries of Destiny's Child to reinvent herself again and again through record setting albums, transformative songs and videos, and visionary marketing strategies. Her songs are not just global hits. They are rife with slogans that simultaneously direct and reflect contemporary culture: "All the single ladies," "I woke up like this," "Okay, ladies, now let's get in formation." Though often more aspirational than real ("Who run the world? Girls!"), the assumption of political power and sexual pleasure vested in black women profoundly changes the terms by which we understand gender and race in the twenty-first century.

Only the thrill surrounding Barack Obama in the heady days of his 2008 campaign can compare to the sheer passion and adoration Beyoncé ignites. However, as Salamishah Tillet reminds us in her interview with Tiffany Barber, the comparison between Obama and Beyoncé is inexact. While both project a preternatural but wildly charismatic calm, he was "the embodiment of the state apparatus" and thus beholden to a structure that Beyoncé escapes. Nonetheless, both have profoundly transformed images of blackness by occupying and, especially in the case of Beyoncé, cultivating an air of astounding exceptionality. Their success threatens to remystify blackness by showcasing extraordinary talent and vision. Yet here again we must confront the paradox that is Beyoncé. Though the American media landscape is accustomed to the deification of a single...