"I Love to Love You Baby": Beyoncé, Disco Aesthetics, and Black Feminist Politics

This article reads the sonic and visual references of early solo career Beyoncé against the grain of a progress narrative of black feminist aesthetic and political development. Merging the work of contemporary scholars of black feminist visual culture and theories of black surface, it argues that disco and its legacies of black women's performative surfaces are a way to theorize black feminist politics away from the visual and sonic protocols of black cultural nationalism that still dominate understandings of black politics. Black feminist disco aesthetics instead imagine a politics rooted in the fantastic registers of black women's disco embodiment.