Race in Beyonce and Britney’s Video-Clips

Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put a ring on it) presents layered mimicry of motion. She performs white moves appropriated from black culture and splices original black moves in-between.

Race in Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

The use of sustained long shots creates a strong stage-like presence unlike the conventional music video that splices and fragments bodies by rapid editing. The stage presence emphasises the art and skill of the dancers, drawing attention to bodily control. This confuses the boundary between the controlled, rational, white body and the senseless, passionate, black body.

The wide border of empty white space that surrounds the dancers means, on one level, that the dancer’s dark angular bodies give meaning to the space. They fill it, inform it, and make it signify; like words on a page. But on another level, the framing of this stage-like space contains the dancers’ moves and skin colour safely within the realm of sterilized and westernised jazz and tap moves.

The lighting alternately emphasises the “whiteness” and “blackness” of the performers. When the choreography in Single Ladies borrows from black moves (0:53), their bodies get low to the ground and the screen blacks-out emphasising the darkness of their skin and the contours of their muscles. The screen then whites-out (1:03) as the choreography rises and returns to vertical, westernised dance moves.

Music Video Trends

Songs by white pop music celebrities, such as Madonna, Britney, and Pink, deal with issues relating to being human: misunderstandings, people not loving you enough, and so on. However, songs by African American celebrities, such as Rhianna, Beyonce, and J-Lo, exemplify white ideals, such as heterosexuality, wealth and fame. They play with, and resist, categorisation as “sub-human”.

In Beyonce’s Sweet Dreams, costuming, make-up and lighting emphasise the whiteness of her skin. In each of Rhianna’s clips she conform to a different ideal of classic Western pin-up girl beauty. However, in other clips, such as Beyonce’s Baby Boy, cosmetics and lighting emphasise the darkness of her skin, and this is combined with costuming and choreography that references tribal sexuality.

Black Sexuality Survives Cyborgian Integration

According to Weheliye, “New World black subjects have privileged access to the post-human because they were denied the status of human for so long.” In Beyonce’s clips there is a playful sense that her black ‘soul’ can withstand cyborgian integration, that it does not threaten the reproduction of whiteness, and that it safely encloses blackness within a realm of futuristic ‘otherness,’ an ‘over there’ enclosed in robotic obsolescence.

Many of Beyonce’s clips emphasise robotic, video game ideals of feminine beauty. Costumes emphasise small waists, large hips and broad shoulders, revealing the easy slippage between sub-human and super-human. In Single Ladies, the dance moves are short and sharp, reminiscent of animation or techno/porn-dollies, but also of traditional African styles of dance. Body language is open and rigid, the body is poised and the moves hit the beats with fashion-editorial boldness. The three dancers, for the most part, maintain geometric triangular shapes in the placement of the legs and their hands on their hips.

The rigidity of the post-human performance de-sexualises the black bodies. The moves are “tamed” and “whitened” through less use of the pelvis; less percussive thrusting, undulation, or rotation; opening of legs is lessened; hips and chest stay in strong vertical alignment and there is no bend in the legs (Desmond, 34). Even Beyonce’s early clips with Destiny’s Child, where the dance moves are more fluid, de-sexualise their bodies by emphasising the bright and girlish playfulness of women made “super-human” and independent by consumerism.

Constructing White Sexuality

Britney Spears and Madonna work hard to construct their sexuality. The relaxed and fluid motion of the body creates an illusion of giving way to senseless passion. The camera watches them from all angles, focusing in close-up on crotch, breasts and mouth; filming them from the side to emphasise forward and backward body rolls.

The choreography works to hide the art and skill of their own dance training, and thus to reject the expected self-mastery of the white subject. Their bodies move in continuous, fluid and circular movements, rolling their shoulders, hands, and hips. They are surrounded by ‘tribes’ of orgiastic dancers who incite raw sexuality.

Unfortunately, this liberated performance of white female sexuality is purchased at the expense of orientalising the other. These ‘tribes’ of dancers are always multicultural, featuring at least one Black and one Asian dancer. However this token representation of cultural difference really only shows their ability to appropriate the bodies and movements of other cultures; showing their own access to, and control over, minority cultures.

Summary

White and black celebrities move in particular ways that speak of their relation to racialised and gendered sexuality. Neither would get away with the kind of moves performed by the other. White performers fight to be sexualised while black performers resist sexualisation. For sexuality is already inherent and implied by the blackness of their skins, just as sexuality is automatically denied by the whiteness of the white performers.

Beyonce’s performance eliminates cultural difference just as much as Britney and Madonna. It is subsumed into her own personal style. Kumar says “self-objectification of identity [is] necessary when an individual moves into a larger structure where constructs such as race, ethnicity, and nationality are threatened” (76).

Individuals, says Desmond, come to stand in as generic racial stereotypes, not necessarily true to culture, often a hybrid formation of different cultures and styles with varying cultural meanings within their original cultures. Beyonce performs a “racial cross-dressing” where she becomes a genre unto herself: a hybrid genre of mixed and forgotten origins and meanings into which her own identity will eventually be subsumed.

References:

Desmond, Jane C.  (1997) “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” in Jane C Desmond (ed.) Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 29-54

Kumar, Anita (2006) “What’s the Matter? Shakti’s (Re)Collection of Race, Nationhood, and Gender”, TDR: The Drama Review, 50 (4), pp. 72-95

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2002) ““Feenin”: Posthuman Voices In Contemporary Black Popular Music”, Social Text 71, 20 (2), pp. 21-47