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 [End Page 106] 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...