“BITCH I’M BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND” Gender Identity and Different Feminist Discourses in Beyoncé’s Music

We live in a time when human rights are still not given and minorities, namely anyone who does not belong to the white Western cigendered male universe. Feminism has played a fundamental role in changing regime of patriarchy and achieve equality between humans in all the levels. Throughout the years, feminism has been influencing people according to different societal needs and the changing times. That led to the emergence of several different waves and types of feminism, such as postfeminism, black feminism and popular feminism. Especially, media have played a critical role in the emergence of all those kinds of feminism since they constituted the source of the need of feminism since they function as a lifestyle resource with anything follows, such as the representation of femininity and the female body in different media texts. In this research I am presenting different notions of feminism and how those evolved throughout the time. Following that I am focusing on how femininity is represented in the popular music industry aiming to understand how different feminist discourses and the female body is portrayed in Beyoncé’s music. Beyonce is amongst the most influential personalities worldwide and has been for years a huge supporter of feminism dealing with issues of gender and societal construction of femininity and black womanhood. She along with her husband, Jay-Z, have built a colossus in the global music industry, hence they are always on the spotlight of not only the fans but also the critics. Scholars and theorists of feminism, amongst them the radical feminist bell hooks, have been targeting Beyonce for years with the accusation that she cannot be a representative of feminism because of being hypersexualized, objectifying the female body, idealizing the institution of family and barely having knowledge of black femininity. And all those accusations are built on the base that She is trying to build a feminist persona through capitalist practices. In this research I am analyzing ten music videos of Beyonce’s discography from 2010 to 2016 in order to understand how different feminist discourses are represented in her work through the method of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis through the eyes of Cultural Studies in my attempt to reach to the conclusion of whether and how she manages to promote a balanced kind of femininity and create her own, in a sense, feminism