FS30310 Beyoncé and Tay: The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Celebrity

Academic Year 2024/2025

Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are contemporary cultural icons. In this module, we examine the popular and critical reception of these superstars, interrogating how that reception reflects and shapes dominant ideas regarding women, Black people, and queer folks. We will put these two very different star texts in conversation with each other in order to think critically about how music and stardom are shaped by discourses of race, gender, power, and celebrity. Beyoncé’s 2015 VMAs performance, in which she was silhouetted in front of giant glowing letters spelling Feminism, is often used as a benchmark for re-emergent feminsms pushing back against postfeminism. Her 2016 visual album Lemonade was hailed as a powerful ode to Black feminism in a moment of hyper-visible anti-Black violence. 2022’s Renaissance pays tribute to Black and queer club music during a cultural moment in which gender and sexual nonconformity were under attack. On the flip side, the production and marketing of Taylor Swift’s albums of “big feelings”, gossip, and personal minutiae lean-in to the girlfriend and memoir culture of 21st century Whiteness, perhaps reaching an apotheosis with the Eras tour.