So as everyone has already stated Beyonce's "feminism" on her latest album is extremely contradictory and problematic - Mia McKenzie outlines a lot of the issues and the critiques of the album, the critiques of the critiques and also acknowledges that we can all still love Beyonce and critique the message in the work.
Anyway, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Ted Talk on feminism, which was sampled on the album, is pretty great and worth a full listen. The interesting part to me is that she talks about this notion of "bottom power." Adichie says:"Some people will say, 'Oh, but women have the real power, bottom power.' And for non-Nigerians, “bottom power” is an expression in which I suppose means something like a woman who uses her sexuality to get favors from men. But “bottom power” is not power at all. Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time, somebody else’s power." What I find interesting is that, to me, this is the issue with the feminism in Beyonce's work. Beyonce is sort of just wielding “bottom power” and not really subverting or negating male power, if you think about it all the more sexual songs are written from that point of view. I wonder if Beyonce got to that point of the lecture and what she thinks about it? Yonce e-mail us plz!
