Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is one of the twenty-first century's greatest performers. She is a nexus of cultural productivity and wealth, as a singer, dancer, actress, audiovisual impresario, and business mogul. She is also, increasingly, a nexus of scholarly productivity; scholarship on Beyoncé unites conference panels, journal special issues, and edited collections. The proliferation of Beyoncé-focused scholarship can be attributed to a multiplicity of intersecting factors, which parallel the multifaceted nature of the artist herself as a brand and “star text” and as a commodity and cultural figure.Footnote 1 First, she is deeply enmeshed in—and highly successful at—digital cultural production. Additionally, her celebrity trajectory has risen alongside the increasing prestige and proliferation of popular music and popular culture scholarship. The Beyoncé star text is also rich for multivalent analyses: Of racial and gender politics, relationships between pop stardom and feminism, how dramatizations of domesticity and motherhood might fit within a broader frame of respectability politics, relations between Blackness and capitalism, and the possibility (or necessity) of activist political articulations through celebrity action or pop performance.
Beyoncé scholarship flourishes, in part, because of the many ways in which the superstar, as a consummate neoliberal late-capitalist icon, operates and signifies in the world. Recent collections of scholarly work include the 2016 The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism, a 2019 special issue of Popular Music and Society, and the 2021 Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times.Footnote 2 This scholarship compiles analyses of various aspects of Beyoncé's output, examining the artist's performance of Black womanhood, motherhood, feminism, sexuality, and Southernness through her lyrics, performances, and audiovisual texts. In addition to these broad collections, works like The Lemonade Syllabus (compiled by theologian and essayist Candice Marie Bembow) fractal out from single texts. In particular, the Lemonade Syllabus situates the 2016 album as central to an intertextual multimedia network of Black feminist diasporic conversation.Footnote 3
Beyoncé: At Work, on Screen, and Online, a 2020 volume edited by Martin Iddon and Melanie Marshall, provides a valuable addition to this diverse and growing field. In this edited collection, the focus is around Beyoncé's work—specifically, her labor—and how it manifests across various forms of media and mediation. The book is organized into three sections that follow its title exactly: Work, screen, and online. These sections offer an intuitive flow, first establishing the framing concept of the artist's labor in her musical performance and production, and then considering her audiovisual performance in film and video, before culminating in a set of chapters that address the circulation of Beyoncé texts online, particularly via YouTube.
In the first section, an introduction by editors Martin Iddon and Melanie L. Marshall sets the stage with the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show. Beyoncé may not have been the show's headliner, but her “Formation” performance generated outsized press and popular discourse. By beginning with this event, the editors foreground the reception of Beyoncé's work at its most provocative and explicitly political. Emily Lordi's ensuing chapter prompts a focus on the concept of work, specifically the way that Beyoncé thematizes and performs her own labor. After considering the artist's early career within a framework of post-soul respectability politics, Lordi argues that she has revised or moved beyond a performance of virtuosic hustle across her 2013 Beyoncé and 2016 Lemonade albums. Crucially, Lordi notes that “it is only because she ‘runs the world’ that she can do this: It is her very success that allows her to disavow the hard work that has (partly) enabled it” (32).
After Lordi's chapter, Will Fulton's and Lisa Colton's contributions function productively as more focused investigations. In “‘A Scientist of Songs’: Beyoncé, the Recording Studio, and Popular Music Authorship,” Fulton examines Beyoncé's collaborative songwriting and production processes, and in “‘Singing All the Time’: Constructions of Cultural Identity in Beyoncé's I Am…Sasha Fierce,” Colton provides an analysis and taxonomy of the singer's melodic styles and modes of vocal delivery. These two chapters explore the theme of labor in ways that will be valuable to readers looking for musicological analysis, as well as scholars seeking fresh models for the analysis of contemporary popular music.
One of the most unique contributions of this volume is that the authors give space to analyzing Beyoncé's screen performances, examining her roles as an actress alongside her personae and appearances in documentaries and music videos, and other aspects of her mediated star text. Julia Cox's Chapter 4 provides an effective bridge from the opening section, examining Beyoncé's 2010s performances of feminism through multimedia production. As an artist, she negotiates a personal brand that balances pop star success with assertions of artistry and authenticity. Jaap Kooijman's chapter “‘At Last a Dream That I Can Call My Own’: Beyoncé and the Performance of Stardom in Dreamgirls and Cadillac Records” shows how she reinforces this complicated work via her film portrayals of artistic predecessors, such as Deena Jones/Diana Ross in Dreamgirls (2006) and Etta James in Cadillac Records (2008). Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's Chapter 6, one of the strongest in the collection, offers an intimate and intertextual “Black queer femme-inist reading” of “Sorry” from the Lemonade film (2016), weaving together various theoretical interlocutors with pithy decodings and interpretations of the video's web of audiovisual signifiers. The chapter also functions as an intertextual link to Tinsley's own collection of essays Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism.Footnote 4 Chapter 7, by Eduardo Viñuela, concludes the “On Screen” section, providing an analysis of the artist's use of exoticism across her oeuvre, connecting her reimagined performance of Georges Bizet's iconic operatic protagonist, Carmen, in MTV's Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001) to Beyoncé's participation in and incorporation of Latin crossover strategies throughout her musical career. Although his analysis is valuable, Viñuela frames this chapter with the use of a term long-used as a slur for the Romani people without providing any explanation or context for its usage.
Much of Beyoncé's success is attributed to how well-suited her output is to circulation and remix across digital platforms like YouTube, making the book's final section both expected and especially welcome. Mary Fogarty's chapter, “Unlikely Resemblances: Beyoncé, ‘Single Ladies,’ and Comparative Judgement of Popular Dance,” continues to investigate threads of authenticity, creativity, and authorship seeded elsewhere in the volume, showing how these concepts are assessed by fans who evaluate and reproduce Beyoncé's choreography in online videos. Additionally, Fogarty shows how choreographic recreation is received differently depending on perceived professional status and performer power: Beyoncé's performance of pre-existing choreography is interpreted as a potential compromise of her creativity, whereas non-celebrities who recreate the “Single Ladies” (2008) choreography across YouTube are praised for approximating her moves as closely as possible.
Reception also factors into the chapters by Áine Mangaoang and Melissa Avdeeff in this section. In Chapter 8, Mangaoang offers an enlightening entry into the genre of signed songs, examining the negotiations of performance expectations, audience, and appropriation that unfold between d/Deaf and hearing performers and viewers as they engage with Beyoncé's catalog. In Chapter 9, Avdeeff investigates both the aesthetics of the “7/11” video (2014) and that video's online reception, productively showing how the artist incorporates an amateur digital aesthetic back into her own professional output—a technology-enabled blurring of boundaries between the amateur and the professional that only increased across the 2010s. Both Mangaoang and Avdeeff use media studies scholarship in their work, offering useful models and citations for scholars interested in effectively analyzing digital content, its circulation, and its reception. Additionally, this last set of chapters suggests how studying varied digital fan perspectives—d/Deaf fans, dancing fans, performatively listening fans—enrich the critical conversations around Beyoncé. One factor that the contributors could have brought more explicitly to the foreground is how fans’ labor is crucial to this digital proliferation, and how that labor is afforded and encouraged by both Beyoncé herself and the digital platforms on which this network of material circulates.
Overall, the strengths of this collection include its multimodal analyses and the interdisciplinary perspectives of its authors. Many of the contributions focus on under-studied aspects of Beyoncé's output, from musical analysis of her vocal delivery to her roles in films and documentaries, effectively encompassing aspects of her audiovisuality that reach beyond her music videos. This collection will be valuable to scholars in a variety of disciplines: Musicology, cultural studies, fandom, and celebrity studies. It is worth noting that although an intrepid fan might find insights in this volume, its arguments and style render it most applicable to graduate students and other researchers.
One critique that might be applied, not only to this volume, but also to the burgeoning field of Beyoncé studies more broadly, is the over-focusing on her output in the 2010s. The impetus to center rich texts like Lemonade renders Beyoncé and her work legible and defensible as a site for academic study due to the way such texts can be unfurled using pre-existing analytical toolkits and rubrics of authorship, creativity, and value. However in a collection that focuses on the concept of work, it would have been useful to see pieces focusing on the Destiny's Child era, or her earliest albums. The spectacle of the child performer and the formulaic practices of the 1990s studio system might be less readily analyzable as musical art, but these formations nonetheless predicate Beyoncé's creative output of the 2010s, and studying them might also open up linkages with analogous industry case studies, like the K-pop idol system.
The saying “you have the same number of hours in a day as Beyoncé” circulated in the 2010s, as a meme that manifested the capitalist grind culture's cocktail of inspiration and self-shaming. Somewhat less frequently, the phrase was countered by acknowledgement of an important reality: Even though it is undeniable that Beyoncé works hard, her work is enabled and augmented by teams of other workers, as well as her own considerable resources of economic and social capital. This volume is perhaps the scholarly embodiment of both the meme and its rebuttal; although the authors inevitably center their analyses around the star as central object and site of creative authority, they also gesture to some of the vast networks of agents and intermediaries that make her Beyoncé. The contributions in this volume offer a multi-faceted engagement with a figure who works—and whose creative works continue to catalyze fervent critical discussion, “bootylicious” bodily synchronization, and all manner of formations in between.
Dr. Paula Clare Harper studies music, sound, and the internet. She is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship has been published in the journals Popular Music and Society, Sound Studies, and The Soundtrack, as well as in the Summer 2020 special issue of American Music, for which she was a co-editor.
