Sanctifying the Senses: Thoughts on Beyonce

Throughout most of American history, black women were the poster children for the grotesque and pornographic in popular discourse. Perhaps this is why I understand Beyoncé, and the doctrine of corporeality and pleasure that it espouses, as a site of liberative praxis: it is rooted in the epistemology of a maligned corporeality, namely black femaleness. As evidenced by the analysis in James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation and Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, the origins of a liberative model in the histories and modalities of a particular embodiment does not foreclose upon the possibility of participation from those who do not share that embodiment. Rather, the model invites them to inhabit the sociocultural space of an alternative embodiment as a means to new understandings. In its unapologetic display of polyrhythmic movement, indulgent sensuality, and bare skin, Beyoncé challenges the raced and gendered legacies that render such displays “inappropriate,” “raunchy,” and “problematic,” even for those raced as black, and moves towards a body politic that sheds the internalized, shaming gaze of the foreign onlooker. In doing so, the album extends a pathway for others to reject the regulatory gazes that endeavor to give meaning to flesh and police modes of pleasure.