Beyoncé’s Lemonade is Smashing

With her latest visual album, Beyoncé is out to free pop culture from its patriarchy.

Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D 5 min read

May 12, 2016

I cannot lie. I have never called myself a Beyoncé fan. I’m not a member of the BeyHive. I’ve never purchased any of her music, and in the past I have declined invitations to write about Queen Bey. But after experiencing the tour de force of Beyoncé’s 60-minute visual album, I drank her Lemonade.

Gif from opening scene of Beyoncé's "Hold Up" video (2016). She emerges with a flood of water rushing through the grand set of doors leading out of marble building. She wears a canary yellow designer dress.

A prodigious feminist manifesto embodied in spoken word, music and moving images, Lemonade explores the ways we squeeze ourselves and each other into prisons of emotional, racialized and gendered oppression — and insists that it’s high time we broke the spell. No longer will the erotic sexuality of black women be threatened. And while Lemonade is nectar for female and male feminists alike, it is black women who occupy the center of Beyoncé’s feminist vision. She’s out to free ... (more)