The author of Moving Beyond Pain made some great points about choosing peace over violence, and the presence of black women’s celebration of unity in Beyonce’s Lemonade. A lot of what the author talked about intrigued me, especially their interpretation of Lemonade and how their’s was different from even Beyonce’s interpretation of her own work.
I find it very interesting that the author feels that there is an ever-present “dehumanization of the black female body” going on today, and that the author took away from Lemonade that it wanted to address and challenge that specific issue. Perhaps there is a big issue there, and maybe the author is right about Beyonce targeting it, but personally, I haven’t seen or heard much about it in the present day in regard to the broad variety of social issues. However, if the author had actually meant the dehumanization and objectification of women’s bodies in general as opposed to strictly the dehumanization of the bodies black women, I would have agreed with their point more extensively. I do agree with the author, however, that black women are discriminated on significantly, just in different ways.
The author also views the violence in Lemonade as contradictory to their interpretation of the album’s central message. But even though the music video contains physical violence on cars and such, it’s also possible Beyonce didn’t actually mean women should go out and beat up cars, or perform violence of similar means. Perhaps the author was thinking too literally about the violence in the video, and the violence was actually just a representation of the toughness, even if that aspect might be cliche, simplified, or even an uninspired representation of it.
