Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights Janelle Monáe’S Vision of Black Queer Futurity

The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research

ISSN: 0006-4246 (Print) 2162-5387 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtbs20

Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights Janelle Monáe’s Vision of Black Queer Futurity

Aleksandra Szaniawska

To cite this article: Aleksandra Szaniawska (2019) Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights, The Black Scholar, 49:4, 35-50, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2019.1655371 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1655371

Published online: 07 Oct 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtbs20 Gestural Refusals, Embodied re-awakens from the shackles of stillness and Flights conformity, alienation and despair, ready to begin a revolution in her Afrofuturist city of Janelle Monáe’s Vision of Black Queer Metropolis. Futurity This essay attends to Janelle Monáe’s queer performance by foregrounding the role her ALEKSANDRA SZANIAWSKA body plays in enacting a vision of Black queer futurity. Instead of focusing on sound and the verbal forms of communication n October 18, 2013—or rather 2719, as present in her lyrics, I ask what kind of gestural O the poster advertising Janelle Monáe’s vocabulary of Afrofuturism we can arrive at if performance reveals—the legendary Apollo we pay close attention to her body in motion. Theater in New York City’s Harlem became Existing scholarship on Monáe largely exam- an Afrofuturist meeting ground of desire, ines her projects through the lens of her queerness, and the future. Enter Janelle music, lyrics and sound organization, in Monáe aka. Cindi Mayweather. She arrives relation to the narratives of Afrofuturism, 1 on stage carried on a hand truck and bound visuality and representation. This essay “ ” in a straightjacket. Her eyes are closed and explores ways in which to read resistance she appears frozen and inanimate until she written within the body itself. For that ’ is brought into a fully vertical position center reason, I analyze Monáe s construction of an stage. As soon as her lips touch the standing android in her Metropolis saga, her live per- microphone, she quickly opens her eyes and formances, selected emotion pictures, as explodes the theater with the sound of her well as her recent short film titled Dirty Com- voice and the power of her movements, puter. Focusing on the potentialities of the chanting against the erasure of Black moving, breathing, and insisting Black body women’s subjectivity in the dominant dis- allows one to think through those forms of col- course. During one of the most forceful perfor- lective queer desire that remain in constant mative moments, which accompanies her flight from, and thus challenge those domi- “Come Alive (War of the Roses)” piece, nant narratives that historically have policed Monáe’s body erupts into a performance of Black bodies in motion. I wish to make mani- losing her mind. She sways around holding fest how attending to non-verbal forms of ’ on to her standing microphone and spins out meaning-making present in Monáe s gestures, of control and “out of place,” only to collapse movements and alternative embodiments on stage as if getting lost from the logic that allows us to imagine a gestural vocabulary pushes Black queer desire into societal of Afrofuturism that puts under duress norma- margins. With the help of the audience tive categories of race, gender and sexuality. who actively participate in this performance Born in Kansas City, Kansas and influenced of “resurrection” by pouring energy into by the Atlanta music scene, Janelle Monáe is a her convulsed body, Monáe’s persona concept artist whose performative projects

© 2019 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2019 Vol. 49, No. 4, 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1655371 engender the Afrofuturist vision of Black community that challenges commodity cul- empowerment. Afrofuturism is a term coined ture’s objectification of Black artists, and by Mark Dery in his seminal article titled allows Monáe to remain in control of her “Black to the Future” (1994), a conversation own music and performance projects. with Tricia Rose, Greg Tate and Samuel Monáe’s Afrofuturist performances, her R. Delany. Drawing from historical memory music, film appearances, as well as activism and ancestral genealogy, Black futurism pre- and multiple forms of social engagement, dates this particular moment, and has func- imagine the presence of Black women in tioned as an artistic aesthetic, a framework spaces that historically have denied their for cultural theory, and a way to imagine the existence. She is a storyteller whose Afrofutur- future through the lens of blackness. Having ist projects invite a re-thinking of what it co-founded her own production company, means to live as a Black queer woman in con- an independent collective of artists called temporary America. As Monáe explains in the Wondaland Arts Society, Monáe released one of her interviews, “sci-fi is a great four concept albums under the Wondaland vehicle because it allows me to talk about label: Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) the present in future terms.”3 The past, (2008), The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III present and future intermingle in Monáe’s (2010), The Electric Lady: Suites IV and V creative projects. She works in the spirit of (2013), and Dirty Computer (2018). Monáe’s Black speculative fiction writers such as concept albums, music videos/short films, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi which she refers to as “Emotion pictures,” Okorafor, Tananarive Due and N.K. Jemisin and songs, which she calls “space ships,” who have imagined complex worlds in create a multisensory experience in imagining which multidimensional Black women not the contours of Black queer futurity. The only occupy the center of the plots, but Wondaland collective brings together artistic whose bodies transcend their physical capa- creators, such as musicians, performance bilities and engender transformative powers artists, illustrators and screenwriters under a of love, respect and healing. Monáe similarly shared vision of queer sociality, as becomes creates spaces that linger between traditions clear from their artistic statement: of the past and technological futures. Her vision of Black queer futurity follows in the We believe truth can be broken down with footsteps of artists such as Sun Ra, George the following formula: Truth = Love x Clinton, Grace Jones, Erykah Badu, Jimi Imagination. We believe songs are space- Hendrix and Prince who time and again ships. We believe music is the weapon of have stepped into the future to explore the the future. We believe books are stars.2 present-day Black experience. Monáe’s reworking of temporality invites the audience In this statement, they articulate the revolution- to follow a futuristic tale, which nonetheless ary powers of art in creating a “loving” future as rings close to home as it parallels the story a refuge from present-day inequalities. The col- of the underprivileged Black community in lective positions itself as an alternative the present-day United States.

36 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 Black performance studies scholars, such Her gestures of spinning, falling and thrashing as Hershini Bhana Young, Stephanie her body in a convulsed-like manner indicate L. Batiste, Thomas DeFrantz, Daphne a desire to move away from the dominant nar- Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser, Nicole Fleet- ratives that have commodified and sexualized wood and Uri McMillan, explore the role of Black women’s bodies. While this perform- the Black body as an archive of knowledge, ance alludes to the scenario that subjects the a locus of cultural memory and a site of Black female body to violence, it concomi- agency, which exceeds the verbal language. tantly rewrites it through an exploration of They scrutinize the processes that make the the body’s kinetic potentialities. Attending to body “speak” and suggest ways in which we those forms of desire that are written in the can read the Black body as a source of poten- body itself allows us to read the body as a tialities. This essay is deeply grounded in site of agency. these theories while contributing to an Gestures and movements constitute a under-theorized meeting ground of Afrofutur- certain vocabulary, a pulsating repertoire of ism and Black queerness through an explora- Black diasporic performance, which carries tion of movement vocabularies. Monáe’s a potential to fashion a counter-narrative to performances fashion a system of communi- the incipient policing of blackness, gender cation, a form of talking by dancing, which and sexuality. My own reading gesture Black performance and dance scholar moves away from an attempt to translate the Thomas F. DeFrantz calls “corporeal multifaceted meaning-making gestures of orature.” He argues that “dance is performa- desire and freedom present in Monáe’s per- tive, mirroring the way in which speech may formances. Instead, I am interested in explor- be equated with action. Dance movements ing the processes that make her body “speak,” convey speechlike qualities that contain and how her body in performance allows her meaning beyond the formal, aesthetic to enact a vision of erotic subjectivity. For, as shapes and sequences of movement detailed Juana Maria Rodriguez pointedly observes, by the body in motion.”4 Just like speech “[s]ometimes the point of gesture is that it makes meaning beyond the sound, tone and can register what cannot or should not be timbre of voice, so dance movements too expressed in words. And sometimes it tell stories beyond visual aesthetics that signals what one wishes to keep out of capture the body in between forms and sound’s reach.”5 Those kinetic movements, positions. The meaning-making power such as the heaviness, in which the body embedded within the Black body in motion hits the ground, the immediacy, in which creates a diasporic narrative composed of the synapses connect and contract muscles movement vocabularies. Monáe’s aforemen- into spasms, and the rhythm of spinning out tioned performance of “losing her mind” fol- of control, constitute multiply signifying lowed by her forceful collapse on stage and actions that remain illegible in verbal subsequent reawakening speaks volumes language. Hershini Bhana Young explores about Black women’s lived experience Black women’s migrating gestures and move- under the ubiquitous conditions of violence. ments as “embodied practices of agency” and

Aleksandra Szaniawska 37 “attempts to write a history contextualized Metropolis: Technologies of within the body itself.”6 While she asks us to Embodiment and Queer Community consider how “[t]he body as gestural archive Building and inventor, as monument and stylus, is paramount to any understanding of diasporic Monáe’s Metropolis saga, Metropolis: Suite I performance,” her insightful analysis also (The Chase), The Arch Android, and The Elec- emphasizes the body’s role in constructing tric Lady, fashions a consistent narrative, different relational affinities.7 which foregrounds the Black body as a site Because gestures have accumulated a con- of resistance. The storyline takes its cue from stellation of social meanings, they can refuse Fritz Lang’s German expressionist film Metro- social scripts, such as racial and gendered polis (1927), which features a futuristic urban codes dictated by society, and demand an dystopia ruled by wealthy industrialists who alternative form of queer belonging. They feast on the working-class labor provided by can re-enact a repressive scenario prescribed people who operate the machines. The film by the dominant discourse, and concomi- raises questions about the marginalization tantly rewrite it into another form of relational- and economic exploitation of ostracized indi- ity. I attend to queer belonging as a form of viduals and imagines the arrival of a mediator sociality that depends on the shared knowl- who would bring the two classes together. In edge of the workings of desire and the erotic Monáe’s work, Metropolis is a technologi- as embodied forms of resistance. In particular, cally advanced megacity segregated along a I wish to make manifest how an understand- human/droid line, where an elite ruling class ing of the gestural vocabulary of Afrofuturism has come to wealth on the backs of in Monáe’s work can become indispensable working-class laborers. Drawing from Lang’s to building a queer affective community. film, Monáe envisions her android alter ego, For, as Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman reminds us, Cindi Mayweather, as a messianic figure a Black queer subject “inhabits social (and who will foster a revolution to end discrimi- sometimes sexual) margins, throwing into nation in the city of Metropolis. As the crisis and into relief our most precious and album liners explain, the subsequent chapters pervasive ideations of the normative, along of the odyssey navigate between the year with the ideological, economic and political 2719 and the present, and follow the flight apparatuses in which the violences of norma- of Android 57821, an Alpha Platinum 9000 tivity operate.”8 This gesture of “throwing into named Cindi Mayweather, who has been sen- crisis and into relief” differently defined epis- tenced to “immediate disassembly” for break- temic boundaries that normalize the body ing the rule administered by the city of constitutes a refusal to abide by the norms dic- Metropolis and falling in love with a human. tated by cultural, historical and societal The ArchAndroid album liner notes empha- codes. It is within such an understanding of size how in 2719, Monáe was “kidnapped kinetic potentialities of the Black body by some bodysnatchers … forced into a present in Monáe’s performances where time tunnel and sent back to our era,” and queerness resides. imprisoned as a patient of the Palace of the

38 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 Dogs Arts asylum. Concomitantly, however, is key in Monáe’s construction of Black futur- she left behind her clone android, Cindi May- ity. So too is the power of “interracial” love weather, who becomes the mythic ArchAn- and the workings of desire to oppose the sur- droid “sent to free the citizens of Metropolis veillance state, which attempts to destroy any from the Great Divide, a secret society form of individual expression. As Tobias which has been using time travel to suppress C. Van Veen pointedly observes, in Monáe’s freedom and love throughout ages.”9 work, the practice of “loving an alien” is a One of the defining motifs of Monáe’s radical queer practice and a form of decoloni- Metropolis saga is the importance of commu- zation, which disorients the relations of power nity building in fostering a revolutionary spirit. and transgresses the divide between human In The Electric Lady, the final chapter of the and non-human, subject and object. He Metropolis triptych, which connotes Jimi Hen- argues that it is a “love that mis-purposes the drix’s album titled Electric Ladyland (1968), we white supremacist category of subhumanity learn that Monáe has magically disappeared and shapeshifts it into radical exhumanity, from the asylum, her body vanishing through signaling a chance for a novel collective the wall as if she were the protagonist of love in the post-apocalyptic timeline.”12 Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Yet, before she disap- Such transgressive potentiality embedded in pears into thin air, she sends her revolutionary acts of loving and desiring is a queer recordings to us, her present-day audience. gesture, which puts under duress those colo- These recordings exist as “secret compositions nial narratives that have positioned Black conveyed to her by the android hero Cindi bodies outside of the Western category of Mayweather,” which seem to “contain within the human. its frequencies some sort of mystical battle Since one of the defining motifs of Afrofu- plan” and thus are prohibited by the ruling turism has been the use of technology to class.10 The album liners create an aura of in- rethink the humanity of Black subjects, it is group membership as they convey messages crucial to also pay attention to the body’s from Monáe to us, her present-day audience. relation to technology in envisioning Black She engages her followers to make connections women as desiring subjects. Consider, for between the albums, explains the dangers instance, how Monáe personifies an embedded in listening to her revolutionary android: a robot or a synthetic organism records, and thus transmits both hers and with a body resembling human flesh that Cindi’s revolutionary agenda.11 Through creat- started to develop human characteristics. ing an aura of secrecy, which involves a deci- Metropolis’s liner notes introduce Monáe’s phering of the storyline to understand the android creation as an exceptional work of importance of her recordings, Monáe poten- art: “Unlike other androids, Cindi’s program- tially encourages her contemporary audience ming includes a rock-star proficiency to actively engage in building a queer affective package and a working soul.” She is an community. unusual, “state-of-the-art organic” android The freedom to move in both time and responsible for popularizing a rebellious space, and in between different embodiments form of music known as “cybersoul.”13

Aleksandra Szaniawska 39 Cindi is not an outer-space alien and Monáe classic “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). does not reject the human body. Rather, the Haraway deploys the image of a cyborg as a Metropolis saga blurs the line between source of limitless possibilities and a meta- Monáe’s stage persona and her android alter phor for resistance and survival of alienated ego by imagining Cindi as a robot created groups when she argues: “Cyborg unities are from Monáe’s stolen DNA. By performing as monstrous and illegitimate; in our present pol- a robotic organism, unique and resistant, itical circumstances, we could hardly hope Monáe extends her own human presence, for more potent myths for resistance and asking the audience to imagine a revolution- recoupling.”14 By performing as an android, ary potential that the Black female body Monáe asks the viewers to imagine a queer could yield. Monáe’s impersonation of Cindi multiplicity of being, which positions Black comes forth in her exploration of the body women’s bodies as transformative. Apart as an automaton, which retains stiff from imagining the android “body” as a site machine-like moves on the one hand, and of limitless possibilities, Monáe’s personifica- on the other explodes any strict rules that cat- tion of an android also provides powerful egorize movement when she performs her commentary on how Black women’s bodies limitless gestures of frenzied dance. Her have been invaded and exploited under characteristic way of widening her eyes and chattel slavery and during its aftermath. As rolling her eyeballs, her use of syncopated Marquita R. Smith pointedly observes, body isolations, and angular, robotic-like Monáe’s tale in not one of escapism. Rather, dance steps toy with the figure’s dual nature, the Metropolis saga could be read as a balancing on the verge of organicity and arti- recipe on how to persist through the history ficiality. Monáe’s dance style resembles a col- of brutality imposed on Black women’s lection of outbursts, as her body becomes her bodies.15 She suggests that cases, such as music. The use of syncopation in her kinetic the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the endeavors accentuates Monáe’s machine- “HeLa” human line cells taken from Henrietta like presence, which simultaneously Lack’s body and widely distributed without grounds her body in the past, present and her consent, as well as the state-sanctioned future. Such focus on gestures and move- killings of Black people, which continue into ments to rethink embodiment queers the the present-day Black Lives Matter moment, static representations of blackness, gender speak volumes about Black women’s exclu- and sexuality, which are part and parcel of sion from the category of the human. By envi- the epistemes of representation. Instead, sioning Cindi as a messianic figure, Smith’s Monáe’s envisioning of Cindi as a messianic argument goes, Monáe stages a performative figure and her playful performance of switch- embodied protest, which attempts to “pre- ing in between her two personas positions her serve the representation of black women’s body as a site of queer “posthuman” powers. humanity.” Such a creative redefinition of embodiment Monáe’s android is a queer figure whose brings forth Donna Haraway’s imagery of hybridity transgresses the boundary between cyborg feminism, which she defines in her human and machine, as well as between a

40 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 man-made automaton designed to fulfill a provides a commentary on the way society specific function and a free-spirited messiah, produces its norms and ostracizes those who chosen to liberate the citizens of Metropolis. do not fit in. Her song “Violet Stars Happy Louis Chude-Sokei explores such transforma- Hunting” from her first album Metropolis tive blending of the Black body and technol- introduces Cindi Mayweather as a man- ogy by turning to the notion of fluidity made “alien,” who runs away from capture. present in the Caribbean discourse of creoli- Monáe thus makes a clear parallel between zation “because of its refusal to fetishize her fictive android storyline and the historical racial subjectivity in the face of either racism conditions of the transatlantic slave trade fol- or technologization.”16 Chude-Sokei fore- lowed by chattel slavery that turned African grounds how “technology has always been subjects into commodities. For, as Van Veen racialized or been articulated in relationship pointedly observes: “The fictive reality of the to race,” and how the representation of android folds back on itself, reaching an Black people as machines in sci-fi has been uncomfortable point where the allegory of forged out of white men’s colonial anxieties the android to blackness, and the real experi- regarding who constitutes the human. He ence of becoming an android, have already raises important questions on how to form “a met in the historical trauma of slavery.”20 new understanding of the porous boundaries This meeting ground between an android as between flesh and machine.”17 Because a commodity and an enslaved Black person Black people have historically been conflated as a commodity is where Monáe’s resistant with machines, Chude-Sokei proposes a “will tale of Black queer futurity is inextricably to inauthenticity”: a desire to re-imagine linked with historical conditions of violence. blackness and technology not in terms of Monáe emphasizes this connection and binarisms and substitutions, but fluid inter- the technologies of “othering” in her multiple connections.18 Monae’s android creation is live performances, such as the Apollo Thea- such “black techno-poetic,” a fluid Black ter’s “Come Alive” act, with which I open. It woman/cyborg construct, which destabilizes concludes with a “resurrected” Monáe silen- the integrity of identity formations. cing the crowd. Like an orchestral conductor, In her interviews, Monáe explains that the she shapes the audience’s responses with the android functions in her work as a parable power of her gestures, making us squat and of societal marginalization and an epitome hide in front of seats and in the aisles. By enga- of the so-called “new other.” She elucidates ging in a call-and-response technique, which the Afrodiasporic conditions of “otherness,” has been deeply embedded in Black perform- when she states: “The android is the new ance practices, she imbricates us, her contem- black. The android is the new gay. The porary audience, within her Afrofuturist android is the new woman. Someone who is storyline. This performance, enacted in often times marginalized [and] discriminated Monáe’s body, largely depends on the audi- against.”19 By fashioning her alter ego as an ence’s understanding and willingness to exceptional robotic organism who trans- follow her gestural vocabulary. She then des- gresses the established categories, Monáe cends from the stage and impersonates her

Aleksandra Szaniawska 41 android/slave as fugitive part: she begins tip- identity, and envisions the erotic as overabun- toeing in between members of the audience, dant, resisting and queer. By foregrounding her torso bent in a gesture of flight, and desire, movement and flight, Monáe’s per- having circled the auditorium in silence, she formances place under duress the established returns to the stage on its opposite side. normative categories of gender, sexuality, While the violence of “othering” that turns race and broadly defined “normalcy.” They Black bodies into commodified spectacles also redefine Black women’s sexual agency rings loud in this performance of Black fugitiv- by staging embodiment as fluid, resistant ity, she nonetheless celebrates the potential of and queer, and in the words of Tricia Rose, the Black body in motion to resist capture. In they engage in “negotiating multiple social her performative act, the revolution is not hers boundaries and identities.”22 alone, but belongs to all of us. As a collective, Alienation, awakening and flight are recur- the audience becomes a “safe” community rent themes in Monáe’s vision of Black futur- who supports and guards the fugitive in her ity. In her performances, the Black queer flight. woman exists in constant motion between hypervisibility and invisibility, resistance and The Erotics of Flight erasure, escaping visual registers that attempt to bind her. Kara Keeling, in The In Monáe’s theatrical projects, desire sneaks Witch’s Flight, positions a Black queer in between music chords, attaches to gestures woman’s presence as “a portal through and movements, and resists any forms of cat- which present (im)possibilities might egorization that have historically policed appear.”23 In tune with Keeling’s call to Black bodies. It erupts as a shared moment attend “to the lines of flight set in motion by exchanged between herself, her band and (un)successful attempts to contain or circum- her audience, and becomes one of the par- scribe the black femme within existing ticles of building a queer affective commu- epistemological categories,” Monáe’s per- nity. Such an approach toward the erotic as formances posit flight as resistance to domi- a site of creative energy and productive nant categories.24 The gesture of flight labor is a dynamic process of active female shapes the contours of Monáe’s Black queer work by means of which Black women can futurity because it denotes an escapist achieve erotic autonomy. Audre Lorde, in motion, a removal of oneself from those her essay titled “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as dominant scenarios that commodify Black Power,” positions the erotic as a “resource” women’s bodies. As an escapist motion, of survival and an “assertion of the life force flight is both material and metaphorical as it of women; of the creative energy empowered, connotes a desire to remove one’s body the knowledge and use of which we are now from one space and transport it into a different reclaiming in our language, our history, our location. It is both a physical movement, dancing, our work, our lives.”21 The erotic which denotes action, and a gestural refusal, as a site of knowledge exceeds an oversimpli- which motions toward such action. To be in fied equation between desire and sexual flight suggests a queer desire to reinvent

42 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 oneself. To be in flight also suggests a queer upon her body. In Monáe’s performances, desire to steal away the pleasures of expres- dance, movement, gestures and facial sing one’s creativity and sexual subjectivity, expressions carry such revolutionary poten- unacknowledged in, or erased from, the tial. The suppression of movement by the dominant discourse. evil Wolfmasters and droid control followed Monáe’s short film Many Moons (from her by resistance by Metropolis’s citizens is the first EP Metropolis) features Cindi May- recurring theme that runs through all of her weather as an entertainment android in concept albums. Monáe’s tracks such as, three performative spaces that have histori- “Locked Inside” from Metropolis, “Dance or cally commodified Black bodies on display: Die” and “Tightrope” from The ArchAndroid, an “Annual Android Auction” that evokes and “Dance Apocalyptic” and “Q.U.E.E.N.” the bidding on Black bodies on the antebel- from The Electric Lady, directly reference lum auction block; an electrifying concert; movement as a resisting practice. Her and a line of androids awaiting replacement. emotion picture “Tightrope” begins with the Monáe walks down the stage personifying following message: “Dancing has long been different androids as the screen displays their forbidden for its subversive effects on its resi- price and the number of bids they received. dents and its tendency to lead to illegal Such engagement with multiple temporalities magical practices.”26 It features patients of suggests a collapse of time and motions the Palace of the Dogs asylum, who dressed toward the interrelatedness of the past, in tuxedos sneak in the corridors and tip on present and future. Monáe’s performance the tightrope. Throughout the video, Monáe ends with an attempted flight when she performs her signature tightrope step: she begins to short circuit: her feet hover above puts one foot in front of the other and the stage and she starts to levitate until she quickly moves it back as if balancing on a falls to the ground annihilated by an external straight line, at times elevating her body as if force.25 This moment of flight, in which unex- she attempts to take flight, and thus resurrects pected motion brings the auction to a close, is a dance revolution that shakes the asylum’s a queer form of resistance that allows her alter walls. By activating her body in a space ego to momentarily escape the shackles of designed to suppress free motion, Monáe con- conformity. tests those narratives that have historically Thinking about flight as a queer desire for policed Black bodies. collective liberation that foregrounds move- Taking the archive of transatlantic slavery ment as a revolutionary tool to build an affec- and its afterlife as her starting point, Simone tive community is key in Monáe’s work. As a Browne analyzes how Black bodies have vio- form of movement that encapsulates a fleeting lently been regulated and surveilled, a prac- moment of limitless pleasure, desire and tice which continues in today’s Black Lives longing, the notion of flight shapes the con- Matter moment. She argues that “[w]here tours of a queer elsewhere in which a Black public spaces are shaped for and by white- queer woman can resist those dominant nar- ness, some acts in public are abnormalized ratives that have historically been mapped by way of racializing surveillance and then

Aleksandra Szaniawska 43 coded for disciplinary measures that are puni- eyelashes and performs her signature upper- tive in their effects.”27 Because public space body isolations, are the first signs that the sup- has been racialized as white, any appearance pressed movements are gaining momentum. of Black people is immediately deemed “out As she activates her body from behind the of place,” suspect and dangerous. Monáe’s table, she slowly moves her head from one joyous tipping on the tightrope is a form of side to the other, distorting the photographic resistance that reclaims and rewrites this stillness of the Black body on display. By sense of not belonging through movement shaping her own exhibition, and talking vocabularies. So too, does her performative back to the viewer, Monáe throws into crisis re-claiming of the Metropolis’s “living” the notion of who is studied in the museum museum space in her emotion picture titled and who gets to be the viewer. Instead, her “Q.U.E.E.N.” put under duress the suppres- performance insists on movement between sion of Black motion in public spaces. The subject and object. As Lia T. Bascomb point- exhibit presents time-travelling rebels with edly observes, the video “offers an alternative their leader Janelle Monáe and her “danger- to the official archive of the anthropological ous accomplice” Badoula Oblongata museum” by creatively rewriting the (Erykah Badu) who are “frozen in suspended museum space, which historically has animation.” As explained in the video’s voice- served as an epitome of the Western encoun- over, they launched a “musical weapons ter with “otherness.”29 By foregrounding program” in the twenty-first century called motion as resistance, Monáe critiques ways “Project Q.U.E.E.N.,” in which various in which this institution has historically posi- freedom movements have allegedly been dis- tioned Black bodies as passive objects of the guised as “songs, Emotion pictures, and works scientific gaze. of art.”28 “Q.U.E.E.N.” generates its own movement The exhibition intends to showcase the vocabulary by gesturally evoking the process Ministry’s success in suppressing rebellions. of initiating and executing a revolution. It con- The rebels are scattered all across the room cludes with Monáe’s powerful rap/spoken with Monáe sitting en face at the table in the word manifesto that is a direct call to Black center of the room and Badu leaning upon women to defy any categories imposed on another table with her back toward the their bodies and join the emerging revolution. entrance. The camera follows two women 30 The living museum is gone and the viewer who enter the sheer white setting of the exhi- is left with a black-and-white image of Monáe bition room and who sneak in a “Project who delivers her message standing in- Q.U.E.E.N.” white vinyl. As they put on the between two intersecting spotlights, her record and duct tape the museum guard, the body positioned at the center, as if she was exhibit walls slowly fill in with sound and the pupil of an eye. This stage arrangement movement as the frozen figures begin to rea- adds a sense of immediacy to her vocal and waken. A close-up of Monáe’s persona who kinetic delivery, as it suggests she is the one sits across the room holding an espresso cup who has the power to look and see. She una- and who begins to intensively flap her long bashedly straightens her bow tie, adjusts her

44 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 tuxedo and angles her body to look directly keeps turning her head from left to right in into the camera without averting her gaze at slow motion and orchestrates her hands to any moment. This performative gesture chal- dance around her body. And it speaks of lenges ways in which Black women’s bodies desire and determination. Echoing historical have been historically fractured, objectified figures, such as Harriet Tubman and Queen and sexualized by the gaze. Instead, by rup- Nefertiti through her lyrics, and bringing to turing the pattern of the colonial gaze mind Malcom X’s high fashion, Monáe through her sharp syncopated movements, insists on community building and defines she positions herself as the one who has the herself as a desiring sexual subject, an agent power to look and desire on her own terms, of her own erotic subjectivity. as she defies any categories that attempt to As is the case with Monáe’s emotion pic- limit her body and her freedom of movement. tures, her live performances are also carefully Throughout her vocal and kinetic delivery, crafted spectacles, which combine theatrical Monáe situates movement as a strategic revo- imagination with queer gestures of flight. lutionary tool when she calls on the audience Time and again, she spins out of control, her to rise, go to the “streets,”“march,” sell hair becoming undone; she pivots, sways, “hope” instead of “dope,” and thus challenges spirals and moonwalks across the stage; she the representation of Black subjects as coated collapses on stage, takes off her shoes, and in what Daphne Brooks calls “powerful still- dives into the audience; she runs away from ness”: having “no movement in a field of the doctor-like figures, who attempt to bind signification.”31 her; she mocks artificiality embedded in clas- The immediacy of this performative act is sical dance poses i.e. when she fashions a chilling. The power of the words Monáe demi-plié in second position and breaks its spurts out as she raps comes as much from smoothness with angular bouncing motion; their meaning, the sound of her voice, as it and thus she performs a “dance apocalypse” does from her gestures and bodily move- that breaks down and exceeds societal ments. Even though she stands in one spot, norms imposed on Black bodies in motion. her movements disrupt this otherwise static By composing a detailed movement vocabu- space. Monáe’s stylized body is yet another lary, Monáe constructs a vision of a Black actor in this performative act as it speaks its queer future in which Black women’s own language, which depends on what bodies, lives, experiences and dreams can Thomas DeFrantz calls “actionable asser- occupy center stage. There is something tions”: speech-like statements proclaimed by elusive in Monáe’s queer gestures of flight, the body in motion.32 Monáe’s body speaks which express pleasure, desire and a longing independently of sound, as if her voice for freedom. Her spinning out of control, initiates deep down in her chest and breaks frantic dance steps and body contractions through her skin. It speaks when she catches enliven a rainbow of desires that escape any breath and the syncopated sharp movements simplistic forms of comprehension. Precisely reverberate through her upper body and spin because these gestures collect meanings that her chest into vibration. It speaks as she signal a longing for an elsewhere, which

Aleksandra Szaniawska 45 exceeds verbal language, they perform a community. As a more explicit celebration refusal to the dominant scenarios that of Black queer sexuality, Dirty Computer attempt to define and categorize Black queer explores the carnality of the flesh-and-blood embodiment. Black body in motion as a challenge to the José Esteban Muñoz suggestively captures rules dictated by a futuristic totalitarian such revolutionary potential within the fleet- society. The regime hunts down any form of ing ephemerality of Black queer motion, individual expression, conceptualized in the which the state apparatus attempts to sup- short film as “dirty computers,” viruses that press, when he writes, “[q]ueer dance is the system attempts to erase. Dirty Computer hard to catch, and it is meant to be hard to begins with Monáe’s voiceover: catch—it is supposed to slip through the fingers and comprehension of those who They started calling us Computers. People would use knowledge against us.”33 In par- began vanishing and the Cleaning began. ticular, Muñoz pays close attention to the You were dirty if you looked different. You role of everyday gestures as performative were dirty if you refused to live the way acts that acquire historical significance they dictated. You were dirty if you showed because they “transmit ephemeral knowledge any form of opposition at all.35 of lost queer histories and possibilities within a phobic majoritarian public culture.”34 This short film moves away from the android- Such an understanding of embodied cultural on-the-run storyline explored in the Metropo- memory, which has been transmitted within lis triptych and the Afrofuturist world it con- specific communities, reverberates in structs does not depend on the presence of Monáe’s Afrofuturist performances. For robotic organisms. Yet, a trace of Cindi May- attending to queer gestures that signal weather, Android 57821, echoes throughout toward those forms of desire that evoke and the narrative in the body of Janelle Monáe challenge the historical fungibility of Black introduced within the storyline as Jane bodies is part and parcel of Monáe’s vision 57821. In this Emotion picture, she undergoes of Black queer futures. Her performances a slow “cleansing” process: her memories are comprise a vast vocabulary of multiply sig- deleted by two white male IT specialists pri- nifying actions that cannot be easily translated marily because of her queer love affair with into words, and as such they depend on the Tessa Thompson’s character named Zen. audience who knows how to “read” them. While Monáe does not perform as Cindi, her protagonist’s flesh-and-blood body is slowly deprived of any form of individual expression, Dirty Computer: Queer Gestures of and thus subjected to the process of becoming Stolen Pleasure an automaton. Dirty Computer juxtaposes the Monáe’s recent work, Dirty Computer (2018), stillness and vulnerability of Monáe’s body is a 46-minute short film, which positions awaiting its erasure with her “dangerous” desire, movement and flight as part and memories: music videos filled with resisting parcel of imagining a Black queer futuristic movement, queer desire and everyday acts

46 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 of love. These videos comprise scenes in within a certain tradition of Black sociality, which a Black queer community flees the such as song and dance. Positioning stolen state apparatus that attempts to restrict their joy as an antidote to the incipience of vio- freedom of movement. As is the case with lence that surrounds Black bodies in motion, the Metropolis saga, it is the focus on move- he argues: ment and gestures as an antidote to the historical policing of the Black queer body in motion To abscond. To steal what we can, looting under a surveillance state that constitutes the our way to destroying the grounds that video’s resisting narrative. keep many of us marginalized. To dance Dirty Computer explicitly celebrates queer and chant and dip-sway-move in the literal desire by focusing on those privately shared face of inequity. Like Harriet Jacobs in a gestures exchanged between Monáe’s and crawlspace stealing the sounds of her chil- Thompson’s personas that flee societal con- dren playing outside unbeknownst to them, straints. Those fleeting moments of pleasure we too thieve our way through the world, and communal joy function as forms of adulterating the world in which joy is sup- queer sociality that counter the vulnerability posed to be impossible.36 of Black bodies in the public sphere. Con- sider, for instance, a dance party at a queer This embodied action of having to steal what nightclub in “Make Me Feel” where social should be the right to feel, desire and breathe aspects of queer desire burst into a rainbow is a strategy of survival for African diasporic of color; a communal escape from the communities and a way to navigate the sys- “streets” surveilled by drones into a celebra- temic devaluation of Black life. In Dirty Com- tion of sexuality in “Screwed”; a whimsically puter, the gestural snatching of pleasure in sensuous “girl power” community that cele- places where it is not supposed to exist is a brates orgasmic powers and the pleasures of powerful form of desire, which envisions a female genitals and femme sex in “Pynk”; future for Black subjects in which different and everyday gestures of love, such as a forms of relationality could come to fruition. hand running down her face, an intimate For as Muñoz puts it: “Queer cultural pro- embrace that turns into a kiss, and the sound duction is both an acknowledgement of the of shared laughter that echoes across the lack that is endemic to any heteronormative sandy shore. The joy that emerges from rendering of the world and a building, a these gestures of refusal is a “stolen” pleasure ‘world making,’ in the face of that lack.”37 shared intimately and queerly by “dirty com- Dirty Computer imagines such a “world- puters” as they challenge the system designed making” process in restless, undefeated ges- to destroy it. It is a pleasure derived from the tures of shared vulnerability, which lead very possibility to counter and disobey, to toward a utopian, though rather simplistic thieve their will from a scenario that does happy ending, in which Monáe’s and Thomp- not grant them agency. son’s love eventually powers through and Ashon Crawley traces such a thieving of destroys the “cleaning” process. For in this joy in Black women’s performance of refusal dystopian scenario in which Black bodies

Aleksandra Szaniawska 47 are stripped off their individuality, it is through Music Studies, 29, no. 3 (2017); Daylanne an embodied recognition of their vulnerability K. English and Alvin Kim, “Now We Want Out by feeling for one another that the protago- Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism,” – nists can retain their “dirty” memories of American Studies, 52, no. 4 (2013): 217 30; Cas- “‘ ’ laughter, sex and love, and thus refuse the sandra L. Jones, Tryna Free Kansas City : The Revolutions of Janelle Monáe as Digital Griot,” system designed to destroy them. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 39, no. 1 As I have argued in this essay, Janelle (2018): 42–72; Grace D. Gipson, “Afrofuturism’s Monáe’s Black queer performances suture Digital Princess Janelle Monáe: Psychadelic Soul together the past, present and future in inter- Message Music Infused with a Sci-Fi Twist,” in Afro- galactic time travel, asking us to envision futurism 2.0: The Rise of Astroblackness, ed. Rey- how gestures, movements and everyday acts naldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (New York: of pleasure can become the most potent Lexington Books, 2016), 91–107; Gayle Murchi- forms of resistance. By foregrounding the son, “Let’s Flip It! Quare Emancipations: Black Black body in motion as a site of endless Queer Traditions, Afrofuturisms, Janelle Monáe to potentialities, Monáe’s performances engen- Labelle,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender der a gestural vocabulary of Afrofuturism, and Culture, 22 (2018): 79–90; Shana “ ’ which makes manifest those forms of queer L. Redmont, This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe s ‘ ’” desire that exceed verbal language. As such, Cold War, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 23, no. 4 (2011): 393–411; Lia T. Bascomb, “Frea- these performances allow us to imagine the kifying History: Remixing Royalty,” African and contours of a Black queer future in which Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 9, no. 1 the Black queer body in motion ruptures (2016): 57–69; Francesca T. Royster, “Epilogue: those dominant scripts that deny its existence. Janelle Monáe’s Collective Vision,” in Sounding It is a future filled with the desire to connect Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts with others, the desire to create, dance, sing, in the Post-Soul Era (Ann Arbor: The University of laugh, and feel, and the desire to live in the Michigan Press, 2013), 186–91. imminence of death. In Monáe’s perform- 2. Wondaland Arts Society website: https:// ances, desire erupts from her embodied refu- wondaland.wordpress.com/about/. sals, dances with her steps, as much as it 3. Charlotte Andrews, “Electric Ladyland,” “reads” from her gestures of shared vulner- DIVA Magazine, September 2013, 61. “ ability. Attending to those small moments of 4. Thomas F. DeFrantz, The Black Beat Made ” flight that register in and erupt from her Visible: Hip Hop Dance and Body Power, in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and body, we can step out of the now and in Body Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown: Muñoz’s words begin to “desire differently, Wesleyan UP, 2004), 66. to desire more, to desire better.”38 5. Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 4. Notes 6. Hershini Bhana Young, Illegible Will: Coer- cive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and Dia- 1. See Mathew Valnes, “Janelle Monáe and spora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), Afro-Sonic Feminist Funk,” Journal of Popular 10–11.

48 TBS • Volume 49 • Number 4 • Winter 2019 7. Ibid., 12. 23. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cine- 8. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Against the matic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 6. 2007), 9. 9. Janelle Monáe, liner notes, The ArchAn- 24. Ibid., 2–3. droid (Bad Boy Records, 2010). 25. Janelle Monáe, Many Moons, Official short 10. Janelle Monáe, liner notes, The Electric film (2008). Lady (Bad Boy Records, 2013). 26. Janelle Monáe, “Tightrope,” music video. 11. Ibid. Directed by Wendy Morgan (2010). 12. Tobias C. Van Veen, “Robot Love is Queer: 27. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Sur- Afrofuturism and Alien Love,” liquid blackness 3, veillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University no. 6 (2016): 87. Press, 2015), 17. 13. Janelle Monáe, liner notes, Metropolis: 28. Janelle Monáe, “Q.U.E.E.N.,” music video. Suite I (The Chase) (Bad Boy Records, 2007). Directed by Alan Ferguson (2013). 14. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in 29. Lia T. Bascomb, “Freakifying History: The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Remixing Royalty,” African and Black Diaspora: Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, An International Journal 9, no. 1 (2016): 63. 2000), 295. 30. For an analysis of agency and black 15. Marquita R. Smith, “Visions of Wondaland: women’s empowerment in “Q.U.E.E.N,” see On Janelle Monáe Afrofuturist Vision,” in Popular Nathalie Aghoro, “Agency in the Afrofuturist Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Femin- Ontologies of Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe,” ist Interventions ed. Susan Fast and Craig Jennex Open Cultural Studies 2 (2018): 330–40; Monica (New York: Routlege, 2019). L. Miller, “All Hail the Q.U.E.E.N. Janelle Monáe 16. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culure: and a Tale of the Tux,” Nka: Journal of Contempor- Diaspora and Black Techno-Poetics (Middletown: ary African Art 37 (2015): 62–9. Wesleyan University Press, 2016), 167. 31. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Specta- 17. Ibid., 149. cular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850– 18. Ibid., 143. 1910 (Durham: Duke University Press), 5. 19. Janelle Monáe, Interview, Hot 97, Septem- 32. DeFrantz, “The Black Beat Made Visible,” ber 12, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 66. 2k7EgZGP7xE. 33. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The 20. Tobias C. Van Veen, “Vessels of Transfer: Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle New York University Press, 2009), 81. Monáe,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance 34. Ibid., 67. Music Culture 5, no. 2 (2017): 16. 35. Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer. Emotion 21. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic Picture. Directed by Andrew Donoho and Chuck as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Lightning (2018). (New York: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53. 36. Ashon Crawley, “Do It For the Vine,” 22. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Avidly, LA Review of Books (August 2014). Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middle- 37. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 118 town: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 148. 38. Ibid., 189.

Aleksandra Szaniawska 49 Aleksandra Szaniawska received her PhD in American Studies from The State University of New York at Buffalo (2017). Her book manuscript entitled Monstrous Erotics: Poetics of Embodiment in Black Diasporic Women’s Performance analyzes African diasporic women’s music, dance, literature, and art in order to explore how artists and activists thieve pleasure from those narratives that have rendered their desires illegible ([email protected]).

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