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Home , Pynk, The Electric Lady

Homoeroticism and Sisterhood as Tools for Black Women’s Radical Self-Love in Janelle Monáe’s “”

An essay by Tirsa With 05/06/2017

“A moment of silent celebration for those of us who don't feel at home in any of their families, who only get 1/3 of an invitation to the cook-out.

Never enough and always too much. Too black too queer too femme to.. be. heard.

Never seen but always looked at. If only we knew what we looked like through our own gaze. If only we could remember.”

excerpt from “Sojourner” a poem by Tirsa With, 31/07/2017.

On April 10th 2018, Janelle Monáe released “PYNK”, the third single and accompanying video of her , which offers a refreshing take on gender norms, queerness and female sexuality. My intervention will provide a critical reading of how

Monáe’s video plays with conceptual maps and destabilizes subject-object locations by representing, as well as embodying, her object of desire: the black female body. I will draw connections between “Pynk” and Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of representation, as well as the “Oppositional Gaze”, coined by bell hooks.

The visual album Dirty Computer weaves a dystopian, Afrofuturist meta-narrative through Monáe’s songs, in which memories of deviant individuals, or dirty computers, are deleted. “Pynk” is more warmly colored, as it follows Monáe’s character, Jane 57821 and her lover Zen, portrayed by , as they encounter a motel inhabited by a group of black women in the middle of a pink desert. Monáe, a vocalist and of her label Wondaland Arts Society, is no stranger to Afrofuturism, and her previous The

ArchAndroid and were set in 2719 (Monae, as cited by Fuse). However,

Dirty Computer is deliberately more personal and set in the nearer future, the link to her character’s queerness and Monáe’s coming out as pansexual are important connections which inform the lens through which “Pynk” was approached by its author.

More specifically, “Pynk” plays with common and uncommon associations tied to womanhood, and portrays Jane’s relationship to and celebration of the female body. The word

“Pynk” and the color pink are recurrent themes throughout the song and video, and represent firstly and most obviously the way the color pink has been coded as feminine. Monáe embraces and celebrates this connection of the color to womanhood by flooding the video with pink visuals and singing “ ’Cause boy its cool if you’ve got blue. We got the pynk.”

(spelled as pynk in Monáe’s lyrics, as found on genius.com). Not only has pink historically been a color linked to womanhood, but it has also been coded as a symbol of queerness, which “Pynk” represents through the portrayal of queer female sexuality and homoeroticism.

Moreover, Monáe also uses pink as a visual signs for the vulva and vagina. This becomes explicit in one of the opening scenes, in which Jane and six other black women are dancing in pink, ruffled pants which resemble the shape of labia. These visuals are juxtaposed with Monáe’s voice singing: “Pynk, like the inside of your … baby”, strengthening the image of the vagina (Genius). These are the first of many verbal and visual reference to vulvas.

However, “Pynk”’s representation of (black) womanhood does not limit itself to those with vulvas, represented by two of the seven dancers who are not wearing labia pants. In fact,

Monáe spans the breath of her references of pink by connecting it to internal organs such as

“the folds in your brain”, “your tongue going round” and “the holes in your heart”. With the multitude of references to the body, and specifically the black female body, “Pynk” disrupts a reductionist reading of women or queer people as being nothing more than their bodies, but the experience of a character with multiple intersecting identities illustrates to how the body can be a location of connection to a universal human experience.

Monáe draws from the conceptual map tied to the color pink, whilst also creating ambiguity by combining different meanings attributed to the color. This playfulness seems to both strengthen the associations, by connecting to communities of womanhood, queerness and humanity, whilst the literal and figurative oversaturation of pink also makes the connections seem obsolete and arbitrary. “Pynk”’s representation of the color pink is reflective, by drawing from gender norms, intentional, by acknowledging the author’s political mission, and constructionist, because it highlights the ambiguity and arbitrariness of the meaning attached to the color pink. This interaction with the color pink exemplifies how reflective, intentional and constructionist representations are not isolated, but interplay in our understanding of and communication language and meaning. “Pynk” not only connects to larger imagined communities, but also presents a community of black women who are bonded through their sisterhood. In one scene, a slumber party seems to be taking place in a bedroom filled with furniture, posters and lighting in pastel pinks. In it, we see a fluffy cat being picked up from the bed by Jane and dropped to the pink shag carpet, landing next to an oyster pictured pink book. Then, three characters, dressed in pale pink, comfortable clothing, sit and lie around Jane on a silk topped bed. As Monáe starts her verse with “Pynk, like the lips around your … maybe. Pynk like the skin that’s under … baby,” the camera zooms in to Jane’s white underpants topped with “sex cells” in bold, bright, pink letters, which reveal pubic hair from behind it (Genius). Then, whilst Monáe sings

“Pynk, where it's deepest inside... crazy”, we see hands grabbing onto and releasing the silk blanket, followed by a close up of a woman’s chest, twirling around a fluffy boa over her silk, vintage bra. Shortly after, Jane tickles said woman’s stomach while we hear “Pynk, beyond forest and thighs.” (Genius).

“Pynk”’s portrayal of the slumber party scene, borrows from a traditional display of sleepovers as a form of female (platonic) intimacy and community, not unlike the slumber party scene in the 1978 classic Grease. In this scene, we also see a group of women in pajamas bonding in a bedroom with pink postered walls. The women in the Grease scene are not only displaying traditional “feminine” behaviors, but also socially pressure each other into behaviors such as smoking and drinking, which create a tension in their embodiment of

“girly” stereotypes of. Similarly, “Pynk”’s slumber party includes femininely coded settings and behaviors, triggering the audience to decode the situation as a display of sisterhood, and one could argue that it also includes a form of deviance through its many homoerotic references, such as the clenching hands, oysters, cat and tickling. It is noteworthy however, that this ambiguity between a platonic or a homoerotic reading of the situation does not seem to create a similar tension within “Pynk”’s characters’ understanding of their gender performance, but could nonetheless be interpreted by some audiences as deviant. Moreover, one should consider that girls’ slumber parties, in film, are not always encoded as platonic, as they are often approached from a male gaze. As such, the slumber party is not (solely) present to create depth in the female characters interpersonal relationships, but serves to cater to a straight male viewer’s sexual fantasy (Mulvey).

While the male gaze centers a hegemonic, white, cishetero viewer, the oppositional gaze, coined by bell hooks, is created through a “critical black female spectatorship” (hooks,

261). Key to her conceptualization of the oppositional gaze is its political nature, which not only recognizes oppressive, stereotypical and reductionist representations, but actively critiques them. However, she explains that the oppositional gaze more than merely resist and critique, by stating: “We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions”. “Pynk” embodies all these elements, through its rosy imagined future in which black women live and love freely it reaches beyond critique of patriarchal gender norms and through its homoeroticism celebrates black female sisterhood and self-love.

Monáe’s queer fantasy of a women-only motel in the middle of a pink desert under a dystopian, repressive regime offers tools to re-imagine not only a hopeful queer futurity, but also highlights the arbitrariness of gender norms and their suppressive nature. It has made me wonder what happens to the image of the “Other”, the woman, the queer, the black, when they are not represented by the “Self” to fulfill the purpose of defining and confining the identity of the Self. “Pynk” offers a refreshing potential answer, in which the Other is not positioned as a threat to the Self, but instead bathes themselves in homoeroticism as a representation of their love for themselves and “dirty computers” like them. By providing the Other with its own representation, Monáe undermines traditional power relations by offering an oppositional gaze through which she inhabits, embodies, loves, desires, presents and represents the black female body. Works Cited: Fuse. “Janelle Monáe On Creating Dirty Computer & Her Relationship With .” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Apr. 2018, www..com/watch?v=bA2QKcQOnoI&ab_channel=Fuse. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Open University and Sage Publications, 1997 Hall, Stuart, et al. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Routledge, 2005. hooks, bell. "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators." Movies and Mass Culture, edited by John Belton, Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000, pp 247-264. “Janelle Monáe (Ft. ) – PYNK.” Genius, Genius Media Group Inc. , 10 Apr. 2018, genius.com/Janelle-monae-pynk-lyrics. Kleiser, Randal. “Grease.” YouTube, YouTube, 1 Mar. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=J40ZNwrpJ2o&ab_channel=CinemaCut. Monáe, Janelle. “PYNK.” Youtube, directed by Emma Westenberg, Wondaland Arts Society, and , 10 April 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaYvlVR_BEc&ab_channel=JanelleMon%C3%A 1e. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual and Other Pleasures”, Macmillan, 1989. “Shades of Pink.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 June 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_pink. Spanos, Brittany. “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself.” , Penske Media Corporation, 26 Apr. 2018, www.rollingstone.com/music/features/cover-story-janelle-monae- prince-new-lp-her-sexuality-w519523.