Teaching Lemonade (Beyoncé) in a feminism course (Louise Pedersen)

By Louise Pedersen, University of Utah

I am a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Utah. During the Fall ’19 and Spring ’20 semesters I taught an upper-level undergraduate course titled “Philosophical Issues in Feminism: Lessons from Beyoncé’s Lemonade.” During the first week of class, the students watched Lemonade, which served as the entry point into the academic literature on the related topics. I got the idea for the class from writer Candice Benbow who, after the release of Lemonade in 2016, initiated an interdisciplinary collection of texts (over 200) that could be used for a Lemonade syllabus (Lemonade Syllabus 2016).    

For those unfamiliar with the world of Beyoncé, Lemonade is a visual album featuring twelve songs that narrate the struggles of being a Black woman in America. Each song is accompanied by its own music video, and when watched in sequence, these videos create a one-hour movie full of visually stunning imagery. The narrative of the film tells a story of a woman who has been betrayed by her husband. It is an intimate look at a personal love story that covers eleven emotional stages: intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, and redemption. While the story is captivating, it is the metanarrative of Lemonade that is philosophically interesting. The metanarrative concerns the broader context of historical meaning, embodied experiences, and knowledge production (from the perspective of Black women). These are the philosophical elements that I teased out of Lemonade.

Teaching Lemonade as feminist philosophy is a way to connect critical theory with real-world issues. The students learned how (theoretical) issues of gender, race, and oppression are undeniably related to the history of African American women. While the star power of Beyoncé might initially have interested students in the class, I found that they quickly switched their focus and became immersed in the topics from the metanarrative.

Building the Syllabus Based on Lemonade’s Metanarrative

When I taught the class, I divided it into three units: feminism, intersectionality, and race and oppression. We spent roughly five weeks on each unit. During the fall semester, I taught the class twice a week (80-minute classes), and during the spring, I taught it three times a week (50-minute classes). I preferred the format of twice a week since it gave me more time to go in-depth with the “heavier” material.

Unit 1, Feminism: Lemonade invites questions about what it means to be a feminist. Can a feminist be sexy (as Beyoncé surely seems to believe)? Why would some, like bell hooks in her article Moving Beyond Pain, say that Beyoncé, in all her exploitative, capitalist endeavors, is bad for feminism? How should feminist philosophy be understood with regards to dominance and patriarchy? The main readings for unit 1 were from Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought supplemented by articles by Catharine MacKinnon, Sally Haslanger, and Sandra Lee Bartky.

Unit 2, Intersectionality: Intersectionality is an integral part of Lemonade. With Black women portrayed in all shapes and sizes against an antebellum background, we are reminded that gender, class, and race (to mention a few factors) are ever-present features of our social world. In this unit, I stressed the importance of acknowledging privilege and understanding the multifaceted adverse effects of oppression. The University of Utah does not have a very diverse student body (it is 70% white with just 1% African American), so this was a good teaching opportunity to raise awareness of a topic that the students (most likely) had been unaware of.

It is important to note that I am also a white woman. I was born and raised in middle-class Denmark, but I have lived in the United States for the last twenty years. I use myself as an example of being aware of my privilege, and I am conscious of trying not to speak for others in ways that are harmful (to not encroach where I have no epistemic authority). This problem of speaking for others, as Linda Alcoff has argued, is one that comes with a heavy responsibility, as it could reinforce existing hierarchies and silence lesser-privileged groups. The main readings for unit 2 were from Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s Intersectionality accompanied by articles by Marilyn Frye and bell hooks.

Unit 3, Race and Oppression: In Lemonade we hear Jay-Z’s grandmother give a speech in which she says “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” Beyoncé’s use of this idiom is an ode to Black women. Despite a history of oppression, they have proven to be resilient and strong against such hardship. In unit 3, I focused on what a theoretical framework of oppression might look like and on what connections such a framework would have to race. The readings for unit 3 were a selection of articles by Iris Marion Young, Kristie Dotson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Anthony Kwame Appiah.

Assignments

The students were graded on a variety of assignments: two short reflection papers (20% of final grade), participation (20%), a short presentation of a topic (relevant to the class) from a news article (15%), a comprehensive final exam (20%), a final paper abstract (5%), and a “Lesson Learned” final paper (20%). By writing the five-page final paper, the students came full circle. They had to choose a lesson they had found valuable from Lemonade and connect it to something they had learned from the metanarrative. They students were incredibly resourceful and imaginative in writing these assignments. Here are some examples of the titles of papers the students wrote: “Forgiveness, Faith, and Redemption in Lemonade,” “Black Women’s Spirituality in Lemonade,” “Cultural Trauma and Black Families,” Color Brave: The Symbolic Use of Color in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” “Personal Identity in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” and “Southern Reformation: Beyoncé’s Rejection of Negative Stereotypes in Lemonade.”

In conclusion, using popular culture as an entry point into philosophy is a great way to gain the interest of undergraduate students. Beyoncé’s Lemonade offers rich opportunities for philosophical inquiry, as it is full of subtle references to gender, race, oppression, power, and hierarchal relationships. Lemonade puts black girl magic at the center, and, very unapologetically, squeezes those lemons and douses them with a heaping spoonful of sugar.

 

 

Comments

[Michael]

This is amazing. Thanks for sharing!

[Maja Sidzinska]

This is pretty great! Many of the readings in the syllabus are ones I assigned in a course I taught titled "Feminist Moral Issues."

I have one little quibble with Unit 3, however, which is that it may risk suggesting that responses to oppression are/should be/can only be individualistic. Whether or not it suggests that depends on which readings are used, of course. The 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' narrative is certainly empowering *to individuals*; indeed it appears in many fictional and non-fictional stories that inspire us to overcome adversity (as individuals). But since it is a liberal/neoliberal doctrine after all, it completely fails as a strategy to explain or oppose systemic/structural oppression. Drawing out this weakness of that narrative has proven to be one of the bigger challenges (for me, at least, in the course I taught) because of how compelling to each student the narrative is *personally*.

[sherwan gul]

this is good add up to the feminism course for emteroernur feminists “Cultural Trauma and Black Families,” Color Brave: The Symbolic Use of Color in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,