"The Problem With Beyhive Bottom Bitch Feminism"

This is going to be a long post. I apologize in advance 

I’m not versed in Pimp Theory (never heard of it before and, tbqh, I’m slightly uncomfortable with that metaphor) so I can’t speak to whether or not the authors’ description of a bottom bitch’s role in the hierarchy is correct. However, I think that discussing Beyonce’s ‘power’ and autonomy as it relates to her place in a power structure is a necessary thing. Her decisions and actions don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re informed by and supportive of a larger system and it’s necessary to look at the context.

Do I think Beyonce is a “bawse” [bottom] bitch? Not exactly. It’s fairly obvious to me that Bey thinks of herself as a “bawse”, but looking at her album sales, ticket sales, single charting, and penchant for copying she’s not really a long-term pace setter or someone who keeps any of her famous contemporaries “in check” or on their grind. I wouldn’t feel compelled to bring this up if so many feminists/womanists didn’t try to use her status as a “bawse” as the basis of why other women are supposed to admire her (or at least toe the line and feign some affinity for her music/image).

As far as social expectations for women re concerned I believe that 1) she’s subject to some of the same standards as regular women plus additional ones due her celebrity and chosen her career, 2) she has a mixed bag of privileges and deficits that inform how most people view her and her choices, and because of this 3) there are times when people underestimate or overestimate her reach as an individual. She does the feminism thing the way seems that’s comfortable for her – an all-female band, girl power “anthems”, occasionally talking about patriarchy in interviews, etc. Beyonce, as one entertainer, is not responsible for holding back the overall status or rights of women/girls in the music industry, in Hollywood, or globally. The authors never implied this but I find that her infamy and openly courting feminism makes her an easy scapegoat for criticism (especially from mainstream white feminists, but that’s another post for another day) and I find some of the shots fired at her to be cheap an unproductive. For example: criticizing her for being a capitalist. Singling her out when she is literally one of billions of players in a capitalist system is very weak, imo. I think that mental energy would be better spent looking at how/why she’s considered marketable by mainstream standards , what drives consumers’ tastes, and how that translates into spending. She doesn't have enough power to keep most regular folk "in check" as cogs in the machine so in that respect she's not a "bawse" bottom.

Re: that Jay-Zoo quote- it’s my understanding that his use of the phrase “eat the cake, Anna Mae” is supposed to be a euphemism for performing oral sex on Bey. I think it’s problematic that he would use an episode of domestic violence against one of his wife’s idols as a way of describing an intimate act with her. Some people chalk it up to his lyrical prowess as a rapper but I still find it to be in very poor taste.

Re: the comments section- some of the posters at least tried to be fair-minded but a good deal of them were whining about the authors trying to “tear down” Beyonce because she’s successful and at least trying to address feminism in a mainstream way, trying to “police” her brand of feminism by saying that she’s a pseudofeminist (which is a word they never used; people just pulled that one out of thin air), or trying to “police” her blackness due to her aesthetic. Too much projection! The most salient ideas I saw in the comments were
*It was her fans calling this a feminist album, not Bey or her promoters (she “didn’t use marketing”, remember?)
It's important to look at who's doing the labeling and why. Is it a feminist album just because it resonates with a lot of women? Is it automatically a feminist album because Beyonce called herself a feminist once? Though these women are by no means the sole arbiters of feminism it remains to be seen if any well-known feminist intellectuals or scholars would describe this as a feminist work...and one of them does it doesn’t mean that they won’t still critique it. Just because the “feminist” label is slapped on something that doesn’t mean that its potentially problematic elements disappear. At this point it only appears to be the Hive and hood-feminists who are waving this banner for Bey.

*If her “art” is to be critiqued in relation to feminism more of her music and videos should be engaged.
I know the authors said that they were planning to do another post on this but in the article they relied on a very limited segment of her work for this article. They could have included some other things for context’s sake (e.g., when and where she said she was a feminist, themes of liberation, objectification, etc. in prior work) while probing what supposedly makes this album feminist in the eyes of her fans.

*Bey is not an intellectual, nor is she a scholar.
Her conception of what feminism means is going to be much more rudimentary than someone like Kimberle Crenshaw or bell hooks and her “art” will reflect that when she chooses to promote a feminist message. A large swath of her fans and stans probably are not intellectuals or scholars (I’m not saying this as an insult, just a statement of likelihood). Whatever feminism they take from (or project onto) her work is probably going to be fairly basic. The authors didn’t say that they expect Audrey/Toni/Kimberle/bell –level thought from the Hive or their Queen but by quoting a prominent scholar they set the tone for a conversation that’s less accessible than if they’d just went with laypeople’s understanding of feminism.