Intimacy, Authenticity and ‘Worlding’ in Beyoncé’s Star Project

Worlding Popular Culture

“…Against critics who have, in the manner of Saunders, argued that Beyoncé's "status as mass commercial product" taints any feminist or anti-racist political meanings her work may generate, Macrossan insists that the "Beyoncé World" so carefully created and maintained by the star, while certainly being geared toward increasing her fame and wealth, also posits alternate realities that feed off and enter into a critical dialogue with the world-as-is, potentially co-creating it otherwise. 57 Beyoncé's 2016 Lemonade video, for example, features an "anachronistic, fantastical and utopian" 58 American South free from white slaveowners that, Macrossan emphasizes, is not taken by Beyoncé's audience-which is "aware of the processes of presentation of Beyoncé World" 59 -as real, authentic, or uncommodified. Instead, it is recognized as a strategic, aspirational world-imagining that empowers Beyoncé and her black fans through "a quite deliberate situating of oneself on the border of different belongings so as the rebuild the world as more open-ended.t"?…”

“Dog boy, media whore. It’s who the hell you take me for”

“…In handing over the performative potential of the online archive to individual social media users, social media take the basic infrastructure behind the fan archive to the next level. The Instagram handle of the @brianmolkoworld account additionally invokes the concept of "worlding" that screen studies scholar Phoebe Macrossan borrowed from film theory in her discussion of pop artists' episodic manifestations across media (Macrossan 2018). An Instagram account dedicated to Molko's 'world' explicitly aligns the fundamentally nonlinear and fragmented nature of persona with the equally non-linear and fragmented script of social media.…”