On Dirty Computers and Dissemblance

David, Marlo D.

doi:10.1086/706517

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Dirty Computer provides an immersive audiovisual experience within a 48 minute 37 second ‘emotion picture’ released on YouTube in April 2018. 12 As Marlo D. David (2020, p. 542) notes, Dirty Computer belongs in the contemporary experimental category of the ‘visual album’, which ‘pairs a story arc with musical content meant to be watched as a single entity’. 13 Jane 57821 and her experiences in a dystopian future world where people who fail to conform to social norms are captured and ‘cleaned’ of ‘dirty thoughts’ by a totalitarian regime provide the narrative vehicle for the music videos.…”

Section: Hieroglyphics Of the Flesh: Dirty Computermentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Hell You Talmbout’: Janelle Monáe’s Black Cyberfeminist Sonic Aesthetics

Yates-Richard¹

2021

Feminist Review

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This article explores the ways in which Janelle Monáe’s audiovisual performances leverage black female flesh to trouble historically constituted imaginings of ‘the human’. Tracking Monáe’s audiovisual aesthetics across ‘Many moons’ and Dirty Computer, I interrogate acoustic and imagistic resonances that recall the repeating horrors of bondage, and which also constitute performative ‘fabulations’ whereby freedoms that are engendered specifically by and within black female flesh might be imagined. Monáe ‘enfleshes’ the cyborg to critique cyberfeminist and posthumanist theories that advocate for material dissolution as a framework for liberation, as well as to trouble black women’s historical relationships to the category ‘human’. Rather than understand Dirty Computer as a (re)turn to the human Monáe, I contend that the project extends the artist’s longstanding critical engagement with the black female cyborg and black sonic cyberfeminist liberatory potentialities.

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Section: Hieroglyphics Of the Flesh: Dirty Computermentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Hell You Talmbout’: Janelle Monáe’s Black Cyberfeminist Sonic Aesthetics

Yates-Richard¹

2021

Feminist Review

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Let’s dance: Diversified depictions of queerness in ensemble dance music videos

Loji

2021

Queer Studies in Media &Amp; Popular Culture

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As delineations of queer and LGBT culture continue to be complicated in academic and community settings, queer musicians are pushing the boundaries of their own gestural expression within their music videos and utilizing the medium of dance to further broaden their self-definitions. Using choreographed group dance, a common convention in mainstream music videos, Sam Smith, Janelle Monáe and Christine and the Queens (and their production teams) make particular creative choices that allow them to expand expressions of identity and solidarity within both the queer community and society at large. In this article, I employ detailed analysis of the aesthetic qualities of three music videos and synthesis of scholarly perspectives as they relate to queer expression to argue that the creative freedom and collaboration inherent to the ensemble dance form provide a rich platform through which these artists can experiment with fluid conceptions of their identities and bring to popular culture the kinds of non-determinative outlooks explored in conceptualizations of queer theory.

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On Dirty Computers and Dissemblance

Cited by 2 publications

References 2 publications

‘Hell You Talmbout’: Janelle Monáe’s Black Cyberfeminist Sonic Aesthetics

‘Hell You Talmbout’: Janelle Monáe’s Black Cyberfeminist Sonic Aesthetics

Let’s dance: Diversified depictions of queerness in ensemble dance music videos

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