(3) Destiny's Child, “Bootylicious”
outjellied
(1) Beyoncé, “Single Ladies”
114-59
and play in the final four
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/23/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)
HEA-REAM LEE ON BEYONCÉ’S “SINGLE LADIES (PUT A RING ON IT)
Recently I have been writing my marriage vows, and so I am rereading one of my favorite manifestos: “Against the Couple-Form.” This is a piece of writing I first stumbled across as a young adult, probably through Tumblr, and have returned to at various points in my life. I have read it in college as I was regularly getting my heart absolutely wrecked on a beer-lacquered frat house dance floor, in my 20s as a long-term relationship unraveled itself one doubt-drenched thread at a time, and now at the cusp of my wedding to the person I hope to know until I die, an event that is perhaps the ultimate culmination of the couple form. This essay, written by the mysterious Clemence x Clementine, posits a feminist and Marxist critique of the idea of coupledom. They are ardently and passionately against couples (and by this they almost entirely mean cis het couples, to their argument’s detriment) and the way that society has elevated the pursuit and maintenance of the couple above all other relationships. How society enshrines political, cultural, social, and financial power within romantic relationships. As they say, “Patriarchy and capitalism thwart any possibility to love in a way that liberates oneself from the logic of the couple or from one’s own oppression. To liberate love necessarily involves the abolition of patriarchy and capitalism.”
I’ve also been thinking about this essay because I’ve been listening to Beyonce’s 2008 hit, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” This is a song that you have probably heard. You may have seen the incredible music video, or one of the many parodies it spawned. If you’re me, you have danced to it at your junior year homecoming dance and at countless other parties and functions, in various contexts, throughout the years. It is, indubitably, a bop. The production is delightfully weird with a lilting, bouncing beat, hand claps, bleep-boop trills and grandiose synths. Beyonce’s voice floats above, doubled, tripled, calling and responding to itself, triumphant in some moments, teasing in others, always maintaining its trademark virtuosic range and palpable warmth. It’s basically impossible not to dance to it. I’m dancing to it at my desk right now.
I think this song often gets read as the battle hymn of the republic of girlbosses. In a Refinery29 article about the song for its 10th anniversary, the writer asserts that “Single Ladies'' is an “empowerment anthem, encouraging women to forget about their trash exes and live their best lives.” I think it’s a fascinating text, tonally kaleidoscopic and slippery in its address, heartbroken and venomous and hopeful all at once.
We start with Beyonce’s call to the titular single ladies. In the verses she’s at the club after breaking up with an ex of three years, an ex who is also at that club noticing her dance with another guy and is now jealous and angry. There’s a hint of vengeance as she sings, “I can care less what you think. I need no permission, did I mention?” The ex is the ‘you’ in the chorus, the person she taunts with the statement, “if you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” To me, this song is about marriage. If you liked it, you should have proposed to me. If you liked it, you should have committed to me. You should have wanted to marry me. You should have wanted me in the way I wanted to be wanted. You should have seen me as worthy of cementing our relationship with a legal contract. Now I’m with someone else and you’re mad, and fuck you.
If you’re me, and you’ve been writing your marriage vows and thinking a lot about what one person can reasonably promise another, about the beauty and the struggle of fitting a form to a feeling, then you can’t help but read in this song a full investment in the couple form. It’s in the idea of the marriage proposal as trophy, an accomplishment, something that is obvious and that we are entitled to. It deeply troubles me, this idea that the final and highest expression of love should be in the form of the romantic couple. That the achievement of this status should supercede other achievements, that other forms of love, other forms of family and community, are less valued and less real than forever couplehood. The way that being in a couple atomizes you, separates you from the world.
My reading of ‘Against the Couple Form’ has changed over the years. I find its treatment of gender overly simplistic, its description of power dynamics lacking in nuance, no discussions of race, class, or disability. Apparently Clemence x Clementine’s thinking has also changed. Four years after the original essay was published, they released a follow-up. In it, they respond to some of their original points, like “we consider the abolition of the boyfriend and the husband part of the historical movement superseding capitalism and patriarchy.” While they stood by their original thought that the couple is a privileged form and can be one of many ways of hiding from true community, from real struggle (“We are still sick of couples and coupley people. We think you are boring and pathetic”), they essentially walk back one of their main ideas, writing, “The denunciation of the couple, the boyfriend, the partner, the plus one may be a form of projection. A way of banishing those things we are afraid to see in ourselves, making them properties of the couple.” I read in the follow-up a turn towards nuance, towards the tenderness and knowledge of self that love can bring. If you are searching for a political argument for romantic love, maybe it’s the way your love for a person can open you up towards other kinds of love, can deepen and enrich your thinking, can help you practice care and solidarity and tenderness and extend them to others. That you can actively cultivate this part of your love together, guard and tend the ways your love flows outwards as well as inwards. It makes me feel hopeful to think about this now, on the verge of something that feels so momentous. It makes the pursuit seem worthy, something to aspire to together.
There’s a moment in “Single Ladies” that I love. It’s in the bridge, when there’s a sonic and lyrical shift. The ‘you’ of the song changes from her ex, to the person she has now fallen in love with. “Here’s a man that makes me, then takes me, and delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond. Pull me into your arms, say I’m the one you want.” In the bridge, I hear a version of Beyonce that doesn’t feel like a tragic victim of the couple form like the rest of us, but someone who believes in love as an animating force. That care and tenderness exist in romantic relationships and beyond. That love in all its forms enriches her life and teaches her about herself, inspires her towards action and away from isolation. That to want to love and to be loved is a brave thing, that this vulnerability makes her a better artist, that she is so much more than a half of a whole. And that to continue to believe these things, and to recognize these beliefs and honor them in another person, is maybe the truest thing we can vow to each other.
Hea-Ream Lee is a writer and teacher living in Tucson. Hea-Ream’s writing has appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, Terrain.org, Popula, and others, and her work has been anthologized in The Lyric Essay as Resistance (2023). She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Wormfarm Institute. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona, where she edited fiction for Sonora Review and where she currently teaches writing to undergraduate students. Hea-Ream also serves as a faculty mentor for the Carson Scholars Program, a graduate fellowship in science communication.
WE’VE BEEN READY FOR THIS JELLY: DESTINY’S CHILD “BOOTYLICIOUS” AND THE PURSUIT FOR SEXUAL SOVEREIGNTY BY AVERY FERIN
Picture it: icy rain spits on the window beside my head as my mother drives me home from swim practice sometime during the slushed winter of 2010. I'm sitting in the backseat of our 2004 Saab with my scabby knees propped up on the seatback in front of me and a library copy of The Twilight Saga: New Moon clutched in my hands like a crucifix. I’m chewing on the lip of a bottle of strawberry-kiwi Propel when the introductory notes of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” filter from the car stereo. I bob my head along to the familiar strum pattern as I flip the page. It’s not long, no more than 7 or 8 seconds, before the percussive scratch intersects what I’d assumed to be an ordinary song for the evening car ride home. If I had to guess, within the next few moments a woman’s honeysuckle voice would fill the cabin as the song fades, reminding us that we were listening to Delilah on Star 105.7.
Kelly, can you handle this? My eyes drift up from the page.
Michelle, can you handle this? I’m hanging on every word. Who’s Michelle? Can she handle it, whatever “this” is?
Beyonce, can you handle this? A name I recognize, and I’m not even fully certain I can handle it by this point.
I replay the hook over and over in my head, determined to remember the lyrics so that when I arrive home that evening, I can look it up and listen to it again. I make a mad dash to the family computer and type “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” into the search bar. A video pops up. The video pops up. I hover my mouse over the play button, and I am immersed in a sort of pop excellence I’d never experienced before.
“Bootylicious” serves as the fourth and final #1 hit for the power group Destiny’s Child, a sort of au revoir before the three women split in separate yet triumphant directions. What makes this song so incredible lies within its layers. Upon first listening, it’s easy to write it off as just another earworm-heavy dance track, and this is not to say that it isn’t, but I beseech you to consider it on a grander scope.
Looking past its superficial veneer, “Bootylicious” functions as a narrative that punches upward from a place of fierce sumptuousness—a sense of self-empowerment that women, namely black women, have been coxswained away from for centuries. Though much of the world exists under the supposition that we’ve come far enough as a society in terms of body acceptance, the problem is enormously prevalent and subsists right there in plain sight—in the very words themselves.
See, body acceptance is all well and good, and is a baseline requisite. It’s one thing to merely accept one’s body, but the suggestion of such is that this is the pinnacle of self-love. This standard is exactly where the song pokes holes. Is “acceptance” the utmost bar for which women are expected to reach? Just contentedness? Destiny’s Child certainly didn’t think so.
Peering through the rubble left over from years of derisive body negativity imposed by the 90’s high-fashion industry, with its Kate Mosses and Naomi Campbells, “Bootylicious” shone through the cracks (no pun intended) and proposed an alternative narrative. What if women were encouraged to not just make peace with their bodies and instead given the conviction to celebrate them?
I wish I could say that I was too young to understand the context of the song, that the sexuality of it all sailed right over my head, but I was a thirteen-year-old girl in 2010; I already knew what it meant to exist in a sexualized body, in this objectifiable framework. What I didn’t know, however, was the power such an anthem could hold or what sort of hand that song could play in what can only be described as a sexual revolution. At thirteen, though, I had already started feeling the ache of expectation on my back as my body began to swell in new places and my hips no longer fit into clothes I’d worn not even a year prior. But in that video, I saw bodies that didn’t just look like the ones I was used to seeing in my mother’s copies of Elle or Glamour. I saw bodies of various shapes, colors, and genders – a completely novel concept for what I’d previously known to be “fabulous”.
I acknowledge that I am a White woman writing about Black women singing about Black love and, moreover, the celebration of Black bodies. I do not know what it felt like to hear “Bootylicious” for the first time as a young Black girl in the early 2000s. I do not know what it is like to be a Black woman, nor will I ever pretend to. What I do know, however, is what it is like to feel as though I am a product of own body, self-worth equated with my figure and frame. I know what it feels like to toss the dice of self-opinion each morning, wondering how I am going to feel about the woman in the mirror when I finally get out of bed. And I do know what it feels like to try and navigate a culture that favors figures I have tried and failed to embody. I was young girl hearing a song about body-love for the first time and it sounded something like the unlocking of a cuff.
The pervasive cultural obsession with thinness bears a steep history embedded in racism that stems as far back as the Renaissance period. Most of us are familiar with the term “fat phobia”, or the compulsive fear of fatness, in the contemporary sense and the detriment it has on the mental health of those targeted. But fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, was not derivative of medical outcomes or perpetrator’s concern for the physical welfare of others, but rather with the belief that fatness was indicative of racial subsidiarity that dates to the Enlightenment era. It expressed itself in the medical industry with the genesis of the body mass index, which levies white male body standards on the world. In the 1940s, the ideals for the Miss American beauty pageant boasted strict obligations for participants, stating that they desired “slender bodies of good health and white race”.
In the book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings writes “Slavery was an incredibly lucrative enterprise and so it was so important to race scientists, who were invested in slavery, to keep a hierarchy in which Black women were not deemed to be the equivalent of white women.”
The conversation surrounding human sexuality has historically omitted the voices of women, muting us into submission and annulled of opportunity to express our desires. When we dare to speak about sex, even in terms of our own bodies, we are branded with labels, scarlet letters, reputations, and ostracization. The censure of avowed sexual desire makes it so that sex is able to be employed as a weapon of power, status, and even manipulation. Further than this, the enforced proclivity to evade conversations involving women’s sexuality can lead to feelings of insecurity and discomfort with any critical health concerns that may correlate.
So how does a singular, inconspicuous dance track from 2001 become a purveyor of bodily and sexual autonomy for women, namely Black women? The answer lies right there in the question itself. “Bootylicious” offers itself as a simple club anthem in the ilk of TLC and The Pussycat Dolls, skyrocketing to the tops of charts and wriggling its way onto dancefloors everywhere while concurrently opening the door for a larger conversation about sexual autonomy. It’s the demonstration of power through joy and celebration and an outrageously catchy chorus, daring to confront the racially charged idea of “beauty”.
Did “Bootylicious” unanimously cure the modern world of body negativity? Probably not. Did it diminish all cynics who attempt to tell women what we are allowed to feel confident about when it comes to our own bodies? Hardly. Did its raucous declaration of self-confidence intimidate, nay, defeat every single person who sought to impose shame upon women for asserting their desires? Not likely. But perhaps this is entirely beside the point.
The power of a song resides within the individual and their singular set of experiences. What “Bootylicious” means to me will always be different from what it means to, say, the woman standing behind me in the CVS self-checkout line. What might be just another Top 40 hit to one person could be the reason behind the self-freedom of another. Everything we create holds the ability to endorse change, and everything we create possesses the power to inspire. So yes, the world is ready for this jelly; we always have been, we just needed the lyrical influence of one of the best girl groups of all time to remind us.
Avery Ferin is a teacher and fiction writer presently residing in Chicago, IL. She attended DePaul University, where she graduated with her BA in English and MFA in Writing & Publishing, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of its art & literature magazine Crook & Folly. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Kitchen Table Quarterly, Motley Magazine, and The Grand Rapids Press. She is the recipient of the 2022 Story Studio Master's Award and the 2024 AWP Scholarship. Her short story, "Summer on Lloyd's Bayou" was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart prize. She currently teaches Creative Writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts.