Revolutionary Communal Love: Black Feminism in Beyoncé’s Lemonade

Corin Ford’s essay explores Beyoncé’s groundbreaking visual album, Lemonade, and its themes of Black unity, empowerment, and resilience. Ford walks us through Beyoncé’s sources of inspiration, which include both her own personal experiences and the work of other black activists, such as Joan Morgan and Audre Lorde. Ford also emphasizes Beyoncé’s inclusion of Black men in her activism, a key way in which her priorities differ from those of past movements. Ultimately, Ford’s essay provides a comprehensive analysis of the album’s message: a call for intersectional Black feminism rooted in community values.  –Elizabeth Emmons ’23, editorial assistant

Revolutionary Communal Love: Black Feminism in Beyoncé’s Lemonade

Corin Ford ‘26

Beyoncé’s maternal grandmother, Agnéz Dereon, passed her lemonade recipe down to her daughter and granddaughter. With this recipe, she preserved the knowledge of everyday alchemy, teaching Beyoncé how to transform pain into healing.  At her 90th birthday party, Beyoncé’s paternal grandmother, Hattie White, delivered the speech that would inspire her granddaughter’s 2016 visual album: “I’ve had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade”  (Knowles-Carter. Refer to this source for all future references). Named after her grandmothers’ wisdom, Lemonade is Beyoncé’s way of passing on their learned resilience. Centering love for her fellow Black women while including Black men in her activism, Beyoncé empowers her community against domestic and national betrayal. In Lemonade, Beyoncé envisions an internally grounded, intersectional Black feminism.

Beyond the women in her own life, Beyoncé draws from decades of Black feminism, recognizing her fellow Black women as a source of restoration. Reminiscent of Beyoncé’s marital conflict, poet Ntozake Shange’s 1976 Broadway play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, explores the struggle to find satisfaction and self-love outside of the male gaze. For colored girls concludes with the realization that validation cannot come from sex or men. In fact, peace cannot even come from a mother holding tight to her daughter, “sayin i’m always gonna be her girl.” Instead, it is the physical care of other women of color that restores the protagonists to wholeness. As opposed to maternal touch, this care does not deny the hardships the protagonists have weathered (Shange 62). Just like Shange’s characters cannot experience true release without acknowledgment of their struggle, Beyoncé cannot make lemonade without lemons. Furthermore, neither transformation is possible without the closeness of women who share the experience of rejection by men and the larger US society. 

This companionship is crucial in Beyoncé’s personal journey toward redemption. As Guardian journalist Syreeta McFadden asserts,

at the centre of Lemonade, there’s a shift as Beyoncé goes on a bus ride with women . . . whose faces are painted white in the Yoruba tradition of Ori . . . we are reminded [of] the power of sisterhood, a community that uplifts and preserves structure when it all seems like it’s falling apart. (McFadden)

In this transformational bus ride, it is not only the proximity of Beyoncé’s fellow Black women that brings her strength. Rather, each woman is empowered by her internal sanctity as expressed through Ori body paint. A concept originating in West Africa, Ori is an everyday divinity encompassing one’s soul and consciousness (Senbanjo). Finding a Shange-like internalized sense of self in shared African roots, Beyoncé gains energy by reconnecting with the women who are as much a part of her as her Black heritage. Their understanding and support help her discover her own capacity for growth, as well as her inherent worth outside of a man’s validation.

Moving away from her personal experience to national organizing, Beyoncé continues to emphasize the role of Black women in communal healing. A pivotal point in Lemonade, “Forward” marks the transition away from Jay-Z’s adultery to a discussion of racism in the United States. In this song, three mothers whose sons were brutally murdered by the police, Sybrina Fulton (mother of Trayvon Martin), Gwen Carr (mother of Eric Garner), and Lezley McSpadden (mother of Michael Brown) hold up pictures of their sons for the camera. This scene transforms into a gathering of famous Black women from different professional arenas in the United States, featuring cameos from Serena Williams to Zendaya. The dinner and following concert assert Black pride and power, with individual performances and collective celebration. This section of Lemonade takes place on a plantation, where enslaved Black women were diminished to birthing mechanisms for an inhuman workforce and routinely raped for profit. Standing defiant, these women reclaim the symbolic center of their community’s dehumanization.

Including Black men in this communal empowerment, Beyoncé departs from the priorities of radical Black feminists such as Shange. Although they are not the focus of the visual album, both Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s father, Mathew Knowles, are featured in Lemonade. Most notably, Beyoncé dedicates a song, “Daddy Lessons,” to her father, fondly remembering their closeness. At the same time, “Daddy Lessons” acknowledges Mathew Knowles’s fraught relationship with Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles. This conflict between love and mistreatment parallels Beyoncé’s own marriage and a larger system of racism and sexism. Beyoncé sings, “He held me in his arms / and he taught me to be strong / He told me when he’s gone / ‘here’s what you do: / when trouble comes in town / and men like me come around’ / Oh, my daddy said shoot.” Knowles is at once aware of and unchanging in his harmful behavior, as well as determined to raise his daughter to withstand men like him. While the women in Beyoncé’s family are more prominent in Lemonade, Beyoncé’s father also helped her find strength.

Mathew Knowles and Jay-Z are also shown in home videos, playing with their daughters and expressing their love for Beyoncé. There is a great deal of warmth between Beyoncé and the men in her life, a connection that, if more complicated than with her fellow Black women, can also be a source of power. Like Beyoncé, Black feminist Joan Morgan advocates for working with Black men to address their misogyny. In her 1999 book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down, Morgan argues that writing off Black men as sexist perpetuates an isolating “us v. them” narrative. Instead, Morgan advocates for the collaborative subversion of patriarchal gender norms; Black women finding worth outside of their appeal to men and Black men outside of their domination of women (Morgan, 44). While Beyoncé foregrounds Black women in her own and the country’s healing, she does not dismiss Black men as loved ones or as part of the larger movement for justice. Instead, she acknowledges their pain, using her marriage as a metaphor. Just as she hurt Jay-Z by walking away, Black women hurt Black men by giving up on them. Recognizing a complicated history of imperfect solidarity, Beyoncé’s Lemonade mobilizes love as the basis for change.

As a heteronormative superstar, Beyoncé’s perspective differs from queer, radical Black feminists like Shange. Throughout her career, Beyoncé has used dance to express her sexuality within the male gaze, building her fame as a sexual icon. She does this in a homophobic, patriarchal world where men govern sexual desire, and any woman expressing their sexuality must pander to a male audience. Perpetuating this system, much of Beyoncé’s work before and after Lemonade embodies what poet and Black feminist theorist Audre Lorde calls “the pornographic.” In her 1984 essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde defines the pornographic as “sensation without feeling,” or the externalization of what should be grounded in one’s self. In contrast, the erotic is an embrace of the internal – a standard of pleasure that informs not only daily life but also activism. Providing a deeper understanding of life’s potential for joy, the erotic reimagines social justice for an equitable, enjoyable future, not just against oppression (42). Partly because of her identity as a lesbian, Lorde’s erotic does not include men as an informant of the female experience. Instead, it creates space for women to reclaim their bodies and sexuality in a country seeking to externalize both, centering women’s internal, unconstrained emotions.

In Lemonade, Beyoncé reclaims dance as a means of Lorde’s erotic, rejecting her past objectification of herself, her dancers, and by extension, her Black female audience. Most of the visual album’s dance takes place in “Formation.” While this choreography is not desexualized, it is tonally different from Beyoncé’s other work, in that it utilizes dance as a catalyst for political discourse. A proclamation of Beyoncé’s Black Southern pride, this music video protests police brutality and the US’s failure to support victims of Hurricane Katrina. Alluding to the Black Panther Party, the choreography of “Formation” features a cast of Black female dancers proudly displaying combed-out hair, blockade formations, and militant fists. These women unapologetically express their raw anger at anti-Black racism in the United States, transforming it into joy and support through their collective movement. Embracing the previously suppressed internal, both the unmitigated negative of systemic oppression and the unmitigated positive of communal empowerment, dance in “Formation” utilizes Lorde’s erotic to inform activism.

Continuing Shange’s, Lorde’s, and Morgan’s feminist legacies, Beyoncé’s Lemonade models intersectional activism rooted in one’s immediate community. Modeling interpersonal critique grounded in love, Beyoncé advocates for an inclusion of Black men in Black feminist spaces that does not sideline Black women. Celebrating the women who supported her through Jay-Z’s infidelity and the women who sustain each other in the face of national crises, Beyoncé discovers love not only for her fellow Black women, but for herself. In a world built on the degradation of Black women, this love itself is a revolutionary act. It is this love that guided Beyoncé’s grandmothers, and it is this love that Beyoncé hopes to impress upon her audience.

Works Cited

Beyoncé. Lemonade, Parkwood Entertainment, 2016. www.beyonce.com/album/lemonade-visual-album/.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Penguin, 2020.

McFadden, Syreeta. “Beyoncé’s Lemonade Is #Blackgirlmagic at Its Most Potent.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/24/beyonce-lemonade-album-video-black-girl-magic-womanhood-america. Accessed 6 Apr 2023.

Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. Touchstone, 2000. 

Senbanjo, Laolu. “The Sacred Art of the Ori.” Laolu Senbanjo: “The Sacred Art of the Ori” | TED Talk, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/laolu_senbanjo_the_sacred_art_of_the_ori. Accessed 6 Apr 2023.

Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Macmillan, 1975.