Women’s Issues With/(out) Human Tissue: The Afrofuturist/Feminist Android in Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady

! In an online interview discussing the creation and significance of the Afrofuturist

movement, Alondra Nelson, one of the foremost Afrofuturist scholars, provides Janelle

Monáe as an excellent example of a contemporary R&B musician who also happens to

be a self-proclaimed Afrofuturist. There is not a lot of scholarship on Afrofuturism--

names of scholars seem to circulate mostly within the realm of Afrofuturist scholarship

alone. Additionally, my research turned up precisely zero hits when searching for

literary scholarship on Janelle Monáe’s work in general, let alone Monáe’s work in

relation to Afrofuturism. However, after reading the articles by Kodwo Eshun,

Alexander Weheliye, and Marco David, I began to understand the purpose behind

Afrofuturism and will outline what Afrofuturism is (and why it exists) later on in the

essay.

! But why Janelle Monáe? Most people who listen to popular R&B and Hip Hop

have never really heard of her. I myself never listen to R&B, Hip Hop, or Rap, but when

a feminist friend of mine recommended I listen to more of her music, I looked her up.

Janelle’s music video “Q.U.E.E.N.” was my first encounter. I was pulled in by the

conceit offered at the beginning of the video: a “living museum,” sponsored by a “Time

Liana Willis!

Dan Cottom

ENGL 4990

17 November 2013

Counsel” dedicated to further a “musical weapons program” launched in the 21st-

century1. Aside from the bold aesthetics of the music video, I found myself getting into

the music for its sheer power and magnitude, something that rarely happens when I

listen to the songs that play on the radio--a genre I assumed Janelle Monáe belonged to.

! I found myself re-watching the video over and over again and, as all good

English majors do, I looked up the lyrics online, wanting to figure out why “just another

pop culture icon” was actually speaking to me rather than offending me. After doing

so, I wasn’t surprised I was drawn to Monáe’s work. The lyrics were meaningful and so

were the concepts behind her music videos (the video for “Tightrope,” which I viewed

in a Janelle Monáe playlist shortly after my baptism into the world of Janelle

Monáe--”baptism” being a very appropriate word as she is becoming, very quickly

(judging by the social media I encounter at at least) an idol for many in the U.S.). My

interest had been piqued to the point of further research.

! I bought her album and fell in love with it too (thinking this could be, after all,

one of those reoccurring instances wherein only one song is worth listening to in an

entire corpus). As I explored the lyrics and scoured interviews with Janelle Monáe

online, I was not surprised to find out that she was a self-proclaimed feminist. But, also

like any good English major, I was skeptical: many pop culture icons have made claims

to being feminist--Beyonce is one, as is Ke$ha, and, most recently added to the list is

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1 For viewing access, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEddixS-UoU

Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke of the infamous “Blurred Lines” video2. Thus, one could

say, the motivation behind this essay is really began centered around two questions:

Why is Janelle Monáe better than Beyonce? And what makes Janelle Monae’s feminism

special? Although I will not answer these questions directly through the essay, after

having read the essay (or even before, whichever the reader prefers), just a quick scan

through any Beyonce video in comparison to the “Q.U.E.E.N.” video will perfectly

illustrate the differences between the two.

! As I will argue, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist-Feminist portrayal of Cindi

Mayweather (her persona as the album’s“creator,”an aspect integral to the conceit of

The Electric Lady) revises the cultural, traditional tropes regarding women. Her revision

offers women agency, primarily through the advocacy for unlimited, unhindered, even

“insane” self expression at the expense of (and due to) sociocultural conventions. Her

conception of self expression is predicated upon, first and foremost, self acceptance,

especially in direct assertion against the sociopolitical structures that seek to annihilate

difference in what is conventionally labeled as "Other." This can be explained from a

multitude of angles (for example, in terms of race alone, which is most common in

Afrofuturist analyses) but for the purpose of this essay I will explore the Android figure

in particular as an emblem of the female’s experience as "Other." In so doing, I will

discuss this conceit in relation to Afrofuturism and the concept of revision generally,

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2 If unfamliar, you can find the video just about anywhere online. For a feminist’s take on the controversy: http://www.policymic.com/articles/56069/a-feminist-takedown-of-robin-thicke-and-anyone-who-thinks-there-s-something-blurry-about-sexism

especially as put forth by Adrienne Rich in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing in Re-

Vision,” making sure to draw out and emphasize the distinctiveness of Janelle Monáe’s

revisioning.

! While the focus will primarily remain on the songs “Q.U.E.E.N.” and “Electric

Lady,” “Ghetto Woman,” and “Sally Ride,” I will also refer to other videos and songs

within her corpus along the way. Links with access to songs, videos, and lyrics

mentioned in, but not crucial to, the analysis are provided in the appropriate footnotes.

For lyrics to the songs I do discuss in detail, see the appendix provided.

The Origin, Claims, and Implications of the Afrofuturist Movement

!! Unlike most schools of thought, Afrofuturism is both a theoretical and activist

endeavor. Their website makes this clear, immediately offering a “loose” definition of

the Afrofuturist movement as “the culture of the urbanized underclass, of the

disaffected and the disillusioned masses” based in the genre of Hip Hop, which is seen,

from an Afrofuturist perspective, as the “post-modern deconstruction of a Western

European meta-narrative” that “stands as an exemplar of the effect upon the individual

of societal ills that are now global in scope.” As the name suggests, the members of the

Afrofuturist movement, both scholars and musicians, are all predominantly African-

American, and their respective scholarship and music tend to thus dwell on the

inequalities that face African-Americans in particular. This means bringing the

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conversation to bear on the Afrodiasporic experience, but in ways that seem to clearly

differ from the previous, more straightforward discourses concerning the African

diaspora, as well as the colonization and slavery which led to its creation.

! One of the defining characteristics of the Afrofuturist movement is its unique use

of science fiction elements as a way of commenting upon the modern-day African

American’s experience as “Other.” But, as we will see, the predominant focus of this

“technique” in no way limits the scope of Afrofuturism’s concerns to African-

Americans, precisely because, in science fiction, an alien is simply an alien, no matter

what its skin color, gender, ethnicity or nationality. In fact, as we will see with Janelle

Monáe, the necessary absence of such traits actually creates a space in which everyone

can identify, thus allowing for “a discourse of extraordinary exceptionalism that

surpasses nation-hood and represents an elevated sense of connection, of oneness, of

common cause” (Hip Hop and Afrofuturism). However, in doing so, the use of science

fiction and the displacement of human being and humanness altogether results also in a

critique of human nature. It is important to note, however, that this critique is rooted in

a particular historical and sociocultural context, its referent being not some abstract

concept of “human nature,” but a particular notion instigated within Enlightenment

humanist discourse that, for Afrofuturists, speciously emphasized a universal human

condition that nevertheless excluded African-Americans (and Africans, and all

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arbitrarily designated “Others”) from actual consideration. As Kodwo Eshun writes in

“Future Considerations for Afrofuturism”:

! ! Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction

! ! writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same.

! ! In The Last Angel of History, Tate argued that “The form itself, the

! ! conventions of the narrative in terms of the way it deals with subjectivity,

! ! focuses on someone who is at odds with the apparatus of power in society

! ! and whose profound experience is one of cultural dislocation, alienation

! ! and estrangement. Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how

! ! the individual is going to contend with these alienating, dislocating

! ! societies and circumstances and that pretty much sums up the mass

! ! experiences of black people in the post-slavery twentieth century.” (298;

! ! emphasis mine)

Thus the exclusiveness of the “humanist” idiom continues on, and so science fiction

becomes the perfect genre for Hip Hop, Rap, and R&B artists to manifest their various

political and social critiques of the presently disaffected and systematically oppressed.

Science fiction, and Afrofuturism in particular, offers an outlook that is “neither

forward-looking or utopian,” since, despite what its moniker may suggest, it is always

situated on the present (290). It is a movement that seeks to provide in its tech-heavy

artificiality “a means through which to preprogram the present” (290). Like science

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fiction generally, Afrofuturism is less about imagining a naive, cliched world of

undifferentiated unity as a species (although this aspect still lingers, as one of its

primary aims is to show that “a global political consciousness is a precursor to a global

spiritual consciousness” (Hip Hop and Afrofuturism)), but more about voicing concerns

by “engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (290;

emphasis mine).

“Reprogram, Deprogram, and Get Down”: Replacing the “Dark Lady” with the “Electric Lady”

! ! “And so you have songs like "Q.U.E.E.N." Erykah Badu and I ! ! wanted to have a female-empowerment song, but we also ! ! wanted to raise the questions of how people judge women in ! ! society and how they can slut-shame her or treat her ! ! differently. And I wanted to raise the question about how ! ! we're treating the ‘Others.’” --Janelle Monáe in Esquire, 2013

“She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together, she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the "words' masculine persuasive force" of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men…” (Rich 39)

!The term “Dark Lady” refers to a sequence of the only extant collection of

Shakespeare’s sonnets. As the quotation from Adrienne Rich suggests, while the

“Dark Lady” sonnets are notable in their own revision of the Petrarchan sonnet

tradition, they are by no means liberating for the “dark-haired” woman who is

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now able to perhaps see a version of herself in a love poem, whereas the majority

of sonnets in the courtly love poetry tradition had emphasized blonder hair (as

well as fair skin and blue eyes--all of which the “Dark Lady” is the complete

opposite of). I do not mean to imply that Shakespeare is deliberately trying to

offer a woman to his “dark-haired” female audience, but the opposite. Many

scholars have argued that sonnets (especially the “Dark Lady” sonnets) are

directed more toward a male audience rather than a female audience, thus

validating the point Rich makes above. But I also do not mean to suggest the

“Dark Lady” sonnets are the source, nor even a perfect example of the ways in

which women fail to find role models or simply recognize themselves in the

various women portrayed before women writers were discovered. In this essay,

“The Dark Lady” trope simply serves as one example of a revision (whether

intended or unintended is not the point). Just as the “Dark Lady” revised the

ideal Petrarchan beauty, so too does Janelle Monae “re-vision” (in Rich’s terms)

her own conception of what a “lady” is: that is to say, an Electric Lady.

! Before beginning to discuss Monáe’s revision with regard to the specific

works in consideration, the conceit and concept behind the android as an

emblem for the 21st century woman first calls for explanation. While many may

be familiar with the cyborg as conceived by scholars such as Donna J. Haraway,

the android is a different being altogether. It is completely robotic; its

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resemblance to the human form is pure artifice, rather than the cyborg’s form

which adds robotic parts to a primarily human body. Recalling that the use of

science fiction is used to profess the insufficiencies of humanistic discourses that

effectively and historically ostracized African-Americans, the use of the android--

a machine, rather than a human being--makes sense in terms of speaking to

alienation as it is almost quintessentially alien, perhaps only less alien in

comparison to extraterrestrial aliens. As Alexander Weheliye explains:

! ! Eshun claims that the sign of the human harbors a negative significance,

! ! if any, in Afrofuturist musical configurations. In these genres, he argues,

! ! shifting forms of nonhuman otherworldliness replace the human as the

! ! central characteristic of black subjectivity:... As a result of the

! ! dehumanizing forces of slavery, in Eshun’s frame of reference, certain

! ! kinds of black popular music stage black subjectivity, bypassing the

! ! modality of the human in the process of moving from the subhuman to

! ! the posthuman." (29)

A cyborg would qualify as something “subhuman,” as it could be perceived,

ungenerously at least, as an adulterated form of the human (indeed, Haraway’s defense

of the concept of the cyborg is created partially in order to refute such perceptions).

However, on the other hand, the android is perhaps so quintessentially “Other,”

especially in an exceedingly tech-heavy, tech-savvy world as our own, that it is, as

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Weheliye puts it, “posthuman.” He associates this distinction as primarily one

replacing notions of the “human” which were (and are) predominately only attributed

to those who are “white,” when placed within the consequences of African diaspora.

The presence of “black subjectivity” as expressed through such a form as an android for

Janelle Monáe allows for the “Other” to now be considered, but only after liberating

itself from what may seem to be unifying, but in actuality is merely a disguised

interpellation of black subjectivity within white subjectivity.

! This is the beauty of Janelle Monáe’s use of her android, Cindi Mayweather. She

is in no way apologetic for the fact that she is an android and makes clear that she is an

android. In fact, her very nature as an android is even pitted against that of human

beings, going so far as to seemingly characterize all human beings as oppressors and

narrow-minded bigots in The Electric Lady. For example, in the interlude “Our Favorite

Fugitive” DJ Crash Crash (who appears periodically like any DJ on the radio to

transition from one song to another), an android himself, takes some calls from those

tuning in.3 One girl who calls in says that she is “disgusted” that there are people who

support Cindi Mayweather because “she’s not even human,” and that they should do to

her whatever “they do to people like that.” Another caller asks if “those in the Android

Community” (clearly a reference to the term “Black Community”) really believe that

Cindi Mayweather is “the ArchAndroid” and then goes on to give reasons why this

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3 There is no online access to the “Interlude” itself, but the full album can be found on YouTube. Skip to around 45:00 to hear the “Our Favorite Fugitive” interlude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAHSHP7hy88

couldn’t be so because of in “the Book of--” but at this point DJ Crash Crash cuts him

off. Both these examples represent humans as bigoted and ignorant, unwilling to accept

Cindi as a legitimate person, let alone consider her to be some sort of prophesied

liberator of the “android people.”

! However, this tension between communities, while clearly prejudicial, is not

altogether hostile, and perhaps shows something akin to Homi Bhabha’s notion of an

“inbetween-space” described in his article “Border Lives: The Art of the Present”:

! ! These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of

! ! selfhood--singular or communal--that initiate new signs of identity, and

! ! innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining

! ! the idea of society itself. It is in the emergence of the interstices--the

! ! overlap and displacement of domains of difference--that the

! ! intersubjective and collective experiences of nationess, community

! ! interest, or cultural value are negotiated." (316-17)

The ability for these callers to interact with DJ Clash Clash could be regarded perhaps as

one such “interstice” allowing for the “domains of difference” to be negotiated through

conversation, even if that conversation veers toward invective. Furthermore, it is

important to note that in another interlude, DJ Clash Clash receives calls from adamant

supporters of Cindi Mayweather. One such caller, tired of the oppression and open

prejudice within the human community, tries to incite other followers of Mayweather to

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burn down buildings in order to defend her and the android community’s interests.

Just as he does with the human ignoramuses that call in, DJ Clash Clash cuts him off as

well, saying “Please stay away from fools like that. Love not war, we are tired of the

fires. Quiet, no riots. We are jammin', dancin', and lovin'. Don't throw no rock, don't

break no glass, just shake your ass Just shock it, shake it baby, with the Electric Lady,”

before transitioning to the next song on the album4.

! Thus the emphasis is on more peaceful methods of articulating one’s

dissatisfaction with disparity and prejudice, opting instead for a “love not war”

mentality. I discuss this notion of a passive, cultural apparatus as a form of activism

later on in the essay, but for now I would just like to note DJ’s small role in both

differentiating the android from the human, true to Afrofuturist form, while also

literally opening up an “in-between space” in which negotiation can occur. While DJ

Clash Clash does emphasize “love,” he does not indulge in the sort of rhetoric

Afrofuturists are critical of: the “we all are one” narrative, as discussed previously in

the essay. Moreover, within this space, part of the realizations I believe the listener is

suppose to have is embedded within an initial feeling of recognition and thus

discomfort. Quickly it becomes apparent that the androids are, ironically, far more

“humane” in their conduct than the actual humans from which the adjective derives.

We are thus guilty by association, as we realize we human beings also indulge or

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4 Using the link available in the third footnote, skip to 13:30.

otherwise allow the same sort of discrimination experienced by the android community.

Only we are forced to observe that those we are discriminating against are not

machines, but actual human beings. It is as if, in choosing the android, Monáe has

made the human experience seem less obvious, pointing to the fact that in spite of our

“best” efforts to find connections with our fellow human beings, we have ultimately

failed in the “humanitarian,” “humanist” efforts that initially and speciously spoke for

unification, but instead breeds, and continues to breed, opposition.

“Q.U.E.E.N.” &/(is the) “Electric Lady”

! Monáe, however, not only wants to draw attention to the oppositions that still

exist in the world--the prevalence of the discrimination and outcasting of the “Other”--

while at the same time breeding her own counter-cultural movement and gaining her

own counter-cultural followers along the way. In discussing the inspiration behind the

name The Electric Lady, she explains that Cindi Mayweather came to her in her dreams

and that she “knew right then and there that this woman, whoever she was, that she

didn’t want to be marginalized or categorized” (Esquire interview). As a result, she

says she “started to dream about a world where there were more women, electric ladies,

a new breed, a 21st-century lady” and she “started to think: What does the electric lady

think about love, politics, sexuality, love, and so on?”

! Thus, in speaking about the Electric Lady, one is not only speaking about Janelle

Monáe’s idiosyncratic, intensely personal alter-ego. Monáe is speaking to and about all

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the “million electric ladies” she calls out to at the end of “Electric Lady”--all women

everywhere, here, in the 21st century. The Electric Lady is the "embodiment" (and scare

quotes are necessary, for the “body” is not human, but distinctly “unhuman”) of the

21st-century woman. Furthermore, Monáe isn't proselytizing, as she leaves the question

open-ended. Cindi Mayweather (who she refers to as “the Electric Lady #1” in the

dedication to The Electric Lady) serves as an avenue for her to explore not only her own

inner psyche but also the changing values and personalities of the women all around

her. It is her own “in-between space” where she can begin to “move away from the

singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories,”

and thus deconstruct the “subject positions--of race, gender, generation, institutional

location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation-- that inhabit any claim to identity in the

modern world" (Bhabha 316).

“You Can Take My Wings But I’m Still Gonna Fly”: Finding, Asserting, and Defending a

Female Identity

! The android, in drawing attention to these “subject positions” as the

quintessential “Other,” serves a particular function for Monáe’s feminism, since Cindi

Mayweather is both simultaneously a heroic Electric Lady as well as a displaced

android. If Mayweather is meant to serve as a model for all other electric ladies, it

becomes quite clear that while Monáe wishes to speak to all 21st century women, she is

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particularly speaking to women who are not yet empowered. Given Monáe’s claims to

being an Afrofuturist, we may postulate that this means primarily women who are

“colored” and lower-class (Monáe herself comes from a working class background--her

mother was a janitor, a personal tidbit she shares in “Ghetto Woman” which is primarily

a panegyric to Monáe’s mother)5. The first few verses in “Q.U.E.E.N.” speak to this,

especially when she says “They be like “Oo, let them eat cake.”/But we eat wings and

throw them bones on the ground.” The allusion is to the infamous lines from Marie

Antoinette that are often seen as words that characterize the tyranny of the bourgeois

attitude that led to the French Revolution. Monáe then cleverly upsets this bourgeois

dismissive gesture by throwing out the rallying back-handed remark suitable to one of

today’s fighting proletariat, African-Americans, while at the same time celebrating their

culture: They prefer “wings” instead of “cake.” And then they go so far as to “throw

them bones on the ground.” Later on in her Outro, Monáe raps “They keep us on the

ground working hard for the greedy/ But when it’s time to pay they turn around and

call us needy.” Thus this image of “throwing down” and (as will be discussed more

fully later) and “getting down” is a way of fighting the fact that the oppressed and the

“Other”s are kept “on the ground,” turned into “the needy” simply because the Marie

Antoinettes of the world don’t want to pay up, and because the empowered can afford

to justify their reasons for doing so, labeling the “Others” simply “needy.”

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5 To listen to “Ghetto Woman,” go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JugqJnLulmw

! On top of this issue of socioeconomic stratification based upon class and race

distinctions is also a commentary regarding women and their treatment in society, as

Monáe states in the epigraph to this section. This is readily apparent in Verse 2 of

“Q.U.E.E.N.”:

Is it peculiar that she twerk in the mirror?And am I weird to dance alone late at night?And is it true we're all insane?And I just tell 'em, "No we ain't" and get downI heard this life is just a play with no rehearsalI wonder will this be my final act tonightAnd tell me what's the price of fame?Am I a sinner with my skirt on the ground?

Here Monáe lets out litany of questions, all focusing around what is appropriate or

what is normal. She expresses the anxiety women feel for not adhering to what is

“sane” and therefore conventional, incessantly fearing that it might be “true we’re all

insane.” Of course, this lyric could speak to anyone designated “Other,” but I find it

particularly resonant when understood from a feminist point of view.

! Adrienne Rich writes about the problems women have with trying to conform to

preconceived, predominantly patriarchal conceptions of what a “woman” should be in

“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” She claims that “we have known that

men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special, as long as our words and actions

didn't threaten their privilege of tolerating or rejecting us and our work according to

their ideas of what a special woman ought to be” (38). She goes on to emphasize the

fact that all conceptions of what a “woman ought to be” in literature were, up until the

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eighteenth century (and even then for the most part), predominantly written by men.

They were thoughts and images situated in and produced for the male gaze. What I

find Monáe to be doing in “Q.U.E.E.N.” and in her work generally is situating herself

and the listener or observer within a female gaze. The women spoken for in Verse 2

clearly express an interest in doing what is appropriate, but Monáe has them reject this

(“And is it true we’re all insane?/ And I just tell them no we ain’t and get down”).

! The motif of insanity pops up elsewhere in The Electric Lady, establishing and

contesting the notion that to be “Other” is to be outside the scope of sanity. In the

dedication pages, the “producer” says that he received a cryptic, yet to be decoded

message-- MADTTAOREH-- that does seem to him somewhat insane. Yet in spite of

this he "know[s] that America and the world deserves to hear this music” and that,

moreover, he “know[s], or rather strongly believe[s], that Janelle Monáe might indeed

be sane and telling a story very close to her vision of the truth” (emphasis mine). It is

important to note that the male producer is concerned with her being sane, but what I

find interesting is that Janelle Monáe seems to make no attempt to justify that she is

sane. She relishes in her (re)-vision of what a woman is.

! To kowtow to any male authority (or authority in general) is to admit that there

is a need to legitimize one’s existence as “Other,” especially when, as a female, one must

exist within tropes historically entrenched within the male gaze. This is why Rich, in

explaining her personal struggle to find herself as a woman in the literature of the past

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that was sexist (but ostensibly objective), says that she “began at this point to feel that

politics was not something "out there" but something "in here" and of the essence of my

condition" (44). Monáe also understands this, but as a musician and an Afrofuturist, it

is notable how she goes about voicing the political within the personal. In “Afrofuturism

and Post-Soul Possibility,” Marlo David writes about Afrofuturist technique generally

and primarily in regard to race, however, I believe the following insight can be applied

to feminist issues as well:

! ! ...Inventive and exploratory play should not be to the detriment of

! ! collectivity and struggle. There requires a recognition that identity, no

! ! matter how liberated it is, remains political. Racism and white supremacy

! ! continue to overdetermine hopes of black futurity, thereby necessitating

! ! nothing less than empowered individuality. (697; emphasis mine)

Thus Monáe seems to understand this, arguing through her emphasis on the personal,

visceral experience of the “Other” that such expression is also necessarily political. As

David notes, even if one is personally “liberated” (many women get told time and again

that, after all, at least they have their individual rights, for example, and so shouldn’t

they “be thankful”?), this does not mean that the collective struggle is over with. The

overdetermination social forces erect over oppressed groups on the basis of whatever

marginalizing factor remains a problem. Thus, Monáe’s voicing of the personal here is

not only personal, but essentially political too. When you “get down” to her songs,

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you’re also engaging in what Erykah Badu calls in her hook the “freedom song”--a song

that she and Monáe believe will, as we all “[move] on,” will serve as a means to “show

you another way.”

“Electric Ladies, Will You Sleep, or Will You Preach?”: Service to the Community

“Well, we can have different values. But I think the common thread that keeps us connected, and where I nominate you an electric lady, is your service to the community. And understanding that you have these unique superpowers to change the world around you. And electric ladies also want to be the change that they want to see.”--Janelle Monáe, Esquire, 2013

! While Janelle Monáe seeks to empower those who feel disempowered through

the celebration of difference, relishing in the dysmorphic and what is popularly

conceived as “dysfunctional,” she does not stop there. Pop music and pop culture is

rife with examples of celebrities who celebrate difference, what makes one “unique,”

and so on and so forth, but what differentiates Monáe, aside from her Afrofuturistic

tendency to focus most on the marginalized, is her call for service to the community. As

she says in the epigraph, the ability to connect is not simply one of saying “there are no

differences” between human beings as “universalist” conceptions would have it.

Rather, Monáe believes that progress and connectivity can only be had by service:

service to one’s community and in actively trying to change the world by also being the

change (rather than simply hoping for it), like a “modern day Joan of the Arc or Mia

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Farrow.” Electric ladies, despite having that “classic” (read: conventional) “kind of

crazy,” nevertheless “know just who [they] are.”

! But why focus on the community at all? If the problem is social conventions,

expectations thrust upon the female individual in spite of her own interests, why

should the electric lady have any concern for those around her? Is Monáe’s call for

individualism, that Afrofuturist “extraordinary exceptionalism,” in any way

commensurable with collective concerns? From a feminist perspective, I believe the

answer is yes. Just as Rich noticed the lack of female experience truly presented in the

literature she read as a young woman, Monáe notices the related need of understanding

that, in celebrating female subjectivity outside the social constructs defined by male

subjectivity, one is creating a space in which a female support network can occur. In

“Endings and Contradictions” Rachel DuPlessis discusses the changing genre

expectations for women throughout the course of women’s history, and while her focus

is on evolving genre convention in particular, I believe her observations can extend to

the message Monáe is providing through the Electric Lady:

! ! When social, familial, and internalized restraints lose their force, when

! ! the character, for sometimes the most subtle reasons, has been

! ! marginalized or herself chooses experimentally to step aside from her

! ! roles, death enforces the restrictions on female behavior…And death

! ! occurs because a female hero has no alternative community where the

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! ! stain of energy (whether sexual or, in more general terms, passionate) will

! ! go unnoticed or even unwelcome. This is why, in the twentieth-century

! ! critiques, community and social connectedness are the end of the female

! ! quest, not death. (16; emphasis mine)

Images of the female quest are abound in The Electric Lady and are expressed through

Sci-Fi tropes like spaceships and space itself. In Verse 2 of “Electric Lady”: “I’ll

reprogram your mind, come on, get in/ My spaceship leaves at ten.” In “Sally Ride,”

one of the most powerful songs on the album in terms of female empowerment,

Monáe/Mayweather say she’s gonna “pack [her] spacesuit” and “[take her] shit and

move to the moon/ Where there are no rules,” urging her fellow electric ladies to take

the journey with her: “It’s the way you believe/ That becomes the very thing you see/

Take a ride in the sky/ It’s calling.” The image of space as a place of possibility is quite

clear. Moreover, the female quest or electric lady’s mission to “[become] the very thing

you see” is akin to her statement in the epigraph to “be the change you want to see in

the world.”

! Furthermore, “Sally Ride” not only expresses the need to promote feminine

exploration of one’s self in order to both defy categorization (“Categorize me, I defy

every label,” as she says in “The Electric Lady”) and assert one’s selfhood. The song

also testifies to the perennial problem of creative freedom from the burdens of domestic

responsibility in order to create. Rich explains this beautifully in “When We Dead

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Awaken,” describing her own personal struggle with domestic duties at the expense of

her creative self:

! ! For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has

! ! to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive.

! ! And a certain freedom of the mind is needed--freedom to press on, to

! ! enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your

! ! motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be

! ! suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and

! ! transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of

! ! alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the

! ! moment...nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its

! ! opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is

! ! re-naming… But to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional

! ! female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the

! ! subversive function of the imagination. (43)

This “freedom to press on” is rendered in “Sally Ride” as well as in many other

moments embedded in The Electric Lady and visualized in Monáe’s various music

videos6. In “Ghetto Woman,” as she raps about her own working-class mother, she says

that “even when she thought she couldn’t, she carried on,” in the face of extreme

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6 The music video for “Primetime” can be accessed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxls2xX0Clg; The music video for “Tightrope,” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc

poverty (“I see you working night to morning light, yet no one cares”) and

discrimination (“they laugh and talk about the clothes/ you wear”). As Monáe

progresses throughout the album, speaking for those like the ghetto woman and

continually defending such an alien, bizarre concept like an android, she fully engages

in this task of transcending and challenging known concepts with an open mind. Rich,

who “had been taught that poetry should be 'universal,' which meant, of course, non

female,” learned to assert the value of personal female experience as speaking to

broader political issues (44). What I find interesting about Monáe is that she does the

same, only she goes one step farther and uses Cindi Mayweather as an android figure, a

quintessential “Other,” in order to stress just how far our arbitrary sociocultural go.

CONCLUSION: Looking Toward the (Afro)-(Feminist)-Future

! As discussed, within an Afrofuturist context, one may take one reading of the

android to mean questioning the arbitrary notions of and Enlightenment, humanistic

“universal humanity” which, in reality, continues to subconsciously exclude African-

Americans. However, Monáe’s emphasis on the female experience and in both building

and servicing the female, the “electric lady,” community within the “android

community” also allows for the same nuance and depth of meaning to be applied to

women as well, especially those discriminated against or otherwise “Other”ed. Just as

Afrofuturism is “characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-

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futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection,” so too is the feminist’s

as outlined by Rich and DuPlessis (Hip Hop and Afrofuturism). Thus the “tool kit

developed for and by Afrodiasporic intellectuals, the imperative to code, adopt, adapt,

translate, misread, rework, and revision these concepts... is likely to persist in the

decades to come” is a tool kit that transcends not only the Afrodiasporic experience, but

also that f gender, class, and sexual orientation (Hip Hop and Afrofuturism). Aside from

building an “in-between space” through the production of her album and her entire

electric lady image, Monáe, as an Afrofuturist, also points to the future. She emphasizes

the fact that the electric lady’s mission is never over. She must continue to “fly” like

Monáe in “Q.U.E.E.N.,” “carry on” like in “Ghetto Woman,” even if it means “packing

[her] shit up and moving to the moon” in order to create a space of freedom to assert

oneself as an electric lady, as a woman, even it means figuratively leaving the planet in

order to do so:

! ! When historical visibility has faded, when the present tense of testimony

! ! loses its power to arrest, then the displacements of memory and the

! ! indirections of art offer us the image of our psychic survival. To live in the

! ! unhomely world, to find its ambivalence and ambiguities... is also to

! ! affirm a profound desire for social solidarity: 'I am looking for the join… I

! ! want to join.. . I want to join. (Bhabha 331)

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While historical visibility has indeed faded, and although Afrofuturists make a point to

point that out, clearly there is still an opportunity to define, assert, and ameliorate the

“ambivalence and ambiguity” of the unhomely world. For Monáe, this means first

embracing it then, somewhat paradoxically, seeking to rebuild it. When asked in

Uptown Magazine whether or not she truly wanted her music, and believer her music

could, “change the world,” she replied:

! ! Yes! I want the music to make people burn their cubicles down and then

! ! pay for a new cubicle. I want people to not feel afraid to ask for help. Not

! ! feel afraid to crawl. Not feel afraid to dance in front of strangers. It’s about

! ! shaving your head, saving your hair and never looking back. I want

! ! people to do things that they never thought they would do before.

To do so, Monáe invites all her audience, but especially her female audience, to look

toward the future while still embracing the present, to do as Bhabha recommends and

be “in the ‘beyond’” by “inhabit[ing] an interevening space” through her music and “be

part of a revisionary time” and “re-inscribe our human, historic commonality” and

“tough the future on its hither side” (Bhabha 321; emphasis mine).

! Abandoning the “Dark Lady,” Monáe celebrates all the “million electric ladies”

in the making, traversing the Bhabha’s “space of intervention” which, for her, is nothing

less than space and time itself:

I dedicate "The Electric Lady" to the 1,000,000 Electric Ladies that will create themselves. I dedicate this album to Cindi Mayweather. Electric

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Lady #1. Thank you for coming into my dreams and my paintings. You sent me your songs, your thoughts, your prayers, your stories and through you I was able to activate myself. I wouldn't want to share DNA with anyone other than you. See you where I always see you, in the future.

Dear reader: May these songs bring wings to you when you are weak and humility when you are strong. May the evil stumble as it flies through your world.

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Afterword

In the genre-breaking tradition of Adrienne Rich, DuPlessis, and now Janelle

Monáe, feminist thinkers looking to assert the validity of the feminine Self, and

that the personal is political, I dedicate this essay to my fifteen year-old sister

who struggles, like all new-born electric ladies and androids throughout the

world, to spark to life in spite of the evil. I can only continue to hope, believe

and preach what the Book of ArchAndroid tells me as I look forward to that

“hither side” of every moment, praying for my sister:

!When people put you down, yeah way down and you feelLike you’re aloneLet love be your guideYou were built to last through any weatherOh Ghetto Woman hold on to your dreamsAnd all your great philosophiesYou’re the reason I believe in me, for real.

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Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. "Border Lives: The Art of the Present." Everyday Theory: A

! Contemporary Reader. Ed. Becky Renee. McLaughlin and Bob Coleman. New

! York: Pearson/Longman, 2005. Print.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "Endings and Contradictions." Writing Beyond The Ending:

! Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana

! UP, 1985. Print.

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism.” The New Centennial Review.

! Vol. 3.,No. 2. Michigan University Press, Summer 2003. 287-302. Online.

Harris, Isoul H. "Janelle Monáe's Secret Agenda." Uptown Magazine. Uptown

! Magazine, 22 Oct. 2013. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://uptownmagazine.com/

2013/10/janelle-Monáes-secret-agenda/>.

Hyman, Dan. "Q&A: Janelle Monáe on What an Electric Lady Really Is." Esquire.

! Esquire, 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://www.esquire.com/blogs/

culture/janelle-Monáe-interview>.

Marlo, David. “Afrofuturism and Post-Soul Possibility in Black Popular Music.” African

! American Review. Vol. 41, No. 4. 2004. Online.

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Monáe, Janelle. "Janelle Monáe - Q.U.E.E.N. Feat. Erykah Badu [Official Video]."

! YouTube. YouTube, 01 May 2013. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEddixS-UoU>.

Monáe, Janelle. "Janelle Monáe - Tightrope [feat. Big Boi] (Video)." YouTube. YouTube,

! 31 Mar. 2010. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=pwnefUaKCbc>.

Monáe, Janelle. The Electric Lady. By Janelle Monáe. Janelle Monáe. Rec. 2011-2013.

! Roman GianArthur, Janelle Monáe, Wonder & Lightning, Nate "Rocket" Wonder,

! 2013. CD

Nelson, Alondra. "Alondra Nelson on Afrofuturism." Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism, 1 Jan.

! 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://afrofuturism.net>.

Rich, Adrienne. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision." On Lies, Secrets, and

! Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979. Print.

Rockeymore, Mark. "Hip Hop and Afrofuturism: The Seeding Of The Consciousness

! Field." Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism, 26 Apr. 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://

afrofuturism.net>.

Weheliye, Alexander G. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black

! Popular Music.” Social Text 71. Vol. 20, No. 2. Duke University Press, Summer

! 2002. Online.

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