Nu Bleu

Abstract

This article interrogates Beyoncé's cultural production as a mode of signification rather than autonomous authorship. Tracing her Renaissance, Lemonade, and Cowboy Carter eras, the essay argues that Beyoncé operates as a semiotic figure through whom the tensions of Black femme aesthetics are staged, circulated, and made legible. Her flickering, mutable image – produced through racial drag, citational femininity, colorist maneuverability, and the sonic extraction of Black queer and trans labor – crystallizes the paradoxes of Black femme representation: highly visible yet structurally precarious, celebrated yet continually delimited. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, bell hooks, Calvin Warren, and Erica Edwards, the analysis situates Beyoncé's performances within the racialized economies that shape contemporary celebrity, where Black femme expressivity is welcomed as cultural resource while constrained by the very structures it appears to transcend. Ultimately, the article contends that Beyoncé's stardom exposes a central contradiction of Black femmescapes: performance offers both imaginative possibility and intensified constraint, illuminating how visibility can reproduce the architecture of racial capitalism even as it gestures toward other modes of being.

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