Does Beyoncé’s Lemonade Really Teach Us How to Turn Lemons into Lemonade?: Exploring the Limits and Possibilities Through Black Feminism

Abstract

Beyoncé and her team foreground Black womanhood in all of its complexity-styling their bodies in ways that celebrate and merge ancient, past and contemporary diasporic African hair, body adornment and dress; by centering Black women's self-expression in song, dance, poetry, wisdom, and most centrally, pain; and by displaying the beauty and diversity in hue and hair texture that has historically been used as a marker to divide, conquer and instill self-hatred within us.Black girls are most likely among girls of any racial group and several groups of boys to be suspended from school (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014) and are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system (Sherman, 2012).[...]we notice a meritocratic undertone in "Formation."(First Edition).