Inside “my [master’s] house”: racialism’s renaissance and the cultural terror of the Black femme celeb aesthete
Bibliographic record
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".