Female performers: From Beyoncé to Franziska Van Almsick

[…] “You ought to be stronger”. Strength, here is figured as flexibility rather than rigidity; instead of preventing bad things from happening, you are optimally prepared to meet any and all challenges.[…] (James 78). Moreover, you ought to be stronger, super sexy, self-confident, smart and a sweet doll…

By discussing an example from the music industry and the sports industry we will try to analyze how femininity, sensuality and erotism have been used as powerful tools for value generation,  starting with Beyoncé and her performative body and followed by the German swimmer Franziska Van Almsick and her “inner strength”.

Beyoncé

Robin James sketches a short history of feminine subjectivity. He talks about a “shift from security-thinking to resilience thinking, [and] from classical white supremacist patriarchy to MRWaSP [Multi-racial White Supremacist Patriarchy]” (79). The oldest definition of femininity entailed fragility, and Beyoncé - though subjective - is definitely not fragile in her videoclip “Drunk in Love”. She flirts with the camera and seems determine. It is then important that this resilience is seen, in other words: “performed for others” (91). By looking directly at the viewer, Beyoncé challenges the male gaze (Mulvey) since she has to be seen overcoming his look (109). James concludes from this that “she has transformed this performance from a damaging to an empowering experience” (110). Yet, we would like to argue that women are affected by the male gaze from birth and although you may have the illusion of overcoming that look, there is no real way to do so.

Simone de Beauvoir describes male/female relations in her book The Second Sex (1946) and states that the man is always the norm and thus self-evident. The woman is ‘The Other’. In the videoclip of “Drunk in Love” by Beyoncé ft. Jay-Z the female pop singer is scantily clad, looks directly into the camera while making sensual movements and sexually tempts the viewer. When Jay-Z finally appears, he is completely dressed and immediately takes on a dominant form. This is where we reach a significant argument of De Beauvoir: women will always portray a sexual being and since there is no group feeling among women of different classes and races, women are complicit to their own submission and are accepting men as the norm (12). Beyoncé seems to portray exactly the image De Beauvoir is describing in her videoclip, yet in real life she is known to be a strong, independent woman and a good role model for young girls. In an interview in 2008 when she just got married to rapper Jay-Z, she stated that “You make sure you have your own life, before you’re someone else’s wife”. This statement, though it seems to be progressive, actually implies that her submission to the man in “Drunk in Love” is her own conscious choice.

            Judith Butler uses Foucaultian theory to claim that we create our identity in the act of performing it. This statement implies the following: “That the gendered body is performative and suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute reality” (Butler 136). In the videoclip “Drunk in Love” the female subject is produced as “female”, since jewellery, make-up, long hair, and nudity is often associated with ‘being female’. Beyoncé’s body is also emphasized since the camera uses close-up shots of her sensual movements, making it again painfully clear that the identity of Beyoncé is related to the surface of her body. Starting from Butler’s theory that identity is formed through performativity, Beyoncé is indeed a strong, independent woman in her career, whereas that is a completely different self than the image she sketches in her performances.

           

 At this point, we would like to bring the sports industry into the discussion. This industry is different from the music industry since it is essentially non-aesthetic (apart from some specific sports), but likewise a powerful attractor to mass media.

Franziska Van Almsick

          

For a long time, the Olympic Games were reserved exclusively for men.  It was until 1900 in Paris that the International Committee allowed women to participate. Notwithstanding, only 22 of 975 were women, who participated in tennis, croquet, sail and golf. Women´s presence in those games were a society polemic mainly in sectors with societal influence as writers and politicians whom rejected the women´s sports practice as consider it “an inappropriate activity from the aesthetic perspective, unsafe for their health and with destabilizing effects for their social role as housewives” (Alfaro 143).  At the London Olympics in 2012, women are 45% of the total athletes and for the first time all the registered nations have at least one woman as part of the country's delegation.

How then do we bring “Doll Power” into this discussion? Let us take a look at Franziska Van Almsick, a German swimmer and 10 times Olympic medallist. Part of her fame is due to the German unification in 1992 when she became the symbol of the reunited country. In 1993, she was named the Female World Swimmer of the Year by Swimming World magazine. Franziska Van Almsick was the perfect example of the “extreme” requirement to be athletic, fun, thin, beautiful, multi-talented and powerful. Her femininity, her strength and good looks were key aspects for a solid advertising campaign.

This German swimmer, whose official website bears the slogan: "More than a Great Swimmer," told the world she warmed up for races by having sex -- preferably in the pool. The strategy of making her intimacies shared-public absolutely worked and as a consequence, 1993 was a super-awarded year for her. Digital technologies like the internet were thus significant for commercial success. More advertising campaigns followed, like when Van Almsick posed in a somewhat revealing outfit several times for Maxim Germany. "Franziska does not have anything against erotic photos. It has already some given [sic], e.g. in MAXIM magazine." This is a good example to briefly understand the concept resilience and how it can capitalize a “latent” damage into ways of generation of surplus value for MRWasP and neoliberal capitalism. Resilience makes women marketable sexually (as femme), ethically (as “good”) and commercially (as productive laborers). Resilience is uniquely tailored to maximize women's productivity for neoliberal capitalism (James 86-7).

We can appreciate in sport industry “the recent proliferation of hyper-sexualised female behaviour as the result of contemporary mass-mediated representations” (McGee 231), Van Almsick is just one example of those athletes who own strength, power and a “wide open-mind” to share intimacies. 

At the end, both singers or swimmers intersect in the industry-fabricated female empowerment through such heavily mediated representations of eroticism, hybridity, and an exoticised sexuality (McGee 231). Apparently it does not matter if it is inside a videoclip viewed millions of times or in an Olympic facility through its proper advertising-communication media extensions.

Statement

Female performers wish to give the impression that they are free from the male gaze, yet they affirm “the other” as the norm in their performances. #Beyoncé #VanAlmsick

Works Cited

Alfaro, Elida. Revista de educación. Educación y deporte, no. 335 (2004): 143 https://books.google.nl/books?id=AYpngIUqQtQC&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=De+Coubertin+oposici%C3%B3n+a+mujeres&source=bl&ots=8uGKYl2_PD&sig=XIadONeB0v1tAX9Hc9gqc7D9uNI&hl=es&sa=X&ved=0CDcQ6AEwBGoVChMI8vPbx_aWyAIVR7gaCh01aw7M#v=onepage&q=De%20Coubertin%20oposici%C3%B3n%20a%20mujeres&f=false

Beyoncé. The Oprah Winfrey Show, 13 November 2008:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9TCRJkBhI (accessed 1 april 2015). Web.

De Beauvoir, Simone. De Tweede Sekse: Feiten, Mythen en Geleefde Werkelijkheid. Utrecht: Bijleveld, 1949. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY: Routledge, 1990. Print.

James, Robin. "Look, I Overcame!" Resilience & Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. Zero Books: 78-124. Print.

           McGee, K. A. (2012). Orientalism and Erotic Multiculturalism in Popular Culture: From Princess Rajah to the Pussycat Dolls. Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 6: 2(Autumn), 209 - 238.

Nowak, Rapaël. (2014), “Understanding Everyday Uses of Music Technologies in the Digital Age”. Andy Bennett & Brady Robards (eds.). Mediated Youth Cultures: The Internet, Belonging and New Cultural Configurations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 146-161. Print.

Initials: RO, GK, AL.