Beyoncé - Formation vs Destiny's Child - Jumpin' Jumpin'

 Beyoncé - Formation

How has Beyoncé's self representation evolved over time? Compare the videos to Jumpin' Jumpin' and Formation

• Both music videos have an energy which is constructed through beatmatching however, thematically, these videos could not be more different, with the video to Formation demonstrating explicitly political and social ideologies.
• The line 'I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils' demonstrates that Beyoncé is proud of her facial features and is empowered by black beauty.
• In the video to Jumpin' Jumpin', Beyoncé has straightened her hair, which was very common for black celebrities at the time to do, to conform to hegemonic, white beauty standards
• By embracing black entity, Beyoncé in Formation constructs a more diverse, celebratory and even challenging representations of black womanhood
• In the video to Formation, Beyoncé still dominates the screen time, yet shares it with a variety of other people and a variety of diverse and complex settings. The variety of settings connotes the complexity of black female identity in the 21st century.
• In Formation, Beyoncé's vocals are calm, relaxed and apparently less edited. Her voice in Formation is more orientated to Hip-Hop than R&B
• Her voice is deep, cracked and croaky, which is symbolic of the deep social-political issues that this song and this video deals with
• The lyrics of the song consider aspects of race , identity and togetherness. While these themes were not widely discussed in pop music of the early 00's, but after significant changes such as the Black Lives Matter movement, discussions of race and ethnicity and police brutality and become mainstream

Liesbet Van Zoonen - feminsts

• men and women are represented differently through media language

• Beyoncé frequently sits with her legs spread apart in the video, perhaps an example of 'manspreading' , which has stereotypically masculine connotations. When anchored by her jerky, aggressive movements. Beyoncé constructs a complex and contradictory representation of gender
• in the master shot sitting on top of the police car, Beyoncé's facial expressions is nonchalant, superior and even bored, which creates an atypical representation of femininity, and again constructs a complex representation of gender
• Beyoncé rapidly bumps her head in time to the bass beat of the song