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Abstract
In this essay, I contend that, since 2013, Beyoncé has become the exemplar of digital stardom in the popular music world by negotiating the representational affordances of social media platforms and striving to innovate in digital music commerce. I examine three specific moments in which Beyoncé transformed her star image in ways that are uniquely digital. In the promotional documentary Life Is But a Dream (2013), she adopts the visual aesthetics of Instagram and Tumblr to address the audience in a strategically intimate way. With the surprise release of BEYONCÉ (2013), she positioned herself as a self-made industry entrepreneur, while relying on her significant social media following to promote the album for free. Finally, with Lemonade (2016), she created a work suffused with representations of black womanhood that summoned a networked public of black women scholars-a group long excluded from popular music discourse-whose online conversations about the album were crucial in shaping its reception, and Beyoncé's image as a black feminist. Because both stardom and media technologies are social constructions, these three transformative moments are inextricable from the technologies that shaped them, and have shaped Beyoncé's star image into a reflection not only of her work and persona, but what it means to live in a digital world.
Introduction: In Formation
At the start of 2013, when Beyoncé Knowles sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" at President Obama's second inauguration, she had long reigned as the queen of pop. She was "the most important and compelling popular musician of the twenty-first century," a New Yorker critic argued a month later, with "the sharpest musical mind of anyone in her pop generation"1 That same year, however, a new Beyoncé was taking shape. Inaugurated by her long-delayed appearance on social media platforms Tumblr and Instagram the year before, the latest phase in Beyoncé's career was grandly unveiled in February 2013. Released by HBO, Life Is But a Dream remediates the visual aesthetics of social media to underscore the film's documentary-style claims to authenticity. Beyoncé emerges as a newly independent artist, opening with a personal recounting of the 2011 split with her father and manager Mathew Knowles. In retrospect, the film was merely a prelude for the next December, when Beyoncé released her fifth, self-titled LP as a...