Janelle Monáe's Age of Non-Binary Gender Expression
Janelle Monáe's Age of Non-Binary Gender Expression
As usual, honesty paves the way to sexual self-liberation (and yes, pleasure)
By T. Bloom
There's a common joke among gays about the way men behave shortly after coming out, becoming super extra gay to overcompensate for all that time spent in the closet. (Joke’s on you, some of us stay that way forever, or turn out not to be men!) I'd say there’s a similar phenomenon for those who come out as non-binary, although it might be hard to for some to imagine what "super extra non-binary" looks like.
Well I'll tell you: one of the things it could look like is Janelle Monáe circa The Age of Pleasure. In fact, I’d hazard that this album — to be released on 6/9 (nice!) and poised to be this summer’s smash hit — is the kind that Monáe could have only made after embracing non-binary identity (the artist uses both she and they pronouns, which I employ fluidly here).
It’s bound to be a little confusing for observers looking in on this journey from the outside. Monáe, who rose to fame performing in deliberately androgynous attire (with a signature sprinkle of femme cuteness) came out as non-binary — or rather, “came in” — last April, three years after revealing their pansexuality in 2018.
It was no mistake that the earlier announcement coincided with the release of Dirty Computer, a decidedly queer half-step away from the artist’s epic chain of concept albums set in a Metropolis-themed dystopia: Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady. The 2018 album was more starkly erotic in a way that conveyed everything Monáe had been holding back over the years… or so we thought, at that point.
2022’s gender announcement was also timed with a release, becoming part of the rollout for Monáe’s sci-fi short story collection, The Memory Librarian. It’s possible some might have seen a mercenary angle in the convenient timing of these announcements, but by now the artist was hardly starving for attention, having already become more widely known for film work such as 2016’s Hidden Figures. Teetering on the brink of becoming a household name, it was arguably important for Monáe to meet their new public in their purest form — inviting everyone to download and run the latest update, as it were.
Although, I honestly wouldn’t fault them if the timing was more calculating than that. Thus is the tradition of Black, queer artists needing to highlight every aspect of their uniqueness in order to reach the level of media visibility and wealth afforded to white, straight, cisgender (passing) artists. Overachieving, oversharing, sometimes even over-promising: that’s showbiz, for those approaching from the margins, and even that can become the basis for finding oneself unfairly critiqued and excluded.
Monáe is so widely loved and so obviously talented, I haven’t seen those kinds of critiques. And the revelations were hardly a surprise, since their entire discography has been a window into their personal sense of otherness, and the community they’ve found (and forged) with fellow outsiders. But changes in their image over the past few years may have confounded the kind of onlookers who tend to conflate non-binary gender and androgyny, or non-binary gender and asexuality.
First, Dirty Computer ditched all of the artist’s former hesitations about openly lusting after women — only hinted at in past lyrics — and paved the way for an on-again/off-again (if it happened at all) celebrity romance with Tessa Thompson, who appeared in the “PYNK” music video.
But since Monáe had already existed for a decade in robotic androgyne drag — think circuits, suits and ties — there was certainly no hesitation in this area left to overcome. She’d already faced and addressed the confines of Blackness, of womanhood, and the particular identity of Black womanhood. And now, in her “Age of Pleasure,” she’s finally granting herself (and other non-binary femmes) permission to publicly enjoy the pleasures associated with Black womanhood, ones which perhaps had felt off-limits before.
Which is an austere way of saying: Janelle is finally in their Titties-Out Era, and we’re all better off for it.
What I described above is an evolutionary arc that plenty of trans/non-binary people seem to relate to — although many others may not. This is part of what makes coming out such a fraught, tedious process: it involves endlessly updating everyone on the specifics of who you really are, and what you need at this moment, in the midst of figuring these things out for yourself. And unfortunately this does often involve correcting people’s well-meaning assumptions, and navigating their reactions in instances when they’re likely to take those corrections personally.
If there’s a universal experience shared by members of this community, I think it’s just a deeper sense of affirmation that gradually helps one relax about how one is perceived by others. Sometimes the “transition” to non-binary doesn’t involve any exterior changes at all, it’s just a new way of explaining what people have been seeing all along. But it really can result in a radical shift in appearance and presentation — sometimes involving medical adjustments such as surgery and hormones, often just opening up new possibilities in terms of wardrobe, hairstyle, name, etc. (and this can be a subject of ongoing amusement and teasing even within the community itself).
And these shifts are not always one-way, or directed toward androgyny. What I see in Monáe’s transition is an exercise in reclamation, finally relaxing their rigid control over self-presentation — an artistic statement that was originally adopted as a survival instinct for someone seeking acceptance in an industry that so eagerly sexualizes and exploits young women. I remember being struck by lyrics Monáe sang in “Sincerely, Jane,” from her 2007 debut EP:
Teacher, teacher please reach those girls in them videos
The little girls just broken Queen, confusing bling for soul
Danger, there's danger when you take off your clothes, all your dreams go down the drain…
At the time, this struck me as both a heartfelt, trenchant warning and also a relatively conservative, sex-negative estimation of what was happening in hip-hop/R&B music. Different women were bound to draw different conclusions, and have different experiences. It’s easier in retrospect to see how Monáe’s polished, post-sexual image and methods of self-empowerment could have been expressions of a nascent, evolving relationship with her own gender complexity, in which the discomfort of being unduly sexualized carried additional fears of appearing to say or confirm something about herself that she never intended to — or perhaps something she didn’t yet fully understand, being only 21 at the time.
That’s what I heard and sympathized with during the Metropolis albums: an artist singing about liberation without fully experiencing it herself, perhaps only attaining through fiction what remained out of reach in real life. Working from behind a mask can be its own eventual form of liberation, especially for trans and queer musical artists (who are unfortunately often accused of “queerbaiting” or appropriating another gender as a result of the ways they’ve used art to explore their emerging shift in identity).
2018’s Dirty Computer changed all of that, but the cracks in that dam were already showing long before Monáe came out. In “Q.U.E.E.N.” from 2013’s The Electric Lady, they defiantly sang:
Is it weird to like the way she wear her tights?
And is it rude to wear my shades?
Am I a freak because I love watching Mary?Hey sister am I good enough for your Heaven?
Say will your God accept me in my black and white?
Will he approve the way I'm made?
Or should I reprogram, deprogram and get down?
The song closes with the affirmation: “Even if it makes others uncomfortable / I will love who I am.” When the Metropolis project first began, it was presented as a doomed love story between a female android and a male human; by the time it ended, it was a coming out story.
Nothing makes people more uncomfortable than loving yourself. Anyone following Monáe’s online presence in the years following Dirty Computer has enjoyed closeup views of the artist cavorting at parties and festivals in long braids and skimpy swimsuits, mixed with moments of A-List celebrity appearances in revealing, haute couture red-carpet attire, leaving her signature androgyny even further behind, staking her claim to the SHE in “she/they” while also broadening the world’s concept of what THEY can look like, challenging onlookers to gradually see no contradiction there.
That brings us to The Age of Pleasure, an album which cheekily acknowledges this shift from the jump by opening with the rap lyrics: “No, I'm not the same… I think I done changed.” And last week’s debut of the track “Lipstick Lover” enjoyed a seismic response across the internet even though much of the reclamatory butts n’ boobs imagery had to be toned down to conform to social media standards.
The album’s cover is itself a glorious jailbreak from the artist’s Metropolis era, featuring Monáe, fully and joyously bare-breasted, swimming through the parted legs of pool party revelers in Esther Williams mermaid mode.
While the celebratory aspect of these images is impossible to miss, too few people are likely to see them as the form of non-binary gender affirmation they likely are, meticulously presented by someone who’s finally capable of relaxing and trusting they’ll be viewed through the appropriate context, now that their truth is widely known.
This might seem like quite a circuitous path for someone to walk in order to end up at the exact same destination — titties out in a music video — but it just goes to show that the individual’s terms really do matter, and how drastically they can shift the public’s appreciation of an artist, as well as their artwork.
While “Lipstick Lover” appears, in its sexual styling, to overtly appeal to a certain experience of Black womanhood (particularly Black queer womanhood), it's also the work of someone who is finally so unconstrained that they can paint freely from the full palette of sexual experiences — which includes simultaneously embodying and worshiping the feminine — without a need to counterbalance it elsewhere, with something else.
Monáe’s specific journey to personal freedom may not look anything like that experienced by certain other trans/non-binary people, including others who are prominent in the music industry. But this itself shows the significance of her making such a splash with this upcoming release, and welcoming curious onlookers into her Age of Pleasure. In the very futuristic-sounding year of 2023, the artist has not only ascended to the higher ground she once wrote/sang about with such longing — like the ArchAndroid she spent years styling herself as, she is showing others how to deprogram and attain it for themselves.
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