Featuring an array of Black people of a range of skin tones and gender orientations, Janelle Monáe’s “Lipstick Lover” video registers as a celebration of black queerness; it asserts that freedom comes with orienting toward pleasure. In this article, Musser argues that what distinguishes “Lipstick Lover” is the way that it is haunted by the lesbian. Lesbian appears not necessarily as identity, but as a specific orientation toward pleasure and being in the world that emphasizes the tactile and collective. And notably, in contrast to Monáe’s previous explorations of the future, here the lesbian is grounded in the past—1970s Jamaica, to be precise.
The video for Janelle Monáe’s “Lipstick Lover” opens with a woman in a shimmering gold bathing suit and sequined cover-up bending over to gently kiss Monáe on the lips. As her lips part, Monáe’s eyes open and she turns her head to the side to look at the camera. The viewer can see that the two are at the edge of a pool; behind them, hazy shapes of people drift by on inflatable toys. The camera follows as Monáe is dragged into a queer paradise of sorts. Holding her legs is a woman with the words “Janelle Monáe presents” pressed onto the ass of her brown bathing suit. Monáe looks around wildly as the music shifts to a gentle reggae beat and more bikini bottoms jiggle into the frame—“Lipstick” reads the yellow bikini, “Lover” reads the red. In this garden of delights, shiny bodies gyrate in bathing suits and painted bodies prance in thongs. It’s a world of party scenes, make-out scenes, food scenes, sex toys, wet T-shirts, tiny shorts, Monáe licking a shoe, Monáe eating said shoe, Monáe masturbating, Monáe in a Pokémon onesie, and a few unforgettable scenes of Monáe perched at the feet of an older butch who is topless and smoking a blunt.
Featuring an array of Black people of a range of skin tones and gender orientations, the “Lipstick Lover” video registers as a celebration of black queerness. While blackness and queerness have historically overlapped in their presumed divergence from normativity, much consideration of queerness has been overdetermined by a focus on white queer people.1 Therefore, Monáe’s foregrounding of black queer sexualities and genders feels like more than balm—it is a declaration of pride. Tellingly, the queer news media was breathless with excitement when the video dropped in May 2023. Carmen Phillips, writing for Autostraddle, introduces her frame-by-frame analysis with these words: “I’m not to be trusted with this music video, this queer Black feminist sex positive pool party has shattered everything inside me.”2 “Janelle Monáe’s ‘Lipstick Lover’ Video Is a Sexy, Sapphic Fever Dream” reads the headline at them, an online queer magazine.3
However, Monáe’s project, not just in “Lipstick Lover,” but arguably in the entire Age of Pleasure (2023) album, moves beyond the mere recognition of black queerness; it asserts that freedom comes with orienting toward pleasure. In promotion for the album, Monáe (who uses she/her as well as they/them pronouns) embraces the term “free-ass motherfucker” to describe their queer lifestyle and politics.4 If reading the “Lipstick Lover” video for narrative, one might argue that the opening sapphic kiss inaugurates the action; it awakens Monáe (and viewers) to a wealth of sensual pleasures. Titillation abounds, prompting imaginings of Monáe at a queer orgy. Is it exciting to see Monáe caress, kiss, and leave lipstick marks on a tattooed bottom? Is it radical and empowering to see scenes of masturbation? The video is indiscriminate and nonhierarchical about the pleasures it presents; there is celebration and fun in all of it.
“Lipstick Lover” is not Monáe’s first foray into black queer expressivity. They have been hailed as a queer musical icon since their debut album, The ArchAndroid (2010), which launched their android alter ego, Cindi Mayweather, whose journey toward freedom and love was chronicled across several albums and music videos.5 In that context, Monáe’s queerness has often been described in relation to their commitment to speculative forms of black living and loving, whether that has meant remixing black music traditions such as soul and funk or inhabiting the image of the Black dandy.6 In their third studio album, Dirty Computer (2018), Mayweather disappeared and Monáe more explicitly engaged with sexual themes. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also came out as pansexual in 2018. This admission added a layer of queer knowingness to Monáe’s songs and videos. “PYNK,” for example, one of the more famous songs from that album, has been seen as an homage to the sapphic. Featuring the actor Tessa Thompson, with whom Monáe was rumored to be involved at the time, lyrics like “pink like the inside of your . . . ” and a video filmed in the desert featuring women wearing pink velvet leotards and flowing, ruffled pink and purple pants that evoke labia, the song and video have been hailed by B. Ruby Rich as post-“New Queer Cinema.”7
Although both “PYNK” and “Lipstick Lover” are sapphically inclined celebrations of femme-femme intimacy, what distinguishes “Lipstick Lover” from “PYNK” is the way that it is haunted by the lesbian. She appears not necessarily as identity, but as a specific orientation toward pleasure and being in the world that emphasizes the tactile and collective. Notably, in contrast to Monáe’s previous explorations of the future, she is grounded in the past—1970s Jamaica, to be precise.
When I talk about Monáe and pleasure, I am not just talking about the swirl of sexual activities in which they engage, but the way that their comfort in their body emanates from the screen. The day the “Lipstick Lover” video debuted, Monáe wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter): “Titties out for the next 15 years.”8 Indeed, the repeated images of Monáe’s breasts—bare (pixelated for viewers on YouTube), scarcely contained by bikini or wet T-shirt—are compelling not only because they are erotically or aesthetically pleasing but because they highlight the relationship between bodily autonomy and pleasure.9
Seeing this amount of flesh might evoke “video vixens”: the scantily clad, gyrating women featured in many music videos. While there are arguments to be made that this form of exposure can be empowering because the women know that they are being watched and they enjoy having that power over the camera, Monáe is enacting something different in “Lipstick Lover.”10 Their nearly naked performance is not really directed toward the camera or the viewer. The use of vignetting, along with the fact that the revelers rarely pause their partying to acknowledge the camera while Monáe sings along to the song rather than lip-syncing all suggest that there is something internal and unrepresentable about the party. Viewers may witness candid moments, but the protagonists, especially Monáe, are generally too absorbed in the fun that they are having to register objectification. Although they are abundant, the pleasures of the visible are beside the point.
It is in this idea of finding pleasure through being in one’s body that one can start to locate the lesbian. Here, I am referring to the symmetry between Monáe’s embodiment of freedom and Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic. Though the erotic can be found throughout Lorde’s work, she elaborates most extensively on the concept in her essay “Uses of the Erotic,” which was first delivered as a paper at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1978. The erotic, Lorde argues, is “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”11 The erotic is that which has been disavowed by white patriarchal society, and it must be reclaimed in order to reject these orderings. Notably, Lorde distinguishes the erotic from the pornographic, which she describes as a form of objectification and a mode of being for others rather than being authentically oneself.12 Lorde’s argument, rooted in black lesbian feminist politics of the 1970s and 1980s, has broad repercussions, but it is grounded in the specific power grid produced by her understanding of interlocking formations of oppression—specifically, patriarchy, homophobia, and racism. It is an argument for a more nuanced examination of power and its expressions and a theorization of one version of what an alternative might look or feel like.
The examples that Lorde uses for finding the erotic are diverse; they include painting a fence, writing a poem, and sharing feelings. “Lipstick Lover” translates Lorde’s emphasis on the variability of the erotic in two mutually reinforcing ways: by emphasizing a range of pleasurable activities and by foregrounding what I refer to as “the jiggle.” In addition to using the body for sexual activities, people swim, dance, eat, and smoke. Aesthetically, this proliferation of pleasures is echoed by the camera’s foregrounding of the jiggle: an embodiment of fleshiness that is all about moving away from solidified ideas of what might constitute pleasure linked specifically to a person or place, and toward thinking about pleasure as uncontained and everywhere.
The jiggle offers pleasure in the vein of the gelatinous, which, following Kyla Wazana Tompkins, highlights the pleasures that are unleashed through movement as well as those that proliferate from togetherness—once one thing starts shaking, it transmits movement and feeling, allowing things to move as one—and in doing so provides another way to think about collectivity and Lorde’s “sharing of feelings.”13 All of these properties subvert the objectifying gaze because they mean that the jiggle offers an abundance of focal points and interpretations. In “Lipstick Lover,” everyone on camera is doing something, moving something, and they are doing these things together. The jiggle refuses to condense sexuality into a particular set of acts or identity. In other words, the jiggle invites viewers into a scene, a vibe, a gathering.14
What is seen is not just a representation of a party, however, but is rooted in Monáe’s lived experience, the residue of which contributes to the video’s candid feeling. “Lipstick Lover” was filmed at their Wondaland West compound in Los Angeles, where they moved in 2020, and features friends and acquaintances of Monáe’s.15 The gathering might be considered an extension of those that Monáe began having during the pandemic, when travel was difficult and clubs were closed. The compound, with its pool, music studio, and living accommodations, offers space for whatever it is that Monáe wants to do.16
It is significant, however, that Monáe is providing the space for the party, not just because it means that they are exerting a certain amount of control over the proceedings, but because places for Black queer people to party are always under threat of vanishing. Kemi Adeyemi describes the way that gentrification and racism in Chicago have made it financially unfeasible for some bars to continue to host black queer parties. The parties that remain often become inundated with others who dilute the vibe, making Black queer women and nonbinary people uncomfortable.17 By investing in Wondaland West, Monáe alleviates these burdens (even if predominantly for friends) and, importantly, shows what it is to prioritize pleasure as an ethos. Pleasure is not a supplement, but the primary stuff of living.
By way of illustration, Monáe describes this reorientation toward pleasure as a change in lifestyle, telling Rolling Stone, “It’s beautiful that I have a title called The Age of Pleasure because it actually re-centers me. It’s not about an album anymore. I’ve changed my whole fucking lifestyle.”18 In addition to the parties, we can see this shift in the matter of the jiggle itself, which some might describe, using a black colloquialism for a curvy body, as Monáe’s “thicc-ness.”19 While Monáe was famous for their black-and-white clothing in their early career, as part of the launch for The Age of Pleasure, they unveiled their figure on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on their way into the 2023 Costume Institute Benefit (aka the Met Gala). There, they stripped down from a diaphanous black-and-white Thom Brown gown to a tiny black sequined bikini, producing a narrative arc that visually illustrates Monáe’s transformation from buttoned-up to daring. Importantly, this shift is not only about clothes, but about a lifestyle. When a reporter asked, on the steps of the Met, about the secret to their curves, Monáe replied, “It’s Jamaican food and sex.”20
Monáe’s response certainly fits with “Lipstick Lover”’s tropical aesthetics, which emphasize bathing suits, brown bodies, exotic plants, and abundant sex and sensuality. However, it is important to note that the Jamaica of “Lipstick Lover” is not necessarily the Jamaica of today, but the Jamaica of the 1970s—a time when the country was imagined to pulse with sex, music, and ganja. I am not referring to the tense political and economic situation of 1970s Jamaica, but the Jamaica of the popular 1972 crime film The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell), starring the reggae superstar Jimmy Cliff. This Jamaica, packaged for export, was positioned as authentic and raw, pulsing with patois, black nationalism, and a little danger. Central to this version of Jamaica is the reggae beat, which, not incidentally, forms the backbone of “Lipstick Lover.” More specifically, it is the “one-drop rhythm,” so-called because the first beat is dropped. This is the rhythm that emerged as 1960s ska turned into rocksteady and then eventually reggae. Since the first beat is dropped, it is a rhythm that invites movement into the void, a little bit of free-falling before the music supports you again. This can be a seductive tempo.
For Monáe to invoke this moment is not just to play with history; it is also to see and feel how the lesbian haunts this depiction of black queerness. Visually, this Jamaica is most easily recognized by looking at the scene of Monáe emerging from the pool with their cropped “PLEASURE” T-shirt plastered to their chest. The way that the translucent fabric clings to Monáe’s nipples and beads of water drip from Monáe’s long braids recalls the 1972 poster for Jamaican tourism featuring Sintra Bronte, a Trinidadian model who was photographed emerging from the sea with wet hair and a similarly clingy red T-shirt that read “JAMAICA.” This poster, which affirmed the heterosexuality of the nation while trafficking in the idea of a sexually welcoming Caribbean, aimed to bolster the nation’s economy through tourist dollars and, by extension, to weaken the nation’s Socialist movement.21 Although Monáe also re-created this visual in promotional stills for “Float,” the first single from The Age of Pleasure, I want to think more deeply about what this aura of 1970s Jamaica might mean in the context of “Lipstick Lover.”
Associating the lesbian with the 1970s is not something new. Compared with nonbinary and queer identities, which are often associated with gender and sexual fluidity, lesbian identities are assumed to be more fixed and, therefore, not only passé but belonging to the past.22 However, it is obvious that Monáe, as a nonbinary person, is doing something different with their invocation of the lesbian. The 1970s lesbian summoned by “Lipstick Lover” cannot be separated from the Caribbean, as association that connects to the erotic and Audre Lorde, who was born in Harlem to parents from Barbados and Grenada and who migrated to St. Croix at the end of her life. But Lorde is not the only 1970s Caribbean lesbian who haunts “Lipstick Lover.” In the figure of the older butch smoking a blunt, Monáe also evokes mati-ism and mati work.
Mati is the Sranan Tongo word for women who have sexual relations with other women. The term has its origins in the communities and intimacies formed by those who voyaged together in bondage from Africa. Anthropologist Gloria Wekker uses the term “mati work” to discuss relationships, more prevalent in the 1970s than now, among working-class women in Suriname.23 In her description of mati-ism, Wekker emphasizes the age differences between the women, which inflect the practice with elements of both service and pedagogy. In addition to engaging in sexual exchanges, women are instructed in how to serve their older lovers by arranging flowers or preparing special foods for their enjoyment, often in return for a feeling of community belonging, safety, and/or money. These relationships were not exclusive—women often also had male partners—and were also seen as extensions of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices. Like Monáe’s emphasis on pleasure, mati-ism rejects forms of respectability and normativity in favor of sexual freedom and community.
Although I have grouped Lorde’s theory of the erotic and Wekker’s discussion of mati-ism under the rubric of the lesbian, it is important to understand that these formulations are not tethered to identitarian politics. In their association with the 1970s Caribbean, these concepts shift what is meant by the lesbian, so that she is a way of being instead of a specific identity.
I see this reorientation crystalized in “Lipstick Lover”’s repeated cutaways to the scenes of Monáe sitting at the feet of an older butch smoking a blunt. Not only does the presence of this elder remind us that sex and sensuality are not only the province of the young; these scenes also allude to the pleasures of intergenerational knowledge transmission. In ways that connect with Wekker’s work, these moments of sharing a blunt point to intimacy and mentorship, sexual or otherwise. The blunt can also (with a wink at psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud’s infamous cigar) function as a lesbian phallus of sorts—recognizing Judith Butler’s assertation that the lesbian phallus, because it is not limited by biology, can be anything—“[C]onsider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things”—and can therefore, as Jordy Rosenberg suggests, be “boundless.”24 Moreover, working the territory of the lesbian joke, the blunt goes up in smoke—revealing a critique of phallocentric sexuality and pointing to the abundant sensual dimensions of pleasure in which Monáe (and this intimacy) is embedded—the smoke caresses lips, asses, hair; is inhaled through nose and mouth; and temporarily occludes vision. These are expansive lesbian pleasures that summon the tactile, the olfactory, and the gustatory.
Beyond Monáe and the butch, the lyrics for “Lipstick Lover” offer another invitation into this lesbian orientation by emphasizing touch rather than sight. Throughout, Monáe sings, “I wanna feel your lips on mine,” suggesting that there is something to these pleasures that extends beyond the visible.25 Later in the song, Monáe suggests capturing them: “We can make a movie I can write it,” before swerving back to touch and the space outside of representation: “Let’s just make a move, baby.”26 It is important, I think, that these propositions are sonic; they echo the jiggle’s transmission of feeling and movement, making felt the residue of the lesbian.
The final scenes of the video, which suggest an orgasmic culmination to Monáe’s masturbatory efforts—they sigh on the bed, and the camera cuts away to one of the sex toys (a pair of silicon lips that open and close on a peeled banana) as it buzzes—also undercut the primacy of the visual. The narrative implication is that the preceding scenes were a fantasy, but the vibration from the buzzing on-screen can be felt by the viewer, especially if they are watching on a phone. The experience is both shared and outside the parameters of the visual. It is in this orientation toward a collective realm of touching and feeling that I find the haunting of the lesbian. Notably, Monáe and Alan Ferguson, the codirectors for the video, describe “Lipstick Lover” as a “emotion” picture because they want to elicit feeling from the viewer.27 In these ways, the invitation to pleasure is open. Maybe these are your fantasies, your pleasures as well, and maybe Monáe has given you some tools to feel them?
Notes
There is much literature on these dual assumptions. For example, Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line gives a history of the overlaps between blackness and queerness, while Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence lays the foundation for the ways that racialized sexuality is always surplus to the formations of normative white sexuality. See Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Carmen Phillips, “Janelle Monáe’s ‘Lipstick Lover’ Music Video Has Fully Melted Our Brains, Autostraddle, May 11, 2023, www.autostraddle.com/janelle-monaes-lipstick-lover-music-video-has-fully-melted-our-brains/.
James Factora, “Janelle Monáe’s ‘Lipstick Lover’ Video Is a Sexy, Sapphic Fever Dream,” them, May 12, 2023, www.them.us/story/janelle-monae-lipstick-lover-music-video.
It is possible to deconstruct this phrase even further since it enfolds both the subversion of norms (free-ass) and the ultimate affront to psychoanalysis—a challenge to the Oedipal complex (motherfucker). See Mankaprr Conteh, “Janelle Monáe Is Back from the Future and Ready to Play,” Rolling Stone, May 22, 2023, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/janelle-monae-the-age-of-pleasure-album-interview-1234736254/.
For this analysis of Monáe, see Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
See Daylanne K. English and Alvin Kim, “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe’s Neo-Afrofuturism,” in “The Funk Issue,” special issue, American Studies 52, no. 4 (2013): 217–30; and Aleksandra Szaniawska, “Gestural Refusals, Embodied Flights: Janelle Monáe’s Vision of Black Queer Futurity,” Black Scholar 49 no. 4 (2019): 35–50.
B. Ruby Rich, “After the New Queer Cinema: Intersectionality vs. Fascism,” The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, ed. Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 3–14.
Monáe’s performance might act as a rebuttal to the forms of depersonalization that Hortense Spillers describes vis-à-vis the different ways that the transatlantic slave trade transformed Black people into flesh or as being-for-others with regard to the inability to consent to touch or to sex and the violent extraction of personhood, labor, and affect. In the surplus of pleasure that Monáe inhabits, they are enacting something closer to what I have described as brown jouissance—a reveling in the unexpected intimacies and epistemologies produced by racially marked flesh. This is to say that “Lipstick Lover” shows us joy in black, queer enfleshment—specifically, in how one can use one’s body for the amplification of pleasure(s). See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81; and Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
For more on video vixens, see Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007 [1984]), 53.
In “Re-membering Lorde,” I write, “[‘Uses of the Erotic’] then, makes two primary claims: that the route to subjecthood is community, and that objectification is experienced as a form of antisociality. Further, objectification does not just impact the individual; by shutting off possibilities of sociality, it also prevents communities from forming, thereby eliminating bonds between women and avenues for nurturing and collaboration. “Uses of the Erotic” is a critique of white, capitalist society, a statement about the potential of feminism, and a rallying cry for action.” “Re-membering Lorde” also contains a long discussion of Lorde’s relationship to the pornographic. See Amber Musser, ‘Re-Membering Lorde,” in No Tea, No Shade, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 346–61.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Crude Matter, Crude Form,” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017): 264–68.
See Sarah Cervenak’s theory of the power of black gathering in Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
Conteh, “Janelle Monáe Is Back.”
There are several further points to consider with regard to Monáe’s Wondaland West, the Los Angeles location of Monáe’s Wondaland, which was originally based in Atlanta. Wondaland itself is the name of their record label, TV and film production company, management firm, brand consultancy, and physical compound, and Monáe is the CEO. Monáe’s control of production as well as their linkage of living and working on their own compound might be influenced by Prince and Paisley Park, given his mentorship of Monáe. Additionally, there are resonances with lesbian provocateur and songwriter Allee Willis’s Wonderland, a mansion in Hollywood known for hosting lesbian parties.
Kemi Adeyemi Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
Conteh, “Janelle Monáe Is Back.”
Dictionary.com writes, “Thicc is a slang term for a full-figured body, specifically a big butt and curvy waist. It is both used sexually and humorously”; www.dictionary.com/e/slang/thicc/.
Michael Nattoo, “Janelle Monáe Credits Jamaican Food and Sex for Her Chiseled Physique in Black Bikini at MET Gala,” DancehallMag, May 2, 2023, www.dancehallmag.com/2023/05/02/style/janelle-monae-credits-jamaican-food-and-sex-for-her-chiseled-physique-in-black-bikini-at-2023-met-gala.html.
For more on these dynamics of sex, heterosexuality, and tourism, see M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” in “The New Politics of Sex and the State,” special issue, Feminist Review, no. 48 (Autumn 1994): 5–23. For more on the specifics of Jamaican tourism in the 1970s and Sintra Bronte’s poster, see, “The ‘Jamaica Girl’ Poster: Story of the Best Tourism Image of the ’70 s,” Groovy History, February 5, 2021, https://groovyhistory.com/jamaica-girl-poster.
I have written about the depiction of lesbians as associated with whiteness and the 1970s elsewhere. See Amber Jamilla Musser, “Lesbians, Tea, and the Vernacular of Fluids,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 25, no. 1 (2015): 1–18.
Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 88; Jordy Rosenberg, “Butler’s ‘Lesbian Phallus’; or, What Can Deconstruction Feel?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 3 (2003): 398.
Janelle Monáe, “Lipstick Lover,” on The Age of Pleasure (Atlantic Records, 2023)
Janelle Monáe, “Lipstick Lover.”
Gabby Giles, “Janelle Monáe Reveals Stunning Visuals for ‘Lipstick Lover,’” Glassefactory.com, June 4, 2023, https://glassefactory.com/janelle-monae-reveals-stunning-visuals-for-lipstick-lover/.
University of California Press