It may have been a few weeks ago now, but some people still can't stop talking about Beyonce's performance at the 2017 Grammys. In the spectacular act, the visionary artist (who is pregnant with twins) continued a theme explored in her groundbreaking album visual Lemonade, delivering an astounding homage to Oshun (sometimes spelt Ochún or Osun), the Yoruba water goddess of fertility, love and sexuality. Within minutes of the performance, footage of it was already going viral.
Hey, they don't call her Queen Bey for nothing.
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Beyonce's stunning Grammy performance
Visibly pregnant, Beyonce performs at the Grammys in what is being called "an ode to black motherhood".
But not everyone was thrilled. It seems Beyonce's choice to perform with her pregnancy visibly on display rankled some of the more mean-spirited folks out there, including NY Post columnist, Naomi Schaefer Riley. In her most recent post, Riley (who has previously written about the guilt that comes part and parcel of mothering) sneered at Beyonce not just for flaunting her newly pregnant body, but acting as if pregnancy and motherhood is some kind of miracle.
She wrote: "Beyonce has never known when to draw the line between what she should share with her husband and what she should share with an audience – see her chair-straddling, tush-wiggling routine from 2014, for instance. But there was another message from her endless Virgin Mary/sun goddess routine: Pregnancy is sexy. Motherhood is divine." She continued: "Beyonce's performance was introduced by her own mother, who seemed appropriately proud. But what happened after that was some kind of pagan fertility worship ceremony. Why is it that in an era where women are constantly insisting that they should not be defined by their traditional, biological roles we have fetishised motherhood to such an extent?"
![Beyonce shows off her baby bump in an Instagram post announcing her pregnancy.](/web/20170224172725im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/3/i/y/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gui4gz.png/1487886374481.jpg)
Not content with pouring scorn on Beyonce for revelling in the physicality of her pregnancy, Riley also took aim at Adele for daring to "self-indulgently" talk about how becoming a mother resulted in a loss of identity for her, which then culminated in a battle with post-natal depression. Apparently, having money and resources means you aren't allowed to also feel terrified at the prospect of raising a child or feel yourself consumed by the myriad emotions that accompany the transition from "woman" to "mother".
One can't help but feel Riley is working out some of her own issues about motherhood in this piece. She implies that pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood are ordinary things that shouldn't be valorised. It's true that all of these acts occur in numbers enough to make it seem ordinary, but the trials and transformation that women endure on levels physical, emotional and cultural to ensure the survival of the human species is extraordinary. To witness the birth of a child is to understand this. Even while understanding that countless others might be at that very moment engaged in the same tussle between two worlds, the majesty of it all – the blood, the pain, the trauma, the fear, the love – feels so unique and monumental that the thought of it happening billions of times throughout history seems absurd. Beyond childbirth, the unequal labour demanded of women and mothers in particular is largely unsung despite attitudes that motherhood in the west is a hyper-revered state in which women who do not much of anything at all are unfairly fawned over. One of the things that's astonished me most about the responsibility of caring for a child is how so many women keep returning to it despite the dearth of appreciation that's shown for what is surely one of the most essential roles we can perform as members of an animal species.
But I have the privilege of taking this stance when reading mean-spirited and ungenerous words such as Riley's. White bodies like mine and Adele's and Katherine Heigl's (whose prudish comments about pregnancy Riley enthusiastically quotes in the opening of her piece) will never be subjected to the particular hatred that is executed against the bodies of women of colour such as Beyonce, especially when those bodies engage in the revolutionary act of bringing more children of colour into the world. When Beyonce stands before the world and defiantly owns her pregnancy, she isn't just challenging a basic misogyny about "women's work" but the white supremacy that differentiates between white women having babies (good) and women of colour – particularly black and Indigenous women – having them (bad).
A generic treatment and application of motherhood values is applied to all women equally, because it simply isn't the case. The ability to bring life into the world is one that is subjected to inherent oppression, but that oppression is compounded by multiple other factors. In Australia for example, white able-bodied women have located our reproductive struggles in fighting for access to abortion to end pregnancies, reproductive healthcare and IVF treatments. These are important fights and they shouldn't be dismissed. But Aboriginal women and disabled women more routinely encounter the oppression of state-sanctioned genocide, with policies allowing for the theft of not only their children but also, because of forced sterilisation programs, their reproductive capacity in its entirety.
![Adele has spoken about her experience of post-natal depression.](/web/20170224172725im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/b/m/i/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gui4gz.png/1487729886840.jpg)
In the United States, women of colour are similarly persecuted and vilified by the white supremacy that allows people such as Riley to assume that Beyonce's political embrace of motherhood is comparable to her own experience. But African American women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related illness than white women. On average, they make 14¢ less on the dollar than white women. Their babies are considered less valuable than white babies. In America, a black woman's 12-year-old son is shot dead in a park because police officers claim to have thought his toy gun was real. In that same America, a white woman's son shoots and kills nine African Americans in an historically black church and the police officers who arrest him stop on the way to the station to buy him Burger King.
Racism cannot be divorced from discussions around reproductive capacity and the bodies of those who bear it. In January, women around the world marched in protest of the Trump administration and the values (or lack thereof) he and his presidency represent. In a follow-up piece addressing the role of women of colour and trans-women in these marches, Brittany Cooper at the Crunk Feminist Collective wrote about the specific oppression of black cis women:Â "Historically, our vaginas were the property of plantation owners upon our arrival. They were used as a vehicle through which to reproduce plantation slavery. Having autonomy of our vaginas and wombs has been central to how black women articulate freedom." She later observes that the fertility of these bodies became undesirable post-slavery, "after we were no longer reproducing property for white people".
![In a display of regal brilliance, a heavily pregnant Beyonce performs at the Grammys.](/web/20170224172725im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/b/m/a/2/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gui4gz.png/1487729886840.jpg)
After Beyonce's Lemonade was released last year, a Facebook post written by Maximiliano Goiz shed more light on the religious imagery. (Goiz, as Amanda Alcantara wrote for Remezcla, "is a brown, queer, half-Cuban half-Mexican priest initiated into the [Yoruba] tradition 13 years ago".)  Goiz said of Oshun: "Oshun is many times presented as the Orisha of love, femininity and sensuality, but many are unaware that Oshun is actually the Orisha who has suffered the most ... when she seeks out revenge for those who have hurt her – and her children – she is unpredictable in her methods and temper ... it only makes sense that Beyonce would allude to Oshun's imagery and personification in an album that is intended to conceptualise a woman's journey of self-knowledge and healing, specifically that of a black woman's journey."
But Riley takes care to learn none of this, nor to consider the chasm of difference between her personal experience of motherhood and how she might feel about its majesty and that of a black woman who openly mourned the miscarriage of her first pregnancy and then endured accusations that her second wasn't even real. Those who've undergone pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood are entitled to feel however the hell they like about it – Riley included. But Beyonce comes from a specific place of racial oppression that cannot be ignored. It is an act of radical defiance for her and the other women subjected to the shame of the state and the public to be able to dictate the message around their bodies and not have sneering, privileged journalists who benefit from white centrality to decide that these celebrations are overwrought.
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