TRANSCENDING THE CIS-TEM: Interpolating Black Queer Temporality

This chapter showcases how Renaissance is a lyrical and compositional project that interpolates a past to build a present performance of Black queerness. By disengaging with a futurism that is embedded in a heterosexist reproductive model, and instead developing a Black futurity fastened to community, Beyoncé disrupts the linearity of time, intersecting past musical interpolations with present iterations of music to demonstrate that queer Blackness is always in dialogue with the past, in the present, about a future. The chapter engages with Kara Keeling's concepts of Black futurity and the productive power of queerness. It also draws from Jose Esteban Muñoz and Sara Ahmed and their concepts on how to disrupt our orientation of time. My argument explores how Renaissance posits a Black queer futurity outside of normative structures of reproduction to dismantle the “cis”-temes that have framed her lyrical narratives in I Am…Sasha Fierce (2008), Lemonade (2016), and Homecoming (2019).