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• 1 media/1_LO2kmwX8Uy6cPTu0lhDViA.jpg 2020-05-15T03:17:45-07:00 Dirty Computer 2 plain 2020-05-15T03:19:42-07:00
  Dirty Computer (2018) — Janelle Monáe
  Janelle Monáe's third album, Dirty Computer, is a newborn classic and a complete, ferocious rewiring of monstrosity and its ecstasies. Monae's notion of monstrosity branches from Donna Haraway's classic feminist text A Cyborg Manifesto. The inhuman and human intermingle, cascade and erupt, and the organic is dissolved and redefined. Of the cyborg figure, Haraway writes, "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics" (Haraway 7). This amalgamation of the inorganic, artificial, and the real or human, is, in Haraway's view, a construction of very modern monstrosity, through which our enchantment with and repulsion for technology seeps outwards. Monáe expands the cyborg and its conception of monstrosity. The unique interactions of technology and the self, Monáe's album insists, do not constitute relationships or true intimacy, and monstrosity is birthed from a belief that technology can do replace our fundamental identities and structures of emotion. Describing the meaning of "dirty computer" in an interview, Monáe says, "We come from dirt and when we transition out we go back to dirt. […] We’re CPUs, our brains are uploading, downloading, transmitting, passing back and forth information. And with all computers you got your bugs, you got your viruses. But are those negatives, positives, features? Or not? I think it’s a conversation I want to have with us as a society, as human beings, about what it means to tell somebody that their existence, either they’re queer, minorities, women, poor, makes you have bugs and viruses. […] it’s about embracing those things even if it makes others uncomfortable." 
  
  The peculiar, singular correlations of monstrosity and femininity, in the form of the cyborg, become most prescient in the song "PYNK." "PYNK" is a sonic, playful, and yet mechanical love song targeted at the monstrous-feminine in its most ecstatic, self-indulgent formulation. The motif of pink, as a color associated with femininity, demonized, mocked, abused, stigmatized, and disowned, has in a way entered the space of the abject in Monáe's lyrics, voluntarily. Pink is rendered monstrous and immeasurable, borderless. In his "(Seven Theses," Cohen describes the monstrous as "a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions" (Cohen 6). Pink, a color, serves as a vehicle for playing with, caressing and disorganizing, the feminine and expanding its definitions into monstrosity. The form is tenuous and untraceable, transcending the limits of conventional femininities in Monae's lyrics: "Pynk, like the inside of your... baby / Pynk behind all of the doors... crazy / Pynk, like the tongue that goes down... maybe / Pynk, like the paradise found / Pynk when you're blushing inside... baby / Pynk is the truth you can't hide... maybe / Pynk, like the folds of your brain... crazy / Pynk as we all go insane." The color's associations with the vaginal  and thus the abject and specifically female, are redesigned and manipulated through camp in Monáe's music video for the song, posted above.