This article examines Lemonade as a decisive intervention in the relationship between Black celebrity and respectability politics. Situating the album within a longer history of racial governance, it argues that Lemonade marks a withdrawal from the belief that disciplined performance can secure protection or recognition from institutions whose authority depends on exclusion. Rather than treating the album as a response to a discrete political moment, the analysis reads it as registering the exhaustion of respectability as an organising framework for Black public life. The article shows how emotional containment comes to signify coercion rather than virtue, while expressions previously managed or suppressed acquire interpretive weight. This argument extends across Beyonc & eacute;'s later work, including Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, where authority increasingly emerges through historical placement rather than immediate approval. Together, these projects articulate a post-aspirational mode of Black celebrity that no longer treats inclusion as evidence of progress. The article contends that Beyonc & eacute;'s work models a form of cultural authority oriented towards durability rather than consensus, offering insight into how refusal operates as an organising orientation under contemporary conditions of racialised power.
This article examines the star text of Chinese actress and entrepreneur Liu Xiaoqing (whose reported birth year varies across sources, most commonly cited from 1950 to 1955) as a diagnostic site for understanding gendered ageing and the cultural production of female sexual subjectivity in postfeminist China. Spanning four decades of public visibility across socialist cinematic heritage, market reform, entertainment industrialisation, and platformisation, Liu’s career has made her a persistent focal point of contestation over the boundaries of age-appropriate femininity. Adopting a cultural-analytic methodology rooted in celebrity studies, this article treats Liu’s star text as a mediated public persona assembled from autobiographies, interviews, screen roles, promotional imagery, platform content, and popular gossip rather than as a reducible biographical subject. The central argument is that Liu constitutes a diagnostic case revealing how postfeminist empowerment operates in China through confidence talk, self-branding, and individualised agency, while remaining constrained by moral scrutiny, heteronormative expectations, market capture, and platform governance. Her performance of ‘agelessness’ constitutes a paradoxical form of celebrity agency: it stages resistance to the desexualisation and erasure of ageing female stars while simultaneously complying with a normative aesthetic regime that treats youth as the primary condition of market visibility.
