Abstract: This essay explores the radical potential of Black performance in the mainstream public through the lens of Kendrick Lamar's February 2025 performance at the Super Bowl. By comparing this performance to Beyonce's appearance at the same venue nearly a decade earlier, I argue that the failure to categorize the two events under the same logics—both rooted in capitalism, consumption, branding, and the symbolic—we also fail to reckon with the ways revolutionary acts are too often affixed to the bodies of cisgender, heteronormative Black men. Using the theoretical framework of misogynoir, a term coined by Black Feminist Moya Bailey, I illustrate the ways that, even in hypervisible positions, many Black women's radical worldmaking efforts are misperceived, erased, and overlooked.
Jenn M. Jackson (2025) studied this question.