Blog Post # 7: Androids

For this week's blog post, I chose to read Aja Romano's article about Janelle Monáe's music video for "Dirty Computer." The article explores how Monáe draws inspiration from science fiction and Afrofuturism in her music and art. According to the article, Monáe spent many years crafting a dystopian universe where she wove themes of Afrofuturism and queer exploration into the story of her alter ego, Cindi Mayweather. Monáe described this alter ego, "a tuxedo-wearing cyborg," as how she hid from the real world. In her most recent album, "Dirty Computer," Monáe revealed that this alter-ego Cindi was actually Jane, the protagonist, all along. In the article, this introduction is seen as a sort of transformation.

"Jane hides within Cindi's glammed-up but constricting tuxedoed aesthetic, but over time, by tapping into her cultural heritage, Jane is able to free the android via Afrofuturism and queer exploration."

The album shows Monáe's growth as an artist and person as she fully embraces her identity as a pansexual black woman within her art, allowing her to fully express herself. Monáe has taken inspiration from tropes created by white male writers but has mapped them onto her own identity as a black queer woman. By doing this, she is claiming those tropes for individuals who are often marginalized in traditional science fiction works, such as "androids" like herself.

“I speak about androids because I think the android represents the new ‘other’,” she told the Evening Standard in 2013. “You can compare it to being a lesbian or being a gay man or being a black woman.”

Janelle Monáe's work, particularly her use of Afrofuturism and sci-fi tropes, envisions a future where creativity, self-expression, and liberation movements are celebrated. In her dystopian universe of Metropolis, these movements have been suppressed, but their artifacts remain preserved in the form of music. Monáe's work celebrates these artifacts and uses them to imagine a future where these movements can flourish and be celebrated. Her work is a modern take on the sci-fi genre that culminates in a vision of what Metropolis could be, one that is jubilant, queer, and Afrofuturist in nature.

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