BEYONCE'S WORLD

Class//End of Time

(credit: Ashley Csanady , National Post also Star Phoenix)

Beyoncé is getting her own course at the University of Waterloo. What the academe can learn from Queen Bey

You know you're the Queen of Pop when a real-life princess looks downright thrilled to meet you.

When the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited New York City last year, they took in a basketball game — but the real half-time show was when the former Kate Middleton and Prince William crossed the court to meet Beyoncé and Jay-Z, America's king and queen of the music industry. But as Queen Bey looked calm, cool, collected in a patterned white blouse and glided to the Royal couple, it was Kate's face that looked like it was about to split from glee.

The authentic wide grin belied something the composed consort rarely shows: fandom. One could almost imagine the princess, whom the British Press once dubbed "Waity Katie" for her lengthy courtship with the Prince of Wales, lifting a left hand in a royal wave and singing along with "Single Ladies."

That's how ubiquitous Beyoncé has become in her almost two decades at the top of the charts in North America and around the world. She stole the show from the minute Destiny's Child burst onto the scene in 1998 with its earworm-inducing "No, No, No." But her performance of gender, beauty, music and personality started well before that, notes professor Naila Keleta-Mae, who will be teaching a course this fall at the University of Waterloo in all things Bey: Beyoncé first learned pretty hurts on the beauty pageant circuit and entered the music scene at the age of 12 with pop group Girls Tyme.

Local and global media have reported on the course, which is a special topics offering this coming fall on gender and performance that rotates through professors and subjects, in both serious and wide-eyed tones. For Keleta-Mae, the raging debate evoked antiquated notions of the traditional canon, which postmodern criticism challenged but has not eliminated from our institutional spaces.

"Lots of scholars have done work around what this canon is, and who is served by it and who the ammunition fired from the canon obliterates," Keleta-Mae said. "Who it obliterates historically has been people who haven't had access to the same amounts of power and privilege as those who've held the canon."

"Beyoncé, like popular culture, has often been relegated to the space of low-brow, low-class work, so I think there are people who are alarmed by the fact that low art could find its way into a high-art elitist space," she said. "What is it about Beyoncé that makes people think she's not worthy of study? Was Shakespeare deemed to be worthy of study at the time he was making his art?"

Critical thought isn't limited to parsing John Milton or choking out the Canterbury Tales. For Keleta-Mae, it's that very mass popularity that makes Beyoncé — whom her teenage students have mindlessly consumed for years — the perfect entry point to the critical thought university is intended to impart.

Everything about Beyoncé sparks debate: her pregnancy was rumoured to be fake, her embrace of the Mrs. Carter label (Jay-Z's last name) drew ire and her feminist "coming out" at an American awards show last year sparked an onslaught of think pieces challenging her right to use the word. The feminist and race scholar bell hooks called Beyoncé a "terrorist" for grabbing hold of the capital-F label while dancing in a corset surrounded by barely dressed dancers.

Yet, Keleta-Mae notes, Beyoncé feminism dates to the earliest years of her career, when she sang "Independent Women" and "Survivor" with her Destiny's Child crew as backup. It's only her most recent album that we see her sexuality splayed on the screen. Bey's always been sexy, but in her 2013 self-titled album she got raunchy.

"It was Beyoncé as a sexualized woman but sexualizing herself in a way we hadn't seen before," Keleta-Mae said, and that intrigued her enough to start studying the singer, and then to developing this course. In "Partition" Beyoncé details back-of-a-limo felatio, in "Flawless" she samples Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDx talk titled, "We should all be feminists." And that juxtaposition is exactly what the course will explore, Keleta-Mae said — does bell hooks have a point or is Beyoncé the embodiment of the new, femme feminism that embraces motherhood, wifedom and sex?