Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computers, and Embodied Posthumanism

Abstract Janelle Monáe has been a driving force in Afrofuturism and a practical theorist of Black embodiment for the past fifteen years, and with her 2018 album and (e)motion picture, Dirty Computer, she has cemented herself as a pop sensation. While many critics have celebrated Dirty Computer for its embrace of queer identity and assertion of Black humanity, they have often done so by pitting it against her earlier work, which often features her cyborg alter-ego and riffs on iconic imagery from the films Metropolis (1927) and Blade Runner (1982), aligning her with speculative traditions concerned with the enmeshment of human and machine. I argue that the formulation of the “dirty computer” is not a departure but an intensification and distillation of her commitment to deconstructing the category of the human and disrupting the human/machine divide. The body as dirty computer interrogates the efficacy of Donna J. Haraway’s version of cyborg being for Black women, whose bodies have been scripted as less-than-human for so long, by calling on Black feminist traditions from Hortense J. Spillers onward that center fleshy materiality as a means of resistance to the hegemonic construction of the human body. In conversation with scholars such as Alexander Weheliye and Uri McMillan, who argue that Blackness is itself a technics, the dirty computer performs an always already virtual Black body materialized through technologies of the voice and citational practices that disrupt linear temporality. Monáe articulates an Afrofuturist feminist vision for embodiment that rejects transhumanism by embracing the messiness of the body as an essential tool for testifying.