By: Anamitra Bora

If I thought too long about the vanilla exploding in my mouth mingled with salted caramel, sticky toffee, and brownie and bound to the conjunctive lyrics of Beyonce’s A Woman Like Me, I would abdicate the primacy of words on pages, let myself dissolve into prosody, and embrace a sort of “diva-ism” akin to a peacock: a mating call, a dazzling act, a spell that bewilders and traps.

The fragility of kinship spills to the songs we are sometimes attracted to, both reiterating a need for intimacy and a desire to wound, governed by the pleasure principle, by the constant push to reduce tension to its most optimal release. We listen to certain songs to resituate ourselves and try to actively feel our interiority when language fatigues to secure an imaginative territory. Instead of looking ahead and trying to pre-live the sensitivities of the future to soften the shock of what is to come, we find ourselves searching for the music that will call back what has abandoned us, biohacking the ache of absence with new desires, new rhythms, new ways of loving. Beyonce’s A Woman Like Me reached me via a Twitter post which is actually a dedicated Beyonce fan page. As soon as I heard the verse, “Do you think you could fall for a woman like me?” something in me refused to settle; I couldn’t maintain my composure because I was captivated by the relief it invoked in me. I felt like a woman, bent to hunt, exaggerated by the feral beats, trumpets, and strings that invited me into a portal of glory. Even as a gay man, I found myself downcast in my room under the majesty of a woman too beautiful and too smart, hovering on the border between objectification and reverence, aching to live my sexual fantasy through her.

I imagine that in the blurring of seduction and ruthless desire, when this R&B ballad was composed for the movie The Pink Panther, Beyoncé conjured the figure of an omnipresent lover, always before the devotee, yet still unreachable. She is not the perfect lover, not the perfect would-be wife, nor the flawless heroic vixen; rather, she is the one almost always perfectly resented. She admits it in her lines, “’cause I find it hard to trust, I need too much and I really don’t believe in love, no, no,” with a militancy that softens only into deeper vulnerability after life-altering distress. Her resistance to instant gratification in love is compelling: even as she wonders whether her lover could “fall for a woman like me,” she breathes life into the fantasy of messiness, thresholds, and consequences, instead of dignified longing. It’s scary. Being safe can be scary for people like us who got distracted early on by modern love, so she provides us a map, a cognitive reframing, before she starts reveling in hopelessness. She warns, “Sometimes I don’t let things go, get emotional and sometimes, I’m just out of control.” R&B isn’t a sweet escape here; it’s a mirror and a warning: if we don’t straighten ourselves out, every love song will drift aimlessly.

Lauren Berlant talks about cruel optimism as a way to describe a condition where attachments to certain objects, ideals, or systems persist despite their inability to fulfill our desires. What happens to us when the world isn’t equipped to handle chaos, when love is pitched as saviorism instead of the messy invasion it really is? I have been with my Punjabi boyfriend for almost two years now and whenever he looked at me with a cool speculation for my flamboyant queerness or, other times, with a softness that felt like a saving from a quantum leap with a gentle hand offered from one experienced sufferer to another, I try to drink that feeling in, to steady myself, because before love often arrived disguised as a hollow performance —“I see you, I hear you”—and the only response was a visceral self-annihilation. Now I want tenderness, to learn one another, to learn something, to collaborate on a feeling, run into his arms when I am weak, silently getting comforted by his breath. Spontaneously, I love you.

This is why “you need to think about it before you get hooked on the venom,” from the chorus, feels like a rite of passage, delivered with suspicion and dismissal. It’s as if I am saying: you will have to break through all the barriers I create — a humiliation ritual of love and rescue to shield me from the very pain I recreate out of older wounds. This shall not be a quick fix of escapism. After all, I’m Sasha Fierce (Beyonce’s Alter Ego), daughter of Tina Knowles, just as great as Michael, James Brown, Tupac, Aaliyah, and Whitney. She’s hyper-aware of her position and navigates them like a general in combat. Beyoncé sounds strained because she knows the glare that surrounds “soul-pairing” can unmask everything people bury under devotion, turning tenderness into interrogation. That same pressure lives in my life. With my Punjabi boyfriend, love arrives quietly; the ordinary embrace, only later recognizable as the lazy pleasure of soulmates, showed me what would actually hold my attention: small gestures, remembering the books I casually mentioned, or cooking the Assamese prawn fry; things I had long abandoned because they’d become too painful. I hadn’t realized how jaded I’d grown until that renewed
innocence arrived. Faced with the choice to reclaim optimism or remain in a dull malaise, I had one chance. I chose to take it and be delighted with his slow, covert obsession.

The lyric “Do you think I could be the one that you seek? ’Cause baby, I’m one step ahead, you’re two steps behind” performs superstardom, a bad bitch spirit: it asserts a staged superiority and adds fuel to the fire of chase while also enchanting an audience always hungry for more, always harder to please. Tracing a lineage from Nina Simone through Janet Jackson to Aaliyah, we can see how Black female performers have negotiated a tension between the muted hysteria of ambiguous relationships and the spiritual expansiveness of blues and jazz, a limbo where
romantic mythmaking becomes a social practice. They treated intimacy as sacred; they moved carefully between relationships and let old feelings reignite them again and again, the repeated attempt to re-experience a peak feeling, even when it exacts emotional cost, almost like the feeling of lighting up to inhale a favourite drug or the feeling of sticking to bodies that rewires trauma or getting addicted to live at the bitter end where news bombarding our social media evaporates into datas, headlines, statistics. Love and romance were (and still are) both intoxicating and tormenting, a cycle that keeps pulling people back in. The slow, irresistible pace pulls you into that zone where the forbidden (blasphemous) and the sacred (miraculous) meet to give birth to intense, risky love and hold hostage to fate.

If we cannot achieve complete liberation then Beyonce’s A Woman Like Me breaks the spell, disrupts anhedonia, and pulls the listener back to a feminine opulence while at the same time merging the body with uncanny linguistic fertility that gives us the nerve to be free. Beyoncé gathers and studies the deep, unspoken currents of Black feeling and turns them into a brave tenderness: an invitation to fall, not into worship, but into a combustible love that is itself a kind of revolt. To love this song is to taste a heart you both consume and are remade by; to become a little of him, a little with him, and entirely yourself to love A Woman Like Me. In that delicious
paradox, you can hear her confess “You need to stop for a minute before you get too deep up in it.” Her love songs teach us to breathe against the machine’s junk currents, accepting love’s strange rumblings without becoming fragile. I see her performance of anger, dismay and rebellion when it comes to love but she denies to spiral into a bottomless pit and make outrage an identity.

Anamitra Bora (he/him) teaches feminist and queer theory as an Adjunct Faculty at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Cotton University, Assam (India). His research taps into areas around sociology of gender and the intersections of queer sexuality, affect theory, and the politics of (absent) bodies and the emotional textures of queer life in South Asia. His current work examines how violence consumes queer flesh, shaped by affective closeness to social heteronormativity and nationalism in Assam producing an amalgam of fantasy and futility. In 2024, he was awarded Best Presenter at the 7th International Conference on Gender and Sexuality in Thailand for his paper “From Sexual Shame to Sexual Pride: Extending Emotions to Homoerotic Connections.”