Cindi Marweather, Android No. 57821

Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). Janelle Monae. Bad Boy Records. Wondaland Arts Society. 2007. The ArchAndroid. Janelle Monae. Bad Boy Records, Wondaland Arts Society, Atlantic Records,. 2010. The Electric Lady. Janelle Monae. Bad Boy Record, Wonderland Arts Society, Atlantic Records. 2013.

Reviewed by Sonya Dyer, SFRA Review #318 (Fall 2016): pp. 31-32, perhaps most usefully on "Monae's gynoid avatar" as an embodied (our term — and, so to speak) "metaphor for an experience of post-Emancipation, past civil Rights, 21st Century Black female subjectivity" (p. 32).[1]

CINDI MAYWEATHER, the avatar-creation of musician/songwriter and performer Janelle Monae, represents a re-configuration of the android (or more accurately gynoid) figure as a revolutionary, intersectional heroine [...].

Mayweather aka Android No. 57821 is a mass-produced droid created in 2719 in Metropolis, a fictional universe within which all of the works discussed in this text takes place. (p. 31) [* * *]

Incorporating elements of RnB, rock, indie, classical, easy listening and funk, Monae has in Mayweather developed an avatar that represents the formally contentious nexus of humanoid gynoid, clone and robot. Mayweather, as a gynoid with a distinct subjectivity and motivation, demonstrates what theorist Isaiah Lavender III posits as the disquieting possibility that the android (supposedly devoid of emotion) might be “capable of developing the emotional qualities of a human” (Lavender, 199; Dyer, p. 32)

RDE, finishing, 4Sep21