The Afrofuturist Vision of FKA twigs’ MAGDALENE (2019)

The musical artist FKA twigs, and her 2019 album, MAGDALENE, seeks to transcend the oppressive racial abuse and resulting wounds exacted by the press during a past relationship through the utilization of the story of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament. Precisely, twigs explore the misrepresentation of Magdalene’s persona as the “virgin-whore” in many religious spaces and cultural understanding. twigs’ themes of divine femininity, alienation, and transcendence during her effort to rewrite and reach self-acceptance after heartbreak in the public eye through MAGDALENE, engage key aspects of Afrofuturism – including the field’s presence as a feminine space, allowing for the development of arts and theories unconfined from traditional gender and racial oppressors. In this analysis, I trace twigs’ employment of Mary Magdalene’s story through both feminist and religious lenses, using Audre Lorde’s essay and positions in “Uses of the Erotic” to further connect twigs’ eroticized and sexual renderings of herself in the self-directed MAGDALENE music video, “cellophane” and Mary Magdalene’s reclaimed story. All of which serve in positioning MAGDALENE as a journey of self-reclamation and acceptance. Here, I also consociate twigs’ self-actualization of womanhood through her iconography in the album’s visuals and cover art with the Afrofuturistic idea of post and transhumanism.