Janelle Monáe, whom part of the public recently discovered as “the singer (and actress) of the Audi ad”, explained on a talk show about her non-binary identity. She had come out pansexual in 2018.
Almost four years to the day after announcing her pansexuality, Janelle Monáe is rethinking her gender identity: the 36-year-old actress and musician now identify as non-binary. She brought up the topic on Red Table Talk, available on Facebook Watch and co-hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield Norris, also detailing why she preferred not to talk about it earlier.
“I don’t just see myself as a woman,” the artist explains on the talk show. I feel all my energy. I feel like God is so above the ‘he’ or the ‘she’. And if I come from God, then I am everything. But I will always support women, just as I will always be on the side of black women. But I see all that I am, far beyond the binary.”
After this statement, the host of the show Willow Smith asks Janelle Monáe the reasons that push her to speak publicly today about her non-binarity. “Someone told me ‘ if you don’t try to understand the things you need to understand before you share them with the world, then you will have to understand them at the same time as the world,'” she explains. That is precisely what I did not want to do. So I told myself that I needed to have everything in my head [before talking about it], because I didn’t want to say anything.”
A non-binary Audi muse
In fact, Janelle Monáe had already mentioned her non-binarity in January 2020 through a tweet with the hashtag #IAmNonBinary before retracting, specifying that she wanted above all to support this community. “I also retweeted a meme from the animated series Steven Universe where it says ‘are you a boy or a girl? I’m an experiment because I was in there, explains the actress today. Especially as someone who has been pushing the boundaries of gender since the beginning of his career. I feel my feminine energy, my masculine energy as well as an energy that I can’t even explain.” However, she continues to use the pronoun “she,” says Rolling Stone.
A soul music singer-songwriter and actress, the American was nominated in 2010 for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary R&B Album for her first studio-recorded opus, The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III). With the general public on our side of the Atlantic, she was especially discovered recently for having signed the music of the advertisement for the new Audi e-tron, in which she appears. A muse of a large non-binary German car: we are progressing!
