Notes

page one: history
historically black women in the US have not fit into traditional ideals of femininity, which have always been focused on the white middle and upper class. The ideal woman was delicate, sexually chaste, and a nurturing mother. the conditions of slavery made it impossible for black women to fit into these ideals. enslaved black women's worth lay in their labor, both physical and sexual/reproductive. they worked in homes and in agriculture, they raised white children, and they were often sexually exploited in order to produce more slaves. this is what is referred to as racial capitalism; black bodies were commodified and given economic value, and so white slave owners relied upon black women's reproductive labor to increase their own economic holdings.

page two: controlling images
controlling images of black women were both produced by and reinforced the injustices black women suffered and continue to suffer. the stereotype of the jezebel allowed white men to sexually exploit enslaved black women, and the legacy of the jezebel still exists today. the stereotype of the mammy portrays black women as devoted to the white families they serve while being disdainful of their own children, when in reality black women have historically been forced to take care of white children at the expense of their own. the stereotype of the welfare queen portrays black women as lazy and willfully dependent on government financial aid. and the stereotype of the angry black women serves the dual purpose of undermining black women's pain, anger, and dissatisfaction (as anything they say is automatically taken to be unnecessarily angry, illogical, and exaggerated) as well as masculinizing them by portraying them as angry, aggressive, and physically imposing. these stereotypes also divorce black women even more from traditional conceptions of femininity, including and most importantly the aspect of femininity which centers motherhood.

page three: modern examples
contemporary culture sexualizes and eroticizes black women, focusing on the black butt as a legacy of Saartje baartman, but there is still the implicit understanding that this sexualization must exist for (white) public consumption. Nicki Minaj's anaconda cover, for example, led to her being heavily criticized even though she was hardly the first woman to pose so provocatively. some of the criticism might stem from the unapologetic way that Minaj is embodying and reclaiming black women's sexual appeal. this becomes more apparent when comparing her to kara walker's A Subtlety statue. it, too, features a provocative image of a black woman's butt, but she faced much less criticism than Minaj, perhaps because she did not embody this reclamation but merely put it on display to be consumed by her audience. the subtlety of the statue's message was definitely lost to some if not most of the viewers, some of whom were noted to take raunchy photos with the statues.


page four:
black women still face sexual violence in large numbers

page five

page six