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Keeping Up Appearances,
Getting Fed Up
The Embodiment of Strength among
African American Women

The body holds meaning. The fact that this thought takes us by surprise itself reflects
significantly upon a culture that is seriously divided within itself, splitting itself off
from nature, dividing the mind from the body, dividing thought from feeling,
dividing one race against another, dividing the supposed nature of woman from the
supposed nature of man.
———Kim Chernin, The Obsession ([1981] 1994, 2)

There is a profound problem of embodiment among women in U.S.

society. Across social classes and racial backgrounds, the female body is
afforded limited rather than full access to a range of human needs and
possibilities. Such societal restrictions in turn lead women to develop and
demonstrate their frustrations through their bodies (Bordo 1995; Chernin
[1981] 1994). Given that women experience their bodies in an inequitable
social context, feminists view women’s body problems as reflective of their
“ambivalence” toward the gender roles accorded them (Perlick and
Silverstein 1994). From this view of the body as a social entity, feminists
voice a healthy suspicion toward the mainstream views of disorder in the
female body as primarily signs of psychological frailty or physiological
dysfunction. Thus feminists view the body problems that predominate
among women—eating disorders, hysteria, anxiety, and depression—as
expressive, embodied protests against the social reality of restrictions,

[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2005, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 104–123]

©2005 by Smith College. All rights reserved.

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devaluations, and violence directed at women (Breuer and Freud [1895]
1955; Jack 1991; Perlick and Silverstein 1994). This connection of the
personal with the social renders the alleviation of these problems as
dependent not simply on psychological or medical treatment but on
fundamental transformations in the social meanings and societal oppor-
tunities available to women.
In this essay I extend the feminist concern with embodiment to the
experiences of black women. I maintain that the dominant image of the
“strong black woman” is a limiting rather than empowering construction
of black femininity and that it rewards women for a stoicism that draws
attention away from the inequalities they face in their communities and the
larger society. Focusing on the work of black feminists who have critiqued
the gender role of strength and data from an interview study with twelve
black women of diverse weights, I connect their construction of “strength”
to the reality of compulsive overeating among black women. In the process
I suggest that this “body problem” may be productively viewed as a muted
protest against the intense selflessness mandated of “strong black
women.”

To Be Black and Female: Performing and

Embodying Strength

“De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it
tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!”
———Zora Neale Hurston (1937, 29)

Taken from the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the epigraph notes the
exasperation of the grandmother of the central character as she makes a
critical observation: the social treatment of black women in a racist, sexist,
and classist society leads to the view that they are “beasts of burden,” who
must labor for others above them in the social hierarchy. While few black
women would readily identify with being “mules,” a consistent thread in
black feminist theorizing draws attention to the selflessness, abuse,
expectations of superhuman abilities, and inequalities faced by women
who see themselves and are viewed as “strong black women.” As I main-
tain in this section, the dehumanization of black women into deviant
beings, into “mules of the world,” is centrally a problem of embodiment or

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 105

 of how the valuation of bodies in society affects the experience of living in
those bodies.
Over the past thirty years black feminists have noted the problematic
assumptions that are attendant on the image of the strong black woman.
As “female Atlas[es],” strong black women are encouraged to take pride in
their capacity to endure and overcome adversity and to survive the physical,
economic, and relational ravages of slavery, segregation, and persistent
racism (Gillespie [1978] 1984). As superhuman characters, strong black
women are recognized for their relationships to others rather than their
connections to their selves. They typically demonstrate “gross displays of
endurance and the absence of a personal agenda” (Scales 2001, 31), and
they routinely put on the appearance of managing myriad difficulties
alone—supporting a family on poverty wages, raising children as a single
parent, enduring humiliation on one’s job and in the larger society—
because they are deemed fit for and unscathed by a life of “labor, suffering,
and survival” (Harris-Lacewell 2001, 4). Strong black women “do it all”
and without complaint. In other words, strong black women typically take
on a social script that acknowledges them primarily when they tolerate the
intolerable.
Black feminists have consistently remarked on the uses of the designa-
tion “strong black woman,” in celebration of a woman’s survival amid
often demoralizing and unjust circumstances. As Marcia Ann Gillespie
clarifies:

How many times have you heard the term applied to a woman whose
life no rational person would choose in a million years? Some sister,
struggling under an impossible load, who’d love to be able to shrug her
shoulders or at least have a few other shoulders to share the burden
with. “That’s a strong Black woman,” someone will say in a solemn,
near-reverent tone that is usually followed by a moment of silence. It’s
almost as if one were judging a performance instead of empathizing with her life.
As a result, her complexities, pain and struggle are somehow made
mythic, and she who so desperately needs our support is placed on a
pedestal to be admired rather than helped. ([1978] 1984, 33, emphasis
added)

The construction of strength allows both onlookers and a woman herself

to de-emphasize her struggle, to disconnect from any assistance, and to

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turn a blind eye to the real oppression in the context she is facing. Keeping
up the appearance of having things under control often requires black
women to adopt a “warrior mode” in which “individual and group respon-
sibilities are distorted, personal and political boundaries are blurred, and
personal and community priorities are unbalanced” (Scott 1991, 11).
Becoming everything to everyone, they become less of someone to them-
selves, hence the often heard reference to black women not as people but
as “mules of the world” (Hurston 1937).
Poignantly describing the script of strength as “cutting off my air
supply,” self-proclaimed hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan explicates her
formal “retirement” from the strong black woman role. In the process, she
draws attention to the obligatory disconnection from self and the stoicism
she was raised to see as the only acceptable way to be black and female.

What I kicked to the curb was the years of social conditioning that told
me it was my destiny to live my life as a BLACKSUPERWOMAN Emeri-
tus. That by the sole virtues of my race and gender I was supposed to be
the consummate professional, handle any life crisis, be the dependable
rock for every soul who needed me. . . . Retirement was ultimately an act
of salvation. Being a SBW [Strong Black Woman] was killing me softly.
(1999, 87)

Essentially, Morgan refused to continue life as a mule, and she began

questioning a gender role that left her unable to see her humanity or to
recognize her right to a life fuller than one of endless struggles endured
with a stiff upper lip. As a result, she gave up a willingness to assuage
everyone around her by hiding her own distress and desires under the
guise of “strength.” Redefining her responsibilities and relationships to
others, she demands that her humanity be respected and that others alter
their expectations of her and themselves.
In a growing body of black feminist autobiographical and clinical
literature, the embodiment of strength is related to the typically overlooked
experience of depression among black women (Boyd 1998; Danquah 1998;
Mitchell and Herring 1998). Such research and theorizing maintain that
performing strength as one’s identity can lead black women to shoulder
the types of daily and major stressors that are precursors to depressive
episodes. Encouraging black women to embrace struggle as their hall-
mark, the script of being strong enough to deal with adversity often leads

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 107

 them to deny the possibility of depression and to have the reality of their
depression denied by others.
As Meri Nana-Ama Danquah found, admitting depression to others was
akin to forgoing her right to be seen as a black woman. On hearing that
Danquah was writing a book on black women and depression, a white
woman expressed disbelief that “mules of the world” could collapse:
“When black women start going on Prozac, you know the whole world is
falling apart.” Black friends were similarly incredulous of her claim to
being depressed (which they read as a “weakness” and as impossible for a
“strong” black woman to embody): “What do you have to be depressed
about? If our people could make it through slavery, we can make it through
anything. Take your troubles to Jesus, not no damn psychiatrist” (1998,
20–21, original emphasis). Despite these denials, depression is a reality for
many black women, and clinicians assert that central to acknowledging
and working through depression is the shifting of definitions of black
womanhood from “strong enough to handle it” to “strong enough to be
human” (Boyd 1998, 151).1
One reason for the persistence of the image of strong black womanhood
is that for both black women and white women the image is often viewed
as a refreshingly “unfeminine” and therefore more empowering alternative
to the dominant construction of white womanhood as weak, dependent,
and uncertain (Painter 1996; Morgan 1999; Townsend Gilkes 2001).
However, while strength has affirming qualities, it is, like all gender roles,
a social construction and one with a significant blind spot: The cultural
and societal expectation that black women will demonstrate strength and
never break down physically or emotionally diminishes outrage about the
status quo, as it assumes that black women have the reserves that allow
them to face, bear, and perhaps surmount adversity.
In the following section I describe a study I undertook to see if a key
physiological reality facing black women—elevated rates of overweight
and obesity2 that place them at increased risk for diabetes, heart disease,
and hypertension (Rand and Kuldau 1990; Siegel et al. 2000)—could be
related to the embodiment of strength and specifically to its requisite
selflessness and voicelessness. In short, I wanted to investigate whether
the overeating that leads to overweight and obesity could be a protest,
albeit muffled, against the expectation that black women silence feelings,
needs, and experiences deemed at variance with the endurance and
selflessness of the strength role.

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Methods

In order to empirically explore experiences of strength, self, and embodi-

ment, I undertook an interview study with twelve African American
women. All were students enrolled at an urban university in the southern
region of the United States and ranged in age from 19 to 46, with a mean of
27.4 years. The women were of diverse body weights, with five self-
identifying as overweight and/or obese. Individual interviews and focus
groups lasted between 1.5 and 2.5 hours and were audiotaped and tran-
scribed. In the next two sections I describe how the women were raised to
perform strength within and outside of families and communities. I also
explore the language of overeating as a protest against the selflessness
mandated by the role of strength.

picking up strength
Of the twelve interviewees, four were obese and one was significantly
overweight. However, eight of the interviewees, including four of the
overweight women, described families in which several, if not a majority,
of the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and sisters were obese and struggled
with weight-related illnesses. The stories these interviewees told about
such women contained a thematic consistency of self-sacrifice and
seemingly limitless endurance. As one interviewee noted, the strong black
women of her rural Louisiana community were “make do women,” who
were expected to accept many inequitable life circumstances. She and
other interviewees described women who tolerated infidelity because they
were raised to “tak[e] all kind of stuff off of men,” who worked multiple
jobs in order to take care of their households and those of kin, and who
raised generations of children. In the process of being strong—that is, of
making continuous personal sacrifices—they also “shield[ed] so much” of
their emotions.
Growing up, there were few alternatives for the women than to be
“strong.” It was modeled by mothers and female relatives, and during the
interviewees’ upbringings, few, if any, other public responses were
tolerated. As forty-six-year-old Traci3 recalls from her girlhood:

Even from, just say a young girl. . . . It’s just something you just learn.
You try to instill in yourself. “Well, mom told me to be strong, so I have
to be strong like her.” And then you start following the example. And

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 109

 then once you see mom strong, grandmother strong, you very seldom
see them cry that much. I very seldom saw them cry that much, but the
strength was there. And that’s just, you just pick it up. And the next thing
you know, what mom is doing, you’re trying to do it. And just about
everything. You see her cooking, you try to cook.

Speaking of her childhood in the second person—“And then you start

following the example. . . . [Y]ou very seldom see them cry that much”—
Traci demonstrates the performative qualities of being strong. By follow-
ing a mother’s actions, a girl hopes to become strong—that is, to suppress
feelings of uncertainty and to project a façade of calm. Thus, more than
simply learning gendered behaviors, “picking up” strength entails recog-
nizing and coming to terms with one’s lack of options outside the role: As
Traci states, “It’s just something you just learn.”
Such immersion in the performance of strength is a common memory in
the autobiographical recollections of these and other African American
women (Scott 1991; Ward 1996). They describe the pivotal experience of
having the expectation of strength foisted on them, usually by mothers. In
the process their personal voice and sense of agency are muted by the
demands of female kin to follow in the externally defined role of what
Michelle Wallace has named the “historical me, the monolithic me”
([1978] 1990, 95; see also Gillespie [1978] 1984). Suggested by these
women’s experiences and their ambivalent recollections, however, is the
sense that performing strength is not equivalent to feeling strong (that is,
capable and in control). Despite the intensity of one’s performance, the
role of strength does not necessarily fit or supplant one’s reality that
contains uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear.
As the interviewees revealed, strength is particularly inflected by gender,
as mothers train their daughters to be the emotional, physical, and often
financial caretakers for kin.

They always say, “You gotta be there for your family.” And that’s the
worst thing. I tell my momma that. “That’s the worst thing you could
teach a person.” . . . And it’s how we interpret it. They teach the son
that, “You gotta be there for each other,” and I think sons listen to it as,
“You can screw up, they [the women] got your back.” Whereas daugh-
ters listen to it as, “I got to take care of. I got to watch out for my brother;
I got to watch out for my family.”

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Strong women such as Evangeline’s mother were raised to make and
maintain few boundaries between their needs and those of others. After
years of supporting her sister’s household and being taken advantage of by
family members, her mother has finally “learned it the hard way . . . where
to be strong, and who to be strong with, and where your priorities lie.”
However, learning boundaries was not a part of her upbringing or that of
many of the other women interviewed who were surrounded by strong
black females. In fact, boundaries were distorted in large measure because
the role of being “strong” rests on external, rather than self-identified,
definitions of being all things to all people.
While mothers and grandmothers are typically one’s role models of
strength, family members and friends also groom a woman to “pick up”
strength by assuming the quality of her. Significantly, the interviewees did
not describe choosing the role for themselves. Rather, it seemed a quality
they developed to fulfill others’ needs for a person to be reliable, other
directed, and uncomplaining in the process.

Everybody claims me to be the strong one. . . . That’s how they see me.
And as a matter of fact, my girlfriend one day, when I told her I’d had
this moment, I freaked her out, she was like, “What do you want me to
do? Do you need to go to the hospital?” . . . And not that I was tearing
up anything or anything, I was just crying. And, it, I had too many things
on my mind, too many things to do, and couldn’t figure out how to do
them, and it just all came to a head. And she was like, “What’s wrong?
I’ve never seen you cry. What’s the matter?”

Others’ perceptions of her strength, as many of the women experienced,

conflict with Jennifer’s awareness of being overwhelmed as a single
working mother enrolled in college. The fact that “just crying” could elicit
concerns about her mental health demonstrates how the presumption of
strength excludes the acknowledgment of other realities, such as exhaustion
and the needs for sympathy and understanding. Crying was literally so out
of character for a strong black woman, such as Jennifer, that to her friend it
appeared pathological, requiring medical attention rather than a compas-
sionate ear. The reaction of Jennifer’s friend, another black woman, makes
sense given that among the interviewees, few had ever seen their mothers
cry, and most of them similarly hid their own “weaknesses” from their own
daughters. Thus “just crying” is in fact a rare event for them to witness and

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 111

 participate in. However, the depth of the women’s investment in the role,
to see it as normative, was revealed when two interviewees, including
Jennifer, noted that they were raising their daughters to be “tomboys,” which
in their view meant that they were girls who projected strength and compe-
tence from a young age. Jennifer in particular noted her lack of patience
with young black girls who acknowledged physical and emotional hurts.
Strength training occurs in part because black families realize that their
females will not be accorded the societal respect and concern given to
white girls and women. Encouraging strength is a way of preparing black
girls and young women for a life filled with adversity. However, as Michelle
Wallace ([1978] 1990) posits, problematic about the construction of
strength is that it leaves no room for acknowledging one’s full humanity.
Any show of weakness renders a black woman not strong and therefore not
black. Since being strong is a mark of distinction for most black women,
the threat of being called weak is one that they seek to avoid. However,
when strength is expected of women under all circumstances, black
women can be placed at risk for being subjected to situations that no one
should have to endure.
Crystal, a single mother of two, relates a particularly poignant example
of the sexism of her father and brothers, who placed the burden of caring
for a dying mother squarely and solely on her “strong” shoulders:

[T]hey wouldn’t do anything. And I was taking my kids late, I was not
doing well in school, I was just, chaos. And, I looked at my dad. I
couldn’t keep my eyes open. He say, “You don’t need any help! My son, I
mean, your brothers, they have to work; you’re not going to pay their
bills.” And then, I was like, “I just want some sleep.” . . . “She don’t
want you here!” [father talking to mother], just because I say I need
some sleep. . . . He said I didn’t need any rest or sleep. And my brothers
didn’t have to do anything. . . . I get more of it from my brothers and my
dad of, “I’m supposed to be a superwoman-type person.” But then also
my friends and guys I meet, so I don’t know [chuckle].

Crystal’s presumed strength allowed her male family members to avoid the
emotional and physical labor of tending to her mother, who was viewed as
a strong black woman and was dying from weight-related congestive heart
failure. As is found among strong black women—women who take on this
role out of the lack of choice to embody black womanhood in other affirm-

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ing ways—Crystal “picked up” the strength to go on. Within such a
context of help not being forthcoming and people refusing to see the
enormity of the endurance expected of African American women, Tia’s
fierce commitment to going it alone makes sense:

You get tired of people telling you no or they’ll be there for you, and
actually they’re not. So what do you do? You rely on yourself, because
you can’t depend on nobody like you can depend on yourself. . . . [It]
only took one or two people to tell me that they would be there for me,
and they didn’t, and you don’t get but one chance. And so once you
blow that one chance, and I know I’m the only one who can do it, then I
only rely on me.

While the black women interviewed often were critical of the role of
strength, speaking about its limitations and constraints, in the face of few
other socially acceptable presentations of self as black women, they also
cloaked themselves protectively in it. For example, following her negative
appraisal of the reactions of the menfolk in her family to her dying mother,
Crystal took some comfort in the sense that others think that she has
things under control. As she observes about this contradiction in herself:

I think I like the idea when people see me as a strong person and not a
weak person. I don’t know why. It just makes me feel good. It’s, it’s
crazy. . . . Because it’s like, I want people to look at me as a person that
“I know I can go to and Crystal and get what I want,” but at the same
time, I want them to leave me the hell alone. So, I don’t know. You
know, it’s like, I don’t want them to say, “Well, I know she doesn’t have
it.” I want them to know, “Yes, she does.” But at the same time, I don’t
want them to ask [chuckle].

Black feminist psychologists Angela Mitchell and Kennise Herring (1998,

65) shed some light on this seeming contradiction when they explain that
the strong black woman role, unlike obviously negative stereotypes of
African American womanhood such as the Mammy or the Sapphire, was
created by African American communities in order to have a self-affirming
image of black women. Thus the unwillingness of African American
women such as Crystal to reject the role of strength, despite its constraints
and distortions, may emerge out of a well-founded fear over what, if any,
positive alternatives they have to the role.

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 113

 fed up: overeating and the protest against selflessness
African American women’s rates of overweight and obesity are likely tied
to compulsive eating, and less to a lack of exercise or the consumption of
unhealthy foods (Bray 1992; Powers 1989; Thompson 1994; Williamson
1998). Previous research seeking to explain the elevated rates of overweight
and obesity among African American women has drawn on a variety of
conceptual frameworks. While a thorough review of this literature is
outside the purview of this investigation, it is worth briefly noting three
major approaches to understanding black women’s eating patterns. A first
suggests that black women’s overeating is tied to the conflicting messages
that they receive about their bodies, which are seen as highly sexualized yet
often undesirable (Aubry 1998; Hammonds 1999; Thompson 1994). Thus
overeating is an embodied struggle between wanting social acceptance and
the frustration of not being able to attain the social and physical attributes
of white, middle-class femininity. A related but more dated line of thinking
focuses on the social contempt that black women encounter for their
“nonwhite” physical traits and that some may incorporate into various
(mis)treatments of their bodies (Grier and Cobbs 1968). The body then
becomes a repository for socially induced hatred of black flesh and
attributes (for example, tightly curled hair, dark skin, “broad” features). A
third set of writers critiques the research world itself as Eurocentric and fat
phobic, and work in this approach highlights the real pleasure and marked
cultural autonomy that can be derived from the preparation and consump-
tion of food among African Americans (Bass 2001; Hughes 1997; Ofosu,
LaFreniere, and Senn 1998). Black women’s bodies thus are sites of
resistance and emblems of cultural struggle against white hegemony.
Looking at each of these sets of explanations and keeping in mind the
real health risks linked to overweight, I find that the social role of strength
has not been sufficiently highlighted as a larger context for black women’s
relationships to their bodies. As writer Rosemary Bray describes, her
physical weight has been a metaphor for the emotional burdens she carries
not simply as an African American but as a “strong black woman” who is
“forever working, loving, volunteering, scolding, nurturing and organiza-
tion—but nearly always for others.” Being (or trying to be) strong has left
her obese and “immensely hungry for much more than food. I am hungry
for the things all of us are really hungry for: hungry to be truly seen and

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known, hungry to be accepted the way I am. There may be no more
difficult desire for an African-American woman to fulfill” (Bray 1992, 54–
55). Thus a focus on the performance of strength attunes us to the “hun-
gers” of problem eating as a reaction to the normalized inequities in black
women’s social relationships and the expectations of selflessness made of
them. As I describe in this section, the performance of strength can
productively be utilized as a framework in which overeating emerges as a
protest against the social role of having to be a “strong black woman.”
Under the weight of having to be strong, black women may resort to
overeating as a coping mechanism. Traci, who was earlier introduced as
learning to “pick up” strength, spent much of her adulthood at least sixty
pounds overweight. Like Bray, she draws connections between being
strong, years when she “kind of kept things inside and dealt with them,”
and finding a temporary “exit” in eating:

I just really didn’t think about nothing. You don’t, you’re not focused on
anything, you’re not going anywhere. You just sit there and you’re at a
standstill. “Well, what am I going to do?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t
know?” You know, you just. You don’t know. You’re, probably you’re
confused. You eat. It’s an exit. You eat. . . . You don’t really have a reason.
But it’s an outlet. . . . It works for you. You don’t have to deal with
anybody, because you just put food in your mouth. . . . You don’t even
taste the food.

At the time that she was eating compulsively, Traci was dealing with an
unsatisfying marriage, raising a daughter and a nephew, working in a low-
wage job as a nursing assistant, and managing the multiple illnesses of a
mother with a formidable succession of weight-related health problems—
diabetes, congestive heart failure, stroke, high blood pressure, thyroid
problems, and kidney failure. Traci’s life was not under control, as her
performance of strength would suggest. However, in eating, she was able
to voice and obliquely face realities of confusion, entrapment, and frustra-
tion not permitted in the performance of strength.
When her mother almost died from the convergence of the illnesses,
Traci left her job to take care of her. To manage her own high blood
pressure and borderline diabetes, a doctor advised Traci to lose weight by
walking. Traci found the treadmill “so boring to me,” and she began going
outdoors, where she enjoyed “being free, out in the air, the wind blowing.”

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 115

 Particularly striking is how liberating—both emotionally and physically—
walking was to her. Essentially, it allowed for a more direct expression of
her needs:
I started walking, and I said, “This isn’t. I’m not happy [in my mar-
riage]. And if I’m not happy, I don’t have to portray this role anymore
that for him I’m going to be happy. . . .” You have to make a decision to
go out and help yourself, and then you’re no longer thinking for just
your daughter. You’re thinking for you as an African American woman.
Because once you’re dead and gone, nobody’s going to know what
happened, why you kept it inside. . . . I took control over my life, then.
And walking helped. I started thinking, and I started becoming bold
[chuckle], I started making decisions, and I’m talking later. . . . In my
late 30s.
Through walking Traci was able to focus on her subjective appraisal of her
life, and not simply on her dependents and their needs and expectations of
her. Being able to step behind these demands, she uncovered and regained
her “voice” and an “identity” that she used to question and distance herself
from the role of strength through which she had lived her life: “I had time
to think, and then, you know, deal with who I am. Who, basically, I am.”
Unlike coping through eating, walking was an outlet that amplified rather
than muted Traci’s voice, allowing her to become “bold.” As a conse-
quence of walking and speaking up, Traci has redefined the strength that
she was raised to “pick up” from the example of female kin to include
“maturity” or “to show that ‘I am human,’” rather than superhuman. With
her boldness, which is different from the endurance of strength, she
expresses “ordinary courage” (Rogers 1993) or the ability to make deci-
sions based on her thoughts and experiences, and not on external
definitions and expectations of self. She is now interested in using her
capacity to endure in the service of her own needs and concerns.
The problem of African American women’s realities being muffled by
the role of strength extends beyond the expectations of family and commu-
nity, to the larger society that joins in the perception that African American
women can (and therefore should) shoulder more adversity than other
groups. Michelle, an obese young woman, works as a teacher’s aide and
recognizes how she and other African American women paraprofessionals
are “used” by the majority white female faculty to deal with unruly children.

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 They [white female teachers] keep calling, so it kinda makes me wanna
say that, “Well, maybe they do think it’s because I’m African American.”
Because they do, if they don’t call me, they’ll call another lady who’s big
and African American. . . . But they won’t never take, you know, the
initiative to do what we’re doing, which is not playing around with these
kids. . . . And not only that, they don’t ask for your tactics, you know.

Her white coworkers interpret her physical body—her blackness, female-

ness, and large size—as representing a type of person who will “take care
of their problems” and put the needs of others before her own. What
Michelle finds “demean[ing]” is that they assume that her body and person
have little purpose outside their needs: While they have use for her author-
ity, they neither value it nor her enough to learn about it, to “ask for your
tactics.”
For Michelle and other interviewees, eating was a key way in which they
resisted the denigration they experienced when performing strength. In
the following autobiographical example, Michelle illustrates connections
among her mistreatment, her projection of a façade of strength, and the
muffled voicing of her anger through overeating:

And let’s say that you’re in the [teachers’] lounge or something, and
you’re eating amongst white people. You’re ticked off at what just
happened, you know. . . . So, okay, I went to [a donut store], and instead
of getting two donuts, I got six donuts. And I’m eating them one after
the other. And I have donut holes, and then my lunch, and then ice cream.
So, white people will look at you, or any other type of race who don’t
understand what you’re going through, will look at you and go, “What
the hell’s her problem? Why are you eating?”. . . But they don’t ask [you]
what’s wrong. . . . They would just assume, “Well, she’s just like an
overeater or something. That’s why she’s big. That’s why.”

Despite recognizing the inequitable treatment she experiences, Michelle’s

socialization into a strong African American woman who handles her
emotions in private dovetails with the secrecy found among compulsive
eaters. However, the succession of food—six donuts, donut holes, lunch,
and ice cream—is more than the work of an “overeater”: In the internal
monologue that accompanies her eating, Michelle voices anger and
reproaches the teachers. While eating she acknowledges “what you’re

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 117

 going through”—that her colleagues are intentionally exploiting her as a
person of lower social status and limited social power.
Michelle and other women were uncomfortable acknowledging eating
as one of the few coping mechanisms allowed them as “strong black
women.” This discomfort was rooted in the mandate they noted that
typically strong black women’s coping had to occur out of sight. Explains
Michelle:

Like I said, black people, black women probably just don’t, you know, it
probably wouldn’t be accepted to just walk in the room and just like,
“Screw this world!” type thing. You know, everybody would be like,
“Okay, you’re fired,” or something like that. They wouldn’t see why
you’re saying that. Maybe it’s because black women are, when they do
cope, they hide, and do what they have to do. So like, no one really sees
outside, . . . they don’t see how they’re [black women] coping. So,
maybe they go, instead of the lounge, they go in their room. Or maybe
they do something else. Maybe they hit their child. Maybe they do this,
maybe they do that, you know what I’m saying? Maybe you don’t see it.

Coping with injustice behind the scenes of their strength performances

and in the process voicing their fears, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities
when eating were repeatedly noted by the interviewees in relationship to
the strong and overweight women in their families. Jennifer, who is
surrounded by large women in ill heath, describes them as “depressed”
from their gender performances. Eating for these women allows them
what strength does not—a respite from others’ expectations.

[So what depresses them?] Life, just life in general. I mean, the
struggles of life. You know, the one time in the world they have to rest
is, “Hey, eat.” One thing they know they can do well is eat and that’s
their quiet time. You eat and you relax, you know. . . . I don’t think
anybody in their right mind would just keep going to the mirror, taking
showers, and just watch themselves inflate like that, without doing
something about it. . . . But I think telling themselves that they are fine
or that they, you know, are built, makes them feel better about what
they’ve let themselves grow into.

Arguably, strong (and large) black women are resisting a role that absorbs
rather than vents emotions, that projects a physical capacity to do what

118 tamara beauboeuf-lafontant

internally they feel unable (and perhaps unwilling) to undertake. Interest-
ing about Jennifer’s analysis is that she both understands overeating as a
strategy for respite from strength and criticizes individual women who
adopt it. My argument is that what appears to Jennifer as an act of letting
themselves go—“watch[ing] themselves inflate like that”—is in fact an act
of trying to hold onto one’s self. However displaced, the verbalizing of
personal needs and the assertion of looking good are both ways of drawing
attention to the self—attention that strength makes difficult for black
women to routinely experience.
As an obese woman who has only recently become “my own cheer-
leader” to move beyond the low self-esteem and negative self-image she
had, Theresa makes an explicit connection between the strong black
woman role and overeating as way to “voice” frustration: “You’re over-
weight and it’s because, you know, ‘I’m cleaning the house. I’m tired. I’m
going to eat what I wanna eat. Just leave me alone,’ you know, and stuff.”
Such a protest is hushed and often falls on deaf ears, in part because
overweight on black women is viewed as a physical marker of strength
(Baturka, Hornsby, and Schorling 2000; Hebl and Heatherton 1998;
Townsend Gilkes 2001). Furthermore, the presumption of strength and the
binary opposition of strength and blackness against weakness and
whiteness render self-concern literally inconceivable, and therefore an
unreal experience for strong black women. Yet to read overeating within
the context of strength’s impossible role is to recognize that these black
women are trying to voice an alternative to their role, that on some private
level they realize the limitations and injustice of the expectations placed on
them. Consequently, I believe that it is imperative to see overeating as
some black women’s imperfect, yet valiant, attempt to voice their refusal to
be the “mules of the world.”
The metaphor of weight gain as “letting one’s self go” needs to be
reconsidered. I suggest that it is the mandate to be strong—rather than the
act of overeating—that results in the letting go of one’s self. Compulsive
overeating, like the other “eating problems” of anorexia and bulimia
(Thompson 1994), can be read as an attempt to resist the loss of self, albeit
on a level that often remains unrecognized and misunderstood. While a
problem and the precursor to unhealthy weight, overeating as described by
the women in this study is primarily an almost inaudible protest against
the performance of a gender role that refuses to allow black women the

keeping up appearances, getting fed up 119

 experiences of “failure, nervous breakdowns, leisured existences, or
anything else that would suggest that they are complex, feeling human
beings” (Harris 1996, 9, qtd. in Harris-Lacewell 2001, 7).

Conclusion

As depicted by black feminists and the women in this study, the dominant
construction of womanhood among and for black women compels them to
demonstrate strength by hiding duress and minimizing a concern for self.
To be a strong African American woman is to participate in a two-sided
performance of being silenced and engaging in self-silencing (Gillespie
[1978] 1984; Scales 2001; Scott 1991; Wallace [1978] 1990). In the process a
strong black woman’s needs can be lost both to herself and to others who
attribute to her a superhuman capacity to endure a life of struggle and
selflessness.
Feminist researchers seeing connections between the psyche and
society, the mind and the body recognize that “lies make you sick”
(Gilligan [1982] 1993, xxvi). The lie of being “strong” enough to bear a life
of struggle without complaint and assistance and the lie of the oppressive
order that the status quo is “natural” and immutable have the potential to
make African American women sick with unhealthy overweight, an
embodied manifestation of the emotions of discontent that naturally
emerge from the constant suppression of one’s desires and interests. The
words of the women in this essay suggest that the significance of overeat-
ing is not primarily in the attendant weight gain but in the fact that it is
often a woman’s attempt to voice a critique of her role. Overeating can be a
way of paying attention to one’s self—one’s positive attributes as well as
one’s weaknesses, desires, needs—in the absence of social opportunities
to be recognized as a full human being. Traci’s experiences are instructive
here: once she found a way to reconsider her role as a strong black woman,
she lost the need to voice her frustrations through food. Walking and the
opportunity to reflect on her life outside of others’ expectations of her
allowed her to face and change what she found problematic and unfair in
her personal and work relationships. She moved from being a “strong”
black woman to a “mature” one who includes her own concerns and needs
among her responsibilities and within her relationships to others.
Taken together the experiences of the women interviewed suggest that

120 tamara beauboeuf-lafontant

placing the performance of strength centrally in analyses of black women’s
lives can reveal a nuanced understanding of how they live within and resist
the social constructions, the “supplied states of being” (Lorde 1993), that
hierarchies of race, class, and gender seek to normalize and embody
within individuals and groups. The role of strength can productively be
viewed as the larger structure that leads black women to use denial,
isolation, and eating as coping mechanisms for having to care for others’
needs to the neglect of their own. Perhaps with such understanding,
researchers will uncover more productive ways of coping, such as Traci’s
walking, that empower black women to define and manifest what they
want their womanhood to mean for themselves.

notes
1. While not asserted by these studies, I wonder to what extent depression among
“strong black women” can be viewed as a protest against selflessness. By
drawing attention to one’s self, the emergence of depression can give voice to a
range of feelings—uncertainty, fear, exhaustion, anger—that are inconsistent
with the performance of strength that expects a black woman to be capable,
without limits, ever giving, and in control of her life. Author bell hooks (1993,
73) suggests a similar connection between addictions and black womanhood
when she posits that compulsive overeating and shopping may allow for wom-
en to “take needed time out” in communities that are deeply suspicious of
claims that black women cannot cope with the demands placed on them.
Perhaps other researchers will pursue this line of reasoning.
2. Almost 65 percent of adult black women are considered overweight, as
compared to 57 percent of Latino populations, 43 percent of white women, and
25 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander women (Leigh and Jimenez 2002, 62). This
trend carries across social class (Rand and Kuldau 1990).
3. All names are pseudonyms.

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