Black Women's Bodies and The Nation

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences
Series Editors: Victoria Robinson, University of Sheffield, UK and Diane

Richardson, Newcastle University, UK
Editorial Board: Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, Australia, Kathy Davis,

Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Stevi Jackson, University of York, UK,
Michael Kimmel, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA, Kimiko
Kimoto, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University, USA,
Steven Seidman, State University of New York, Albany, USA, Carol Smart,
University of Manchester, UK, Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh, UK, Gill
Valentine, University of Sheffield, UK, Jeffrey Weeks, South Bank University,
UK, Kath Woodward, The Open University, UK
Titles include:
Jyothsna Belliappa
GENDER, CLASS AND REFLEXIVE MODERNITY IN INDIA
Edmund Coleman-Fountain
UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVE IDENTITY THROUGH LESBIAN
AND GAY YOUTH
Niall Hanlon
MASCULINITIES, CARE AND EQUALITY
Identity and Nurture in Men’s Lives
Brian Heaphy, Carol Smart and Anna Einarsdottir (editors)
SAME SEX MARRIAGES
New Generations, New Relationships
Sally Hines and Yvette Taylor (editors)
SEXUALITIES
Past Reflections, Future Directions
Meredith Nash
MAKING ‘POSTMODERN’ MOTHERS
Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps and Body Image
Meredith Nash
REFRAMING REPRODUCTION
Conceiving Gendered Experiences
Barbara Pini and Bob Pease (editors)
MEN, MASCULINITIES AND METHODOLOGIES
Victoria Robinson and Jenny Hockey
MASCULINITIES IN TRANSITION
Francesca Stella
LESBIAN LIVES IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIA
Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities
Shirley Anne Tate
BLACK WOMEN’S BODIES AND THE NATION
Race, Gender and Culture
Yvette Taylor, Sally Hines and Mark E. Casey (editors)
THEORIZING INTERSECTIONALITY AND SEXUALITY
Thomas Thurnell-Read and Mark Casey (editors)
MEN, MASCULINITIES, TRAVEL AND TOURISM
S. Hines and Y. Taylor (editors)
SEXUALITIES: PAST REFLECTIONS, FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Yvette Taylor, Michelle Addison (editors)
QUEER PRESENCES AND ABSENCES
Kath Woodward
SEX POWER AND THE GAMES
Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

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Black Women’s Bodies and
The Nation
Race, Gender and Culture
Shirley Anne Tate

Associate Professor in Race and Culture, University of Leeds, UK
Visiting Professor and Research Fellow, University of the Free State, South Africa
© Shirley Anne Tate 2015
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To my mother Beatrice Louise Baird-Watt,
who taught me by example how to be
a Black woman
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Contents
List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction – Iconicity: Black British Women’s Bodies

as (In)Visible Spectacles 1
1 Looking at the Sable-Saffron Venus: Iconography,
Affect and (Post)Colonial Hygiene 17
2 Batty Politics: Desire and Rear Excess 47
3 When Black Fat Does Not Signify Mammy:
Disparagement Humour and Sexualization 68
4 Fascination: Muscle, Femininity, Iconicity 93
5 Pleasure Politics: The Cult of Celebrity, Mullatticity
and Slimness 118
6 Skin Lightening: Contempt, Hatred, Fear 146
7 Coda – Decolonization and Seeing through Black
Women’s Bodies 164
Bibliography 172
Index 183
vii
List of Figures
I.1 Rachel Christie, Miss England 2009 11

1.1 The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to
the West Indies 22
1.2 Agostino Brunias (1728–1796) West Indian
Washerwomen, c. 1773–75 26
1.3 Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies 28
viii
Acknowledgements
I thank my family Encarna, Soraya, Damian, Jenna, Tevian, Lachlan,

Arion for their support, laughter and fun during the writing of this
book.
A version of the analysis in the Introduction will appear as ‘Are we all
Creoles? “Sable-Saffron” Venus, Rachel Christie and aesthetic creoliza-
tion’ in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations (eds E. Gutiérrez
Rodríguez and S.A. Tate, forthcoming).
Some of the analysis of Michelle Obama’s muscles appeared as
‘Michelle Obama’s arms: race, respectability and class privilege’,
Comparative American Studies, Volume 10, Issue 213, August 2012. Some
of the analysis in Chapter 7 on glamour also appeared in this article.
ix
Introduction – Iconicity:
Black British Women’s Bodies
as (In)Visible Spectacles
The history of the Black woman’s body in the European-North American

imagination is imbricated within the racialization of colonialism and
enslavement that still remains today, both in metropoles and former/
present colonies. Transgressive femininities and marginalized corpore-
alities are central to her representations in white US-UK/European-Latin
American-Caribbean cultural consciousness. During enslavement, women
of African descent were seen as having bodies made for reproduction,
whether that was in providing sexual services, producing children or giv-
ing the labour necessary to ensure white leisure. As just bodies, lumps of
flesh for consumption, they were displayed nude for sale at slave auctions
and exhibited publicly or privately in the drawing rooms of the wealthy
and aristocratic in Europe, as was the case for the Hottentot Venuses
(Hobson, 2005).
Early European travel writers ensured that the Black woman’s burden
was to mark the gendered and ‘raced’ boundaries of European national
identities and white supremacy (Morgan, 2009). African women’s bod-
ies were affective from the very outset of European exploration as they
were ‘desirable and repulsive, available and untouchable, productive
and reproductive, beautiful and Black’. These meanings circulated long
before the establishment of the UK’s colonies in North America and the
Caribbean (Morgan, 2009: 39).
Europe has a long tradition of marking the racialized other through
the creation of monstrous bodies. One of these is the long-breasted wild
woman which was used as a description of West African women because
travel writers carried ideas with them from Europe about distended
breasts being synonymous with witchcraft and dangerous sexuality
(Morgan, 2009). African women were described as promiscuous, able
to cope with the pain of childbirth, bestial, savages, anti-motherhood,
1
2 Black Women’s Bodies and The Nation
naked, without shame and with such distended breasts that they could
feed the children they carried on their backs (Morgan, 2009; Hobson,
2005). The Black woman’s difference was constructed as psychological,
cultural, moral and physical. This was ultimately encoded as racial dif-
ference ‘as the icon of women’s breasts became evidence of tangible
barbarism’ (Morgan, 2009: 58).
By the middle of the 19th century interest had shifted from the
breasts to the buttocks as this body part was constructed as a clear sign
of hypersexuality and the buttocks were those of the Hottentot Venus,
Saartje (Sarah) Baartman (Hobson, 2005). European fascination with
their construction of the Black woman’s bottom led to Sarah Baartman’s
removal from South Africa and display in Europe as the ‘Hottentot
Venus’, linking the idea of female savagery to uncontrollable sexuality
through the focus on her bottom, her steatopygia (Fausto-Sterling, 2009).
There was also intense interest in her genitalia and Frenchman Georges
Cuvier devoted himself to dissecting and describing that body part on
her death so as to bare the secrets of the ‘Hottentot apron’ which he
came across through perusal of travel writings. For Cuvier, Baartman
was more monkey/ape than human. So, for example, he compared her
buttocks to the genital swelling of female mandrills or baboons, indeed,
he even saw her head as similar to that of monkeys. He went so far as
to dissociate Africans from Egypt. This dissociation was necessary from
his racist viewpoint forged within a North European perspective, as
Egyptian civilization had provided his entire world with the principles
of law, science and perhaps also religion, and that could not be attri-
buted to Black people (Fausto-Sterling, 2009: 87). Sarah Baartman shows
us that the Black woman’s body has long been the object of pathological
distortions in which it has been constructed as sexually abnormal and
racially ‘other’ (Gilman, 1992; Crais and Scully, 2009). However, the
Sable-Saffron Venus, which is the focus of this book, predates Baartman
and as such was a context for her emergence and that of other images
of the Black woman in the Caribbean and Europe.
During Caribbean enslavement, Sable-Saffron Venus as ‘the hot con-
stitutioned woman’ (Mohammed, 2000), ‘the market woman’, ‘the
seducer’, ‘the concubine’ and ‘the breeder’ captured the popular white
imagination perhaps to offer explanations for some white men’s sexual
preferences (Hobson, 2005). In the latter years of the twentieth century
other ‘controlling images’ (Collins, 1991) of Black women emerged in the
UK, such as ‘welfare dependent lone parent’, ‘the strong black woman’
and ‘the big mama’. In the USA controlling images of Black women
emerged during enslavement and its afterlife, variously called Sapphire,
Jezebel, Mammy, the tragic mulatto and Aunt Jemima (hooks, 1992;
Iconicity 3
Collins, 1991; Weekes, 1997; Streeter, 2012) depending on such

characteristics as body shape, size, skin colour, their behaviours towards
men and the part they played in reproduction. For example, both Sapphire
and Jezebel could be lighter skinned with slim curvaceous bodies, as theirs
was a sexualized function. Mammy was darker, plumper and had the
function of housekeeper/child-rearer/caregiver whereas the tragic mulatto
was destined for melancholia given her mixedness (hooks, 1992; Collins,
1991). If one assumes that these images derived from stereotypes generated
by whites, it is already clear that dominant white perceptions of body size,
shape and skin colour alongside assumptions of Black women’s psyches
and productive/reproductive functions, were already being imprinted onto
their racialized bodies constructed as the binary of the iconic frail, thin,
asexual white femininity. Oppression was both rationalized and justified
as white America, the white Caribbean and its metropoles projected what
it feared about itself onto Black women’s bodies.
This repetition of images in the UK-US (Collins, 1991; hooks, 1992) and
Caribbean derive from shared North Atlantic universals (Truillot, 2003)
from which sprung stereotypes and dominant perceptions of what consti-
tuted a feminine woman’s body in terms of skin colour, size, muscularity
and shape. The gaze from white iconic bodies set about the task of dissec-
tion, constantly reproducing the Black woman’s body as multiply displaced
(Fanon, 1986; Yancy, 2008). Hers was a ‘raced’, classed, gendered, sexual-
ized and aged docile body caught in the interpellative matrix between
discourses on ‘race’, dominant body politics and aesthetics, against which
Black women’s multiple bodies struggle to emerge as others of these rep-
resentations. This interpellative matrix attempts to silence Black derived
aesthetics but as Andrea Shaw (2006) shows, there were always alter/
native-bodies which co-existed with the dominant view of ideal women’s
bodies as thin, frail and white. These alter/natives have emerged forcefully
in the 20th–21st centuries through the bodies of global celebrities such as
Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Jessica Ennis,
Serena Williams, Alesha Dixon, Grace Jones, Rihanna and Thandi Newton
and their very skin, bone, fat and muscle that is subjected to the dissec-
tion of the normalizing white gaze. This gaze constructs the Black woman
attempting to return them to silence, invisibility, docility. This observation
speaks to the necessity to ‘race’ docile bodies.
Race-ing docile bodies
In Discipline and Punish (1977) and the History of Sexuality Volume 1

(1976) Foucault traces the complex and shifting network of relations
between power, knowledge and the body. This network of relations
produces historically specific forms of subjectivity as well as silencing

others. Through ‘genealogy’ he questions the self-evident and seeks to
determine possibilities for social change and ethical transformation
of our selves. In Discipline and Punish the docile body comes about
through discipline, for example, coercive power, a supervision of time,
space and movement as well as surveillance (Foucault, 1980). Discipline
is not enslavement as there is no appropriation of the body, nor is it
about service to a master. Rather, discipline establishes in the body
the constraining link between an increased aptitude and an increased
domination which produce governmentality. The power of the norm,
its governmentality, appears through discipline. The norm is the meas-
ure of difference. It produces reality, objects, rituals of truth, knowable
individuals and subjectivities. However, individuals can resist the grip
of power even if only temporarily because it has many points of con-
frontation and instability. The possibility of resisting power is even the
case when we become the agents of our own normalization through
governmentality as we become invested in the categories, classifications
and norms of discourses which seek to estrange us all from our racial-
ized bodies.
For Foucault (1972: 49) discourses are social practices that systematically
form the objects of which they speak rather than reflecting reality. For
example, ‘the fat Black woman’s body’ does not exist beyond discourse
nor does the body of the ‘slimmas’ (slim). Further, fat/slimmas are subject
positions within discourses on the body. Discourses constitute a field of
knowledge and rule out other possible truths. Through a micro-physics
of power within discourses on size/shape/skin colour/muscularity, we
become the agents of our own surveillance and normalization. Foucault’s
insights have been useful to feminists concerned to expose the processes
through which the female body becomes a feminine one (Grosz, 1994);
subjected to disciplinary practices like diet and exercise. These produce
embodiments that conform to norms of feminine beauty and attractive-
ness (Bartky, 1988) as women succumb to eating disorders like anorexia
and bulimia which can be seen as disciplinary technologies of the body
(Bordo, 1993).
Our attention on Black women’s bodies necessitates a focus on the
gendering, ageing, heterosexualizing, classing, abling and race-ing of
body discourses, discursive positionings and body regulation. Frantz
Fanon’s (1986) historico-racial schema, those racialized discourses which
impose what it means to be the Black woman and the racial epidermal
schema which emerges from that as the essential truth about the Black
woman, keep Black women’s multiple bodies under surveillance. The
Iconicity 5
white colonial gaze homogenizes Black women’s bodies as it dissects and

inscribes its own meanings of racialized otherness. Colonial otherness
emerges as the disturbing distance in-between the colonial self and the
colonized other (Bhabha, 1986). This perspective enables us to see that
considerations of ‘race’ have been erased from Foucault’s docile body as
whiteness is the invisible norm from which all theorizing begins.
In her critique of Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler (1995) makes clear that his
disciplined bodies paid no attention to the history of colonial oppression
and its impact on the bodies of both the colonized and the colonizer. In
the History of Sexuality (1976) and the 1976 Lectures at the College de
France, Foucault only looks at the internal dynamics of European coun-
tries and their disciplinary bio-political strategies. Racism for Foucault
began in the 19th century but was preceded by an earlier racism of the
nobility organized to maintain aristocratic privilege (Stoler, 1995). His
genealogy of racist discourse is based on Europe so that colonial geno-
cide, the policing of desire for fear of ‘race mixing’ and the production
of racialized difference are unaccounted for (Stoler, 1995). Locating rac-
ism in 19th-century Europe denies the colonization of ‘the New World’
from the first voyage of Christopher Colombus in 1492 and the ensuing
subjugation of the indigenous populations, establishment of racial hier-
archies, enslavement and miscegenation. In this encounter with popula-
tions that were then sub-alternized we see the bio-power of European
racism in its interaction with the ‘savage other’. We also see the disci-
plining of individual ‘native’ bodies, for example, ‘become Christians or
perish’ as the Iberian message to the conquered, and the global regula-
tion of the population, for example, the indigenous Caribbean Tainos,
Arawaks, Ciboneys and Caribs became ‘Indians’. Bartholomew de Las
Casas (c. 1550) in his In Defence of the Indies spoke at length about the
savagery of the Spanish against indigenous Caribbean populations which
led to their decimation in most of the region. Las Casas also raised con-
cerns about ‘inter-racial sex’ and the production of populations that would
be made loyal to the Spanish crown. After Spanish conquest a society in
which the norm was to be white, Christian and Spanish, produced racism
against the indigenous population in the Caribbean which also became a
feature of the conquest of Latin America. In both the Caribbean and Latin
America the focus from Columbus onwards has been keeping the white
‘race’ white through ‘purity of blood’, controlling white women’s sexual-
ity in the colonies and managing local mestizo/‘mixed race’ populations.
This racism had its precursor in the Spanish reconquista which makes us
remember that we cannot understand discourses of ‘race’ outside of the
bio-politics of empire (Stoler, 1995).
The biopolitics of empire has set the basis of a study of bodies in which
‘race’ erasure is the norm. If all the women’s bodies are white this has
implications for the agency of Black women’s bodies which are located
as marginal (Tate, 2010). However, if we think about the power of mar-
ginality (hooks, 1991) and the possibilities of ‘race’ performativity (Tate,
2005, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2013) we can engage with different readings.
That is, we can locate subjects that are not constrained by endless sub-
jectivation to discourses on what the Black woman’s body should be or
how it should comport, for example, but are themselves engaged in con-
structing subject positions. Fanon (1986) shows this in his production of
a critique of white racism through the Black, colonized subject gaze as he
unpicks the intricacy of the historico-racial schema and the racial epider-
mal schema, the very invisibility of which can only be sensed at times
through the affects they generate. In Discipline and Punish Foucault talks
about resistance in terms of confrontation, instability and temporary
inversion of power relations. In his later work (Foucault, 1980) resist-
ance neither predates the power it opposes nor exists in a site external
to it. Rather, it relies upon and grows out of the situation it struggles
against. In Lecture One: 7 January 1976 Foucault (1980) speaks about an
autonomous, non-centralized form of knowledge production which is
not dependent on the approval of established regimes of thought. These
subjugated knowledges involve popular knowledge (savoir de gens) which
does not aim at unanimity. Indeed, for Foucault through what he calls
a ‘critical ontology of the self’ which involves autonomy, reflexivity and
critique, individuals develop viewpoints from which to resist govern-
mentality. Thus, bodies cease to be docile because they are involved in
knowledge production and subject constituting practices even if these
are subaltern (Spivak, 1995) and never enter the realm of knowledge that
is validated and recognized.
This book takes as its point of departure how it is that the (trans)
national affective entanglements of the Black woman’s body are main-
tained in Europe, the US and the Caribbean through a particular (post)
colonial racial gender politics. That is, a Black Atlantic racial gender
politics re-produced through the spectacularization/invisibility of Black
women’s bodies within representation. Here, the focus of such (trans)
national affective entanglements is the (post)colonial melancholic rep-
etitions of that Jamaican English enslavement creation, the Sable-Saffron
Venus, written on/through/with the spectacularization/invisibility of the
Black UK woman’s body as the always already known, strange, immuta-
ble other. The Sable-Saffron Venus trope speaks the institutionalization of
(post)colonial hygiene as Black British women’s multiple bodies continue
Iconicity 7
to be erased from the UK’s national social skin. This erasure is based on
negative affect in melancholic repetitions of the Sable-Saffron Venus
trope which in turn has led to the iconicity of African American women’s
bodies in UK culture. Indeed, their bodies have come to represent the
Black woman in UK and wider European culture. Such a statement can
be made even though in the UK we have had and still do have, public
Black British women such as aristocrats Dido Elizabeth Belle (Lindsay)
and Lady Bath, models Jourdan Dunn, Alek Wek, and Naomi Campbell,
singers Jamilia and Beverley Knight MBE, talk show host Trisha Goddard,
politician Diane Abbott MP, athletes Denise Lewis OBE and Dame Kelly
Holmes, writer Jackie Kay MBE and members of the House of Lords:
Baroness Patricia Scotland of Asthal, Baroness Valerie Amos, Doreen
Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE, anti-racist political
activist, and Baroness Una King of Bow.
The book’s analysis focuses on the representations of the bodies of iconic
Black women in the Black Atlantic-the Caribbean-UK-USA. Specifically, it
looks at how we can still speak of Black women’s bodies as agentic within
representational melancholic repetitions where the attempted erasure of
subjecthood makes it impossible to know if their consent to their image
was not compromised by questions of profession and the global market
in the Black woman’s body. Notwithstanding knowledge of intentionality,
analysing such representations through the lens of ‘race’ performativity
(Tate, 2005, 2009) as both performative failure and productive of excess,
creates Black women’s body. This decolonial focus moves us away from
the question of whether or not they are victims or parody in terms of
European racism, sexism and heteronormativity, so often the focus of
feminist critique.
Beyond victim or parody: decolonizing Black

women’s bodies
The discussion in this book places the racialization of Black women’s

muscle, bone, fat and skin within Britain as nation, psyche and social
body through the trope of the Jamaican English construction – the
Sable-Saffron Venus. Chapter 1 picks up the theme of the Sable-Saffron
Venus in colonialism and the 21st-century ‘post-race’ present to see the
twists, turns and erasures made in her representation by the racializing
white gaze. The discussion speaks against and ruptures the construction
of the Black woman’s body within the academy and popular culture
where North Atlantic universals (Truillot, 2003) have established her in
representation as African American, Hottentot/Black Venus and devoid
of agency, a blank canvas to be written on. That is, it speaks against

(post)colonial hygiene as a white racial practice which reproduces the
Black woman’s body while it erases multiplicity and agentic counter
practices. Breaking the silencing of Black women’s bodies and locating
these bodies within the UK ultimately leads to a contemplation of the
question of difference and sameness. Which differences must cease
to be salient and which others become visible for the rather abstract
national ‘we’ to be a binding force? Who becomes the ‘them’ against
which belonging can be measured? Where are Black British women’s
bodies in representation?
These questions are significant given that the Black woman’s body
within UK popular culture has been located elsewhere, as the iconic
Black woman in the UK is invariably African American or if African
diasporic is based in the United States. What does this location of the
Black woman’s body elsewhere – whether as Oprah, Michelle Obama,
Nicki Minaj, Rihanna or Beyoncé – mean for the positioning of Black
women’s bodies in the contemporary UK? Do African American
women’s celebrity and class status mean that they are also the body
and beauty icons against which Black British women are judged? Why
is it the bodies of African American women that draw our attention
rather than our own Black British bodies? Why are Black women largely
absent from white authored discourses on the body? Why does the
Sable-Saffron Venus still continue to emerge in UK discourses on the
Black woman’s body?
These questions and observations point to the fact that though we
live in postcolonial times, coloniality still impacts the knowledges on/
of, power over and positionings of Black women’s bodies. This book
develops a decolonial approach to looking at the representations of Black
women’s bodies within popular culture as an antidote to this continuing
coloniality of power (Mignolo, 2011) based on Eurocentrism. Its deco-
lonial epistemic project is to revisit the racialization of Black women’s
muscle, bone, fat and skin through the trope of the subaltern figure of
the Sable-Saffron Venus as an agentic ‘alter/native body’. In doing this
it thinks Black women’s bodies otherwise as it draws on Michel-Rolph
Truillot’s (2003: 36) view that modernity ‘requires an other outside of
itself and an other within’, an alter/native. Further, modernity creates
North Atlantic universals, ideas that are presented as rational so as to
hide their projection of anti-Black women negative affects whilst silenc-
ing their own racialized history. Enslavement, colonialism and settle-
ment in the metropole constructed Black women’s bodies as alter/native.
As affective other/same, these bodies draw attention to the negotiations
Iconicity 9
through which the semblance of consensus on the national citizen body

is created. At the same time they rupture this consensual, collective body
formed through the (re)iteration, (re)interpretation and (re) presenta-
tion of the meanings of muscle, bone, fat and skin – the materiality of
the body itself. Thus, the decolonial reading engaged in this book sees
this alter/native-body dismantling body norms and rebuilding anew or
revealing alter/native modes of being through engaging in what Aimé
Césaire (2000) calls disalienation.
Such disalienation refuses the Eurocentric disembodiment of North
Atlantic universals as it speaks against contemporary anti-Black woman
body politics. Disalienation refuses the erasure of the particulars of
Black women’s bodies so that a single racialized particularity – British
colonialism and enslavement’s Sable-Saffron Venus – can emerge as the
Black woman’s body. Césairian disalienation asks that we engage in a
critical dialogue on/with/through Black women’s bodies as equals. This
orientation questions the historico-racial schema’s (Fanon, 1986) dis-
section and displacement which establish the boundaries of what it is to
be ‘Black woman’ and ‘Black woman as national citizen’. Reading Sable-
Saffron Venus as the alter/native-body of disalienation works against
her own invisibility in mainstream British culture as well as against a
history which saw her subordination and exoticization (Ali, 2005). It
is in the paradoxical relational spaces of power, knowledge and affect
that the book revisits the Black woman’s body in popular culture in the
UK in juxtaposition with its Caribbean and African American celebrity
icons. This revisiting unpicks the continuing affective life of the Sable-
Saffron Venus in the 21st century through looking at the muscle, bone,
fat, skin, class and age of Black women’s bodies in the UK-US-Caribbean
in discourse and representation. Thinking through these embodied
markers of alterity, it interrogates the hidden ‘batty’/body politics of
desire within Black British, African American and Caribbean women’s
absent-presence in representations (Chapter 2) as well as critiquing ‘the
Black fat woman’ as the repository of what the Black woman’s body is or
should be (Chapter 3). It then moves to the Black woman’s body as a fas-
cinating spectacle, at once hyper-feminized/masculinized, hypersexual
and other (Chapter 4). The book revisits skin through looking at both
the love of mullatticity (Chapter 5) and the (trans)national disgust of,
but fascination with, skin bleaching in Black communities (Chapter 6).
It concludes by looking at age, disability and the possibility of Black
women’s agency (Chapter 7). This book’s decolonial imperative aims to
locate it within an-other vantage point from which Sable-Saffron Venus
alter/natives (Truillot, 2003) transform how we see and how we feel in the
face of the established global trope of the Black woman’s body which
emerged from enslavement and colonialism.
In the interplay between how it is that we know what we see and feel,
‘race’ performativity enables a relational engagement which unveils the
intricate and, at times contradictory, raced, gendered, sexualized, abled,
aged and classed investments which are so much a part of dis/identifications
(Muñoz, 1999; Tate, 2009). Such dis/identifications are necessary for the
emergence of agency through disalienation (Césaire, 2000). Thus it is
that, through dis/identification Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives impact
on how we analyse racialized technologies of the visual, conceptualize
racialized, gendered corporeality and theorize the affective load of Black
women’s bodies. Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives refuse the white gaze
solely focused on the fetishization of the Black female body as object
which denies its own desire to re-make itself through the very skin,
muscle, bone, fat of the racialized other. We can explicate this, the issue
of agency mentioned previously and illustrate the possibility for a deco-
lonial approach to analysing Black women’s bodies as we go beyond the
positionings of victim or parody, through the example of the first Black
Miss England, Rachel Christie.
Twenty-year-old Black-white ‘mixed race’ Rachel Christie’s crowning
as ‘Miss England’ on 20 July 2009 (Figure I.1) brought home to the heart
of the metropole the racialized cultural politics of beauty constructed
in the Caribbean during enslavement and colonialism. Alongside her
valorization as ‘Queen’ she was also negated as a national representative
because her body was codified through a particular aesthetic cultural
politics within the Miss England beauty pageant. This pageant main-
tains white aesthetic, cultural, social, political and moral hegemony
through the imperial corporeal binaries of the Sable-Saffron Venus/
English Rose. There is a racialized aesthetic relationality in the Black
Atlantic in which the Sable-Saffron Venus/ English Rose binary and its
accompanying ideology of white beauty-morality and Black ugliness-
depravity, continue to reproduce affective bodies through melancholic
repetition. This binary still continues to dictate who can occupy the
space of Miss England, which body will be recognized, which skin/size/
body shape/muscularity will be given admission to the community of
the nation as its local and global ‘face’.
We can see the racialization of valorization and admission to the
national body, if we turn to the Daily Mail interview on 25 July 2009 by
Francis Hardy, ‘I won Miss England to prove that being black is NEVER
an excuse for failure says Linford Christie’s niece’. As we will see, this
interview is an exercise in melancholic repetition of the Sable-Saffron
Iconicity 11
Figure I.1 Rachel Christie, Miss England 2009

Courtesy of photoshot.
Venus trope. Hardy oriented his audience to a reading of Christie as

Miss England which shows her as not the English Rose because of class,
‘race’ and hypersexuality. Her Englishness is constructed as impossible
in the interview because of her kinship with Black Jamaican descent
Linford Christie. Rachel’s uncle, Linford Christie OBE, is the only
British man to have won gold in four major athletics championships,
the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, the World Championships
and the European Championships. In 2011, he was once again in the
public eye as the ‘spokes-body’ for Kleenex Pockets, an ultra-thin packet
of tissues designed specifically for men’s trouser pockets. The campaign
tagline ‘I’ve got a tiny packet’ was written across Linford Christie’s
trademark muscular torso. ‘Tiny packet’ wills us to remember that
Linford is known for his ‘lunchbox’ because of the bulge apparent in
his lycra shorts from his days as a sprinter. His lunchbox and his tiny
packet diminish Black men to their genitals instituted during colonial-
ism and enslavement. Linking Linford and Rachel through ‘blood’ starts
a chain of racialized signification in which Black women’s and men’s
hypersexuality and the Black body as spectacle become the focus of a
range of white affects such as desire-repulsion, disgust and contempt.
These negative affects are part of the technology of racism in the UK
which continues to place bodies designated as racially other outside of
the national social and citizen skin.
Though still linked to the UK through her white mother and place of
birth, her genealogy is constructed as subaltern because of class, drugs,
jail time and Irish Catholic descent. She is the daughter of a white Irish
Catholic mother and a working-class Black Jamaican descent father
who was jailed because of drug possession and later died in a street
drugs fight. Her parents’ status meant that her life was one of poverty
on a London ‘sink’ council estate. Her Black-white ‘mixed race’ back-
ground was presented as a source of dysfunction and family trouble, a
familiar theme borne of the UK’s informal anti-miscegenation regime
(Christian, 2008; Carby, 2007). Another part of her story is a familiar
one for Black people as her lack of academic ability made her turn to
her athletic capabilities, eventually becoming a fitness instructor and
Olympic hopeful. Again the national narrative is that of the only pos-
sibility of Black success lying within sport or because she is a woman,
modelling. Her body is also placed in the masculinized Black woman’s
space of ‘the body as machine’ in the focus on her athleticism, her
kinship with Linford Christie and the comparison to a famous Black
female athlete, Dame Kelly Holmes. We are also oriented to her body as
spectacle in the focus on her height and her comparison with former
Iconicity 13
super-model Naomi Campbell. This latter comparison, alongside the

stress on her as Black outsider, reveal the turn to the Sable-Saffron Venus
trope even though this naming remains invisible.
We could also say that the newspaper article attempts to construct
a ‘post-race’ UK. We can see this in its headline and in the extracts of
the interview with Rachel Christie. In insisting that ‘race’ should not be
an excuse for failure whilst acknowledging the continuation of institu-
tional racism in sport and society more generally, she could be read as
having lost a sense of the impact of white power. This is so, as she relates
success to ‘post-race’ ideas of hard work as necessary for success but also
to a middle class habitus based on consumption and comportment:
You hear black kids say: ‘I can’t do anything with my life. I live in
a ghetto’. I say: ‘Well, get off your backside and get out of it. Stop
making your ethnicity an excuse’. I want to show them you can do
anything you want, whatever your colour. I don’t like hearing: ‘I can’t
do this or that because I’m black’. They should stop behaving in a way
that stereotypes them. If you come across as smart, if you dress nicely
and speak well, it shouldn’t make a difference if you are black or white.
Maybe some people have experienced racial discrimination. Not me.
She erases the structural and societal impact of racism through the call
to the neo-liberal Black subject to improve their status via their own
personal effort. Her denial of racism through ‘not me, maybe some peo-
ple have experienced it’, focus on the Protestant ethic and insistence on
a deracinated meritocracy, place Christie within the ‘post-race’ English
mind-set. As such, ideologically, she can represent the nation. However,
‘race’ makes her interpellation as the English Rose impossible which she
recognizes when she asserts habitus as more significant than ‘race’ – ‘it
shouldn’t make a difference if you are black or white’. The ‘shouldn’t’
here is important as it signifies that she is aware that ‘race’ impacts life
chances. ‘Shouldn’t’ speaks back to the English nation through its 21st-
century assimilative tolerance which nonetheless asserts the impossibil-
ity of ‘race’ equality. Further, she places her success in the Miss England
pageant as political in that she wanted to show Black youngsters what
was possible. Thus, she makes visible her own group of interest as
the Black English and achieves what Stuart Hall (1996: 27) calls a ‘re-
epidermalization, an auto-graphy’ of herself as Black on her own terms.
She shifts herself to a position of not Sable-Saffron Venus through
excess in her autography of herself as Black. This excess is shown in
her move beyond the Sable-Saffron Venus body to a position of the
deracinated meritocracy constructed in the UK’s ‘post-race’ state-speak,

whilst simultaneously acknowledging the continuation of institutional
racism. Her body itself also produces failure in the repetition as not the
English Rose. As the first Black-white ‘mixed race’ Miss England her lack
of fit as Queen highlights the otherness of her body and the invisible,
normalized whiteness of the space of Miss England. Further, she reveals
the nation to itself as still envisioned as white. As such, both the excess
and performative failure of ‘race’ performativity negate the power of
melancholic repetitions of Sable-Saffron Venus by producing some-
thing other than was expected by (post)colonial discourse on the Black
woman’s body. Through estrangement, a process of making oneself
strange to representations of Sable-Saffron Venus and its attendant dis/
identification, the mimic woman of the stereotype fails but the mim-
icry (Bhabha, 1994) of her autography produces a new subjectivity, a
Césairian disalienation from the stereotype, a Sable-Saffron Venus alter/
native. Through estrangement and dis/identification Césaire’s (2000)
disalienation enables the remaking of her Black body.
Her autography as Black English disturbs the national citizen social skin
because as Black-white ‘mixed race’ her body does not have the mimetic
quality of extending towards whiteness. The one-drop rule of hypodes-
cent (Ifekwunigwe, 1999; Zack, 1993) emerging from enslavement which
insists that African descent makes one Black in perpetuity irrespective of
mixing, stops this possibility of extension. However, impossibility is also
productive here. This is so as, this very impossibility enables her Black-
white ‘mixed race’ body to disrupt the state narrative of tolerance and
national ‘post-race’ pretensions because impossibility itself necessitates
national narratives of white origin and essential racial difference. These
essentialist narratives of origin and difference keep embodied memories
of ‘race’ power integral to white identifications that arise in the rupture
in white Englishness produced by her body. As such, her body refuses
whiteness and insists on different categories of recognition as English.
However, her body’s refusal of whiteness and its non-recognition by
whiteness as English is returned to us as her being cast out from the
body of the nation, as her abjection, because of the article’s construction
of Christie as Black, as well as subaltern through her white Irish lineage
and the very transracial heterosexual intimacy from which she emerged.
As a 21st-century inheritor of the British Empire’s Caribbean enslavement
Sable-Saffron Venus, she has already been placed as the binary of white
beauty, femininity and respectable sexuality. For example, we are told
in the article that her ‘voice is soft and low but her resolve is steely’. At
the same time as she is feminized through her voice she is masculinized
because of her resolve. This latter is reinforced through the assertion that
Iconicity 15
she used to be a tomboy and the constant reminder of her athleticism.

The interviewer’s question of whether or not she lost her virginity to her
ex-boyfriend remained unanswered but is out of place as it hints at an
uncontrollable sexuality. The question’s peculiarity is especially marked
given that Christie presents herself as someone who aims for respectable
married status, as should any English Rose. Christie’s refusal to answer shows
her critique of the hypersexualized, negatively affective space of the body of
Sable-Saffron Venus in a nation in which racialized skin still matters.
The continuation into the 21st-century UK of the Sable-Saffron
Venus illustrates the necessity to think through the cultural politics of
beauty within the Miss England beauty pageant as pageants have the
function of choosing a beauty which stands in for the nation (Barnes,
1997). Thus, there is a mimetic connection between whoever wears
the Miss England crown and England’s social skin. The question which
is now apposite is, ‘if she was darker-skinned, had locks and facial
features which have been discursively constructed as Black would she
have become Miss England?’ If we are honest about beauty and skin
politics in England then we would have to say ‘no’. She won because
the Black-white ‘mixed race’ beauty stereotype from enslavement and
colonialism persists and places other Black beauties as ugly through its
continuing valorization of those visible bodily markings constructed as
white. However, though crowned ‘Miss England’, Christie’s body as not
white highlights its outsider status in a space that has always already
been defined as that of the English Rose, as white.
Black bodies have a disruptive impact at the level of the nation
whether it is as ‘inner city rioters’, ‘muggers’, single mothers or national
beauty queen. Thus, Christie’s body was symbolically charged as Miss
England. It produced a new affective relational politics which chal-
lenged the nation to go beyond asserting English métissage, which for
Edóuard Glissant (1997) is a mere mixing which does not lead to social
change. Challenging the nation to go beyond its narrative of mixing
as a signifier of English tolerant multiculturalism, her body insisted
that the nation should embrace racial equality. Christie’s story as well
as her body itself, stake a claim in the national narrative, but it is a
story of racism, sexism, poverty and achievement in spite of ‘race’ or,
indeed, perhaps within the parameters produced by whiteness of ‘entry
but only so far’. The interview showed the white negative affects of
desire-repulsion, disgust and contempt through interpellating her as
Black-white ‘mixed race’, non-academic, athletic, from a problem fam-
ily, poor and hypersexual Sable-Saffron Venus. This ensured that the
English Rose was kept firmly in place as that which Rachel Christie was
not and could never become. Hers was a short reign as Miss England but
her erasure from the public memory reminds us that skin, bone, muscle,
fat are significant for the national social skin, psyche and affective life.
What is also self-evident is that colonial and enslavement historical
antecedents to Christie enabled this melancholic repetition of the Sable-
Saffron Venus trope in readings of her body by the white gaze.
Conclusion
Bodies that continue to matter in Europe/the US are those that are

white or have been passed by whiteness. These bodies are locatable
within discourses on the Black woman’s body. We can see this, for exam-
ple, in women’s magazines in the UK which are not aimed at a niche
Black market where Black women’s bodies cannot represent all women.
However, white women’s bodies expect to occupy this space of repre-
senting all women quite unproblematically, while the only Black wom-
en’s bodies in these magazines continue to be largely US American. In
such a pragmatics of recognition, exceptionality procedures produced
by stereotyping allow us to occasionally see Black athletic/dancing/
performing/out-of-place bodies, for example Rachel Christie, as bodies
that are recognizable. For instance, there is a specific racialization of
Black muscle which relates to 18th/19th-century racist pseudo-science
and its common-sense equation with the Black woman as only capable
of hard physical labour, which we see being replayed in the debate over
Michelle Obama’s ‘right to bare (bear) arms’. Whether docile or not, in
the 21st century we continue to be in the grip of the spectacle of Black
women’s racialized bodies alongside their invisibility. However, Sable-
Saffron Venus alter/natives are produced through disalienation with
its twin processes of disidentification and inscribing new auto-raphies
onto the surface of the Black woman’s body. A Sable-Saffron Venus alter/
natives perspective on bodies enables us to see that there is a corporea-
lity of class, ‘race’, gender, age, (hetero)sexuality, ability and the power
of celebrity within representations of iconic Black women. Such an
intersectional, disruptive corporeality based on disalienation underlies a
decolonial approach to making Saffron-Sable Venus alter/natives visible
within the nation as a Black Atlantic (trans)national versioning of female
iconicity no longer dependent on whiteness to come into being. Let us
turn next to thinking through the bodies of Black women and affect by
looking in more detail at the practices of white colonial hygiene which
attended the emergence of the Sable-Saffron Venus in the English-
speaking Caribbean during enslavement and colonialism and how it is
that this still resonates in contemporary times.
1
Looking at the Sable-Saffron Venus:
Iconography, Affect and
(Post)Colonial Hygiene
For Saidiya Hartman (2008: 2):
what we know about Venus in her many guises amounts to little

more than a register of her encounter with power […] An act of
chance or disaster produced a divergence or an aberration from the
expected and usual course of invisibility and catapulted her from the
underground to the surface of discourse […] We only know what can
be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the
world of her captors and masters and applied to her.
What I am interested in as I borrow ‘from the world of her captors’

is exploring Sable-Saffron Venus as a conscious act of colonial and
contemporary white racial hygiene to deal with white male desire, dis-
gust for the Black woman’s body, as well as fear of loss of sovereignty
through heterosexual transracial intimacy and concubinage. During
enslavement and colonialism, imaging Sable-Saffron Venus became a
site of hygiene for white men seeking ‘to go native in the Caribbean’, or
forsaking ‘pure white women’ for sex with ‘hot constitutioned’ women
always already known as ‘dark temptresses’. As a parody, Sable-Saffron
Venus stuck to the bodies of all Black women in the Caribbean. She
became a word used as a warning, a mode of disciplining white het-
erosexual male desire for Black female flesh as much as presenting her
body as violable, disposable, a commodity and prostitute. In the zone
of exception that was the sugar plantation in the Caribbean, her bare
life (Agamben, 1998) made white lives liveable. Like Hartman I seek
to ‘revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of
violence’ by trying to understand the heterosexual white male disgust
of and desiring fear for Black women’s bodies, which produced those
17
artefacts of Caribbean enslavement iconography: ‘the Voyage of the

Sable Venus’ as both ode and image, the painting ‘The West Indian
Washerwomen’ and the satire ‘Johnny Newcome in love in the West
Indies’. Their reading will lead into thinking about who can come into
the circle of meaning through representation as the chapter revisits
Truillot’s (2003) alter/native by charting the emergence of the Sable-
Saffron Venus as muscle, bone, fat and skin, which we see reflected in
the bodies of Saartje Baartman, Josephine Baker, Grace Jones, Beyoncé
Knowles, Rihanna and Naomi Campbell. First, let us move to historiciz-
ing the Black woman’s body as fetish object.
The Black woman’s body as fetish object – the Black

Venus and desire
During the Middle Ages, (1119–1142) the religious scholar Peter

Abelard, wrote to Hélöise on the Song of Songs and the Ethiopian,
the Queen of Sheba, being chosen for the King’s bed, ‘besides, it so
happens that the skin of black women, less agreeable to the gaze, is
softer to touch and the pleasures one derives from their love are more
delicious and delightful’ (Sharpley-Whiting, 1999: 1). He wrote in the
Middle Ages about Blackness, the nature of Black female sexuality and
bodies in a way which still resonates today. These were the beginnings
of the sexualization of Black women that found a place among France’s
19th-century male literati and the rest of Europe (Sharpley-Whiting,
1999). Black women have long occupied a space in which their bod-
ies are always marked as abnormal objects of white male desire so as
to construct those bodies within a politics of exceptionalism (Beckles,
1999). As such the sexual use of a Black woman did not mean that the
act was about intimacy or that it removed abnormality from the Black
woman’s body as reasons for this exception could be found. The uses
and abuses of the Black woman’s body does not end there as it has
become a fetish object which provides an essential texture for the pro-
duction of the white US American/European woman’s body. Indeed,
for Hortense Spillers (1987: 65) speaking from the position of Black
women’s bodies:
Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my

name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother’,
‘Aunty’, ‘Granny’, God’s ‘Holy Fool’, a ‘Miss Ebony First’, or ‘Black
Woman at the Podium’: I describe a locus of confounded identities,
a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national
Sable-Saffron Venus 19
treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not

here, I would have to be invented.
If Black women were not here they would have to be invented so

that ‘the white woman’s body’ as norm could come into being. We
see this, for example, in the European fascination with the Hottentot
Venus (Yancy, 2008; Hobson 2005; Gilman, 1992) and Grace Jones,
the French embrace of Josephine Baker, the body of Sasha Fierce as the
curvaceous Black ideal/stereotype, our love of Oprah Winfrey who as a
‘raced’ yo-yo dieter displays the fat Black woman’s body which as anti-
Mammy seeks respectability through reigning itself in, as well as the
svelte supermodel body of Naomi Campbell. We still see European/US
Africanism linked to the perception of white Europeans/US Americans
as racially superior in the body of Sasha Fierce as Sapphire/Jezebel.
Indeed, Sasha Fierce might be the embodiment of 21st-century re-
imaginings of the Hottentot Venus if one notices the sexualizing focus
on her body as ‘booty’ and breasts in such DVDs as ‘Videophone’ and
‘Single Lady’ as well as her publicity shots. For Janell Hobson (2005: 7)
ever ‘since nineteenth century popular exhibitions in Europe of South
African women with so-called steatopygia, black female bodies have
been fetishized by this feature and identified with heightened sexual-
ity and deviance’. This statement relates to the white gaze, however,
because as Black cultural insider Hobson (2005: 2) also notes ‘[…] from
a black cultural viewpoint, to not be endowed from behind is to be
“lacking” in some way’.
The name ‘Venus’ is not a form of praise. Venus was the protector
of Rome sex workers who erected a temple in her honour where aspir-
ing courtesans were taught the arts of love (Yancy, 2008). The use of
‘Venus’ to describe Baartman, amongst others, locates Black women’s
bodies as those of sex workers, as ‘loose’, which invokes white moral,
sexual and racial superiority (Yancy, 2008: 95). Prior to Baartman, the
‘Sable Venus’ and her Black-white ‘mixed race’ sister/daughter ‘Saffron
Venus’ were constructed in the Caribbean. ‘Saffron’ makes us think
of both the colorant/spice and the food that is consumed, The word
‘sable’ means both a very dark colour and a small animal with thick fur
that is used for clothing and artists’ brushes. In ‘sable’ we see the link
between animality and racial othering characteristic of white discourse
on Africans whose enslaved bodies were consumed in the fields and in
sexual and domestic services on Caribbean plantations. Sable Venus’s
18th-century representation in the poem The Sable Venus: An Ode by
Isaac Teale (1765) sexualized, exoticized and othered all African descent
women represented as willing and submissive sexual partners. It erased

enslavement’s daily brutality, the horrors of the Middle passage and the
white benefits from the slave trade in the Caribbean itself (Bush, 2000)
as we can see in this brief excerpt
O Sable Queen! Thy mild Domain

I seek and court thy gentle reign
So soothing, soft and sweet.
Where meeting love, sincere delight
Fond pleasures, ready joys invite,
And unbrought raptures meet.
Do thou in gentle Phibia smile,

In artful Benneba beguile,
In wanton Mimba pout
In sprightly Cuba’s eyes look gay
Or grave in sober Quasheba
I still find thee out
The Englishman Teale, was employed as a teacher in the ‘learned

languages’ by Zachary Baily, the uncle of the then 22-year-old Bryan
Edwards who would go on to be a Caribbean historian and vociferous
supporter of slavery (McCrea, 2002). The Ode ends with all of Jamaica,
particularly the people of quality, from Port Royal, Spanish Town and
Kingston, coming to greet the Sable Venus on her arrival in the island
and the poet declares his utter devotion to her whether she appears as
Phibia, Benneba, Mimba, Cuba or Quasheba. These were all names of
African enslaved women at the time (McCrea, 2002). Although it was
an English-Jamaican creation the ode was widely circulated and influ-
enced 18th- and early 19th-century pro-slavery mind-sets. For example,
the ode was reproduced in Bryan Edwards’ (1794) book further aiding
its circulation. In Book 4 we see Edwards’ (1794: 26) attempt at white
colonial racial hygiene as he addresses his audience through the satire
of poetry on the folly of white male paramours in the Caribbean, when
he says:
I shall therefore conclude the present chapter by presenting to my

readers, a performance of a deceased friend in which the character of
the sable and saffron beauties of the West Indies and the folly of their
paramours, are portrayed with the delicacy and dexterity of wit, and
the fancy and elegance of genuine poetry.
One wonders, though, if the ode was not also a warning to Edwards
himself from his teacher as Teale concludes
Should then the song too wanton seem,

You know who chose th’ unlucky theme
Dear BRYAN, tell the truth
(Edwards, 1794: 33)
The ode led to the response of the painted illustration The Voyage of
the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies (Figure 1.1) by Thomas
Stothard and its engraving by William Grainger (McCrea, 2002) which
appeared as an illustration in Edwards (1794: 27).
Stothard’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West
Indies (1793) is a satirical reference to Boticelli’s Venus transferred to
the slave trade (Mohammed, 2007). If we juxtapose the bodies of the
two Venuses we see that the Sable Venus has a more curvaceous (more
bottom) and muscular body – biceps, trapezius and quadriceps – than
Boticelli’s Venus who looks barely pubescent, with no muscle tone to
speak of, slender limbs and barely visible hips. The Sable Venus is being
declared to have a body which is both productive as a labourer on the
plantations and reproductive as a site of sexual pleasure and bearer of
children to be enslaved. While the whereabouts of the painting of the
Sable Venus is unknown, the image survives in Edwards (1794) and in
William Grainger’s engraving in the British Museum. The Sable Venus
was placed in a ‘Sea Triumph [so] Stothard appeared to have ensured
that his black African slave would be ensconced within an old mytho-
logical “topos” which had become an established feature in British
visual iconography’ (McCrea, 2002). The Sable Venus emerged from the
sea with a shell as the vessel of transportation. She had gods and cher-
ubs who protected her on her journey across the Atlantic. This image
of a Black woman in motion relates to the public triumphal spectacle
that existed since Graeco-Roman times. However, the painter/engraver
does not conceive the Sable Venus as a ‘Venus’ but as Rafael’s Galatea
who rides in a cockle shell and is pulled by dolphins. This means that
the Sable Venus did not have the same status as the goddess Venus
because she was a Neried and a sea-nymph (McCrea, 2002). Her ‘race’
put her below the white Venus in terms of status. Further, the horrors
of the Middle Passage are re-presented as a version of the birth of Venus
because the slave ship, with its brutality, rape, murder and deprivation
is transformed into a shell, while dolphins replace deadly sharks ready
to consume African bodies whether dead or living (Mohammed, 2007).
Figure 1.1 The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies
Courtesy of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.
Both Teale’s poem and Stothard’s painting were used by Bryan

Edwards (1794), to support the slave trade by diminishing its barbari-
ties and those of plantation life for the enslaved. By drawing on these
two sources he implies that there has been a rebirth of European culture
in the Caribbean through the idea of the rebirth of Boticelli’s Venus.
Further, he erases the decimation of the original inhabitants and denies
the ravages of the enslavement of African women (Mohammed, 2007).
This denial is also accomplished by placing the Sable Venus’s origin in
Angola which was not a British colony but a Portuguese one. However,
it was well known that the West Indian planters preferred people from
Angola and the Congo to Coromantees from the Gold Coast because
they were cheaper and supposedly ‘less resistant’ to enslavement. The
poem and the painting rendered the Sable Venus suitably ‘European’
for white men, represented as FRANK, Spaniard, Scot and English, who
would eventually exploit her even though planters like Edward Long
(1774) thought she looked like an ape.
Bryan Edwards (1743–1800) retired to England in 1792. He was a
member of the West India Lobby and was an opponent of the aboli-
tion of slavery. His publication established him as a serious historian
of British colonial history and West African slavery and was used by
both pro- and anti-abolitionists. In 1794 the book was translated into
German and in the second edition in 1794 the image of the Sable
Venus appeared illustrating the poem (McCrea, 2002). It is unclear if
the engraver replicated the essential details of the original painted-
illustration (McCrea, 2002). However, what is more pertinent is the
sexualizing European male gaze which produced the Black woman as
Sable-Saffron Venus.
For Patricia Jan Mohammed (2007: 7), if ‘you were to look again
closely at both Venuses, although the Sable Venus holds the strings of
the sea horses, it is not a free flowing lock of golden hair which deco-
rates her neck like that of the Boticellian counterpart, but a decorously
placed slave band’. Although McCrea (2002) asserts that this is a pearl
necklace, the Sable Venus was decidedly un-free even if she wears a
loin girdle of precious stones and ankle amulets, revealed by her robe
which has fallen to the base of the car (McCrea, 2002). The muscular-
ity exposed by her de-robing points to her as a worker, different from
the white women who were her betters. The Sable Venus was clearly
part of the regime of colonial visibility which discursively constructed,
positioned and disciplined Black women’s bodies in order to generate a
coherent and seemingly consensual image of social relations based on
white male, heterosexual domination.
McCrea (2002) suggests that Stothard may have used the antique cast
at the Royal Academy as the basis for the Venus as female models were
regarded with suspicion even though there were no rules for the use of
Black female models at the time. The bodies of both the Botticelli and
Sable Venuses are represented as decidedly not fat. Indeed, Boticelli’s
Venus is recognizably slim by contemporary standards. Therefore, the
European standard impacted on Black women’s bodies in an anatomical
economy in enslavement societies in which being ‘attractive to white
men’, which could be translated as not being fat, but being nonethe-
less curvaceous, could potentially have life-changing benefits. The clear
reverse of this is that Black enslaved women had to be represented
as beautiful in known ways – that is, slim with pert breasts and large
buttocks – so as to continue the fiction of white men as naive dupes
who succumbed to their powers of seduction. Other representations
of Black women at this time were ‘she devil’ who resisted the sexual
and economic needs of white men and passive ‘asexual drudges’ (Bush,
2000). We can speculate that their depictions would have been far dif-
ferent from that of the Sable Venus. The depiction of the ‘she devil’, for
instance, would most possibly be as muscular and defeminized as was
the case for Nanny the Maroon leader and a Jamaican National Hero,
whereas ‘passive asexual ‘drudges’ most possibly would have been rep-
resented as fat and, therefore, undesirable as was the case for Mammy
in the USA. The point of this speculation is to make it clear that body
shape, size, musculature as well as skin colour linked to Black women’s
place in the anatomical, productive, reproductive and affective econo-
mies of enslavement society and the value placed on some bodies and
not others. Further, the Boticelli Venus’s slight curves/pert breasts/
rounded stomach/slim norm which cuts across Europe, the Americas
and the Caribbean as a desirable body type is not new but clearly has a
long history in our Global North West bodily imaginaries.
The Sable Venus ‘represented white male erotic fantasies, but also the
widespread practice of concubinage and sexual exploitation of black
women’ (Bush, 2000: 762). Concubinage was a survival strategy for
younger enslaved women and demands a deconstruction of the white
English representation Sable-Saffron Venus as tempting, scheming,
wanton and non-labouring slave body who was always prepared to
lead white men astray because of her dangerous hyper-sexuality (Bush,
2000). The rape and coercion of Black women was paradoxically repre-
sented as a triumph of the Venus over the slave owners and slave traders
within Teale’s poem and within plantation enslavement societies. There
emerged in the Caribbean as elsewhere a white fetishization of Black
women as an element of white masculinist culture (Bush, 2000). We see

this masculinist view of Black women and white men’s right to their
bodies repeatedly in Teale’s poem as the Sable Venus is presented almost
pornographically as beautiful, beguiling, prostitute:
Her skin excelled the raven plume,

Her breath the fragrant orange bloom,
Her eye the tropic beam:
Soft was her lip as silken down,
And mild her look as evening fun
That guilds the COBRE stream
The loveliest limbs her form compose,
Such as her sister VENUS chose,
In FLORENCE, where she’s seen;
Both just alike, except the white,
No difference, no – none at night,
The beauteous dames between
This construction prevailed even within the deeply significant

African-centred womanist culture which existed during enslavement
and which only became partially supplanted by masculinist culture
since emancipation (Bush, 2000). Indeed, it ‘was the existence of such a
culture which arguably prevented white men from ever gaining the full
measure of black women, even those whom they supposedly knew inti-
mately through concubinage’ (Bush, 2000: 776). Thus, enslaved women
should not be seen as helpless victims but as women who had some
measure of control over their own sexuality and that of their owners
(Mohammed, 2007). As a strategy of survival, relationships with white
men could offer better treatment for Black women and their Black-
white ‘mixed race’ children as well as some material gain through, for
example, independent ‘business’ activities like huckstering – small-scale
marketing and trading – and the possibility of freedom. We see this
in the stories of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Lindsay) who was brought up
by the Earl of Mansfield, extended family to her father Captain John
Lindsay. Her name Dido points to her Blackness as it draws on Book IV
of Vergil’s Aeneid which recounts the love of Dido Queen of Carthage for
the Trojan hero Aeneas and her despair when he abandoned her. This
story was turned into the opera Dido and Aeneas by the English baroque
composer Henry Purcell. Dido’s mother Maria Belle after many years
of sexual, reproductive and domestic enslavement to Dido’s father was
freed and given a house and land in Pensacola, Florida by him. Contrary
to the picture painted here by Maria Belle’s servitude, as concubines

women were not passive but also involved in slave revolts (Bush, 2000).
The Sable Venus was also imprinted on the bodies of ‘mixed race’
women, ‘Saffron Venus’, and this is visible in paintings of the era such
as the pro-slavery painter Agostino Brunias’s (1773–75) work, The West
Indian Washerwomen (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Agostino Brunias (1728–1796) West Indian Washerwomen, c. 1773–75

Courtesy of the Onyx Collection, Institute of Jamaica, Kingston.
Here, Saffron Venus is represented pornographically as is the case for

Sable Venus:
She is central in the image, her stance is very similar to the [other]
two Venuses [...]. Modesty forbids her nakedness to be completely
exposed, but, in the new sexual freedoms which the Europeans of
primitivism have already in many textual and some imaginary visual
interpretations deemed fitting of this region, she stands, in the midst
of similarly bare breasted women folk. The movement of wind and
nymphs, or Triton and dolphins, are replaced by white head wraps
of the black washerwomen and the whitened washed clothes placed
on the river stones which protectively encircle the brown woman. In
doing so Brunias recreates the shell shaped motif of both the Boticelli
and Sable Venuses. It is also a painterly device to ensure that the eye is
led to and remains riveted on the central object. Like the Sable Venus,
her neck is encased, this time in decorative fashion. The slave band
becomes an ornament rather than a controlling device. This Venus is
no longer white or black. She is olive skinned, mulatto, the hybridity
of the painting itself, neoclassical and romanticism combined collud-
ing with the hybridity of the mulatto Venus and in this painter’s eyes
signalling the hybridity of the region […]. (Mohammed, 2007: 7)
Her Black-white ‘mixed race’ body is curvaceous with clearly demar-

cated waistline and hips under the piece of material tied at her waist
and under which we can assume that she is naked. Again she has pert
breasts, a rounded but very toned stomach, muscular arms, shoulders,
thighs and calves. Whether this muscularity was considered attractive
at the time or was to show her status as worker, as enslaved in contrast
to white women is unclear, but such muscular, slender yet curvy bodies
were eroticized at this point by Europeans in Caribbean colonies and in
the metropoles as well as being warnings for unwary white men such
as Johnny Newcome.
‘Johnny Newcome in love in the West Indies’
The hand-coloured aquatint etching satirical print, ‘Johnny Newcome

in Love in the West Indies’, was published in April 1808 by William
Holland, Cockspur Street, London (Figure 1.3). Its size (height 246
millimetres, width 351 millimetres) meant that it could have been
easily passed from reader to reader. It sets out in six panes the life of
Johnny Newcome’s miscegenation from first arrival in the Caribbean
28
Figure 1.3 Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies
Copyright Trustees of the British Museum.
to the descriptions of his Black-white ‘mixed race’ children. It enables

an insight into 19th-century British anti-miscegenation mind-sets in
the metropole. His name ‘Newcome’ highlights his recent arrival in the
‘West Indies’ and his becoming part of the white male creole fraternity
by engaging in concubinage with Black enslaved women.
In the first pane of the etching the text, ‘Smitten with the charms of
Mimbo Wampo, a Sable Venus, daughter of Wampo Wampo King of
the Silver Sand Hills in Congo’, is as instructive as its accompanying
picture. Very dark-skinned Mimbo whose only visible facial features
are her white eyes and her teeth, is clothed in an above the ankle skirt;
short sleeved blouse, hat and veil and hooped earrings. She is plump,
bowlegged, bare footed, with muscular shoulders and arms, has elon-
gated breasts and holds a tobacco pipe. Her elongated breasts already
place her as primitive, as do her bare feet, tobacco pipe and earrings
while her skirt intimates both field labour and lack of appropriate
feminine modesty in displaying the ankle. This is not offset by the fact
that she is clothed as her lack of civilization cannot be ameliorated by
Western accoutrements even as a princess from the Congo, nor can
she be improved without the white man’s influence. Pane two sees
Newcome in a chair with his foot in Mimbo’s lap. Mimbo is now dressed
in a long skirt and is hatless showing her tightly curled hair but still in a
short sleeved top. Her hatlessness points to her being inside rather than
in the fields. The caption sets out their growing intimacy at the same
time as it ridicules the possibility of love between them because of their
inequality of status amplified by the fact that she is removing parasites
from his body – ‘Delicately declaring his love to the aimable [sic] Mimbo
Wampo, while she is picking his Chegoes. “You lub me Maʃsa” eh! eh! ?’
Mimbo here has a very cunning look on her face which brings to mind
the colonial idea that white men were always subject to entrapment by
‘dark temptresses’. This pane was a warning to newly arrived white men
of the perils of the Caribbean.
Pane three shows the level of Newsome’s ‘going native’, his creoliza-
tion into the ways of the West Indies, as we see him ‘Consulting Old
Mumbo Jumbo the Oby Man how to get poʃseʃsion of the charming
Mimbo Wampo’ and the obeah man’s reply “Lets me alone for dat
Maʃsa”. The obeah man has an earthenware jar with ‘Feathers Grave
Dirt Egg Shells &c’ and he is clearly still on the plantation because of the
windmill for the sugar mill in the background. This is how low the new-
comer has sunk because of love/sexual desire for Black flesh so that he
has to speak to a slave about giving him help through delving in what
was seen by Europeans as ‘African Black magic’. Pane four’s caption
reads ‘Mr Newcome happy – Mimbo made Queen of the Harem’. Here
Mimbo has Newcome on his knees in front of her while she sits in a
chair smoking her pipe with a shawl, a pearl necklace and bracelet,
a skirt covering her ankles and a short sleeved blouse, while the scene of
Newcome’s submission is looked at by other harem women who appear
to be younger, slimmer, of different skin shades and exposing only their
necks. Their inclusion makes us see Mimbo as very unattractive and
more primitive as compared to the other Saffron-Sable Venuses.
In kneeling before a woman who is the butt of the joke, Newcome
himself becomes a joke, a caricature of the white man who has gone
native in the Caribbean. As is the case for other white men, Newcome has
a ‘harem’ of enslaved women as is his due. The use of ‘harem’ ori-
entalizes the Caribbean (Sheller, 2003) and brings into view sexual
excess from the East within the West. It also removes Black women
irrespective of skin colour from the position of possible wife to con-
cubine, as transracial marriage was illegal. However, the sexual labour
of concubines belonged to their master. The idea of the ‘harem’ in
the Caribbean, could have been a critique of miscegenation’s erosion
of white British values and monogamous morality and the voicing of
fear of such miscegenation because of the production of Black-white
‘mixed race’ bodies. There was also paradoxically a valorization of the
sexual vigour of white men in the colonies. Therefore, it is not only
white women who came into being through the bodies of Black women
but white men as well. In Pane five we see ‘Mr Newcome taking leave
of his Ladies & Pickaneenees, previous to his departure from Frying
Pan Island to graze a little in his Native Land’. This could be read as
a warning to those white women in the metropole who would think
about marriage to planters, overseers or other white men in or from
the West Indies and to beware the possibility of the harem peopled
by Black women and the Black side of the family already created by
the potential husband. It is interesting that he is leaving ‘Frying Pan
Island’ as this places the cartoon strip both as a satire and completely
fictitious. However, it demeans the inhabitants who remain, who are
not as mobile as the Native Son of Britain, and places him as comical
even though he is a white man and at the top of the colonial racialized
societal order. ‘Ladies’ is derogatory as the only ladies at that time were
white, again making Black women the butt of the joke.
‘Pickaneenees’, a term used to refer to Black enslaved children on the
plantation, also related to his children because of the one drop rule, irre-
spective of their skin shade, facial features or hair texture. These children,
as ‘mulattoes’, were placed outside of whiteness and must be relegated to
their native land, Frying Pan Island, which is the location in which they
have any meaningful social place as his offspring. The idea of ‘Native Land’
in this pane at once shows distance from the West Indies even though he
has gone native, at the same time as it also points to the ‘natives’, the
Black others whether enslaved Black women like Mimbo Wampo or their
‘mixed race’ children to whom we then turn in pane 6.
Nine children are illustrated here which shows the fecundity of the
white man-Black woman reproductive pairing as in popular European
lore and the children’s lack of fit with the white European child even
though they are light-skinned, with the caption ‘A few of the Hopeful
young Newcomes’. We could well ask are they hopeful of inheritance,
freedom, legitimacy, privilege, because of their father? We can surmise
that whatever their hopes are they are likely to be dashed because
they are racialized others as we see in their images, names and the
brief descriptions given. They are presented almost as if they are part
of the plantation’s possessions, being listed but again with the edge
of satire never too far from the surface. For example, ‘Lucretia Diana
Newcome a delicate Girl very much like her Mother, only that she has
a great antipathy to a pipe and cannot bear the smell of Rum’. Lucretia
Borgia and the Greek goddess Diana combine to make us think of
the Sable-Saffron Venus as she is much like her mother, a debauched
seductress. These names themselves in their grandeur make a joke of
these children as mimic Europeans who can never occupy that very
white space because of the mark of Blackness. The use of the adjective
‘delicate’ is shown to be a joke because she is similar to her mother
who we know is not delicate at all as she was used to field labour,
smokes, drinks and as a member of the harem is now used to sexual
and reproductive labour. Child 8, Henry Sammy Newcome, is ‘a child
of great spirit am already Damne Liberty and Equality and promises
fair to be the Touissant of his country’. Johnny Newcome’s fathering
of the next Touissant is a direct warning to those white men set on
his path that they could unwittingly father their own destruction as
the second Black Republic in the Caribbean rises from the ashes of the
plantation to join Haiti. A tale of white colonial ‘race’ hygiene, indeed,
as the white man, subject to ridicule, is the creator of his own fall from
grace through his desire for Black woman’s flesh and the author of his
own demise through fathering his own Brutus. The story does not end
there as Johnny Newcome also produces the Black side of the family
in the West Indies, never to be acknowledged but always a threat to
the white genealogy of the white Newcomes in the Native Land and
the colonies.
The figure of the ‘mammy’ is present in Johnny Newcome, which is

why the joke is on him as he chooses Mimbo Wampo over the slimmer,
younger-looking Sable-Saffron Venuses. This might tell us something
about how the psyche of the newcomer is developed in the satire, as white
colonial masculinity in the Caribbean has no fear of public approbation in
the colonies. Johnny Newcome is in search of an intimate who is enslaved
by him so is unable to refuse his advances. He has been presented as a fool
who courts her instead of merely compelling her by the force of his owner-
ship and white superiority. Through the master’s force in enslavement we
see that transracial intimacy is not necessarily about closeness. It is also
about distancing, anxiety, alienation, dis/identification, violence and hate
(Fortier, 2008). These negative affects and practices underlie the satire and
also embedded the ‘big black Mamma’ within metropolitan life as a sexu-
alized, unattractive, child-bearing, fat, Sable-Saffron Venus.
This satire shows that as for other European colonialists elsewhere, British
colonial authorities were obsessed with moral, sexual and racial affronts to
European identity in the Caribbean (Stoler, 2002). Europeanness was inter-
sectional as it was class and ‘race’ specific but also codified through gen-
der. European bourgeois bodies defined their ‘healthy sexuality’ in racial
and gender terms in the Caribbean specifically around the idea of ‘racial
purity’. In British colonies historical evidence reveals institutional anxiety
about the regulation of transracial marriages and the emergence of ‘mixed-
race’ populations (Stoler, 2002; Monahan, 2011). This anxiety emerged
because colonial regimes insisted on maintaining the connection between
heterosexuality, class, gender and ‘race’ in defining what it meant to be a
respectable citizen. Within this racialized economy of love/sex, European
men and women were respectable only when they restrained their desires
so as to maintain white legitimate paternity, intensive maternal care, fam-
ily and conjugal love (Stoler, 2002; Monahan, 2011). European women
in the colonies were discursively encased in passionless domestic lives,
mythologized as the perpetually endangered subject of colonized and
enslaved men’s desire, dissociated from the sexual desires of European
men and irrevocably removed from the position of desiring subjects. All
of these aspects of the ideology of white colonial ‘race’ hygiene in terms
of heterosexual transracial intimacy can be seen to be at play in ‘Johnny
Newcome in Love in the West Indies’, in Issac Teale’s poem and in the rep-
resentations of the Sable-Saffron Venus. They can all be read as warnings
to white British men and women of what could occur if they veered from
the path of white ‘race’ respectability in the Caribbean colonies.
This hygiene highlights the white hysteria focused around racial
purity and that dominant white, heterosexual, English, male subjectivity
could only be produced through the possession of the body of the Black
woman whether Sable or Saffron (DeVere Brody, 1998). Indeed, for
Jennifer DeVere Brody (1998) the 19th century’s most significant ‘misce-
genated’ couple promoted by a range of discourses and representations
was Black women and white men. One such dominant and dominating
discourse is worthy of mention here. That is, that the union between
white women and Black men was sterile and physically impossible but
that between a white man and a Black woman was fecund and as such
economically desirable in the production of an enslaved population for
economic gain (DeVere Brody, 1998). Through such raced, gendered
and heteronormative ideology white men maintained their grip on
(il)legitimate paternity in the colonies (DeVere Brody, 1998).
With this as historical context we can read the Johnny Newcome
satire as part of a range of Victorian artefacts which ‘ironically reference
tropes of blackness and femininity as the “disavowed and violently
denied differences”’ (DeVere Brody, 1998: 8). Thus, the satire expressed
national metropolitan anxieties about class, ‘race’, gender, sexuality
and citizenship. These formed the matrix within which negative white
affects evolved focused on the destabilizing body of the Sable-Saffron
Venus. Its very muscle, bone, fat and skin was the focus of detailed
scrutiny and Foucauldian panoptical surveillance. This is very clear in
all three cultural artefacts discussed above, which combined, enable
a glimpse of the British obsession with white colonial ‘race’ hygiene
and its insistence on white ‘race’ purity. Such insistence is shown in
the figure of the Sable-Saffron Venus and the nine children displayed
in ‘Johnny Newcome’ whose hybridity confirms white purity as both
internal and external because of the ‘Black blood’ which courses
through their veins and passes on impurity. Thus, irrespective of skin
lightness one was always impure because of African descent and illegiti-
macy. The gaze of colonial hygiene on the Sable-Saffron Venus contin-
ued in the 20th century and is still present in contemporary discourses
on Black women’s bodies.
Bodying 20th–21st century Sable-Saffron Venus: divas,

glamazons and the racializing gaze
In freedom the Saffron-Sable Venus disappeared but the younger

African-Caribbean woman still has an erotic appeal for white men as
we can see in sex tourism to the Caribbean (Kempadoo, 2004). Further,
as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (1999), Debra Willis and Carla Williams
(2002), Janell Hobson (2005) and Jayne Ifekwunigwe (2006) argue, the
Black Venus master narrative is reasserted in contemporary historical

moments in Europe and elsewhere and orchestrates the global ‘skin
trade’ in Black women’s bodies.
For example, there is a long-standing French fascination with Black
women’s bodies cemented in the French imagination most certainly since
Baartman’s exhibition, as we can see in those two iconic 20th-century
nudes, Josephine Baker and Grace Jones. The long-existing trope of La
Vénus Noire and French interest in primitivism made Josephine Baker
famous in 1925 with the Revue Nègre and the Folies Bergère in 1926–27
through her emphasis on her bottom as ‘she played to and mocked her
era’s interests in jazz, black sexuality, and African “savage” dance […]
Through her danse sauvage, she recreated popular stereotypes of the black
female savage, femme fatale, and wild animal but altered her perfor-
mance of these stock types to mock European concepts of black female
beauty and sexuality’ (Hobson, 2005: 94–5). Baker became the ‘exotic
primitive’ always already known as wild and libidinous through the body
of the Black Venus which she performed. Her wildness was also shown
in her iconic banana skirt designed by the artist Paul Colin. George
Hoynungen photographed her nude in 1929 as the Black Venus, in which
she clutches a veil that falls to her feet and this became a classic erotic
image ( Jules-Rosette, 2007). ‘Baker’s portrayal of Black Venus thoroughly
erased her African American identity as her stage and film portrayals of
African (North and sub-Saharan) [Princesse Tam Tam, 1935] and Antillean
characters [Zouzou, 1934] aligned her with blackness, Africanness and
Caribbean-ness’ (Hobson, 2005: 96). Although both films dwelt on a
mixing of cultures the exotic was relegated on the outside of the French
nation through Baker’s Black body (Ezra, 2000). Her subjugation is
apparent in Zouzou (1934) when she is perched in a birdcage, dressed in
plumes, singing about Haiti. The majority of the images of Baker still in
circulation ‘are geared toward a male gaze and suggest the photographic
subject’s desire to be adored, manipulated and dominated’ (Jules-Rosette,
2007: 20). ‘Race’ plays a part in her primal imagery, subjugation and abil-
ity to pass from one Black body to another in inscribing savagery and a
reason for its separation from the nation as other. However, Anne Anlin
Cheng (2011) re-reads Baker’s body as disruptive Sable-Saffron Venus
alter/native. For her, Baker’s body was a second skin without which
European Primitivism, for all its racist, sexist objectification, would not
have emerged. Indeed, she sees her as representing a fracture in the repre-
sentational history of Black women which revolved around the figure of
the Hottentot Venus as well as being a phenomenon of modernism and
the entwined complexities of ‘race’, style and subjecthood (Cheng, 2011).
Jamaican-born, US American raised model, singer and actress, Grace

Jones, is a modern day diva and icon who has influenced others such as
Rihanna and Lady Gaga. She began her career as Andy Warhol’s muse
before moving to Paris as a model in the 1970s. Here she ‘remembers
going to a party with various French Ministers wearing nothing but
a string of bones around her neck’ (Sewards, 2008). Nudity to shock,
entice, seduce, stir desire. Bones to propel to the surface repressed
white memory of Black female alterity, animality and cannibalism. She
intended to scare as well as attract, to be a source of endless fascination.
She was the mistress of her own objectification, the one who deter-
mined the direction of the racializing gaze, her own iconic positioning
as diva, as freak. She says, ‘in the 70s and 80s we all had our fun, and
now and then we went really too far. But, ultimately, it required a cer-
tain amount of clear thinking, a lot of hard work and good make-up to
be accepted as a freak’ (Sewards, 2008). Iconic freakery had to be used
to bring the ‘world’s most daunting diva’ into being who is still a living,
‘scary legend’ (Sewards, 2008). Jones has been an icon in the fashion
and music world since her collaborations with her ex-partner Jean-Paul
Goude, who she left because he looked at her as an object. The French
photographer ‘transformed her from a human being into an androgy-
nous alien, with cropped military hair, angled shoulders, poised like a
panther to pounce’ (Sewards, 2008). This Sable-Saffron Venus entered
the UK imagination as non-human-cat, through the workings of the
French post/colonial psyche and Goude’s emphasis on her darkened
skin as a sign of alterity. In Jungle Fever Goude shows the extent of his
construction of her when he says ‘she became the threatening blue-
black male-female, erotic menace I wanted her to be, crashing cymbals
and chanting to music, breaking out of my frozen stop-time drawings
through my direction to surges of gesturing rage’ (Pacteau, 1999: 101).
In Goude’s art she became ‘the imaginary embodiment of the threat-
ening animality and corporeality that hovers at the limits of [white]
existence’ (Pacteau, 1999: 101). Her skin was darkened to a ‘shade of
blue-black-brown as if oiled to turn the skin into a reflective surface’
(Pacteau, 1999: 98) which became a menacing focus for whiteness even
as she was desired.
Grace Jones’s most iconic image is that of her glistening nude black
body, on all fours like a cat in a cage with the sign ‘Don’t feed the
animal’ surrounded by bones and raw meat, roaring in the face of an
audience of heads who silently watch her come to life as that which
they most fear, a wo/man eater. This image is based on a live perfor-
mance designed by Goude of the enactment of a fight between Grace
Jones dressed in a tiger costume and a real tiger. She wins and is shown
still dressed as a tiger chewing on its bloody bones (Pacteau, 1999). Her
black skin now becomes that of the big cat. Both the live performance
and the image bring the audience face-to-face with their stereotypes of
Black women’s alterity and excess through reproducing the stereotypes
themselves as impossible. Their very impossibility points to the perse-
verance of primitivism, representing Black women as animals and the
repulsion-desire for the Sable-Saffron Venus. It is her skin that we see,
not Grace Jones nude. Her skin’s hyper-presence erases the absence of
clothes, as Fanon’s historico-racial schema reduces her identity as racial-
ized other to her body’s surface, her Black skin, itself a negative signifier
(Pacteau, 1999). Throughout her career Grace Jones has claimed that
she is more man than woman (Sewards, 2008) and we see this being
played out in the nudes of her as a boxer posing with the Leone punch
bag which shows her lean, pert breasted, muscular body and her simu-
lating lesbian sex as the butch with a nude white woman, her sparring
partner. Helmut Newton’s (1980) photograph of a nude Grace Jones
crouching in profile, glancing over her shoulder with a smile, hold-
ing a black leather red-lashed whip makes us focus again on her skin.
However, now the stereotype is that of the white man’s erotic fantasies
of the submissive Black slave or conversely the Black bdsm dominatrix.
Grace Jones has been placed as animal, sex slave, freak, dominatrix,
woman-man, devourer of men in our psyches and that followed her
into her roles in Conan the Destroyer (1984, director Richard Fleischer)
and ‘Mayday’ in the James Bond movie View to a Kill (1985, director
John Glen) as well as Vamp (1986, director, Richard Wenk).
Her skin comes in and out of focus in the 1986 film Vamp, a horror
comedy for which she performs the theme song. According to the direc-
tor Richard Wenk, the film is also a piece of art enabled by Jones’s use
of actual iconic images of herself to that point in her career, as well as
her body itself as a scene of writing by artist’s brush and special effects
techniques. She never speaks but maintains the shock–horror–humour
through growls, make-up and body movements. We see Grace Jones
as Katrina, the vampire stripper, in white face, red blunt bob wig, red
lipstick, red dress and shoes with blue eyes on a black body painted by
her friend Keith Haring in a white asymmetrical design reminiscent of
Australian aboriginal body art. The spotlight finds her seated on the stage
set with a chair which looks like the seated body of a beheaded man,
painted in a black and white design similar to her body. She initially
searches out the audience with her eyes, open mouthed and clawing
the air. Then she crouches on all fours, does a cat stretch and walks
her hands across her body with her silver-clawed gloves. She strips to
reveal her painted body and her silver metallic breast and vagina covers.
She lies across the chair on her back and shakes her body making her
bottom the focus. As Black vamp in white face, she is the epitome of
both white desire and horror, as seducer and consumer of white flesh.
As Black vamp her body is grotesque, abject, much like her animal in
a cage as a ‘non-objet du désir which hovers at the margins’ (Pacteau,
1999: 88) but which is nonetheless sensuous. Her play of white on Black
and Black on white also shows Black skin/white skin as a mask which
is a detachable fetish reliant on its discursive insistence on the incom-
mensurability of difference to come into being. In white face Jones/
Katrina is the seat of negative affect such as shock, horror, fear, repul-
sion because of white ex-nomination from ‘race’ because she threatens
to disrupt the natural racial order while such negative affect rolls into
desire for the other.
Sasha Fierce, a.k.a. Beyoncé Knowles/Mrs Carter, has been criticized
by Black Nationalists and feminists alike for showing too much skin,
being a passive dupe of hip hop’s raunch culture, demeaning Black
sisters through her hyper-sexuality, selling out Black women’s respect-
ability in order to make millions and have cross-over value as an artist.
Beyoncé knowingly created Sasha as an alter ego. A woman who can
do what she wants, push the limits and be a feminist and anti-racist
irrespective of how she is positioned as a Black woman. She refuses the
white/Black voyeuristic gaze of the known of the Sable-Saffron Venus’s
body and speaks to all women about our bodies, our desirability, our
desires and the beauty of Black women’s bodies. Sasha can transgress
the bounds of respectable and acceptable femininity without any loss
to Beyoncé of her position as a middle-class/ upper-class, monogamous,
heterosexual, Christian, married, business woman (Lee, 2010). Sasha
pushes feminism and Black Nationalism to their limits through the use
of her body. She resists Sapphire and the Sable-Saffron Venus by produc-
ing excess, by reproducing a hyper-sexual, hyper-feminine parsing of
Venus for us to avidly consume.
In doing this she engages in what Homi Bhabha (1994) would call
‘mimicry’, returning an answer to (post) colonial patriarchy in the
form of the white racializing gaze which is something other than was
expected. Through mimicry she shows us that she can challenge the
gaze of white/Black hetero-patriarchy which would make her a 21st-
century Sable-Saffron Venus, through focusing on her two bs, ‘booty and
breast’. Through her continuous translations of ‘booty and breast’ she
shows Sapphire and Sable-Saffron Venus to be empty signifiers of Black
womanhood and the construction of the white racist imaginary. She

positions her body as that which is desired but can never be possessed.
In ‘Single Ladies’ potential partners are told ‘if you want it put a ring on
it’. We are also shown what ‘it’ is, legs, bottom, breasts, sexuality. Hyper-
sexuality highlights the myth of the necessity for the respectability of
marriage for sensible Black women. Sasha Fierce is not a Sable-Saffron
Venus or a Sapphire irrespective of the shapeliness of the parts of the
body she displays. She is a woman of the world who knows how things
work and who wants a relationship on her own terms. Political correct-
ness is as much passé as subtlety and demure femininity in her Black
Third Wave feminist anti-racist world. Here, third wave ‘power-punnany
Black feminism’ (Lee, 2010) transgresses the post-slavery necessity for
Black women’s respectability. Sasha Fierce actively resists representa-
tions born from the white hypersexualizing, racializing gaze and the
Black gaze of respectability in order to articulate another self through
gendered, ‘raced’ and sexualized identities and personhood. She chal-
lenges Black middle-class respectability by translating a Black woman
for the 21st century who can be hypersexual wife/partner, feminist and
willing to have a heterosexual relationship only on equal terms. Sasha
has reclaimed Black women’s agency and subjectivity. However, her
subversion is continuously undermined given the proliferation of Black
women’s bodies most notably their bottoms in hip-hop and dancehall
music videos, on porn sites and in porn videos.
An example of this from hip-hop culture is Barbadian Rihanna’s
‘Rude Boy’ in which she says ’Come on rude boy, boy can you get it
up? Come on rude boy, boy is you big enough? Take it, take it, baby,
baby, take it, take it, love me, love me’. The fetish here is her bottom
emphasized by her dance moves, her Jamaican Rasta colours inspired
fringed shorts and other skin-tight outfits and a male dancer resting his
elbow on her ‘head down butt-up’ distended bottom. There is only one
close-up of her pert breasts in the zebra outfit. As for Baker she is posed
with animals (Lion of Judah, snake and zebra) and is portrayed as hyper-
sexual through lyrics, dress and comportment. It is interesting that it is
Jamaican themed – the Rasta colours, the Lion of Judah image, the ruf-
fled shorts, the dancehall moves, the boxes from the sound system and
the name ‘rude boy’ – but also African – the snake, the zebra, the lion.
She replays the image of Black women’s animal nature when it comes
to sex by biting the (fake) snake as a tongue in cheek joke about the
image itself. She places herself as both Jamaican and African as opposed
to her Barbadian origins and USA contemporary location while ripping
off Grace Jones’s body paint in Vamp in her zebra stripe body suit. In
this excessive production of iconic images of Black female sexualization

she continues to place the Jamaican and African descent Sable-Saffron
Venus’s body at one step removed from other Black women’s bodies
in terms of unrespectability, hypersexuality and sexual aggression. She
does this because in the repeat of Sable-Saffron Venus she makes clear
that her simulation builds upon a foundational image that is itself a
simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981) in which Black women’s body parts
are spectacles. As 21st century Sable-Saffron Venus Rihanna shows us
in ‘Rude Boy’ that the simulacrum has become a truth which needs to
be deconstructed. As such, Rihanna’s performance as a Black 3rd wave
‘punnany princess of power’ (Lee, 2010) makes us notice that the Black
woman’s body
is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality:

a hyperreal […] The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matri-
ces and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced
an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be
rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal
or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact
no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from
a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without
atmosphere. (Baudrillard, 1981: 1–2)
We would have to add to this peculiarly deracinated account that the

simulacrum which is the Black woman’s body continues to be enveloped
by a racialized and racializing imaginary in which she continues to be
reproduced as Sable-Saffron/Black Venus/ Sapphire/Jezebel/big Black
mama, all of which condition Black women’s bodies re-emergence.
In the English context when we think of a Black woman’s body that
has been made into a spectacle we think immediately of the beauti-
ful Naomi Campbell. Now 43 years old, the first Black supermodel to
emerge from the UK had been dubbed ‘Black Panther’ during a career
which has been marred by her infamous bad temper and her charac-
terization by the media as a diva. She has had a total of eight Vogue
covers and was the first Black British model on the cover of British
Vogue although Donyale Luna from Detroit, USA was the first Black
model to grace the cover of British Vogue in a March 1966 cover shot
by David Bailey. She was also the first Black model on the cover of
French Vogue followed by the cover of American Vogue’s September issue
the year after which was the first time a Black model had been on the
September cover. She became the first Black supermodel from the UK in
1990 alongside Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and

Christy Turlington. She is a woman of many firsts!
Long the Black Venus for Dolce and Gabanna, Campbell as Black Panther
always has a hint of animality beneath the thin veneer of her beautiful
civility. For example, as the face and body of their 2011 Animalier eye-
wear campaign, the animal print swimsuit and glasses remind us of this.
Continuing this theme in Almaz Ohene’s coffee table fashion book we see
Naomi in a wild jungle/savannah big cat print outfit showing bare legs
and shoulder with a train of the fabric behind her running head to head
with a cheetah with her hair up in a flowing, long, straight, black ponytail
and glistening skin. There is also an image of a more overtly sexualized
supermodel in a RAW photograph of a very pale, blonde, naked, white
woman sandwiched between an equally naked Naomi and a muscular,
young Black man. The man is fondling the white woman’s vagina from
the front while Naomi with one breast showing is kissing her and simulta-
neously fondling her breast from behind with her genitals pressed firmly
against the woman’s bottom. In this image she is placed as hypersexual
because of polyamorous threesomes. She is also placed as sexually deviant
because of the assumed bisexuality of the scene where she is consuming
the white woman’s body as Grace Jones did previously. The white racial-
izing gaze positions a bisexual/lesbian Campbell as destabilizer of the skin
of the English nation as consumer of pure, white femininity.
Campbell also has another place in the English imagination as seen
in the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Bliss advertisement in 2011. Its compari-
son to her skin as chocolate did not go unnoticed by the UK public
long used to making this comparison between Black skin and sweet
treat traditionally emerging from the labour of Black/of colour people
on sugar and cocoa plantations in the colonies. The chocolate bar was
surrounded by diamonds and the words ‘Move over Naomi there is a
new diva in town – I am the world’s most pampered bar, now in three
new flavours’. After public outrage at the racism in the advertisement
and the model’s threat to sue Cadbury because she found it upsetting,
insulting and hurtful to be described as chocolate, the advertisement
was removed. The company apologized to the public and the model
after initially saying that it was just a tongue in cheek play on her repu-
tation for tantrums but the Advertising Standards Authority threw out
complaints that the advertisement was racist. There is something else to
be said about this advertisement as it brought back into public percep-
tion her appearance at the Charles Taylor war crimes trial at the Special
Court for Sierra Leone in which she was accused of accepting ‘blood
diamonds’ from the former head of state in 1997.
She has been well known for tantrums throughout her career it is true
and these caused her to be fired by Elite Model Management in 1993 as
well as being involved in lawsuits against her for abuse from employees,
associates and even police officers at Heathrow Airport. She has done
a stint in rehab for cocaine addiction and was also famously banned
for life by British Airways, though with an estimated net worth of $48
million in 2009 this should not be problematic (Wilson, 2012; Photo:
Naomi is seriously going bald). She has had a failed novel ‘Swan’ and a
failed album ‘babywoman’ so diversification from ‘supermodel’ has
been difficult, though her fragrance fared better and she has had small
parts in film and television. Naomi has most recently been in the news
in August 2012 when her traction alopecia was revealed as she climbed
back onto the boat of her then partner Vladislav Doronin in the waters
off Ibiza. She has continued her evolution from supermodel over the
years. In 2013 she became producer and coach of the Sky Living pro-
gramme ‘The Face’ and joined fellow Black models Iman and Bethann
Hardison as a supporter of the advocacy group Diversity Coalition to
campaign against racism against Black models in the fashion industry.
Her anti-racist stance is not new as her critical comments in 1997 about
racism in the fashion industry were avidly followed in both tabloids
and broadsheets even if dismissed as ‘the unsubstantiated carping of
the tantrum-prone rich and famous’ (Gary Younge, ‘The trends that
make beauty skin deep’, Guardian, 24 November 1999, cited in Law,
2002: 127). However, she revealed the endemic racism in the industry as
shown by the BBC programme Macintyre Undercover which highlighted
verbal abuse of ‘niggers’ and systematic exclusion from modelling
opportunities (Law, 2002).
Her hair or lack of it, complete with pictures, was the focus of the
media in both the UK and the USA. This drew first horror at her lack of
natural hair but later drew pity from some amidst the detailed discus-
sion from medical experts about what had caused her hair loss – weaves
and extensions – and speculation about whether the damage was per-
manent or not. We now have a flawed Sable-Saffron Venus in our midst,
one who makes us wonder what there is beneath the latest weave or wig
as we watched her with her abundant locks on ‘The Face’. She is a Venus
who has suffered for fame, career and beauty. Her hair story is also one
that could be read as the tragic outcome of a Black woman who had to
have visible markers of whiteness, long, straight hair and later coloured
contact lenses in order to succeed in the fashion industry.
We could also read her mimicry of the tropes of Black womanhood in the
UK – animality, savagery, hypersexuality, bisexuality/lesbianism – much
differently, though, if we think about her disrupting Saffron-Sable Venus

as an alter/native. This can be illustrated if we look at the difference
between the images of the nude Naomi Campbell, the very similarly
posed nude Grace Jones with the Leone boxing bag and the iconic pho-
tograph of a naked Josephine Baker mentioned earlier. None of their
body types or full frontal poses fit into the stereotype of the Hottentot
Venus, the focus is not their bottoms but their beauty of face and form
subtly highlighted through light and shade. These images can be read
as examples of a racist, heteropatriarchal genealogy of Black women
as objects of desire as well as examples of the idealization of the Black
female form and agency (Cheng, 2011). Baker’s face is highlighted to
show her as both the possessor of childlike innocence and adult allure.
Her head is slightly bent so her heavily made up eyes gaze pensively at
the camera. Hooped earrings, thick hooped necklace and thick bracelets
remind us of the image of the Sable-Saffron Venus of enslavement even
whilst her hands clasp her breasts and the cloth which hangs down
the front of her body covering her genitals modestly but rendering her
naked to the voyeur’s eye. The full frontal nude of Naomi Campbell
which catches the eye in highsnobeity does not seem to be styled to titil-
late unlike Baker. Naomi, looking straight at the camera, has her hands
on her head covered by a mid-back length weave highlighting her pert
but full breasts which are also lit so as to be lighter than her body. Her
hand placement lengthens her body highlighting her slender waist,
muscular torso, slightly rounded stomach, hairless but shaded genitals,
curved hips and long muscular legs beyond. The lighting on her face
focuses the eye on her cheekbones and her lips while she looks directly
at us, the audience, without need to titillate through draped cloth, to
entice, seduce, entertain or befriend through her display of skin. This
is very much the same for the Grace Jones nude although we are also
pulled into a judgement of her through the Leone – ‘lion’ – on the
punch bag. Again, though, we go back to the difference between the
naked as pornographic and the nude as artistic in Western Art (Willis
and Williams, 2002) with Campbell and Jones occupying the latter
category. As artistic nude rather than pornographic naked Black female
body they allow us to read the usual pornographic positioning of the
Black woman’s body against the grain.
Baker’s iconic shot represents her through melancholic repetition as
the child/adult of colonialism. This particular body politics places her as
in need of white guidance at the same time as being seductress through
her body’s submission. The melancholic repetition wrought by this
iconic image as it circulates in our times erases Black British women’s
bodies as themselves caught within a melancholic repetition in which

Blackness belongs out there somewhere else but not within the body
of the nation. For Cheng (2011) Baker’s image revives the racist and
sexist objectification that constructed European primitivism. However,
as said earlier, we also need to read against the grain of this to see the
idealization of Black female agency as Baker became the discursive fet-
ish for modernism (Cheng, 2011). Baker was created as freer than white
European women through her savagery which was a visual colonial
trope (Cheng, 2011). We can also read against the grain of these repre-
sentations to see Baker as a break in the representational history of the
Black female body as Hottentot Venus (Cheng, 2011) and extend this to
say that her body shape/size is reminiscent of the Sable-Saffron Venus of
the Caribbean which we still see being replayed on the bodies of Grace
Jones and Naomi Campbell.
So, even in the early 20th century the Caribbean colonial had pene-
trated European society as we see with the ease that Baker played
Zouzou. The unconscious ambivalence of colonial desire where these
three women – although being iconic at different times in the 20th
century – are both the objects of reverence and disgust-contempt makes
us wonder at the affects which underlie their iconicity as exceptions.
Thus, when we look at these women nude what is it that we see? We see
beautiful, slim, curvaceous, toned bodies but in the UK we also see these
women through the Caribbean colonial trope of Sable-Saffron Venus in
which there is no possibility for category confusion in terms of ‘race’
or gender. Their very bodies have been given defined contours by this
legacy. Skin and what lies beneath it acquires legibility through this
legacy. However, as nudes both Jones and Campbell enable a reconcep-
tualization of the Black woman’s body. Looking directly at the viewer
they leave objectification behind and as subjects interpellate the viewer.
This reverses the spectacle of the Black woman’s celebrity body which
aimed to disavow their becoming other than what was envisioned by
colonial discourses of the Black woman as other. In turning the tables
on the would-be objectifier we see the becoming moment of new racial
and gender identities through the relationality of skin(s).
The skin ego (Anzieu, 1990) of the viewer undergoes change through
‘race’ performativity. Desire enables an affective flow from the body of
Jones and Campbell which rewrites the skin ego of the viewer. Even
though they are subject to racialization, fetishization, objectification,
their racialized skin reasserts its agency as specifically Black and darker.
Such a revision of the skin ego through affective flow can explain the
lure of Campbell’s and Jones’s skin, muscle, bone, fat as we never cease
to be in their thrall. Such affective relationalities enable darker skin to

refuse the basic assumption that skin is intractable and that the only
racialized position in terms of the skin we inhabit is the one of colour.
The viewer becomes acutely aware of their own racialized position in
the grip of this racializing affective flow.
Continuing viewer fascination rewrites a racialized body history that
extends beyond ‘race’ fiction. This is so because a re-cognition which
contaminates through the transracial intimacy of the gaze and the flow
back questions our knowledge of the other. ‘Race’ becomes a visual,
corporeal (Cheng, 2011), fluid, affective phenomenon even whilst it
remains imbricated in essentialist discourses of difference and immuta-
bility. However, can fascination also operate through disgust-contempt
rather than just Black-philia? Let us go back to the image of Naomi
Campbell head-to-head with the cheetah. We know that her Black skin
registers disgust in our culture but also fascination at how it feels to the
touch, looks when it sweats and glistens, how it functions with muscle,
skin, bone and tendon. Her body reorganizes the visual field and our
psychic borders as we know that it is impossible for her to run as fast
as the fastest land animal. As that aspect of our epistemology of igno-
rance (Yancy, 2008; Mills, 1997; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007) ruptures,
we need to ask what are we being oriented to see? We are being asked
to see Naomi selling a product through replaying to us a particular
coloniality of knowledge on the Black woman’s body via stereotypes of
Sable-Saffron Venus as Amazon, superhuman. As we gaze, the stereo-
type revealed makes us question anew the known Black woman’s body
of discourse within which she emerges. She alters our line of sight and
disgust-contempt in that moment that we recognize that we view her
through a stereotype which haunts her possibility of emergence – the
Black Panther. Naomi Campbell as body and psyche exists within a
gazer space in which her own agency is threatened because of her loca-
tion as spectacle. However, this is a threat only as she replays for the
viewer the stereotype which attempts to construct her as Black woman
but which cannot. The image’s excess itself overflows and denies closure
around Campbell as Black Panther and makes the viewer question the
truth of this white construction.
Like Black celebrities from Baker to Jones, to Beyoncé, Campbell’s
is a life which is marked by self-fetishization because of the fact that
her body is both a brand and racially branded (Wingard, 2013). Racial
branding implicates a lack of agency in the bringing into being of the
Black woman’s body, in the use of hypersexuality, temper, freakery,
excess. It is hard for us to know whether or not the women themselves
have agreed to be put in cages, stripped naked, dressed in basques, but
the point is that whether this is self-stylization or not, these images

always produce excess. We can see that ‘race’ performativity helps us to
view this excess as agentic through the performative failure to be exactly
as the stereotype entails. New subjectivities are produced through ‘race’
performativity as we get the stereotype and the excess which is Naomi,
Grace, Beyoncé, Josephine, Rihanna. What is not being argued for here
is subversion or transformation but an excess and failure in the repeti-
tion which allows us to re-cognize the subject as not the stereotype, as
agent producing a simulacrum.
Further, if we look at both Campbell and Jones as nudes we can see
that as objects of desire or disgust-contempt they have shifted to the
position of subject through their gaze back at us which makes us ques-
tion our fixed borders. In other words, they make us notice that we also
shift from the position of subject to object as our subjectivities are in
a state of constant flux. All of these women are skilled in surrounding
themselves with various masks, which we peel off much like an onion
until we think we have reached their core. This is apparent, for exam-
ple, in the different roles that these women assume in their professional
lives. Campbell, for instance, is fashion model, Playboy cover girl, writer,
actress, singer, TV producer – so which is ‘the real Naomi’?
The issue of the real is troubling as it speaks authenticity and origin.
We have to be content with thinking of her public persona as a simu-
lacrum of both the Sable-Saffron Venus and herself. She can be who we
want her to be, object of desire, focus of disgust, glamazon, much as
she can clothe herself in different masks so that ‘race’ and gender per-
formativity work to make her performance of Naomi speak her. These
iconic women are as much manufactured as racially branded bodies as
manufacturing themselves as brands. We can see this manufacturing if
we look at those nudes of Jones and Campbell in which they simulate sex
with white women. The body of the African descent woman has already
been placed as heterosexual and hypersexual, but when it is designated
lesbian or bisexual it is placed in the butch position. This is the case for
Jones and Campbell as they are shown to ‘use’ the bodies of submissive
white women. This tells us that it is not only Black men that are a danger
to white womanhood but Black women also. Women who have been
masculinized historically also threaten white man’s right to possession of
white women’s bodies and indeed of their own bodies as well.
Conclusion – affective Black bodies
Both Jones and Campbell appeared in the Olympics ceremonies in 2012

in London and then they were captured on camera at Wimbledon 2013
as ‘tennis bffs’. What is it about these two women of Jamaican descent

that has captivated the British nation? If we think about their careers we
can see that images have been focused on their darker skinned bodies,
their ‘unique looks’, hypersexuality, their being like big cats and their
psyches as divas and glamazons, who are bad tempered, aggressive and
uncontrollable. Their bodies have become the location of the excessive
that questions gender, heterosexual and ‘race’ norms. We should not
confine subjects like Baker, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Jones and Campbell to
the trite hypersexualized archetype (Lee, 2010). We should instead see
them as feminists who creatively carve out space for Black female sexual
subjectivity and beauty of body and face. As for Shayne Lee (2010), it
is important to take a Third Wave Black feminist approach to see how
these women break out of the politics of respectability in which Black
women have been tightly wrapped post-enslavement and which has
restricted Black female sexuality, erotic agency and empowerment.
This removes us from seeing Black female artistes, models and sex sym-
bols as being exploited replications of the 18th-century Sable-Saffron
Venus. Instead they become feminists asserting sexual agency and
individual autonomy through both their work and (re)presentation of
themselves in everyday life. These women counter negative stereotypes
not through a shielding of the body and foregrounding of morality,
intelligence and civility but through excess and the spectacle of skin
and body parts including rear end excess explored in the next chapter.
2
Batty Politics: Desire and
Rear Excess
In the 21st century ‘rear end aesthetics’ (Hobson, 2005) valorizes

racial alterity. It also severs links with the steatopygia of Baartman as
it connects with the desire for the derrière of the Sable-Saffron Venus
alter/native which we see replayed in hip hop, soca, dancehall and
in the boom boom brasilera. Black women’s excessive bottoms have
now entered the global body market in ‘erotic capital’ (Lee, 2010;
Hakim, 2010) as they are being reproduced through aesthetic surgery’s
stylization possibilities on a variety of bodies including those of Black
women themselves. In February 2011, 20-year-old Black British student,
Claudia Aderotini from Hackney East London, journeyed with friends
to Philadelphia for silicone injections to enhance her bottom. She paid
£1,000 for the procedure which she felt would boost her hip hop career
as she had been dropped from a previous promo because her bottom
was too small and as such did not possess erotic capital. Unfortunately,
her ‘pumper’ used industrial grade silicone. She never came home. She
died twelve hours after the procedure was done in room 425 of the
Hampton Inn Hotel near the airport. This was a tragedy but one that
makes us wonder what alter/native-body desires and agencies are being
made visible through the manufacture of batty by both Claudia and
the celebrity known for her bottom (batty) and breast enhancement,
Nicki Minaj?
This chapter argues that the über-batty points in two directions
simultaneously. It is a Black celebration of ample curves but at the same
time it speaks back to the politics of feminine body containment. Such
containment submerges desire for curves beneath fear of flesh and fat.
This is seen in the widespread ‘debodying’ imperative of size zero, and
the assumption that eating disorders relate only to white bodies. Further,
as active consumers and producers of the aesthetics of rear excess, Black
47
women are creating body parts that reflect transracial, heterosexual

objects of desire. These objects that sell in the global traffic in Black
women’s bodies in popular culture are assumed to always already be a
part of Black women’s embodiment. However, the bottom manufactured
to be excessive speaks to a turning away from the politics of respectabil-
ity in which the Black woman’s body is so often embedded (Lee, 2010).
Instead, there is alter/native positive value being created in a sexual excess
shown on the body itself which is only constrained by spending power.
This chapter seeks to go beyond the white European gaze on Hottentot
Venus by looking to the work of decolonization of the bottom being
undertaken through the larger bottom as erotic capital. Let us turn to
look more historically at the Black woman’s bottom in the white gaze.
Black bottoms, white gazes and desires
On the 22–28 March 2014 cover of Closer magazine in the UK below

the headline ‘Body Shocks’ we see before and after pictures of Kim
Kardashian with the words ‘Kim grows her bottom for the wedding’. The
pictures show a very large increase in the size of her bottom in terms of
length, width and perkiness over a period of three months. ‘Growing’
something speaks to agency but it also speaks to a naturalness which
this growth also denies because of its speedy increase in size. There is
no suggestion of her going under the knife to achieve these curves in
an article that just dwells on the fact that she wants her body to be the
curviest at her wedding. Could this interest have been sparked because
the bottom should still be under control and, indeed, much smaller if
one was to claim the space of respectable femininity? Was the article a
comment on the fact that Kardashian was incorporating Black women’s
curves onto a woman of colour’s body in preparation for her wedding to
Black rapper Kanye West, where she has to be the curviest, because of his
‘race’ and therefore her ‘Blackening’? Media interest there has been, but
this is somewhat muted in comparison to that given to Serena Williams’s
bottom when she wore a form fitting black lycra cat-suit, accessorized by
blonde braids at the 2002 US Open Tennis championships.
The media coverage and the online comments and images focused
on Williams’s bottom so that her body became the location of fascina-
tion, celebration, the grotesque as well as desire (Coleman-Bell, 2006;
Hobson, 2003). Indeed, the
representation of Williams’s black sporting body is loaded with

carnal connotations so that she becomes a compliant whore for
Batty Politics 49
the white imaginary that she is centrally packaged for […] black
butts can function as ‘unruly and outrageous signifiers’, or as overly
empowered motifs that resist the dominant reading that accompa-
nies them. (Coleman-Bell, 2006: 199)
From this viewpoint Black women’s bottoms perform the aesthetic

labour of resisting the white racist iconography that would place them
as unruly, deviant indicators of heightened sexuality by replacing
this with a point of view which, like Williams, revels in the flesh and
transgresses the dominant reading which would make them other. As
32-year-old, size 12-14, 5 foot 9 inches, 10 stone 7 pounds, Williams
has said ‘I don’t do the “D-word” ever: If I lost 20 pounds I’d still have
this bum’ (NOW, 2014). Williams is a multi-millionaire shareholder
in the Miami Dolphins football team and a designer with pieces and
accessories available on the Home Shopping Network, who does not
discipline or silence her body as she resists the ‘racialized grammar’ that
would seek to define her bottom negatively as Hottentot (Coleman-Bell,
2006: 199). Her sporting body transforms negative images of African
American womanhood as she has been taken up as spokesperson for
McDonald’s, Avon, Puma, Nike and Wrigley. Thus, her body displaces
the white female body as iconic. Indeed, this was played out in a 2004
Nike Olympics advertisement where white female bodies morphed into
the body of Serena Williams (Coleman-Bell, 2006). However, a racialized
grammar which comes out of a particular history of markets for the
Black woman’s body and their ‘economies of the flesh’ impact on the
creation and reception of Black women’s bottoms in the USA, UK and
the Caribbean as they continue to be fetishized and sexualized.
The reactions to both Williams and Kardashian illustrate the hidden
‘aesthetic labour’ (Gruys, 2012) and affective labour of Black women’s
bottoms as they negotiate competing cultural repertoires of white,
middle-class, heterosexual and Black aesthetic worlds where bottoms
are kept under control in order to be respectable. Kardashian’s bottom
in the news as ‘body shock’ illustrates that the bottom has always been
a space of dialogical critique and body interchanges between Black,
white and women of colour. Placed as point of disgust but simultaneous
desire and used to shame Black women into a location of object, we can
but wonder at what cultural change in how the bottom is viewed has
enabled Kardashian to grow a bottom that is big enough to be Black like
Black Barbie, Nicki Minaj. We also need to wonder if her bottom carves
the critique of those hegemonic claims of the Black woman’s large
bottom as site of disgust and shame in the same way as would Minaj’s
or Williams’s? Indeed, does Kardashian’s bottom reveal how aesthetic

categories breed their own instabilities as do Minaj’s and Williams’s
whose Black bottoms are subject to spectacularization?
The Hottentot Venus is the usual space to start in an exploration of
Black women’s bottom as spectacle and fetish object but we should begin
instead with white European travel writers’ views of the bodies of the
African women they encountered. If we do this we can see that the Black
woman’s body as both raced and gendered has always been subjected
to spectacularization by the white male gaze as stated previously. In her
analysis of racial and gender ideology in European male travel writing
from 1500–1770 Jennifer Morgan (1997) argued that these white men
turned to Black women’s bodies as evidence of cultural inferiority and
racial difference. As stated earlier African women’s bodies were depicted as
labouring, monstrous and their naked breasts and genitalia were seen as
signs of lack of civilization and grotesquerie even whilst they generated
‘complex interstices of desire and repulsion’ (Morgan, 1997: 78). For
example, these writers’ comments on ‘elongated breasts’ potentially
made readers wonder about the difference from white women in those
other forbidden zones of a woman’s body, the genitalia and the bottom.
Of necessity, European morality meant that these parts could not be
described in decent company. However, Black women’s bare breasted-
ness and the thigh-length skirt with which they were often adorned in
images which showed the curvaceousness of the hips, stood in for these
silenced body parts. The silencing of these body parts was also related to
the prohibition on fornication, adultery and sodomy. It was important
to silence these body parts lest they hint at the miscegenation that began
on first contact. Why else was it necessary to speak of these women as
moving from man to man counter to European Christian, monogamous
morality? Women had to be painted as loose to account for white men
gone wild in the tropics.
In being spoken of as ‘loose’ the image which would be relayed
to the European public was that of prostitutes who were thought to
have distended genitalia (Gilman, 1985). Travel writing aimed at seal-
ing the Black woman’s body as hypersexual, immoral and abnormal.
As finally constituted such a body could not enter into a relational
contestation of white power for self-definition because of its imposed
inferiority. The white male gaze re-created the Black woman’s body
as a powerless site in which his hegemonic discourses could maintain
claims of white superiority. This was essential as if the women were
inferior then the whole ‘race’ was infra-human and Black men were
negated. This was the case even whilst sexual difference constructed
Batty Politics 51
male bodies as nobler, to be admired and even aesthetically appreciated

(Hobson, 2003, 2005).
From first contact the Black woman’s bodies came to be triple (Fanon,
1986), indeed quadruple, if overlain with gender and this was more
literally fleshed out in enslavement. In enslavement the Black woman’s
body became a site of domination, a biotext on which slave owners
inscribed authority (Camp, 2002). The body was also lived as subjective
experience through terror, suffering, control and force, as well as being
reclaimed by Black women as a site of resistance in opposition to slavery
and a source of pleasure, pride and self- expression (Camp, 2002). Such
reclamation constituted an everyday ‘somatic politics’ of opposition to
white racist hegemony (Camp, 2002). The necessity for such somatic
politics makes us recall that racist discourses and hegemonies were
constructed out of ‘race’d and gendered bodies – out of their very bone,
fat, muscle, skin, and body parts.
In order to keep white aesthetic hegemony in place Black women’s
bottoms could not make constitutive claims of their own. Black women
had to remain subaltern and their versionings of their body parts
through the somatic politics of opposition had to be kept outside of
representation. White discourses on the Black woman’s bottom had to
be repeated, intensified and continually circulated. This was accom-
plished during enslavement in the Caribbean and North/Latin America
where the body spoke its subjugation through terror, coercion and
institutionalized control of racialized bodies. However, such bodies
could not be totally claimed as property or named as inferior because
of the intervention of agency even within the death worlds (Mbembe,
2003) of plantation enslavement. Within these death worlds, the Sable-
Saffron Venus trope was one medium through which whiteness sought
to contain Black female agency as this Venus reproduced their bodies as
commodity, owned, sexually violable, inferior and devour-able whether
through touch, gaze or sexual penetration. Through its representation in
word and image Sable-Saffron Venus became an integral part of populist
racial theory which circulated in the press, travel writing, etchings, sat-
ire, paintings, public lectures, fairs, museums, racist pseudo-science and
laws. This racialization aimed to show that the Black woman’s body’s
inferiority existed internally and externally, on the skin as much as
beneath it, evident in its comportment, lack of intellect, civilized lan-
guage or culture. Therefore, white racial dominance did not only operate
from the position of disembodied universalism but was very embodied.
Indeed, it produced its own embodied epistemologies although it was
always open to challenge as aesthetic hegemony can never be complete.
This is so because Black women’s bottoms continually refuse to be the

sign for that which whiteness is not.
One such refusal and insistence on agency during enslavement is
that of Jamaican National Hero, the Maroon leader, Nanny. Nanny
led a guerrilla war against British colonialists for many years during
the First Maroon War (1720–1739) from her Maroon stronghold in
Eastern Jamaica. She was an excellent military strategist, a chieftainess
who passed down African music, customs and language to her people
and was said to be an obeah woman. Such was her leadership, power,
cunning and fame that she is reputed to have caught bullets with her
bottom and shot them back at the British! To show your bottom to the
enemy in this way and to use it as a weapon underlies the agency of the
bottom in Jamaican culture in which showing the bottom is a sign of
deep disrespect as it communicates disgust and contempt. This Sable-
Saffron Venus alter/native shows us that much before the Hottentot
Venus exhibitions in Europe the Black woman’s bottom was a zone of
fascination and fear for white men.
We can see this fascination and fear within the metropole if we look
at that most celebrated and vilified of bottoms in the European imagi-
nary, the Hottentot Venus, the Khoikhoi woman Saartje Baartman, the
first in a long tradition of exhibits brought to London in 1810, sub-
sequently baptized in Manchester, England who died in Paris in 1816
aged 25. She is supposed to have signed a contract with her exhibitors
Hendrik Cezar and Alexander Dunlop and also received payment but
no such contract has been found. Positioned as the object of the white
racist gaze her body parts – genitalia, bottom, brain, skeleton – were
exhibited after her death alongside a report to the scholarly community
by Georges Cuvier in 1817. She remained on exhibit in the Musée de
l’Homme in Paris until the early 1980s when the post-apartheid South
African government requested her repatriation for burial. Her body
parts were returned and buried in Cape Town at a funeral on 9 August
2002 (Hobson, 2003, 2005). For Hobson (2003, 2005) her exhibition
both alive and dead shaped the way that Black women’s bottoms came
to signify deviant sexuality that also emerged in 19th-century popular
culture. What is interesting now is that we can still see an interest in her
bottom on Youtube if we look at the video of the ‘San Women with stea-
topygia (fat bottom)’ put up by a Big Brazilian Fan, which in 10 months
got 42,693 views. In this video we see a white, blonde clothed woman
walking with two Black women, lionesses and a dog in the desert. The
Black women appear to be naked except for a necklace and a waist belt
that could have a thong attached. Their bottoms are fully exposed to
Batty Politics 53
the gaze both from the side and straight on while the white woman’s
remains stubbornly hidden, clothed.
If we do a restorative reading of the Hottentot Venus bottom we
can see the agency in her very subjection if we think about how white
women viewed their own bodies in terms of lack. Further, if we think
of bodies as relational and, thus, engaged in dialogical interactions
we can see how it is that without touching or otherwise drawing near
to the Black woman’s bottom that very body part can translate across
bodies because of white lack. Indeed, the spectacle of that bottom was
projected into the bustle that became a part of white women’s embodi-
ment even though like a mask it can be removed from under the skirt
to reveal what is not there. Bustles were additional padding on the seat
of a dress that gave the impression of a large bottom (Hobson, 2003).
They masked white women’s bodies with the Black woman’s projected
body part that at one point in European history alluded to hypersexu-
ality, deviance and grotesquerie but now came to connote ‘luxurious
beauty’ (Hobson, 2003). The movement of the bustle to white women’s
bodies indeed shows that Baartman’s bottom was a sexualized object of
desire that had to be incorporated by white femininity so as to assume
its unfettered sexual allure.
The Black woman’s bottom was cannibalized by both the gaze of
whiteness and its manufacture of the bottom for white women’s con-
sumption. What we have here is the double move of estrangement
from the difference of the Hottentot Venus bottom by whiteness, at the
same time as its revalorization as commodity in the bustle. Through
the bustle the Black woman’s bottom was made into a fetish object by
commodity capitalism. Thus, its value as body part and object was
measured by the cost and popularity of the bustle as the manufactured
Black bottom that moved across the colour line. The Hottentot Venus’s
bottom only increased in aesthetic and monetary value when it was
repackaged as a white object of desire to emphasize white rears, an act
in which even middle- and upper-class respectable women as well as
burlesque performers participated (Brown, 2008).
The 1920s with its craze for the body of the ‘flapper’ was a time at
which one would expect that the bottom would be de-emphasized.
However, the social dance, The Black Bottom, emerged in the flapper
era and was a precursor to the Charleston (itself a precursor to the
Lindy Hop) that was just as popular among middle-class, urban USA
and Europe. The name ‘bottom was a common nickname for black slave
quarters and black neighbourhoods in small southern towns’ (Stockton,
2006: 68). However, I would like to view this dance as located in display
of the Black bottom as body part. The Black Bottom originated in New
Orleans as a swaying and stomping Black dance. The words for the origi-
nal Black Bottom dance were written by Black pianist, composer and
dancer, Perry Bradford, in 1919 and the lyrics were instructions on how
to do the dance. Musical producer George White saw the Black Bottom
performed in a Harlem nightclub, bought the music and introduced it
to white audiences in ‘Scandals of 1926’. The dance was popularized
and changed for the ballroom (dancetimepublications.com/resources/
social-dance-timeline/1920-blackbottom-charleston/). Such was the
Black Bottom’s popularity that British Pathé in 1926 had Alice Melrose
perform it for its audience (www.britishpathe.com/video/the-real-black-
bottom-dance). Needless to say this dance does involve making notice-
able outward movements with the bottom highlighting the expectation
that the Black woman’s bottom is prominent.
The voyeurism attached to the Black woman’s bottoms reached its
zenith in Europe in the 20th century in the work of white French
photographer Jean Paul Goude, particularly his 1981 Jungle Fever which
‘reveals his fascination and desire for black women’s bottoms likening
them, in one instance, to those of a “racehorse”’ (Hobson, 2003: 95).
The woman whose body had been distended, fragmented and re-
presented with a horse’s rear was that of African American model
Toukie Smith. Goude had also portrayed Carolina’s behind in 1978
as a table on which a champagne glass was balanced as it was filled.
This 1976 image of Carolina Beaumont taken in New York was named
‘The Champagne incident’. Goude recreated this famous image for the
Winter 2014 issue of Paper magazine featuring Kim Kardashian. Goude’s
work is a reflection of the French approach to the highly sensual Black
Venus, such as Josephine Baker, and provides pornographic pleasure for
the white male gaze even though if white men admit desire for Black
Venus’s bottom they are seen as deviant much as they had been when
the Hottentot Venus was displayed (Hobson, 2003).
Many commentators on Black women’s bodies would say that within
the diaspora large bottoms have always found a place. Indeed, for
Hobson (2003) across the diaspora Black women centre their sexual-
ity by performing with their backsides whether in childhood games of
‘showing the motion’ or in adult life ‘wining’ in soca, dancehall or hip
hop. Sir Mixalot’s 1992 rap ‘Baby Got Back’ focuses on Black women’s
rears as objects of desire as he declares he likes big butts. If we look at
the butts which he calls big as embodied by the dancers in the music
video we can see that these are obvious but very toned, perky and in
control, which challenges existing ideas of grotesquerie and deviant
Batty Politics 55
female sexuality. He celebrates Black women’s bottoms throughout the

song precisely because they differ from white hegemonic standards of
beauty and have the power to make all men shout (Hobson, 2003).
Further, he sets up the white female body as an unreal silicone toy as
opposed to the authentic, well-proportioned Black female body with
‘back’ even while he reduces women to this body part (Hobson, 2003).
Another rapper who reduces Black women to this body part most
infamously in his ‘Tip Drill’ (2003) is Nelly. He also makes money
from this part through the sale of his Apple Bottom jeans that has
been referenced in Flo Rida featuring TPain’s 2007 single ‘Low’. Oprah
Winfrey also included Apple Bottom jeans in her list of ‘Oprah’s favourite
things’ in 2004. The brand insists that a ‘woman should not try to fit
the clothes, the clothes should fit the woman’. They are called Apple
Bottoms because ‘apples come in all shapes and sizes. Named to cele-
brate the appeal of female’s apple bottom the jeans are designed to
ensure curves are accentuated. Apple Bottoms embrace femininity
and celebrate the inner fashionista’ (www.drjays.com.content/brand/
apple-bottoms.html). They are also available in plus sizes so appeal to
all women. Hip-hop generation women such as Beyoncé Knowles and
Alicia Keyes have also ensured that having back is an aesthetic ideal that
has spread out from Black women’s bodies so that even though women
still ask ‘does my bottom look big in this?’ the answer ‘yes’ is met with
joy. We can see this joy exemplified on numerous YouTube sites such
as ‘booty dance’ and ‘her booty big.com’ where bottoms are displayed
variously dressed in order to show how they can move. The shame of
being large bottomed has been erased as there is no longer disgrace
attached to this body part and women no longer feel embarrassment or
unworthiness but rather take pleasure from the bottom. Large bottoms
have value whether through the debasement of spectacularization and
sexual fetishization, or by virtue of being a commodity engaged in the
global market in Black women’s body parts, or through being a site of
the social and cultural capital of aesthetic surgery enhancement as for
Nicki Minaj.
This could be one explanation for why Kardashian’s bottom is not an
issue. There is no abjection and humiliation attached to this body part
as she entered the market in the bottom as commodity. However, like
Jennifer Lopez, her bottom might give us a different take on this particu-
lar ‘rear end aesthetics’ (Hobson, 2003) that is about distinction rather
than decolonization. In Hobson’s view, J’Lo’s Latina body coloured as
‘exotic’/white rather than possibly mixed with Blackness because of her
Puerto Rican descent, bridged the desires of both Black and white men
for whom she could serve as the racial other. Similarly, as a woman of
colour Kardashian has been coloured ‘exotic’/white and located as Black/
white object of desire. Further as is the case for Lopez, her enlarged bot-
tom does not signify Baartman as it would for African descent women,
but rather would be likened to Aphrodite Kallipygos’s beautiful bottom,
with her slim waist and shapely legs open to the gaze as she shows
her rear by lifting her robe while she brazenly looks over her shoulder
at herself revealed. This would be the Venus that both women would
represent in dominant culture (Hobson, 2003). Like Lopez, Kardashian
as an exotic woman of colour is seen as more sexual than white women
but less deviant than Black women and in this way, as Kallipygos, her
bottom avoids stigma. Kallipygos is interesting because as she titillates
the gaze she takes pleasure in the view of and from her own body as a
site of beauty and desirability that in turn requires contemplation from
its viewer (Hobson, 2003). In this way the claim could be made that
Knowles also represents Kallipygos in terms of the way her body and
bottom has been positioned within dominant culture as beautiful, cur-
vaceous and desired across the colour line because of its location on her
lighter skinned body, itself placed as ‘exotic’.
However, being Kallipygos is not the fate of many other Black women
as we can see if we look at the misogyny of hip-hop videos (Sharpley-
Whiting, 2007), soca and dancehall (Frank, 2007) and Lily Allen’s music
video (2013) ‘Hard out here’. We can locate the latter as both racist and
sexist even within the Third Wave feminist message on body image and
relationships being doled out to her fans and Allen’s self-deprecating
message in the video ‘Lily Allen has a baggy pussy’. Allen begins from a
very feminist angle in a critique of those women who succumb to soci-
etal and celebrity culture pressure to be slim, beautiful, young, sexy and
objectified. The phrase ‘it’s hard out here for a bitch’ expresses this cri-
tique. However, the bitches in Allen’s video turn out to be her backing
dancers, the majority of whom are Black. In this extravaganza of gyrat-
ing bottoms, Allen remains detached from those bitches. Instead, she
reproduces the worst of hip hop misogyny through her white woman
performance of disembodiment in being fully clothed, apart from the
scene as a viewer, failing to dance and her spectacularization of how
Black bitches move, how they adore money and phallus-shaped objects.
She even goes as far as to slap a Black woman’s gyrating behind while
never offering hers up for a slap. Despite its potential homo-eroticism
this slap also placed her further apart from the bitches but as someone
still curious about the feel of Black bottoms, about how they reverberate
with the slap as they gyrate. However, this touch is neither sexualizing,
Batty Politics 57
nor indeed is it neutral. It is the touch of white female dominance

and judgement which draws the eye to that body part which is always
already known to be possessed by the Black woman and not by disem-
bodied whites.
The big mobile bottom is both always already known and an expec-
tation for Black women’s bodies. What does this then mean for Black
women who are thin with small bottoms? How can it be said that size 0
Black women as well as Black Barbies decolonize the Black woman’s bot-
tom by re-appropriating and re-envisioning that body part and putting
it on show for their own delectation much like Kallipygos? How can
building one’s own bottom produce a Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native
that decolonizes the bottom as it erases the Hottentot Venus through
Black women’s aesthetic labour based on the consumption of available
enhancements in the global market? Before the discussion moves to size
0 and fear of flesh let us look at the debates on whether or not women
performers reclaim their bodies by exposing them, thereby denying
patriarchal fetishization within soca, calypso and dancehall currents in
the Caribbean and its diasporas in the UK and USA.
Bottoms in soca, calypso and dancehall
Kevin Frank (2007) examines the politics of Caribbean women’s oppres-

sion and agency through various forms of what he calls ‘Caribbean
bacchanalian culture’ – soca, carnival and dancehall. Looking at women’s
sexual performances in these popular culture forms from the lens of
women’s performances as articulations of gender subordination in
Caribbean culture, he takes issue with Caribbean feminist accounts
of exhibitionist expressions which place women as agents. For Frank
(2007: 173), women’s sexual displays in these arenas ‘suggest infantile
sexual lives, prone to the manipulation of authority’. In his view, the
male power associated with Caribbean women’s ‘sexual performances’
makes them exploitative and almost pornographic; thus, women are
objectified and dehumanized rather than being active producers of
meaning (Frank, 2007). Further, women continue to be subordinated to
the male will as they are exoticized and objectified in the dancehall or
calypso/soca stage and cannot be agents (Frank, 2007). In his view it is
not sufficient to say that if a woman takes pleasure in being observed
then she is an agent or escapes being fetish or object (Frank, 2007).
Donna Hope (2002) also acknowledges that male dominance can be
an outcome for dancehall women given male domination in Jamaican
society generally.
Dancehall is one of the New World Black expressive cultures which

is a music, style, language, social movement, profession and space
(Stanley-Niah, 2006). The word represents the venues for the dances
of the poor population of Kingston, Jamaica, which flourished in the
1950s. Dancehall is the ‘ “choreographing” and “choreography” of
an everyday identity that negotiates and critiques aspects of Western
domination, with the rude boy, Rastafarian DJ, promoters, dancers and
dancehall crew members as key social actors and producers’ (Stanley-
Niah, 2006: 177). Dancehall culture is the location for the creation and
dissemination of these critiques which reflect poor, urban, Black, dis-
possessed Jamaicans in a classed, gendered and capitalist culture (Hope,
2006). Indeed, dancehall ‘is a cultural dis/place of ongoing dialogue,
confrontation and contestation with the rigid socio-political, gendered
and classed hierarchies of Jamaica’ (Hope, 2006: 125). It is an active field
of cultural production through which the socio-politically marginalized
construct distinct local and national identities which are taken up
globally (Hope, 2006). Further, its displays of hypermasculinity are
questioned by its male dancers and crews that transgress hegemonic
readings of masculinity (Ellis, 2011; Hope, 2006) through a refashion-
ing of hard core men via appropriation of ‘feminine’ aesthetic rituals
(Hope, 2006, 2010, 2011). Dancehall culture has a ‘propensity to traffic
in ambivalent representations of self and personhood which often
resists attempts to homogenize’ (Hope, 2006: 127). This is also relevant
for the bodies of women who compete with men for centre stage in the
dancehall or to be dancehall queens.
Dancehall is productive of subversive gender enactments. Although
fewer in number, dancehall women are active producers of meaning
for Carolyn Cooper (2004: 125–6) whose versioning of dancehall sees
it as a space where ‘affirmation of the pleasures of the body, which is
often misunderstood as a devaluation of female sexuality, also can be
theorized as an act of self-conscious female assertion of control over
the representation of her person’. In dancehall performances women
use their bodies, including their bottoms often as the main scene of the
action, to do particular kinds of work and accomplish particular kinds
of statements. The aesthetic labour of ‘wining’ and ‘griinin’, which
focuses on the bottom, represents a Black racial, urban, working-class
identity that rejects the colonial, Victorian and 19th/early 20th cen-
turies post-slavery Black Nationalist heritage of respectability, moral-
ity, character training and a return of women to the private sphere
so that women could take their place as symbols of national progress
(Edmondson, 2003). Respectability still continues to be part of middle/
Batty Politics 59
upper-class gender discourse in the Caribbean as an antidote to those

Black women – usually working class, urban dispossessed – who are seen
as ‘anti-woman, pathological and lascivious viragos who undermine
the national project’ (Edmondson, 2003: 1). There can only, therefore,
be two nationally sanctioned categories of female popular culture
performances – those which are decorous and socially approved spectacles
like beauty pageants which work for social uplift or their binary, trans-
gressive, vulgar spectacles associated with racial decline (Edmondson,
2003). These represent the patriarchal cultural condition that represses
women’s sexuality, views dancehall culture as vulgar and the women as
debased because of their burlesque performances, ‘batty riders’, punny
printers and other body revealing attire which are seen to be part of the
slackness culture of dancehall.
Slackness itself needs to be questioned as slackness – sexually explicit
songs about women’s body parts, sex and sexuality – did not just emerge
in dancehall culture in the 1980s but existed in the earlier musical
forms mento, ska and in early dancehall in the 1950s (Stanley-Niah,
2006). Further, ‘slackness with permutations like misogyny, homopho-
bia and commodification, speak rather to the irreconcilability of such
characterizations as slackness within Western epistemology’ (Stanley-
Niah, 2006). Dancehall artist, Lady Saw’s ‘What is slackness?’ redirects
the pointing finger to failed politicians, potholed roads, violence and
state exploitation (Stanley-Niah, 2006). If dancehall identities are just
related to the binary slackness/culture, we miss the fact that in Rastafari
and its offspring cultures of reggae and dancehall, agents reread self,
cosmos, status, space and symbols, producing ‘revolutionary, counter-
invention(s) of the self’ (Stanley-Niah, 2006: 185). Therefore, we should
revisit the figure of the dancehall queen, which – if we follow Frank –
would be read as a sign for its own domination. We should not see
‘dancehall queen’ as ironic or satirical as in ‘Black Venus’, as it is about
praise and valorization if we relate it to its Rastafarian etymology. Here
a Black woman, especially one’s partner/lover/wife, is a queen to be
venerated and protected.
As counter-inventions, women reveal their bodies to reclaim them
from the hold of middle-class gender discourse of the devout, sexu-
ally repressed, maternal Black woman. Dancehall women revel in the
cultural margin-but-centre of Jamaican national and diasporic cultural
expression (Cooper, 2004). This presents a challenge to state/middle-
upper class interests in control of the woman’s body as each ‘wine’ and
‘griin’ of the bottom and women’s ability to ‘do di wuk’ and ‘tek di wuk’
resists the micro-practices of power. Indeed, working- and middle-class
women enact eroticized roles in the dancehall not available to them as

they appreciate the erotic power of their bodies without experiencing
shame (Cooper, 2004).
Leaving the dancehall behind we can see that Black, working-class
women were also placed as in need of discipline in other Caribbean
countries such as Trinidad and Tobago. As elsewhere in the Anglophone
Caribbean in the late 19th century Black men’s ability to rule was
judged by their control over ‘their’ women (Edmondson, 2003). Judged
against both white and Indian women, African descent women at
this time were seen as loud, lewd and vulgar jamettes, associated with
the barrack yards, gangs and the streets (Edmondson, 2003). Jamette
originally referred to female stick fighters in what was considered a
male sport and they were active as chanterelles or calypso singers whose
carisos (songs) were regarded as lewd instigators of obscene dancing
(Edmondson, 2003). As carnival became respectable through private
sponsorship there was increasing pressure on women to refrain from
bawdy public performances, including songs and former male stick
fighters appropriated the feminine cariso that focused on gossip,
banter and abuse (Munroe Smith, 2004). Women were increasingly
‘housewifed’ in the 20th century to maintain bourgeois Euro-American
respectability and were expected to accept that jamette culture was not
a path to social mobility (Munroe Smith, 2004). Poverty also meant
that women were kept out of professional calypso tents because music
has always been a precarious way to make a living. However, from the
1970s women are increasingly on the calypso scene and musical perfor-
mance is the site of empowerment, commentary and critique as women
calypsonians participate in a ‘vernacular feminist project’ that resists
domination and questions its causes (Munroe Smith, 2004: 52). Today,
Carnival in Trinidad is a significant site of revelry, commerce and global
tourism that enables the body’s exhibition at the same time as it gives
space to make believe, contest roles and assume new identities (Frank,
2007). Black women’s bodies are overly sexualized in Carnival’s costume
turn to bikini and feathers and again we have the dual location of the
bottom in terms of an empowerment-objectification/ female pleasure-
patriarchal desire nexus. This is so as the body is the most personal
thing that we possess but also the most public and it provides us with a
political resource for contesting domination (Camp, 2002).
In Barbados the ‘wukkin up’ in Calypso is regarded as inappropriate
and disrespectful by the middle/upper classes and Church morality
because of the over-sexualization of women’s bodies rather than being
seen as dance for aesthetic pleasure (Springer, 2008). However, for
Batty Politics 61
Jennifer Thorington Springer (2008), calypsonian Alison Hinds reclaims

calypso and its dance forms as women’s empowerment because she
expands existing definitions of womanhood through reinventing the
female body. In doing this she valorizes the ‘wuk up’ as an art form, as
part of a Caribbean culture that repudiates colonial ideologies which
would locate it as vulgar and disrespectful and challenges androcentric
representations of women (Springer, 2008). As for soca and dancehall,
Bajan calypso creates subjectivities that directly challenge respectability
by calling on the legacy of the rebel woman refusing to be defined by
colonial measures of worth (Springer, 2008). Male calpysonians call
to men to find a woman’s bottom to ‘wuk up on’ while Hinds chal-
lenges men to keep up with her ‘wukkin up’. Audiences have wondered
whether Hinds’s bottom was real and its prominence has both intrigued
and disgusted audience members, which points to the cultural impor-
tance of the behind and the ability to roll it in contradistinction to
discourses of respectability which would see the bottom disappear from
the public sphere (Springer, 2008). As she moves Hinds looks back at her
bottom gyrating skilfully as does the audience as they ‘wuk up’ calling
attention to their rear ends (Springer, 2008) in Kallipygos fashion. The
bottom whether in the ‘wuk up’, ‘wine’ or ‘griin’ modes is a resource for
redirecting the gaze
which has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people
globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that
there is a critical gaze, one that is oppositional […] one learns to look
a certain way to resist. (hooks, 1992: 116)
What is subversive about the bottom as rebellious political site is that

women are inviting the gaze through their performances of the bot-
tom unleashed. What does the bottom as site of Sable-Saffron Venus
alter/native politics and the bottom as cultural imperative, as necessary
for assertions of Black womanhood, mean for those women with the
debodying desire for size zero?
Size 0 and fear of flesh
Within Black diasporic culture there is a connection between food and

the bottom which has been used to either praise Black women in terms
of sex and passion or negate them as sexual (Parasecoli, 2007). As will
be discussed later in the book, US findings show that as Black women’s
socio-economic status increases so does the incidence of anorexia and
bulimia. Indeed, for Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2003) disordered

eating including compulsive over-eating and dieting are common cross-
racially given that food is a survival strategy to deal with oppression,
trauma and pain. Disordered eating is the embodiment of inequalities
(Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2003). The continued presumption that the strong
Black woman exists and is essential for community survival alongside a
cultural reverence for the large Black woman means that Black women
may develop compulsive over-eating which is not recognized as prob-
lematic (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2003). The assumption that Black women
prefer to be ‘thick’ rather than ‘thin’ prevails across the Black Atlantic.
However, Black women are not impervious to socially induced disor-
dered eating of the debodying kind even though they supposedly come
from communities who support body weight as a sign of a strong Black
woman (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2003; Witt, 1995). Further, middle-class
Black women see excess body weight as a sign of lower-class status in
common with white contemporary popular culture (Parasecoli, 2007).
For those women who refuse fat the apple bottom is still a possibility.
The apple bottom is much sought after in US culture if we look at
exercise regimes for the gluteus maximus aimed at achieving this bot-
tom shape. An example of this is Flavilicious’s apple bottom workout
on YouTube where she puts the trainee through a workout of different
glute exercises that over time should produce the tight and pert look.
If women can’t get a ‘boom boom Brasilera’, Lopez’s or Knowles’s bot-
tom by eating and exercise, the alternative is to have implants to get
that extra lift, fat removed from the stomach and placed in the bottom,
silicone injections or if surgery is unaffordable then trousers with the
bottoms already inserted have been a possibility for a number of years.
Bottoms are now prêt a porter so to speak!
For a Black woman in US American popular culture who aims to be
size 0 it must be somewhat daunting when the booty is related to food
and edibility is the location of sexual innuendo (Parasecoli, 2007).
Indeed, ‘bootylicious’ made popular by Destiny’s Child talks about a
woman’s behind as ‘jelly’ which literally marks the bottom as delicious.
The jelly metaphor originates in the blues era and was introduced into
the mainstream by Skylar’s (1942) ‘It must be jelly’ (Parasecoli, 2007).
Beyoncé sings many songs about the booty, for example, ‘Single ladies’
(2008) and ‘Check on it’ (2005). This leaves Black women who are thin
in a position of having to assert that bottoms also exist on the body of
the ‘slimmas’ though not one known for its size.
Even when small the Black woman’s bottom still exerts the same
ambivalence societally because of whose body it occupies. The ‘slimmas’
Batty Politics 63
bottom can still be considered excessive, exert the same attraction as a

sign for hypersexuality and be considered obscene. Like its fleshier sister
it can be a source of both pleasure and desire for all men who consider
women as accessories but also be a means of self-affirmation for women
(Parasecoli, 2007). Can the same be said for those excessive bottoms
produced through aesthetic surgery?
Constructing disrespectable bodies as sexual excess – Black

Barbie’s über bottom and dancehall queens
As has been affirmed above claims on the body can never be complete
and are always open to challenge through the creation of Sable-Saffron
Venus alter/natives that challenge the taken for granted of the Black
woman’s bottom. Black women like Trinidad and Tobagonian Nicki
Minaj who choose to grow their bottoms through aesthetic surgery, or
dancehall culture women who take ‘the fowl pill’ for the same purpose,
engage in a very particular estrangement in order to brazenly embody
the unbound carnality of excess. That is, one in which they disalien-
ate (Césaire, 2000) themselves from society’s requirement that Black
women ceaselessly enact the Hottentot Venus. Such disalienation is
necessary in order to celebrate this body part and own it as their own
even while it has been manufactured. Such manufacturing is as much
physical aesthetic labour as it is psychic and affective. Black women’s
bottoms have become sites of revalorization as they have moved from
a position of Hottentot Venus and disgust. Their position is now that
of cultural object as much sought after and revered as vilified. The bot-
tom that once spoke raciology (Gilroy, 2004) has been resuscitated and
re-membered differently especially by the Black Barbies, Li’l Kim and
Minaj. Their bottoms have become sites of conspicuous consumption,
locations of display of wealth and the bling culture of hip hop that asks
that work is done on and with the body to increase cultural and social
capital. The production of the über batty implies a more liberated and
unashamed taking control of the body and a worlding of the world from
the perspective of this bottom as a site of resistance rather than shame.
The über bottom is productive of different racial affective and corporeal
economies that negate debasement through attributing value to Black
women’s bodies in terms of the money spent on the über bottom.
The über batty is one that is outside of the control of the disciplinary
white gaze on the Hottentot Venus but is in the control of its producers.
It is Minaj who develops it, who determines how far she is prepared to
go with stretching her skin, how much she is prepared to spend on its
growth. It is far from being a zone of abjection and the hyper-reflexivity

of the body produced by shame (Sedgwick, 2003). The über batty as a
‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1990) of subject constitution reproduces differ-
ence but now it can be found on a Black woman’s body as easily as it
can be found on a woman of colour or a white woman’s, like that of the
actor Ice T’s wife Coco. The über batty refuses the epidermalization of
shame as Black and female much as it refuses racialized shaming (hooks,
2001). It shows that that which was once abject (Kristeva, 1982) and a
melancholic remainder of enslavement and colonialism, has now burst
forth as a complaint (Cheng, 2001). It is a complaint against being
set apart, made deviant, abnormal, degraded, excluded from the body
of the Black respectable, middle/upper-class woman. As complaint it
shows that much as it is condemned it has a hold over those who set it
apart through the power of fascination. As abject, the über batty does
not respect aesthetic rules, racial borders or societal hierarchies but
disturbs these bodily orders through bursting forth as a conspicuous
extrusion. This assails the gaze magnifying its produced and productive
value as body part rather than as a radical humiliation of the self, a
self-dismissal. Value here is seen only in terms of ‘monetary or material
worth’ – how much was paid for it and its ‘utility’ in terms of how much
can be earned from it by its producer (Stockton, 2006: 25).
The über batty’s relationality enables an intensification of affective
value in the bottom itself as it reveals the construction of an-other
self that undoes the hermetic seal in which the Black woman’s body
is tightly encased. In such a relationality, both the body and its gazer/
producer engage in dis/identification (Muñoz, 1999) from the Hottentot
Venus. As such they destabilize normative ideals on the Black woman’s
bottom, normative identities in terms of beautiful/ugly bodies and
resist Hottentot Venus assertions/ ideology in the 21st century. This
is an orientation that finally points women in the direction of a soci-
ality devoid of shame. It is an orientation that refuses melancholic
repetition through failure to produce the body as spectacle. Instead, it
derails the negative affect of disgust and shame that attempt to stick
to the body’s surface and psyche (Tate, 2013). Its size pushes against
those affects which would force the skin ego (Anzieu, 1990) to recoil in
horror of its overflow of racialized body boundaries. Instead, the über
batty illustrates that there is no one set of desires or one body, much
as the bustle’s incorporation onto the white woman’s body produced
other-white women’s bodies.
Black Barbies – Lil’ Kim and Minaj – had to run the risk of censure
through wearing the historical sign of Black woman’s deviance so
Batty Politics 65
obviously on their bodies. In showing their latent desires by inscribing

this on their bodies they (re)negotiated the Black woman’s bottom as
racist insult and shaming injury. Instead, the batty is worn with pride
as Black Kallipygos looks back and speaks its (im) possibilities. In resist-
ing reduction to a body part through that very body part itself, Black
Barbies remake the bottom as a sign that necessitates reworking to be
multiple, to become bottoms, to refuse to be silenced by the one, the
stereotype of colonial discourse. Black Barbie’s mimicry (Bhabha, 1994)
of the Hottentot Venus ensures that she cannot stand in as sign for
the irredeemably othered Hottentot that has been lost in translation.
Speaking back to stigma through mimicry of a stigmatized zone of the
Black woman’s body creates a second skin that seeks to be read other-
wise than through colonial discourse (Prosser, 1998; Cheng, 2011).
Such decolonization through the über batty speaks of the bottom’s
aesthetic labour into the 21st century and the coloniality of both ‘race’
and gender (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010) that asks for the always already
known enactment of inferiority and shame through the bottom. Rather
than the wounding relationality of shame (Ahmed, 2004) what Black
Barbies/ dancehall/soca/calypso women provide is pride in size, aes-
thetic joy and delight in self-constructed sexualization which controls
the direction of the gaze rather than being objectified by it. In being
excessive, overflowing the bounds of the Black woman’s body, Black
Barbie mitigates against Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (2006: 64) ‘debase-
ment aesthetics’ when she speaks of cloth. Much like cloth, the bottom
is something that is worn to add aesthetic value to the body which can
also shift to ‘visit debasement on the wearer’ depending on the direction
of the gaze (Stockton, 2006: 64). The surgeon’s knife and silicone, the
participation in the imperative to enhance one’s body and Third Wave
Black sex-punnany-power feminism (Lee, 2010; Sharpley-Whiting, 2007)
mitigates debasement aesthetics because of ‘disalienation’ (Fanon, 1967;
Césaire, 2000). In disalienation there is an unmaking and remaking of
racialized bodies so that they are restored to human modes of being in
the world. This disalienation does not just relate to hip hop culture, as
we can see if we turn once again to dancehall, soca and calypso.
Conclusion
Much before Sir Mix-a-Lot burst onto our screens surrounded by gyrat-
ing bottoms, Black women’s bottoms had retaken the stage across the
diaspora. As public sphere spectacles these bottoms, whether in Trinidad
and Tobago soca, Bardadian calypso, Jamaican dancehall or the bikinis
and feathers of carnival, placed Black women’s bottoms at the centre of

national and diasporic Caribbean culture. Dancehall queens in Jamaica,
like Carlene for example, had to ‘wiin’, ‘griin’ and ‘move di batty’,
whatever its size and whether clothed in batty riders or thong body
wear. Dancehall was an equal opportunity arena in terms of size for the
exhibition of the body. This reflected the Jamaican national aesthetic
of the Black woman’s bottom which revelled as much in fat as it did in
‘slimmas’. Dancehall women’s bodies are a revolt against the respect-
ability of Jamaican middle/upper-class morality and femininity much
as they are against Black Nationalist virtuous covering of the woman’s
body and the coerced exposure of women’s body parts to the patri-
archal gaze of white and Black men. Independence from the British
Empire, the cultural turn to Africa, a valorization of Black women’s
bodies drawing from Black Nationalist politics, modern Blackness and
Caribbean feminism enabled a redrawing of the Black woman’s body.
Such a redrawing produced Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives which
would refuse the constraints of respectability within the private sphere
to become within the social and cultural context of dancehall/soca/
calypso women in the Caribbean and its diasporas in the UK/US. Here
are women who knew the value of their batty, how they looked, how
they moved, how they spoke their sexuality and agency. As contem-
porary Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives dancehall/soca/calypso women
through disalienation from the colonial and early independence years’
expectation on/of Black women’s bodies have enabled a decolonization
of the bottom much before that of Black Barbie. This has been done
through performative failure in the repeat of discourses on the Black
woman’s body.
The bottom, whether the product of surgery or not, continues to be a
sign of danger and fascination, desire and disgust, shame and valoriza-
tion as well as a zone of empowerment for Black women, whatever their
size. However, the culture industries are engaged in mass, global com-
modification of this body part which runs the risk of the affirmation of
both patriarchal and white power over Black women’s bodies through
reverting to the vilified Hottentot Venus stereotype. Sable-Saffron
Venus alter/natives within dancehall/soca/calypso/hip hop culture show
women seizing control over the visual representations of their bodies
through their gaze on/from the bottom.
Disalienation has been presented above as a way of (re)creating
Black women’s bodies through the third space poetics of mimicry and
performative failure to produce the Hottentot. An important aspect of
such mimicry is dis/identification. For Black women there has to be
Batty Politics 67
dis/identification with structures that radically exclude them in order

that their bottoms can be readable on their own terms. This is an
important survival strategy in an anti-Black woman culture. The gaze at
the behind from Black Kallipygos is agentic. Through dis/identification
the objectifying gaze is parodied so that the bottom is the centre of
a critique of women’s objectification from within that objectification
itself. Black women’s dis/identifying bottoms create a particular Sable-
Saffron Venus alter/native ‘livity’. That is, a lifestyle and world view on
Black Kallipygos as rebellious questioner of spatial, temporal, political,
gendered, classed, ‘raced’, ablist and heteronormative codes. The next
chapter continues to focus on dis/identification as it engages with Black
fat women’s bodies as a location of power and critique.
3
When Black Fat Does Not Signify
Mammy: Disparagement Humour
and Sexualization
In her insightful work on the agency as well as sexual and economic

power of Black fat women in literature, Andrea Shaw (2006) speaks
about the cultural and aesthetic authority of ‘the West’ and its success-
ful imposition of these values on subaltern populations. She critiques
this imposition by speaking about whiteness as the epitome of a beauty
that devalues the ‘race’, gender and, indeed, body shape, size and colour
of the subaltern. From her vantage point of the fat Black woman’s body
she sees this devaluation as ensuring that fatness and Blackness are
not attributes that have been considered beautiful. However, the fat
Black woman’s body is re-read by Shaw as a site of beauty, sexuality and
resistance to this devaluation.
It is curious that there is no Black fat woman/ Black woman strug-
gling with fat in the UK that can be mapped exactly onto Oprah who
has struggled very publicly with fat for years or with the character
‘Precious’ in the film of the same name. Also, unlike the USA, we
have no mythical Mammy in popular culture apart from the African
American actresses Hattie McDaniel, Ethel Waters, Louise Beavers and
Butterfly McQueen, except perhaps Bertha in the confused.com adver-
tisement who stands in for the hypersexualized ‘Big Mama’. Perhaps
that is because as enslaved, Mammy was known as wet nurse, domestic
worker, care giver or concubine and such knowing had to be suppressed
in order to ensure that her reproductive labour for and intimate rela-
tionships with, white women and men did not need to be acknowl-
edged post-slavery. In 2011, the UK television character ‘Precious Little’
brought the fat Black woman onto our TV screens even though we
know that it is a fat white man who brings this caricature into being
as the butt of the joke. The real joke, though, is that the Sable-Saffron
Venus alter/native emerges in Precious Little’s refusal of the fat Black
68
Black Fat 69
woman’s body as a locus of control through workplace ethics which

demand her submission to the organization’s rules. What does it mean
for the location of the fat Black woman’s body when it is in fact a white
man in black face and in drag? What does confused.com’s cartoon
representation of Big Mama tell us about the hypersexualization of
Black fat through humour? This chapter first looks at the problem
of combating fat before turning to a discussion of the politics of fat
acceptance. The analysis of the film Precious, Precious Little and con-
fused.com’s Big Mama focuses on the possibility for fat Black women’s
agency as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives.
Fat as problem
The obese Venus of Willendorf is the oldest of the Venus figurines that
have been found in France, Italy, Austria, Turkey and the shores of the
Black Sea (Shaw, 2006). Shaw (2006) claims that she is Black given her
corn-rowed hair, which shows that fat Black women have always been
revered and desired rather than despised. Although fat was clearly
revered in the Stone Age, in Ancient Greece Hippocrates warned against
sudden death in those who were fat. His advice was that obese people
with lax muscles and red complexions should only eat after strenuous
exercise and only take wine before meals. There should be no snacking
even though they should only eat once a day. They should not bathe,
but should sleep on a hard bed and walk naked for as long as possible
(Shell, 2002). Galen, the 1st-century Greek physician, believed that he
could make a patient thin through rapid running, wiping off his per-
spiration and massage with diaphoretic injunctions. Ibn Sina, an Arab
physician in the 10th century lists obesity as a disease in Kitab al-Qanun
and recommends a treatment of hard exercise, lean food and judiciously
timed baths (Shell, 2002). Thus, there has long been an understanding
about the combination of diet and exercise in combating fat. Dieting
was the case even in Ancient Rome though they were addicted to feast-
ing. Romans disdained fatness and women starved in order to please
their husbands and fathers.
In 18th-century England concern over corpulence continued into the
19th century as did the belief that ‘polysarcia’ (‘much flesh’ in Greek) could
be controlled or reversed through individual effort. The 19th century
brought various scientific understandings, for example, of food as fat,
carbohydrates and proteins, the Quetelet Index which later became
the BMI, and the idea of metabolic rates and calorie counting (Gilman,
2008). ‘Since the 1860s diet culture dominated the marketplace as the
appropriate “cure” for obesity’ (Gilman, 2008: 4).This abhorrence of fat

could have been prompted by athleticism, entry into the labour market,
capitalism or the ‘science’ that linked overweight with poor health
and a national financial burden (Shell, 2002). Freudian theory was
also brought to bear in understanding obesity. Theories of ‘obisigenic
personality’ or obesity as a component of neurosis were later shown to
be inaccurate by the Kaplan Review (Shell, 2002). Susie Orbach (2009)
continues the tradition of looking at overeating as a symptom of psy-
chological problems which we can overcome by therapy and self-help
as emotion clearly affects health. Thus, we eat not to satisfy hunger but
to fill some deep psychological need and once we know what that is we
can cease to overeat.
In 21st-century England, obesity in men increased from 13.2 per
cent in 1993 to 23.1 per cent in 2005 and from 16.4 per cent to 24.8
per cent for women, but there was no very significant change in the
proportion of adults who were overweight (NHS Information Centre,
2006). In 2004, Black Caribbean and Irish men had the highest rates
of obesity (25 per cent), while for women the highest prevalence rate
was for Black African (38 per cent), Black Caribbean (32 per cent),
Pakistani (28 per cent) and lower for Chinese women (8 per cent),
than the general (white) population (NHS Information Centre, 2006).
In 2002 the direct cost of treating obesity was between £45.6 million
and £49.0 million and between £945 million and £1,075 million for
treating the consequences of obesity. In 2005, 871,000 prescriptions
were given for the treatment of obesity compared with 127,000 in
1999 which is an increase of 585 per cent (NHS Information Centre,
2006). In the UK total energy intake fell by approximately 20 per cent
between 1974 and 2004 so more people are on a calorie controlled
diet than ever before. Men, women and children have also increased
their daily intake of fruit and vegetables per day (NHS Information
Centre, 2006).
Fat is an organ that cushions our internal organs and as insulator
and fuel for the body is more energy productive gram for gram than
either protein or carbohydrate (Shell, 2002). When our BMI is within
the prescribed healthy range (18.5–25) body fat is unproblematic, but
if not, the word ‘obese’ makes it the enemy to be removed from the
individual and national body at all costs. According to Ellen Ruppel
Shell (2002: 229):
Overeating and inactivity are the proximal causes of obesity, but

unfettered consumerism drives the obesity of the twenty-first century.
Black Fat 71
Despite well-intentioned government nutrition recommendations,

most of us continue to eat more than our bodies can healthfully
tolerate [...] the human appetite loses its ability to regulate in an
environment offering so few opportunities to exercise and such an
abundance of calorie-dense foods. The less we move and the more
rich food we eat, the more difficult it is to self-regulate.
Growing anti-fat attitudes over the past thirty years have meant
that weight has emerged as a marker of status in the UK/US (Rice,
2007). Anxieties about fat are intensified in government health dis-
courses on obesity and overweight. This all deflects attention away
from structural causes of health problems related to fat (Rice, 2007).
In North America, the current debate on obesity and overweight is
framed by understandings of this phenomenon as myth or epidemic.
Feminists like Orbach (2006) showed that as women are identified
socially with their bodies, patriarchal messages about valuable bodies
had consequences for women. Feminist concern led to investigations
into the prevalence of eating and body image problems throughout
the 1980s and 1990s and poststructuralism meant that the focus
became the exploration of the way bodies are shaped by discourses
(Rice, 2007). These messages are now far outweighed by the idea that
fat is a disease of westernized societies (Rice, 2007). However, for Carla
Rice there is empirical uncertainty that fatness is a disease caused
by overeating and lack of exercise. Fat as disease narrows what con-
stitutes healthy bodies and leads to its medicalization around Type
II diabetes, BMI and the obesity epidemic, which increase anxieties
and make questionable medical interventions into overweight seem
rational (Rice, 2007).
The United States has paved the way that the rest of the world will
follow if there is no decisive intervention. In a country where physi-
cal education is not high on the list of subjects in school, Coca Cola
trades money for sole access to drinks machines and fast food is part
of the cafeteria menu, the number two public health risk factor is
obesity, responsible for 300,000 deaths a year. Tobacco at 400,000 will
be overtaken by obesity within the next few decades (Shell, 2002).
There is a callous disregard for the health and well-being of the con-
sumer as manufacturers of sugary, salty and fatty foods, all implicated
in ill-health, scramble for their cash. Given the overwhelming focus
on obesity and ill-health and the scientific/ pharmaceutical industry
focus on finding a cure, what has fat now come to mean in the lives
of ordinary Black women?
Fat acceptance?
As we sat in the sauna at the local community centre gym two Jamaican
heritage British women spontaneously began speaking about fat. One of
the women looked at her legs and said:
My God imagine I can see my long legs now. For a long time
I couldn’t see my calves. I know you won’t believe it looking at me
now. I’ve lost 6 and a half stone you know. I knew 9 and a half years
ago that I was really fat when my mom said it. But I’ve kept if off
for 9 and a half years now. A man I used to go out with told me that
he saw my batty before he saw me. That’s all he saw not me. I saw
him recently and he asked if I would go out with him and I said no.
I don’t want a man like that.
Her companion replied:
How have you done it?
She replied:
Diet, exercise and self-control with the food.
Her companion:
All my life my weight has been up and down. I lose weight when I
want but I don’t lose it for a man just for myself.
We have been told within our communities, scholarly work and families
that fat on a Black woman is acceptable, loved and a sign of femininity,
so why are Black women having conversations like this in Britain in
2014? We could say that it is because they have imbibed the societally
pervasive fear, shame and disgust of fat and use it to discipline their
bodies. Certainly they are both aware as everyone else of the mantra
of diet, exercise and self-control as key to weight loss. If your Jamaican
mother tells you that you need to lose weight this might also make us
think that in the Jamaican context healthy, attractive, feminine bodies
are also slim rather than only fat. I am making this point because it
is important to keep at the forefront of our minds that many differ-
ent models of beautiful Black women’s bodies co-exist and that class,
sexuality and age, for example, impact on these models. However, fat
Black Fat 73
continues to be seen as unhealthy and unacceptable if weight goes past

a societally designated point even given the fat acceptance movement.
For Sam Murray (2005) culture in ‘the West’ is characterized by
negative collective knowledge about fat. That is, we all know that fat
women’s appetites are out of control and they are weak-willed. This
knowledge informs interactions and positions along a spectrum of
bodies and identities within which we have a negative response to the
aesthetic transgressions of fat bodies. The fat body is constructed as a
failure. As a deviant form of embodiment the fat body has to engage
in a constant process of becoming parsed as disavowal of flesh in order
to be granted personhood. On the way to becoming thin, fat women
are called upon to ‘pass-as-thin’ (Murray, 2005: 155). Murray instead
urges us to ‘come out as fat’ following Eve Sedgwick and declare the
truth of one’s body in order to renegotiate the representational contract
between one’s body and the world. This coming out is even necessary
within the hypervisibility of the fat body because what is aimed for is
being seen in new ways. Speaking resistance is the basis for fat accept-
ance and fat politics. Murray acknowledges that even the subject of fat
politics sometimes feels the need to be apart from their own fat flesh.
Apart from the paradoxes of individual psyches she asserts that in terms
of politics ‘size acceptance’ is not a singular politics and there are ambi-
guities and resistances in identifying simply as fat. The central tenet
of most size acceptance organizations that we love our bodies, look at
them in new ways and make them visible in politically empowering
ways, can also be critiqued. Murray’s view is that fat pride’s insistence
that we see ourselves from exterior positions means that we occupy
positions outside the body and what should be aimed for is embodying
fatness. Fat bodies continue to be seen as reaffirmations of normative
frameworks in, for example, pool parties and lingerie, so fat politics
still privileges thin bodies in its attempt to imitate the norm. The hete-
ronormative negative visual regime in which the fat body is located still
remains intact. Therefore, more has to be done than simply asserting fat
is better than thin and building communities of support by accepting
that there is no unitary fat self or singular experience. Ambiguity is the
key to a new politics (Murray, 2005).
However, ambiguity is not the key to destabilizing the societal disgust-
fear-shame which fat generates. Perhaps these affects also need to be
‘racially’ located. I say this because if it is the case that fat Black women
have always been accepted in African and Black Atlantic diasporic
communities then disgust, fear and shame would come solely from a
white affective matrix. If it is true that fat has always been accepted and
acceptable, respected and respectable within Black communities then

the Fat Acceptance Movement is speaking to and for a largely white
constituency.
Shaw’s (2005a: 143) view is that whiteness ‘has become the defining
zenith of physical attractiveness’ and such ideals of feminine beauty
have meant that fatness and Blackness as physical attributes place Black
women outside of beauty. She shows that national beauty pageants
regulate conceptualizations of beauty and that even though women
like Tyra Banks are seen as beautiful and there have been Black Miss
Americas nothing much has changed in terms of Eurocentric beauty ide-
als. For her, US American beauty culture has not yet accepted Blackness
as a viable feature. Shaw’s (2005a: 144) views about Black authenticity
in terms of physical appearance seem to exclude features which she sees
as European, ‘high cheekbones, straight noses, relatively thin lips and,
of course, slender bodies’. Indeed, Shaw uses Mammy as ‘the antithesis
of a modern-day black beauty queen’ to show that Mammy’s image
serves the same function as the Black beauty queen (Shaw, 2005a: 145).
That is, to ease racial anxieties by making Black physiology acceptable
to a white culture in which they are othered. In her view in response to
Mammy and Aunt Jemima – a-sexual, masculine, domestic, caring – and
their unrelenting racism, Black women have responded by either aim-
ing for ‘unrealistic body-image goals that privilege slenderness’ (Shaw,
2005a: 147) or flaunted their ‘race’ through, for example, ‘ghetto fabu-
lous’ dress. She sees this latter as an attempt ‘to inscribe a Eurocentric
vision of femininity on the black female body’ (Shaw, 2005a: 149).
Shaw intimates that body image goals that privilege slenderness are
not Black and that everything begins from whiteness. This makes Black
women devoid of agency, denies the workings of ‘race’ performativity,
erases centuries of Black anti-racist aesthetics and denies that there are
beauty crossings in trans-racial stylization. However, Shaw is right to
talk about the pivotal nature of physiology in the judgement of indi-
viduals and in self-perception. For her the fat Black woman’s body is
an inverse signifier and it is triply removed from the conceptualization
of ‘normal’ in the West so it cannot be easily assimilated into the body
politic. The fat Black woman’s body also recreates a parallel beauty
arena in which there is a concentrated state of otherness in terms of
the hegemonic standards. Thus, the fat Black woman makes it possible
for other Black women to situate themselves as that which she is not.
A series of essays in Feminist Media Studies (2005, Volume 5, Numbers
1–2) focus on the relationship between women and discourses of the
fat body to show the continuing marginalization of fat within a UK/
Black Fat 75
US context, where being thin is still privileged and the fat body is in a
constant state of becoming. Becoming thin, that is, as this is the only
body that is recognized because of 21st-century sizeism. One fat body
that seems to be outside of this becoming and is in fact frozen, static,
is that of the fat Black woman. Formerly ‘Mammy’ in the US and ‘Big
Mama’ in the UK her role in the white imaginary is to naturalize the
domestic – caring, cooking, cleaning – services with which Black women
in the US have long been associated (Shaw, 2005b). This has also been
the case in the UK context as we can see with the large numbers of Black
women who continue to be in these roles. One fat Black woman who
Christina Fisanick (2005) thinks is in a state of becoming is Oprah as,
in becoming the public face of yo-yo dieting, she has shown that she is
fat-phobic. Oprah’s view is that we should love ourselves first if we are
to make any change in terms of diet, exercise and weight. This seems
to give the impression that it is impossible to love your body if you are
fat (Fisanick, 2005).
Oprah’s view is no different from Orbach’s (2006) in terms of self-
love, finding out the cause of the problem of over-eating and dealing
with this so as to stop the vicious cycle. We can but wonder why Orbach
is not called fat phobic when we see her intervening in women’s lives
through self-help to encourage them to ‘become’ thin through, for
example, visualizing what they would be like as thin. Just because she
said that women used fat as protection against patriarchal society and
Oprah did not, does not make Orbach immune from the charge of fat
phobia. The focus of critique shifts if instead we see Oprah as speaking
against the US’s loved/hated Mammy by refusing fat. We could see her
anti-Mammy stance as being productive of a Sable-Saffron Venus alter/
native which refuses the mapping of Mammy onto fat Black women’s
bodies. We should recall that ‘mammy’s body is grotesquely marked by
excess: she is usually extremely overweight, very tall, broad-shouldered;
her skin is nearly black. She manages to be a jolly presence – she
often sings or tells stories while she works’ (Wallace-Sanders, 2011:
5–6). Oprah as millionaire television entrepreneur through OWN,
TV presenter, actress, producer, philanthropist, the nation’s therapist
and national gift giver, presents her audience with the exact opposite
of Mammy which provides a contemporary antidote to such racist
thinking.
According to Katariina Kyrölä (2005) the closet of size is constructed
not only around the fat body but is the fat body in popular culture.
Fatness is a closet of fear that prevents the true thin woman from com-
ing out. Invisibility is a part of the closet of fear and this extends to the
paucity of studies of fat bodies in feminism. Again we can see this in

Orbach’s work as women are asked to work on finding out why they
cling to their fat in order to rid themselves of it. The language of politi-
cal correctness also makes fat invisible as in ‘big’, ‘woman of size’, ‘plus
size’ or ‘XL people’. The point is that for the Fat Acceptance Movement
the word ‘fat’ should not be avoided but used as a powerful affirmation
of identification. Within this, fat people are not seen as responsible
for the oppression of sizeism, or as needing to let out the slim person
inside. Rather, the focus shifts to fat people having a place in the world
without apologizing and to looking at how gendered power structures
need to change in order to remove the closet of fatness.
Fat still continues to be a feminist issue as is attested to by fat grrl
projects which began in the 1990s arising out of riot grrl feminism, DIY
and counter-cultural projects to challenge anti-fat bias in mainstream
and radical subcultures and to claim fat as a positive identity (Shantz,
2005). The zines Fat Girl, first published in June 1994 and Marilyn
Wann’s Fat!So? with its Fat Power Manifesto are exemplars of this. Even
given their susceptibility to marginalization because of their small-scale
subcultural politics and reliance on zines as well as the possibility that
self-definition can eclipse broader alliances, these are important aspects
of the critique of wider cultural loathing and fear of fat.
In line with the FAM, size acceptance became theoretically fashionable
and a range of size acceptance narratives began to emerge in mainstream
publications (Brown, 2005). We could also see this in Britain in Colleen’s
TV show ‘Real Women’ in which no ‘lollipops’ are featured. However,
we still continue to see a comparative thinness in both presenters and
television show participants alike, which in the USA is approximately a
size 14 to 16 or smaller (Brown, 2005). This is also the average size range
for women in the UK though we should acknowledge that sizing in both
countries is different. For Brown (2005) there is a movement towards the
middle ground rather than an acceptance of all sizes and shapes. Melinda
Young (2005) also criticizes women’s magazines which have a pedagogic
function for women as they continue to have an oppressive, problematic
representation of femininity in which fat speaks of underachievement,
failure and the body as an incomplete project. Women’s magazines
standard fare is cellulite creams, exercise crazes, before and after pictures
of those who have lost weight, celebrity diets which create an identity
for women of difference, lack and a need to have a body in the process
of becoming thin as fatness is pathologized.
Karen Anijar (2005) looks at internet sites – feeder sites – where fat
women’s bodies are celebrated, indeed fetishized by men. In her view
Black Fat 77
these men’s rejection of fat phobia makes them pro-feminists while she
highlights how fatness and whiteness become normalized in discus-
sions of women. Further, the feeders’ worldview still remains one of
fat/ thin (Anijar, 2005). This basic dichotomy is not disrupted and is an
essential aspect of feeders’ perspectives as they objectify women’s bodies
in terms of their desires.
In her critique of this 2005 Feminist Media Studies issue, Elspeth
Probyn (2008: 402–403) states:
Theoretically and politically these articles seem to be blind to the

history of feminist/cultural studies. The idea that politics can be
served by methodologically simply effecting a semiotic reversal has
been deeply critiqued by many, including Kobena Mercer’s incisive
critique. Given the global and economic realities of the world, there
is much more that feminism needs to do beyond reclaim[ing] fat and
us[ing] it as a political strategy [….] Orbach’s point was to look at why
women used fat as an armour against patriarchal society. The use of
Orbach’s argument to claim ‘fat acceptance’ has been accompanied
by a pervasive argument, which draws on a very narrow reading of
Foucault’s ideas about power and discipline. […]
For Probyn, feminist analysis should also encompass the socio-economic

structures that are producing ever-larger bodies. We should focus on the
immense changes in global flows of capital and agribusiness, which
are putting millions out of traditional work and forcing them into
metropolises as well as producing the cheap and unhealthy products
that everyone in the world now eats. When the body becomes excessive
the medical industry steps in to offer weight loss surgery.
Weight loss surgery (WLS) refers to a range of surgical interventions
that aim to limit the body’s ability to both consume and absorb food.
This is achieved through the reduction of stomach capacity and/or
intestinal length (Throsby, 2008). There are deaths from weight loss
surgery as well as complications and chronic side effects like infection,
malnutrition, internal bleeding, vomiting, diarrhoea and other intesti-
nal and digestive problems (Throsby, 2008). WLS can transform health
status and quality of life but gaining a healthy weight can be risky. The
National Health Service (NHS) in England provides gastric band and
gastric bypass surgery as a way of treating obesity with the approval of
NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence). In 2013 the NHS
spent up to £81 million on gastric bypasses (18,577 operations) and up
to £10.5 million on gastric bands (7,650 operations). There has been a
530 per cent increase in gastric bypass NHS operations over the past five
years with a total cost of £85 million a year (MacRae and Bates, 2014).
WLS is rarely seen as an acceptable way to thinness because of the moral
prescriptions which exist about care of the body and surveillance of its
boundaries.
This is even the case for Black women, even though fat is supposedly
more acceptable in Black communities as we see, for example, if we
look at the media coverage of Janet Jackson’s and Tyra Banks’ weight
increase and subsequent weight loss over the past few years and Jennifer
Hudson as the spokesperson for US Weight Watchers. Their weight gain
is inevitably blamed on junk food, lack of motivation to exercise, not
caring about how they look to others and taking the easy way out by
over-eating. We can see this as well in the British case with the vilifica-
tion of Anne Diamond and Fearne Brittan as cheats for taking the easy
way out of fatness without the self-sacrifice of avoidance of food and
hard work of exercise that speak of the awareness of the sin of gluttony
and the possibility for repentance of the fat body. Abstaining from
food, exercise and talking about the struggle are all part of the popular
culture confession of fat-turned-thin. Vilification also results from the
appearance of control over the body being taken away by WLS which
means that the post-op reborn ‘new me’ is always seen as inauthentic
(Throsby, 2008). Oprah and Dr Phil have spoken out against the quick
fix of having your stomach stapled and fat acceptance groups have also
condemned it (Wilson, 2005). In terms of the latter there is a certain
level of size insistence because if you have lost your fat then you are
seen as conforming to cultural expectations (Wilson, 2005). Thus, there
is continuing spectacularization of both size and shape.
The spectacle of size/shape
One arena in which ‘race’ has appeared is that of bodies as spectacle,

whether this is the exercise-sculpted white male body, the shrinking to
bone of anorexic white celebrities, the athletic or obese Black body. For
example, if we think of dancehall queens like Carlene in Jamaica, we imag-
ine a fat body but one that can still bubble, whereas if we think of Rachel
Christie the image shifts to a curvaceous but slim embodiment. If we think
of famous Black women like Oprah, Janet Jackson, Michelle Obama and
Mariah Carey, we see women living with fat through diet, exercise and
surgery. What is interesting, though, is that we are never presented with
images of anorexic Black women unless they are cat-walk models. Are we
to assume that anorexia among Black women does not exist?
Black Fat 79
Lack of recognition does not mean non-existence. We spend so much

time looking at Black obesity or the more positive ‘bootylicious’ that
we have decided that anorexia is a white woman’s problem and there
are ‘naturally slim’ Black women. We might have running in our mind
the idea that because we have different ideas and aesthetics around fat
within the Black Atlantic in which women should be curvaceous to
fat this protects women from the psychological and physical harm of
anorexia (Shaw, 2006).
The variety of Black women’s embodiment makes us wonder about
claims like that made by Orbach (2009: 140) that globalization has
spread the ‘westernized body’ around the globe and that there ‘is a uni-
formity from Caracas to Riyadh – which prevails under both the hijab
of the devout Muslim and the wig and long skirt of the religious Jew.
Western ideals of slimness, a particular shape of nose and youth are
everywhere prized’. The Eurocentrism of this claim is worrying because
the world does not revolve around a European centre. There are alter/
native beauty models in the African diaspora and that always will be the
case (Craig, 2006; Shaw, 2006; Tate, 2009, 2010). Orbach (2009: 140–1)
also speaks about the mutability of this ‘Westernized’ body as there are
‘yearly modifications to the model […] While slim has been a domi-
nant motif since the 1960s recently tall has been added, as have big
breasts and now the big, firm bottom’. However, it is necessary to take
issue with ‘Westernized’. What does it mean exactly? The Caribbean is
Westernized but has been consistently denied this location as has Latin
America, which are both spoken about as being in the ‘Western hemi-
sphere’, as the media reports of the January 2010 Haitian earthquake
show. Why is it still impossible to say North West European and North
American if that is what is meant? It is specifically their worlding of
the world that we are talking about here. As well as this, ‘Westernized’
speaks white hegemony as it makes white racialization and racialized/
gendered/sexualized/able-bodied/aged/classed, that is intersectional
aesthetics, invisible. What this means is young, white, able-bodied,
heterosexual, middle-class, slender bodies are recognized, sought after
and privileged.
In Shaw’s (2006) readings of literary and cultural texts we are left with
the idea that being slim is a racial effacement and an imbibing of white
aesthetic norms, both of which must be resisted and are being resisted
in the African diaspora through the body of the fat Black woman. In her
discussion of the novel ‘Nervous Conditions’ she speaks about Nyasha
who has no stable sense of herself as African because of exposure to
English culture and education, who develops a problematic relationship
to food and in maintaining a slender figure defeminizes herself. The

slender bodies of other women in the family also act as emblems of
oppression under Eurocentric ideals. Whilst Shaw makes the point
about the necessity for the recognition of different embodiments and
fat acceptance, the idea that being slim is a racial effacement erases
Black women thus embodied and renders them outside of the Black
diasporic social skin. We need to have an alter/native perspective on
the body based on the multiplicity which we know to exist rather than
a body politics of the ‘authentic Black woman’s body’. We should make
this body politics a necessity because for centuries Black women’s bodies
have been created as other to white women’s bodies and their hyper-
visible bodies have been used as a cipher for invisible white women’s
bodies to come into being. An alter/native perspective on bodies would,
for example, enable us to see that there is a corporeality of white class
(Bourdieu, 1988) and gender with thinness as its epitome. Nothing
much has changed since the Duchess of Windsor reportedly said that
one could not be too rich or too thin. White celebrity size 0 continues
this dictum into the 21st century so that ‘race’ power continues to be
shown in white bone and frail a-sexual femininity.
We can see white ‘race’ disgust for the body of the fat Black woman,
Mammy, where ‘desire and disgust are dialectically conjoined’ (Ngai,
2005: 333) as desire says ‘yes’ and disgust says ‘no’. ‘Disgust is never
ambivalent about its object […] it is never prone to producing the
confusions between subject and object that are integral to most of the
feelings […] disgust polices and strengthens this boundary [between
object and subject] ’ (Ngai, 2005: 335). Disgust finds its object unbearable
and insists on its exclusion by blocking ‘sympathetic identification’ (Ngai,
2005: 340). However, Mammy is tolerated because of her ‘sociopolitical
ineffectuality’ in terms of political dissent or social change (Ngai, 2005:
342). Mammy is constructed as the antithesis of whiteness, a house slave
whose dark skin and girth mark her as other from desirable white femini-
nity and whose domestic and care work signals her as subservient female
(Wallace-Sanders, 2011). Negativity is heaped on Mammy so that white
femininity remains superior and there are no subject/object confusions.
Disgust for Mammy is felt because of Black fat. What is under the skin
makes her sexually undesirable but good for the domestic and care work
necessary for white reproduction. She carries the fat that white women
see as anathema. As long as she remains the racial container of fat then
we can continue with the fiction that all Black women like to be fat and
white women see it as their duty to constantly struggle to be thin. This
understanding of Mammy pervaded US society and still resonates today
Black Fat 81
in a society which finds fat unbearable, disgusting and something to be

expelled from the body. This was illustrated by Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania, the oldest African-American college in the United States
which was reported by the Guardian Weekly (Pilkington, 2009: 7) to have
taken ‘a coercive stance in the battle against America’s obesity epidemic’.
A policy was introduced in 2005 to ensure that students have to take a
test to check their weight status. If they are judged to be ‘obese’ – that is,
with a BMI of more than 30, a waist measurement of more than 90 cm
for women and 100 cm for men – they will only be allowed to graduate
if they take a one term Fitness for Life class irrespective of their academic
performance. The class includes walking, cycling, aerobics and lessons
in healthy diets. The university pursued this approach because it felt it
had the responsibility to tackle obesity which disproportionately affects
African Americans. This example shows that there is no sympathetic
association with Black fat in USA. So why is it that Precious became such a
phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic?
Precious (2009) is based on the novel Push by Sapphire (1998). It was
directed by Lee Daniels with Gabourey Sidibe starring in the lead role,
Mo’Nique as Precious’s unemployed welfare-dependent mother Mary,
Mariah Carey as her social worker and Paula Hatton as her teacher
Blu Rain. In Harlem in 1987, 16-year-old African American Claireece
‘Precious’ Jones who is overweight, pregnant with her father’s child
for a second time and physically, sexually and mentally abused by
her mother, is expelled from school and asked to enter an alternative
school. Her first child by her father ‘Mongo’ has Down’s syndrome
and is being cared for by her grandmother. Precious escapes from her
harsh everyday life by fantasizing as she watches television while she
is being raped, looking in the mirror getting ready to go out or going
through her photo album. While being raped by her father she imagines
herself as the superstar of a music video (she admits to wanting to be
on BET) shoot with an adoring lighter-skinned, slim, handsome, young
Black man who is in love with her. Looking through photo albums the
pictures talk to her and her white male teacher who she has a crush
on tells her that he will divorce his white wife, marry her and take her
to the suburbs to live with him. Precious looks in the mirror and sees
a pretty, white, thin, blonde girl. When she stays at Blu Rain’s apart-
ment we see Precious’s view on a style of life (middle class) in which
she doesn’t understand anything that is being said and sexuality (her
mother doesn’t like homosexuals but that doesn’t mean anything to
her) where she accepts people as they are and tries to get them to speak
to her concerns by mentioning that she watches Oprah. Inspired by her
new teacher, Blu Rain, she learns to read and begins to see a new social
worker Mrs Weiss (Mariah Carey) to whom she confesses the incest.
After her son Abdul’s birth Precious returns home. However, Mary drops
the baby, they fight and Precious leaves. Ms Rain finds her a room at a
Halfway House. Precious meets with her social worker in which she asks
her ‘What colour are you anyway? You some type of black or Spanish?’
to which the reply was ‘What colour do you think I am?’ While
Mrs Weiss gets them two sodas Precious steals her file from Mrs Weiss
and shares the information about jobs and pay with her fellow students.
A few days later at the Halfway house Mary tells Precious that her
father has died from AIDS and asks her to come home. Precious says
no and tells her mother to go to the doctor. This is another moment
of Precious’s life in which her fantasy light-skinned lover fades from
view as the stark reality of her life in the form of her mother walks in
front of him on his bike in the street below as he invites her to come
for a ride, offering her a helmet. As she turns away from the window
we know that she is now fully in her reality, living with HIV and being
the parent of two young children, one of whom is disabled. Mrs Weiss
asks Mary about Precious’s abuse. Mary’s response is that it broke her
heart that her man wanted to have sex with Precious and not her, even
when she was a baby and even though she loved her baby she allowed it
to happen because she needed his love, even though her question ‘who
is going to love me?’ shows that this did not mean that she got what she
wanted. Precious says that she will never see her mother again and tells
the social worker that she can’t handle her or her life before she leaves
to start her life as a single mother.
Watching Precious I cannot say that I felt sympathy or revulsion
because she was fat. Instead what held my attention was the harshness
of her life for one so young, the continuing complexities of ‘race’, class,
gender, sexuality, ability and colour in the United States and wonder at
her ability to keep living throughout all that she had endured. Precious
became a phenomenon not so much because of Black fat but perhaps
in spite of it as the film dealt with issues that speak to our common
humanity. It broke away from the ‘current and historical epistemic
and habituated embodied orders [in the United States] that configure
and sustain the white gaze and function to objectify the Black body
as an entity to be feared, disciplined, and relegated to those marginal-
ized, imprisoned and segregated spaces that restrict Black bodies from
“disturbing” the tranquility of white life, white comfort, white embodi-
ment and white being’ (Yancy, 2008: xvi). Within these embodied
orders the history of the objectified Black body is linked to the history
Black Fat 83
of normative whiteness, for instance as fear, desire, terror and fantasy

(Yancy, 2008). It is both affect and discourses which lead to the ‘dis-
tortional seeing’ (Yancy, 2008: xviii) of whiteness as it time and again
objectifies the fat Black woman’s body.
Precious breaks this distortional seeing by showing us that the ‘Black
body is a historical project and as such is capable of taking up new
meanings through struggle and affirmation’ (Yancy, 2008: xxii). Perhaps
it is Precious’s very agency that has led to the film’s success as she turns
away from abusive mother, inept state professionals and a fantasy life
towards the possibility of forging a life on her terms. In doing this she
moves away from the negative meanings and affects attached to her
Black fat abused body which has been constituted relationally within
the semiotic field of difference where whiteness is the norm as we see
when she looks into the mirror and sees not herself but a slim, white,
blonde teenager. She ceases to be victim of the self-alienation brought
on by her abuse and the racism of US society which has led to her self-
doubt and ‘desire to be white’. She seeks corporeal integrity as a fat
Black woman and psychic integrity so that she is no longer external to
her body as in her fantasies but is at uneasy rest within it as she breaks
out of the life and the identification which is dictated by her status as
a fat, Black, poor, abused, semi-literate single mother, living on welfare.
She refuses self-alienation and as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native asserts
the value of her fat Black woman’s body.
She does this through personal love (Hadreas, 2007), that of another
Black woman, Blu Rain. As we watch this scene we can wonder about
this loving affirmation. If we want to see it negatively we can say that it
takes a light-skinned, middle-class Black woman to make her feel whole
and dismiss this love for that reason. However, we could also see this
as a need for affirmation and wholeness within the whole Black com-
munity. I say this as one consistent theme throughout the movie is the
difference – of sexuality, class, skin colour, hair texture, body size and
shape, educational attainment – within the Black community itself and
the necessity to overcome this in order to unite. Love for each other
irrespective of difference means Black inclusion in the 21st century.
Blu Rain’s love helps to break the ‘pernicious mark of dark skin’ (Yancy,
2008: 3) in the United States which would divide Black people from
themselves. Instead, she asserts a sense of communal, political and
social subjectivity as Black women.
For Fanon (1986) the Black man must be Black in relation to the white
man. Precious shows us that Black women have to be Black not only in
relation to the white woman who is the transcendental norm but also
to the Black woman in all her different sizes, shapes, skin colours, hair
textures, classes, sexualities, abilities and ages. This is why Blu Rain’s
love is so fundamental as it cuts across the racialized system of dif-
ference and its shade codes for inferior dark and superior lighter skin
where all that is non-white is ‘other, marginal, ersatz, strange, native,
inferior, uncivilized, and ugly’ (Yancy, 2008: 6). Love does this through
acceptance of who we all are, of finally seeing who we are and find-
ing that it doesn’t matter (Hadreas, 2007), of seeing ourselves through
each other’s eyes rather than the gaze of whiteness. White recognition
is not sought but it is another Black woman’s recognition that counts.
This significantly unsettles Fanon’s (1986) historico-racial schema as
Precious begins to break free of her fantasy life in which she sees a
white, slim, blonde girl in the mirror rather than herself and yearns for
a lighter-skinned boyfriend with ‘good hair’. Her darker-skinned, fat
Black woman’s body ceases to be the location of self and social phobia
and becomes the seat of possibilities as she changes the teleology that
her body and class entailed. She becomes free as she remakes herself
anew, not as an abused daughter but as a single mother of two who
actively shows them love and unconditional acceptance. She breaks out
of the racial (in)visibility of fat, poor, Black, abused welfare recipient in
which she is only seen and known through love. It is love that enables
her to affirm her fat Black woman’s body. She inscribes herself within a
new set of values in which she takes control of her life and her future
possibilities rather than being forever dependent.
Her autography inscribes value onto her fat Black woman’s body even
if this is temporary and does not erase the systematic oppression that
fat Black women face in the USA. She rejects the interpellation of poor,
fat Black woman’s worthlessness and as a site of value her body breaks
the iconography that perpetuates infrahuman stereotypes of Black
womanhood. As she claims adult personhood she performs an affirma-
tion of self within the backdrop of state intervention, racism, abuse and
poverty. She becomes impossible for the stereotype to contain within
its framework as she is a contradiction. She has claimed that which was
never expected. Her resistance removes her from the space of raced, gen-
dered, sexualized and classed imaginings where she has no value and
in which she is subjected to the discipline of the state (social workers,
teachers) and her parents. She psychologically survives having her fat
Black abused, poor woman’s body placed as problematic in US society
when she ceases to desire the physical beauty attributes of whiteness.
Precious locates us in the space of shame for thinking that as a fat Black
female teen she is nothing else than what is known as possible through
Black Fat 85
our classed, gendered, hetero-patriarchal and racist imaginings. Instead,

she locates us in the space of empathy where we recognize ourselves as
implicated in her plight, where our affects shift with hers as we recog-
nize her as racialized, sexualized, classed subject. Empathy has made
Precious such a success in the US/UK not pity.
Paradoxically it is Mary, the sexual, emotional and physical abuser,
the fat Black woman who remains racial object because of the need for
love and recognition from ‘her man’, for whom we feel pity. We feel pity
in spite of our revulsion for who she is and what she has done to her
own child or maybe because of such revulsion. We feel pity because our
affects are already determined for us by the Director’s full screen focus
on her face, the power of the words in the screenplay and the delivery of
the actress’s gripping monologue on love and loss. The Director makes
us look on from outside at the emotions of Precious’s mother without
feeling implicated in this in any way. Perhaps the Director is sending
a message to us all that Black women must be agentic to break out of
the racist imaginary and build new lives based on love of self/others.
As we are placed as the pitying through listening to Mary’s suffering we
are located as those who must forgive as we feel the intense suffering of
this woman dragged over the edge into condoning incest and extreme
cruelty towards as well as hatred for her daughter because of her love
for ‘her man’. It is the intense suffering of love which has driven her to
such all-consuming hatred, physical violence and psychological abuse.
It is love which traps her as victim incapable of agency, unable to make
us feel compassion because her fat Black woman’s body has been coded
through the normative ‘race’ and gender framework as undeserving of
compassion. If she is Black, fat, poor, abused and can’t find love, it is
her fault and she should do something about it. Are fat Black women’s
bodies differently located within humour in the UK?
The fat Black woman in the UK – humour and racism
We know from the previous analysis of colonial white racial hygiene

in ‘Johnny Newcome’ that the fat Black woman was already an object
of derision and disgust in the metropole. Even though she was used
for reproductive and productive labour, her fat Black body was at odds
with the iconic English Rose or the ‘mulattaroon’ (DeVere Brody, 1998).
As such, it was placed outside of the economies of white heterosexual
desire which dynamized plantation societies where Black women were
irredeemably inferior because of the intersectional dynamics of the
historico-racial schema and the racialized gender system in which their
bodies were interpellated. In this interpellation, the Black woman’s body

was always already named as inferior because of its gender and ‘race’, in
need of white rescue, and for Fanon (1986: 112) ‘battered down by tom-
toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, [and]
slave ships’. I would, of course, like to add, hypersexuality, promiscuity
and the statuses ‘breeder’/domestic worker/caregiver/field labourer/
concubine. The coloniality of labour and gender (Gutíerrez Rodríguez,
2010) combined, ensured that Black women occupied the societal lowest
rungs, especially so if they were dark skinned and fat.
The assertion of the importance of size as a determinant of white
value during enslavement can be made if we look again at the images
of Teale’s Sable Venus and the Saffron Venuses painted by Brunias.
These images highlight the white pornographic gaze which had as its
focus the slim, toned bodies of enslaved women irrespective of their
skin shade. Thus, even though the word ‘Mammy’ was not in com-
mon usage in the Caribbean colonies or in the UK, the darker-skinned
fat Black woman was positioned solely as an object of derision and
disgust, as we see in Johnny Newcome and the representations of his
‘Venus’ which encapsulated racial ordering. It did this through invest-
ment in showing which bodies were valueless and which in peril of
‘going native’. Representations of fat Black women such as Newcome’s
Venus contained within them racialized gender elements of thought
and affect which the white British felt, understood and propagated. The
fat Black woman was the most othered of Black women in the metro-
pole and colonies. Her body was used to articulate difference and the
racial descent of white men. This is present in the satire as the fat Black
woman’s body as an object of white man’s desire is made ridiculous. The
white man who desires such a body is also ridiculed and made ‘stranger’
from metropolitan whiteness. If we look at this satire as a ‘contempt-
ible collectible’ (Turner, 1994) we can relate this to that long tradition
in the USA of Mammy. Her ‘character became both standardized and
stereotyped as Uncle Tom’s Cabin moved to the stage and the exagger-
ated caricatures of minstrel actors replaced early representations of the
character’ (Wallace-Sanders, 2011: 24). Minstrelsy and racist humour are
still with us in 21st-century UK as we can see in the ‘Come Fly with Me’
character Precious Little and confused.com’s fat Black woman, Bertha.
Like many Black Britons I watched ‘Come Fly with Me’ with interest
to see what Precious Little would turn out to be like but came away
thinking that it just was not funny. Instead, humour was being used to
inure audiences to the ‘gollification’ of society in the continuation of
the racist representation of the googly eyed, fat Black woman who was
Black Fat 87
shiftless and the butt of the joke but too stupid to recognize the joke that
she was. Her name ‘Precious Little’ is already humorous as she has pre-
cious little of anything – water, tea, cups, coffee, intellect. Matt Lucas’s
versioning of Precious Little, the fat Black woman who speaks with a
Jamaican accent and is wont to call on God and the Lord Jesus at the
drop of a hat, brought to mind the long tradition of black face minstrelsy
performed by white men. There is also a history of white women min-
strels with cork in the USA who performed what Jayna Brown (2008: 3)
calls ‘racial mimicry’ as they performed Topsy for approximately 70
years. Minstrelsy involved humour and the taking on of the body of the
Black woman by white men beginning in Victorian England. Black face
minstrelsy was also well established in the 19th century in the US urban
north where, like its Victorian counterpart, white men caricatured
Blacks for profit (Lott, 1993). For Eric Lott (1993) blackface minstrelsy
in the US arose from a white obsession with Black male bodies produced
by white racial fear. However, such minstrelsy disavowed its own bod-
ily investments through racist ridicule. It is important to acknowledge
that what was laughed at by whites were their own constructions of
Black bodies and culture. Minstrels did not mirror Blackness but as they
lampooned their white parsing of Blackness they put up their own racist
constructions for ridicule. They laughed at their own racialized fear and
disgust of the other through the minstrel mask which articulated racial
difference. Such articulation drew up and crossed racial boundaries tem-
porarily for the purpose of white entertainment and the maintenance
of white domination. The ambivalence (Bhabha, 1994) of minstrelsy
lies in its simultaneous racial aversion and desire. Thus, blackface mins-
trelsy is less a sign of ‘absolute white power and control than of panic,
anxiety, terror and pleasure’ (Lott, 1993: 6).
For Jennifer DeVere Brody (1998), there was an obsession with class
and ‘race’ in British black minstrel shows alongside a reaffirmation of
whiteness in each performance. Indeed, such reaffirmation was their
raison d’être whilst the performance of ‘race’ was always a gendered one
(DeVere Brody, 1998). White males impersonated the Black woman in
black face cross-dressing which DeVere Brody (1998) reads as a form of
miscegenation. This is a miscegenation without sex, where in taking on
the body of the Black woman ‘the white man unites with or perhaps
expresses his own repression of blackened femininity […] such repre-
sentations reveal the latent desire to create and control difference. Such
impersonations are complex: they expose the multiple contradictory
readings of blackness and femininity that circulated in Victorian cul-
ture’ (DeVere Brody, 1998: 83). White cross-dressing men in black face,
white men pretending to be the Black woman in staged performances

produced complicated ‘race’ performativities which brought to light
racist ridicule. At the same time it served complex desires for misogyny
and white men’s sexual freedom because of their juxtaposition of that
ultimate binary, Black woman/white man. This was aimed at re-producing
social distance and racial difference through the inscription of these
impossible bodies onto white, male flesh.
Inscribing impossible bodies led to racial distancing through this
second skin. Such inscription did not lead to proximity or intimacy
or indeed anti-racism. Distancing was also the case in a ‘homoerotic
context [where] such performances may have made another white male
body “safe” for sexual play […] When representations of blackness,
femininity, whiteness and masculinity collide, the white man playing
the part of the black woman comes face-to-face with the forbidden [...]
blackness, femininity and illicit sexuality are related in this imaginary
schema’ (DeVere Brody, 1998: 83–4). White male occupation of the Black
woman’s body served to produce white hegemonic masculinity and to fix
its definition as much as it replayed white stereotypes of Black women.
Cross-dressing blackface minstrels named the Black woman/white man
through their performances of ‘putting her on’. Here, the white man
becomes subject through the ridicule of the Black woman who is also his
creation through blackface. This places Black women in a less powerful
position as absent presences whereas white men are present absences
because they are not themselves (DeVere Brody, 1998). They still occupy
the view from nowhere while producing an elsewhere of Black women’s
subjugation on the stage through humour. Further, these performances
reveal that ‘white’ and ‘Black’ as racialized and racializing categories are
a ‘projection of white male desire’ (DeVere Brody, 1998: 85). Indeed, by
‘imitating black people, pretending to copy black forms, “white” prac-
titioners mixed up the difference between imitation and original and
invented the blackness they copied. For their intents and purposes, the
blacks they performed were the (un) real thing’ (DeVere Brody, 1998: 85)
White men constructed white Englishness through minstrelsy’s nega-
tion, through its very ‘blacking up’ which in the moment of the crea-
tion of Black femininity fills up the void of white masculinity which as
white norm remains invisible. Thus it is that, after the play across bodies
and the colour line, the humour of pretence, ‘the natural returns with
a greater force as naturalized whiteness, which is contrasted to the now
unnatural performance of blackness’ (DeVere Brody, 1998: 85).
In ‘post-race’ UK we still see the ‘race performativity’ of minstrelsy’s
gollification in the form of Precious Little. Here we have a 21st-century
Black Fat 89
versioning of the fat Black woman’s body on white male flesh which
seems to take us again into the realm of white racial fantasy, as we
repeatedly see Lucas performing a version of the cross-dressed wench.
What structure of racial feeling in 21st-century UK would this perfor-
mance draw on? Would Precious Little occupy a shape-shifting middle
term which makes her safe to laugh at because we know that she is a
white construction? Would Matt Lucas be the butt of the joke rather
than his alter ego, Precious Little? Or does Lucas set up a white dis-
cursive construction such as the fat Black woman so that white racism
becomes the butt of the joke?
We know as audience that Precious is Lucas in blackface. If he can be
a fat Black woman, his minstrelsy marks the attempt at detachment of
culture from ‘race’ and the absorption of the fat Black woman’s body
into the nation as joke. How the fat Black woman is constructed is
relevant as she can only be absorbed as funny in her very otherness.
Her strange way of speaking (Jamaican patois inflected English), her
dyed blonde short afro, hyper-Christianity, criminality, shiftlessness,
untrustworthiness and google eyes are hallmarks of that absorption.
However, her absorption into the nation is negated as the fat Black
woman’s body masks the white man underneath. Precious Little can
be read as 21st-century minstrelsy, as racial domination if we place
her alongside the British love of the golliwog. Even as the television
series disappeared to the after-life of DVDs, golly remained a part of
the vocabulary of UK racism.
The golliwog has been the UK’s most popular representation of Black
people from the beginning of the 20th century, familiar in nurseries,
magazines and the circus. Enid Blyton published The Three Golliwogs
in 1969 and the golliwog was the Beatles’ mascot. The jam manufac-
turer, Robertson’s, dropped the epithet ‘wog’ and adopted the golly as
its brand image. In 1980 for its jubilee the company distributed over
20 million golly products from pens, t-shirts, badges to dolls and tea-
pots. The National Committee on Racism in Children’s Books began
a campaign at this time to ban the golly as symbol and toy but golly
maintains an uneasy position in the national psyche as beloved and can
still be bought in stores. Precious Little continues the national love of
golly and is testament to a gollification of society so that she becomes
the 21st-century golliwog as the fat Black woman’s body. Lucas does not
replace the racist depiction of Venus in Johnny Newcome but replays it.
He does not so much trouble the essentialized fat Black woman’s body
as renew it for a 21st-century audience as the location of mirth which
denies white desire for Black fat. Precious Little signifies extant power
relations in the UK’s racial hierarchy as the white man playing the fat
Black woman is made the bearer of white discourses and practices con-
structed as Black, here African Caribbean/Jamaican.
Richard Dyer (1997) in White asks us to look at the work of the
stereotype as it always reveals its producer. This is where we can see
the agency in the alter/native Sable-Saffron Venus when we redirect
the gaze. Precious Little with her googly eyes, dark skin and speech is not
about Blackness. Like the blackface minstrelsy which preceded her she
is about whiteness and its constructions of its own racialized psyches, lives
and very flesh. White is what Precious Little is not, produced through a
carnivalizing of ‘race’ and a cannibalization of the fat Black woman’s
body. However, the political effects of this are plural as consumption
of the racist message of the joke is more indeterminate. Disparagement
humour is not neutral because it
does not necessarily mean sexist, racist or homophobic attitudes

will change […] they might cause more negative stereotypes in teller
and listener and lead to attitudes underlying disparaging jokes being
interpreted less critically [which] creates a climate where racism and
sexism appear to be tolerated. (Martin, 2010: 143)
What happens when the fat Black woman’s body is used to sell prod-
ucts, as is Bertha’s in the confused.com advertisements from 2010–12
when the white character Cara was retired – for example, ‘Chain
Reaction’ and ‘Young man, hey now’. We could say that these artefacts
of commerce and popular culture now widely available on YouTube
symbolize a recognizable racist act as well as a sexualizing one. The fat
Black woman in these ads is safely contained as Cara’s non-threatening
side kick. Her name ‘Bertha’ is easily transposed to ‘birther’ whose
excessive fecundity and sexuality must be controlled through humour.
Bertha shows her cleavage and bottom both of which bounce uncon-
trollably when she moves – for example, when she dances on the car
in ‘Young man, hey now’. She is the inept fat Black woman who is not
equal to Cara or a replacement for Cara as the lead so they both had to
retire at the same time to be replaced by ‘Bryan’. Bertha’s breasts and
bottom are the focus through their very size, bounce and ability to grip
the gaze in opposition to the non-bouncy body of slim, white Cara or
the slim Black women backing dancers. We see this displayed in the
‘Young men’ ad in which she dances on the car. In a 2012 ad Bertha
had a clear role as equal lead with Cara but her breasts and bottom are
again highlighted when she shoves Cara’s face into her breasts. On the
Black Fat 91
beach in 2012 both women are on loungers Cara is being massaged and
Bertha is being fanned by tanned, muscular, young men. Bertha pulls
an ice-cream cone out of her breasts which simultaneously removes the
sexualizing gaze on her body because of humour at the same time as
intimating that desire for sweet, fattening, milky food can be attached
to her breasts. However, when she jumps into the car displacing the
occupants who shoot upwards because of her size, any possibility of
sexualization is removed as humour takes its place.
Through humour these ads accomplished serious racist and sexist
work between 2010 and 2012 in enabling both racism and sexism to be
tolerated. Indeed, ‘racist humour does serious racism […] it is the sym-
bolic separation from serious action that enables agents to use humour
for serious purposes’ (Weaver, 2011: 1–2). The ads could be said to be
engaging in a brand of fat Black woman jokes, beginning with her
name ‘Bertha’, which excludes her from the category ‘woman’ through
inferiorization produced in a coding of racism through humour. Such
coding helps to maintain a ‘post-race’ logic in which racism is unac-
ceptable but the racialized other must be kept in place. As fat and Black
she is othered because of an excess of skin and undesirable corporeality.
For Simon Weaver (2011: 7), such racism is ‘liquid [a] polysemic and
elusive racism of postmodern social formations, including postmodern
humour and one that encourages reflexivity in the viewer’. Perhaps this
is what Precious Little and Bertha enable. Perhaps this very reflexivity is
the vehicle for the Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native that speaks the rac-
ist nation through its own negation of its carefully constructed notion
of itself as tolerant of difference. Humour is not a harmless or benign
form of communication. Rather, ‘racist humour, jokes may act as a type
of coping mechanism for the racist, in the form of a palliative because
the effects of joking allow for the expression, reinforcement and denial
of racism’ (Weaver, 2011: 12). As threatening reproductive bodies both
Precious Little and Bertha speak to white fear of Black women others
and the necessity to belittle Black women through humour. We see
reflected back at us a particular structure of feeling within British racio-
logy where fat Black women are removed from the position of white
male desire and occupy the space of derision.
Sable-Saffron Venus alternatives enable us to note the location of this
derision as the white supremacist psyche. Its construction of the fat
Black woman is still rooted in ‘race’ thinking in which the only body of
value is white, middle-class, young, slim, able-bodied and straight. The
continued gollification of society through television makes us wonder
at the fear of the fat Black woman’s body which still lingers. In such a
psyche we still have a coloniality of gender and ‘race’ which refuses the
fat Black woman’s body as object of desire. Now as in Victorian times,
she is an object of ridicule produced by whites for white consump-
tion in which they understand their racism but refuse to admit to this
charge. Precious Little and Bertha both enable the continuation of an
epistemology of ignorance (Yancy, 2008; Mills, 1997) where whites
refuse to acknowledge the world they have created. However, viewed as
Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives they refuse that refusal by encouraging
the white audience to stare itself in the face and stop laughing.
Conclusion
Black women’s fat continues to be deeply affective. In blackface min-

strelsy and specifically the cross-dressed wench performances we see
white men’s fear of Black female power replayed in the grotesque trans-
mutations of these female bodies. In contemporary times we still see this
in white reproductions of the fat Black woman’s body for humour. Liquid
racism also means, though, that these bodies are now open for audience
reflexivity. As such, Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives offer the audience
the opportunity to reflect on its own racist worlding of the world and
to refuse its epistemology of ignorance in which the fat Black woman’s
body is located as object of derision and desexualization. Thus, as alter/
natives these figures enable the audience to engage critically with dispar-
aging jokes which create a context in which racism and sexism become
intolerable, rather than tolerated as part of the laissez-faire approach to
governing racist culture.
4
Fascination: Muscle, Femininity,
Iconicity
As spectacles, Black women’s bodies have long been zones of fascination

in the UK/USA. Indeed, the exceptionality procedures produced by
racial stereotyping allow us to occasionally see Black athletic/dancing/
performing and Black/white ‘mixed race’ bodies, for example, as bod-
ies that are recognizable in adhering to white feminine slenderness
allied with Black voluptuousness. This has been the case with actress
and former Miss USA, Vanessa Williams and singer Beyoncé. The latter,
formerly praised for her feminine toned arms was vilified after shots
of her ‘muscly’ appearance at the Superbowl in February 2013. Her
publicist requested the removal of the unflattering shots whilst issu-
ing two flattering shots of her for the start of her ‘Mrs Carter World
Tour’ (Nelson, 2013). There were no muscles to be seen on the Madame
Tussaud’s waxwork of the singer on display in Regent’s Park in August
2014. There is a specific racialization of Black women’s muscle which
relates to 18th/19th-century racist pseudo-science that continues to
impact on the regimes of recognizability of Black women’s bodies as
we see being played out on/ through the bodies of Serena Williams
and Michelle Obama. The muscular Black/white ‘mixed race’ body of
former Spice Girl Mel B (father Black Jamaican descent, mother white
English) has been a site of fascination in the UK media but only in so
far as to reproduce her as at odds, unsettling, stranger. Her emergence
as Sable-Saffron Venus produced an alter/native-body which unsettled
the assumption that feminine beauty is always already scripted as white
and de-muscled/de-bodied. Such unsettling of dominant body aesthet-
ics has also been accomplished through the muscles of Jessica Ennis
MBE (Black father of Jamaican descent, white mother from Derbyshire)
as poster girl for the nation in the 2012 Olympics and her role as face
for the Olay Essentials Range aimed at consumers aged 24 plus, amongst
93
other sponsorship deals. First, let us move to looking at fascination

before discussing the racialized gendering of Black women’s muscles.
Fascination: fear, disgust, contempt
Black women’s bodies have been made to bear the burden of white
negative affect even while they have been sources of endless fascina-
tion which is also expressed as fear, disgust and contempt. Fascinate
in its original Latin was ‘fascinare’, meaning ‘to bewitch’. If you fasci-
nate someone you irresistibly attract their interest, their desire. They
can’t take their eyes off you even if they find what they are looking at
repellent. What is it that draws us to bodies that we are repelled by?
Fascination exerts an inter-corporeal connectedness even when we feel
fear, disgust or contempt. Fascination draws us in, enabling us to set out
on a quest to understand the what/how/why of the other’s embodiment
and psyche. What/how/why hint at lack of volition on the part of the
object of the gaze. If this is the case this would absolve these objects
from all blame as the owners of hypervisible bodies. This returns the
body to the status of human-though-different.
The scene of fascination is one in which comparisons are made to
the norm, to oneself and that which fascinates us. There is almost
what could be seen as an inter-corporeality produced through the gaze
discussed earlier in the book, in which the viewer’s body extends to
the other, touches and moulds to it at various points of fascination –
the face, the shoulders, the chest, the stomach, the legs, the bottom, the
skin, the muscles, the fat. Body parts themselves cast a spell. They are
the fascinum, the spell, the witchcraft that overcomes the senses so that
as my eyes move me to her in comparison I am either absorbed into
her body as she is into mine or refracted as different, as inassimilable.
Inassimilability or extension into the other does not mean that fasci-
nation ceases. Fascination continues in the desire to find out the why of
assimilation and the untranslatability of the body. Why can’t I be like
her? Why do I want to be like her? What have I become? Is my becom-
ing accompanied by fear, disgust, contempt? Fascination makes us look
at ourselves first and foremost, at our very lives, to find out why we are
fascinated by bodies/body parts. It is in the exchange between bodies, in
the matching and untranslatability that we can begin to know ourselves,
begin to understand our fascination as a pull to knowing the other, to get
behind the façade that is the skin to ‘the real them’ beneath.
Fascination seduces as it is itself seductive. It makes us want to know
the truth of the other. What has she hidden from others that she might
Fascination and Muscle 95
reveal just to me? There is an odd recentring of the self even though the
location of fascination is the other’s body. Thus, the gaze of fascination
is a narcissistic one. It helps us to see what we can get from the other
to construct a self. It is about shoring up who we feel and are certain
that we are through comparison. The more I compare myself to you the
more fascinated I become, the more your body draws me in.
Fascination is both affective and affecting. Its fluid intercorporeality
means that it is a simultaneous process of becoming/unbecoming as
comparison unfolds. To be fascinated, to be in its grip, speaks to affect
and its transmission. We are as affected by body parts as we are by objects
that pertain to them like fat, bone, muscle and the skin that contains
them. Fascination can also relate to negative affect (Ngai, 2005), to a
pull away from rather than a pull towards. What I sense need not be
appealing to hold me fascinated. Disgust is as fascinating, as riveting.
I stand looking at what I find disgusting and I am as mesmerized by the
yearning to discover why that disgust exists, what it is about what I see
that pushes me away, how I feel this disgust, where I feel it. Fascination
operates through all the senses and on all the senses. Sight is not its
principal carrier. Touch can be equally captivating. Think of the feel of
silk. It holds us in place, captures our hands so we want to keep strok-
ing, keep caressing. Much the same is the case for skin. How often do
we remark that Black women have ‘baby soft skin’? The very words
produce in us the compulsion to touch, to caress and in that movement
to feel a sensual attachment to that skin. Fascination moves us to want
to possess such skin.
Fascination moves us to respond, though at first we stare wide-eyed
or simply feel with our eyes shut. Being moved to respond implicates a
psychic reaction whether we realize it or not. As we are formed by our
skins the skin of others and what is underneath it equally forms us.
Their skin ego (Anzieu, 1990) becomes ours even if only fleetingly as
the work of comparison and translation is done. Extending my skin ego
makes me think ‘how would I feel if I was like her?’ Would I be happy
with my own skin or would she be happy with mine? Fluid intercorpo-
reality isn’t just about the materiality of bodies but is also entwined in
being in what we imagine is the other’s psyche and becoming someone
else in that process, no matter how fleeting.
The power of fascination to move us and to make us move lies in the
wondering about others set off in our daily encounters with those who
draw our eyes, our hands, our ears, our noses, our mouths. Fascination
works first and foremost through the senses but it also works through
our imaginings, through our imaging of our selves as other or more
firmly our selves unchanging and unchangeable. Thus, fascination can

be as unsettling as it can be self-affirming. If it has the power to move
us to be unsettled why do we submit to its allure? Maybe the ‘OMG!’
moment is simply something over which we have no power. The more
we try to resist the touch, the look, the smell, the taste, the sound,
the more fascinating the body as object becomes. To resist the pull of
the senses is to intensify fascination so we move towards the body if
only to diminish the pull of fascination. We need to be satisfied sensu-
ally, to be sated, to have seen/touched/heard/tasted/smelled our fill for
the body as source of fascination to lose its appeal.
Fascination’s many definitions such as ‘to allure’, ‘to bewitch’ speak of
the beloved in the eyes of the lover. So it is an opening out to love as we
extend ourselves to the other. However, in finding ‘the abnormal’, mus-
cle, bone, fat, skin, we turn back towards our boundaries in fear, disgust
and contempt. Fascination, fear, disgust and contempt are imbricated
with each other and they can bewitch us so like an adrenalin junkie we
ceaselessly seek out the fascinating other – whether read through fear,
disgust or contempt – so that we can feel, so we can become. One such
fascinating other is the darker-skinned Black woman with muscles.
Fear: darker-skinned Black women with muscles
It seems odd to talk about Black women’s bodies as fearsome or fearful.

However, if we look at the history of the Black woman’s body in Western
eyes and thought we can see that it was constructed as dangerous by
Euro-Africanisms which still continue to represent Africa, Blackness
and African heritage people as moral, sexual and racial pollutants. In
enslavement, Black women’s bodies threatened the white body and
social hierarchies with pollution from hetero-sexual desire and its possi-
ble offspring. The construction of the Black Venus placed prostitute pro-
clivities onto the bodies and souls of Black women. In the 19th century
the Black woman’s licentiousness was argued to be a fact through blood
discourses in Europe, such that les goutes du sang noir (France) has deep
cultural and racially sexualized implications (Sharpley-Whiting, 1999),
as do ‘one drop of Black blood’ (UK/USA) and ‘una gota de sangre negra’
(Spain) also for Black/white ‘mixed race’ women. Black women today
are still ‘imprisoned in an essence of themselves created from without:
the Black Venus’ (Sharpley-Whiting, 1999: 10).Their bodies were also
dangerous to the social order whether as object of desire or as worker.
As worker the threat was to the very place of ‘woman’ in the social order
while as object of sexual desire the threat was to the iconicity of white
women as love and sexual object. White life politics are built on the
fear of the Black other in ‘the West’, a fear which has been reproduced
across time and space whether the object of that fear is present or not.
Fear of the Black woman is embedded in Western society to the extent
that it still shapes our interpersonal interactions across the colour line.
Here, if someone is immersed in a governmentality of discourses which
say that the Black woman is dangerous then a Black woman in the flesh
or in the imagination will produce a feeling of insecurity, a ‘how do
I act now?’ response, or a compulsion to avoid her at all cost. Fear of the
Black woman is fearsome as it is
[…] diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, unanchored, free float-

ing, with no clear address or cause; when it haunts us with no visible
rhyme or reason, when the menace we should be afraid of can
be glimpsed everywhere but is nowhere to be seen. ‘Fear’ is the name
we give to our uncertainty: to our ignorance of the threat and of what
is to be done – what can and what can’t be – to stop it in its tracks – or
to fight back if stopping it is beyond our power. (Bauman, 2006: 2)
Fear of the Black woman’s body is based on casting it as evil, trans-

gressive or in some other way outside of what we see as the norm for a
‘liveable life’ (Butler, 2004). Once it is set outside the norm it remains
as it is cast, an unknowable hyper-known, knowledge of which remains
within the colonial stereotype. That which remains outside of the ste-
reotype is unknown, unmanageable and also leads to fear. Indeed for
Homi Bhabha (1994) the stereotype itself remains a source of insecurity
as the repetition required to fix the meaning of others can become
unstable at any moment because it may be lost in translation. The Black
woman’s body has been established in the West as a zone of fear so
that this is easily called up within the white psyche even in societies in
which they are neighbours, colleagues, friends, family members, lovers,
fellow citizens. The haunting fear of the Black woman’s body is con-
structed through racialization. As such, whiteness menaces itself with
its own uncertainties about the destabilization of the hierarchies that
must be kept in place at all costs so that the known remains unchal-
lenged. Hanging on tightly to fear and racial (un)certainties operates
at the level of both the visible because of the historico-racial schema and
the felt because of the circulation and intensity of affects. This ensures
that fear of the Black woman’s body spreads, amplifies and permeates all
aspects of life because her body cannot be contained within the known
of her difference from whiteness. In order to ensure containment,
difference must be anticipated and continually put into the place of the
known. This operates through what Sara Ahmed (2004) identifies as the
stickiness of the economy of fear within racial regimes where fear slides
across signs as well as between bodies and projects us from the present
into the future. A present-future where fear
creates the very effect of ‘that which I am not’, through running away
from an object, which nevertheless threatens as it passes by or is dis-
placed. To this extent, fear does not involve the defence of borders
that already exist; rather fear makes those borders, by establishing
objects from which the subject, in fearing, can flee. Through fear not
only is the very border between self and other affected, but the rela-
tion between the objects that are feared (rather than simply the rela-
tion between the subject and its objects) is shaped by histories that
‘stick’, making some objects more than others seem fearsome […] fear
works to restrict some bodies through the movement or expansion of others.
(Ahmed, 2004: 67–9)
‘Fear is an embodied experience; it creates the very effect of the surfaces

of bodies’ (Ahmed, 2004: 68). Fear is an important aspect of the skin ego
of whiteness itself as it restricts some bodies through its own movement
or expansion. As whiteness strives to establish difference from the fear-
some Black woman’s body, so such difference and fear becomes part of
its ego, its own skin and what it projects out to construct the bodies of
the always already known as racially different. The racial regime of visible
difference must be kept in place to ensure that the borders of whiteness
are kept firm. This is done, for example, through fear of pollution because
of the potential invisibility and unmarkability of the other produced by
mixing and its concomitant danger of not knowing for sure who the
other really is. This fear impels the development of resemblance because
fear does not reside in a body but moves between them so that it can be
materialized on any body within ‘a particular profile range’ (Puar, 2007:
186). So expert surveillance is set up of Black women’s bodies, noses, lips,
hair, skin colour, breasts, bottoms and muscles so as to mark difference
and develop racialized aesthetic profiling. Racialized aesthetic profiling
means that fear can be materialized in all Black women’s bodies irre-
spective of who they are. This ensures the continuation, circulation and
amplification of fear of the Black woman’s body as she begins to move
outside of the borders established through the phenotype and stereotype.
On Saturday 4 July 2009, Serena Williams became Wimbledon Women’s
Singles champion again, beating her sister Venus. Both women were
unashamedly muscular wearing the mark of their athletic approach to

their sport and profession. Their muscles and prowess, though, have
never drawn questions, as did the body of Flo-Jo Joyner. Flo-Jo was awe-
some on the track, a powerfully muscled sprinter who taught us all in
death that the way to success was not to be found through the use of
chemical enhancement. We remember Venus and Serena also for the
challenge they presented to the sexism of the Wimbledon tennis cham-
pionship when they claimed equal pay for work of equal value and won.
Representing themselves as different from other women shows that the
Williams sisters feel power on the tennis court and this is significant given
that women are encouraged to feel powerless in regard to men especially
in terms of the size of their bodies (Grogan et al., 2004). This shows the
confidence of these women, something also borne out by Serena’s ‘girly’
on-trend dressing of her powerfully muscled body. Serena flies in the
face of the view that muscularity is inappropriate for women, especially
muscles that add bulk to your body. Her bulky muscles place her outside
of the body rule system (Bordo, 1993; Bartky, 1990; Wolf, 1991) of slen-
derness and remove her from feminized ideas of ‘toned’ and ‘athletic’
in relation to acceptable body shape. Serena shows that bulky muscles,
breast tissue, a visible waist, a large bottom and femininity (Grogan et al.,
2004) are not incompatible at all.
Serena’s darker skin removes her from the realm of beautiful feminin-
ity in the US/UK. If we add that to her powerfully built muscular sports
woman’s body we see why she is the subject of derogatory comment.
When she is not playing tennis, Serena dresses her body in a very accept-
ably feminine way to assert the fact of her womanhood. Irrespective of
how her muscular body is dressed it challenges racialized gendered
bodily control over women and creates alter/native constructions of
‘race’, beauty and femininity. There seems to come a time when Black
flesh is too much, when celebrities show too much or when they assert
corporeal autonomy by inscribing the masculine onto their bodies (Tate,
1999). What is interesting about Williams as excessive woman is that
she is not hypersexualized as she still belongs to ‘the masculine’ even
after decades of body culture which linked women’s muscle with care of
the self. Women like Williams develop bodies which are outside of the
strictures of the feminine norm on muscles and are not hypersexualized
within heterosexuality unless one is interested in muscle worship. What
is it about muscles that stop hypersexualization from happening in the
way that fatness or slimness does not?
Perhaps it is the general public itself which needs to shift its perceptions
so as to extend the body rule system to incorporate a difference which
shows control based on building the body up rather than slimming it

down, being bulky rather than toned. This extension is done, for
example, by Nathan Caton in Pride (July 2009: 63) in answer to the
question ‘which female celebrity has the sexiest body’? ‘Oh that’s
hard. Only one? I am a big admirer of Stacey Dash. But then Serena
Williams, despite being a tennis player, has got some amazing curves
on her’. What is it that we fear about Black women’s muscles? Our rela-
tionship with muscle is one in which we think that they map gender
onto bodies and so border crossings like female muscularity produce
extreme anxiety in the social skin. This is a ‘fetishistic engagement
with an anxious spectacle’ (Cavanagh and Sykes, 2006: 93). Muscles
as fetish are endowed with sexual significance among other multiple
meanings and stand in for something lacking, threatening or socially
prohibited. As fetish, muscles remind us that ‘the culturally desirable’
obscures a cultural anxiety which comes from a lack, fear or the need
to protect oneself from punishment. Muscles are fetish object because
they encompass fear, repulsion, desire and adoration in the social skin
(Cavanagh and Sykes, 2006).
If we add ‘race’ into the affective terrain of muscles as fetish we
see opening before us the old questioning of Black women’s hetero-
sexual womanhood from which they are removed. The question ‘ain’t
I a woman?’ was raised by the abolitionist and women’s rights activist
Sojourner Truth as she exposed her right arm to the shoulder show-
ing her muscular power in Akron Ohio in 1851 (Guy-Sheftall, 2009).
She illustrated all this time ago that there is a gendered and sexual-
ized historico-racial schema in terms of size and shape that operates to
keep Black women in the space of ‘non-woman’. There is nothing for
the white social skin to fear in a Black woman with muscle as she has
already been located in the third-space of non-woman without even the
possibility of becoming woman. As an outstanding athlete Williams is
adored. As a ‘woman who looks like a man’ disgust is not far from the
surface of such adoration because of her muscles. Her body has become
the object of a white affective matrix’s simultaneous fear and adoration
of women with muscles. I say ‘white’ here because I assume that since
muscles have been part of a Black woman’s embodiment because of
Sable/Saffron Venus’s labour in both plantation and free societies, the
affects that Black people might feel towards her muscles are not so much
fear or revulsion as admiration because of their visible strength. Through
muscles there are multiple displacements in which womanhood is some-
times conferred or questioned. This questioning still occurs even in the
21st century as the US First Lady Michelle Obama’s arms make clear.
Michelle Obama’s arms: muscles as excessive body parts
Michelle Obama’s photograph on the cover of US Vogue (March 2009)

caused media furore because of her muscular arms. They look good
and declare her body culture discipline, so why so much press cover-
age on her ‘rippling biceps’? The struggle over Michelle Obama’s ‘right
to (bear) bare arms’ shows that the USA is far from being post-race
as the respectable femininity of the First Lady is judged by white,
middle/upper-class privilege which insists on lack of musculature on
women (Tate, 2012). However, as ‘not’, as the negation of the norms
of white upper/middle-class respectability and resister of the discursive
positionings of Mammy/Sapphire/Jezebel, she creates a space of resist-
ance through failure in repetitive signifying so that Michelle Obama,
a Black First Lady, can emerge (Tate, 2012). Michelle Obama has re/
produced the Sable-Saffron Venus onto a muscular alter/native which
speaks against Black women being kept in their place of abnormality,
hypersexuality, masculinization and exoticization. Drawing on exist-
ing tropes of class, ‘race’, gender and care of the self, the media focus
on her muscles shows that Black women’s bodies have become fetish
objects. They provide an essential texture for the production of the
white US American/European woman’s body (Spillers, 1987) which
moves Black women to a subaltern place (Dantas, 2009: 121).
The media fascination with Michelle Obama’s muscular arms illus-
trate that her African American body has disturbed the status quo
because she is not ‘the somatic norm’ (Puwar, 2004). The White House
and First Lady spaces as white have been constructed politically, cultur-
ally, structurally and aesthetically. As an inside-outsider Obama’s arms
became spectacles that mark the unmarked somatic norm of the First
Lady as white. The attention to her arms subtly designates her as outside
the somatic norm in which ‘race’ is ex-nominated from white bodies
and in which she becomes ‘other’ in white spaces. She is known only
through ‘race’ stereotypes as a threat to the white social skin politically,
culturally, aesthetically and psychically (Tate, 2012). Constant surveil-
lance of her body highlights outsider status. She, as no other First
Lady before her, has to performatively enact a ‘known’ bodily hexis to
claim her place in the White House in terms of, for example, intellect,
competence, control, glamour and a middle/ upper-class respectable
femininity recognized across ‘race’, class and national boundaries (Tate,
2012). Embodying the habitus of the African American/white/transna-
tional middle/upper class and being a member of the upper echelons
of US and international society, she makes us aware of the tacit criteria
which exist for entry which can still be put as civility. Civility is assessed
through how her body speaks, looks, behaves and is adorned in order
to remove its threat as not the somatic norm. Michelle O has to be both
glamorous and professional, mother/wife/First Lady through stylization
so as to undermine the threat posed by her body to the US social skin
imagined as white.
The fascination with her muscular arms maintains the psychic and
corporeal boundaries of the First Lady as white. This has been done
without the fear/disgust/contempt for Black women’s bodies raising
comment. Though hyper-visible in the public sphere her body is con-
tained as always already known within the existing historico-racial
schema in which her Black body is returned for Fanon (1986: 113)
‘sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, animalistic, bad, mean, ugly, can-
nibalistic, lascivious but, most importantly, feared’. As the possessor of
arms that are gendered and ‘race’d as unruly, she disrupts the ability of
white femininity to mark its limits as sole occupier of the elite White
House space. This disruption occurs through her alter/native Sable-
Saffron Venus body which produces a not through ‘race’ performativity.
For Judith Butler (1988) subversion of identity becomes possible
within repetitive signifying and change occurs through failure in the
repeat. As not, Obama’s enactments of Black, respectable middle/upper
class, US femininity construct the disruptive possibility of a Black First
Lady within its racialized impossibilities because
Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play
requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered [and raced]
body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts
interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.
(Butler, 1997: 410)
Her darker-skinned Black body always already dictates failure when

whiteness is the norm but failure produces something other within
spaces of resistance to culturally restrictive corporeal enactments. This
resistance opens a space for disruption through a different sort of ‘rep-
etition of that [First Lady] style’ (Butler, 1988: 521) which ‘is never fully
self-styled, for living styles have a history, and that history conditions
and limits its possibilities’ (Butler, 1988: 521).
To be a First Lady in the style of Jackie O, is to be fixed, to make the
body conform to the First Lady as cultural sign, to bring the First Lady
into being on the body within the recognized boundaries of (im)pos-
sibility through a sustained and repeated corporeal strategy in which
stylization is key. However, through her stylization Michelle O shows that

the First Lady as cultural script is a white ‘race’d regulatory fiction (Tate,
2012). Becoming the first Black First Lady is the struggle for Michelle
O because of racism and the fetishization of the Black woman’s body.
Obama’s arms transgress the obsession with slenderness and lack
of bulk as the epitome of feminine embodiment. Her arms place her
outside of the norms of frail thinness to which we have become accus-
tomed almost to the point of being anaesthetized against the shock
when we look at white celebrity size 0 bodies like Victoria Beckham’s,
Lindsay Lohan’s or Nicole Ritchie’s. Or maybe because of the Black
skin trade, her very flesh, her darker skin tone reminds whiteness that
she is matter out of place that should be put in its place. Media assess-
ments of the First (African American) Lady Body illustrate that we still
live with an aesthetics which connects to slavery’s de-feminization and
hypersexualization linked to Black women’s muscularity and naked
flesh. Perhaps this explains why it is that Obama’s arms come under
such intense scrutiny from the white media as these body parts ‘pop
out’ and assail its gaze. These parts are designated ‘not feminine’ and
become feared as well as the locus of disgust and contempt as she does
not show feminine tenderness as a ‘Lady’ should because of her inscrip-
tion of ‘masculine’ toughness on the body.
Her body also speaks of control, dedication and hard work, attributes
which are masculinized in US/UK culture and must be re-appropriated
to the masculine position lest heteropatriachy suffer too much of a jolt.
However, muscle produces an other body, a third form which asserts its
femininity against the grain of the norm. It could be this third form
that provokes such unease as it refuses categorization and recognition
as acceptably feminine (Tate, 2012). How is respectable femininity con-
structed when the muscular body refuses recognition? Michelle Obama
does this through her clothes, make-up, hair and demeanour. Being a
style icon reinstates her femininity to a large extent. As First Lady she
must do ‘recognizable Black’ though transracial, middle/upper-class,
heterosexual femininity at all costs or risk censure (Tate, 2012). When
the body’s muscles and how it is adorned and not intellect is what leads
to recognition as a First Lady then one can turn to glamour in order to
call the First Lady into being. Glamour as artifice, performance and
sophisticated feminine allure, is subject to changing ideas about femi-
ninity, consumerism, popular culture, fashion and celebrity (Dyhouse,
2010). Celebrity means that Michelle O can be placed within the sphere
of glamour through readings of her stylization practices irrespective of
her muscles (Tate, 2012).
To wear muscles, to be a third body, reproduces women as profoundly

aware of the impact of their bodies on those around them and that
their bodies are the one sure place from which stereotypes can be tack-
led (Tate, 1999). Obama’s muscles become a location of critique of the
possible and the expected from the margins of idealized femininity.
Muscles and gym use also denote her as having the leisure time and the
money to gain muscle especially if this involves the use of a personal
trainer. She is staking a claim not to the field labour of slavery but
to middle or upper class status. Her body work destabilizes the usual
conventions of raciology which would deny the possibility of a Black
middle/upper class.
Obama’s body is the result of the emergence of what Charles Edgley
(2006: 233) calls ‘the ethic of health through personal achievement’ and
its accompanying consumer products from exercise equipment to gyms,
nutritional supplements, exercise DVDs, personal trainers, liposuction,
which has gripped American society in its war on corpulence. Here, the
‘idea that virtually anyone can achieve standards of health and fitness
through a proper regimen of diet and exercise quickly translated into an
ideology that everyone ought to’ (Edgley, 2006: 236). However, Obama’s
worked out flesh has also been made aberrant because of the intersec-
tion of ‘race’, gender and class which constructs her body as outside of
the frame of expectation of First Lady embodiment. That is, her body
should not look like a site of power which is both coveted and feared.
Further, her muscles maintain active personhood for herself even as
she is consumed as the next Black fashion icon and celebrity mom in
the United States. In fact, one could go a step further and speak about
Michelle Obama as being cannibalized by the media focus on her arms
if we see cannibalism as ‘domination, fear, absorption, revulsion and
dehumanization’ (Owens and Beistle, 2006: 207–8). In this domination
Obama becomes her arms, body parts, so that the media can project
their own taboos on decorum, muscles and aberrant flesh onto her and
avoid their own positioning in this as upholders of racist, sexist, classed
and heterosexist body norms. Such moral panic locates Obama’s mus-
cles as deeply affective. We can also see this if we look at the Black-white
‘mixed race’ body of Mel B through the prism of disgust.
Disgust: Mel B’s six pack
Skin does double work as the boundary between the psychic inside and
outside as well as being a symbol of containment (Miller, 2004). Skin
and what lies beneath are the focus of body concern in which disgust
plays a role. Thus it is that the material, symbolic and psychic body can
be linked through disgust. Indeed, our ‘concerns about the body, and
the role of disgust in protecting the body, are complex amalgams of
intuitive and learned health consciousness relating to the actual body
together with reactions to perceived threats to the symbolic body […]
Among the senses, smell, taste and touch associate most strongly with
disgust. Vision is less critical and hearing least of all’ (Miller, 2004: 7).
We can take issue with Miller here as we have shown above as the gaze
defines who the Black woman is or can become. As a perceived threat
to the symbolic body of whiteness vision is perhaps the most crucial
in generating disgust of the Black woman’s body in a racialized sensing
economy in which some white people never get to touch, smell or taste
Black women. However, ‘race’ discourses ensure that even within lack of
sensory perception the Black woman has been continually reproduced
as disgusting. ‘Race’, gender and their formation of the contours of the
Black woman’s body means that disgust does not require sensory input.
It is always already known and present as [white] affect. An example of
this is the production of disgust at Black people’s smell which would
have been circulated to the public in the metropole. This is shown
in Edward Long’s (1774) The History of Jamaica where in describing
Jonkonnu he shows his disgust thus:
These exercises, although very delightful to themselves, are not so to

the generality of the white spectators, on account of the ill smell which
copiously transudes on such occasions; which is rather a complication of
stinks, than any one in particular, and so rank and powerful, as totally
to overcome those who have any delicacy in the frame of their nostrils.
(Cooper, 1995: 25; my italics)
Long makes distinctions between white people’s delicacy and Black

insensitivity to their own stench and also constructs Black smell as rank
and overpowering. To be white is not to smell but to be offended by
the stench of Black people. The smell of Blacks has also been remarked
on as a current in Brazilian racism (Pinho, 2010). Disgust serves to pro-
tect a white sense of security in their superiority and ensure that what
is designated disgusting is separated from the self because it remains
contained within its skin. As affect, disgust speaks about the self, about
one’s sense of identity (Miller, 2004). Therefore, Long shows that by
‘specifying what I will not accept as related to me, disgust indicates my
values but also my anxiety lest some contact leave me contaminated or
diminished, brought from high to low, rolled in the mud and muck of
experience’ (Miller, 2004: 14). In the dynamics of disgust ‘difference is

felt to be necessary for the self to feel substantial and defined, but dif-
ference opens up the self to feelings of inferiority because once there
is an Other, a relationship exists between self and Other in which one
may be better or worse than the Other. So those who insist on difference
often are haters of the specific forms of difference they encounter (and
maintain)’ (Miller, 2004: 164).
We see this dynamic in Nikki Grahame’s column ‘I’m not keen on
Mel’s new look!’ when she says
Mel B has certainly got an impressive new body but, to be honest,

I don’t like it when girls are muscly like that. I think it’s unattractive
and not very feminine at all! Perhaps she’s going through a phase
where she wants to bulk-up, although I hope she gets her old body
back soon, as she’s always had a fantastic figure. (OK, Issue 678, 16
June 2009, Hot Stars: 23).
What is interesting about this is that it is simultaneously complimentary

and derogatory. Complimentary in that her new body is impressive but
derogatory in that the new body is muscular, unattractive and unfemi-
nine. By comparison her pre-muscle body meant Mel B had a fantastic
figure. Further, Mel B’s muscularity is read as her going through a phase
where she wants to bulk up, rather than being about a longer-term
body project in which Mel B is making a claim for muscles as feminine
and attractive. Looking at Mel B’s body I see trained abdominals which
cannot be called a six-pack. These are the only apparent muscles on her
body which don’t get in the way of her having a ‘fantastic figure’. It is
what is seen as bulking up that causes consternation, as being toned
and athletic is part of our everyday mainstream discourses on doing
acceptable femininity. Tone and athleticism are ok, bulk is not, bulk is
problematized if we want ‘to do girl’ (Ussher, 1997).
Mel B and her body also grace the cover of Issue 74, 5 July 2009 of
Fabulous, the News of the World magazine. She stands eyes down, head to
the right in a bikini with her abs on display with the words WARRIOR
WOMAN across her legs and the caption ‘Gladiators ready! Mel B on
the sit-ups and sex sessions that got her fighting fit’. She is the topic
of the magazine’s Hot Body Issue, the caption of which reads ‘Sex and
the Six-Pack. Mel B insists she’s not obsessed by her body but heck we
are. She gives us the low-down on how she really got her amazing abs.’
We then get her story of diet and exercise. She eats low carb, fat-free,
organic, nutritionally balanced food delivered twice a week to her by
Freshology, does 600 sit-ups four or five times a week, does the plank
for 100 breaths, doesn’t diet like her mother used to, is on the treadmill
for 30 minutes and for the other 30 minutes alternates between her legs
and her arms with weight training. Mel B says ‘dieting is self-torture,
just eat well and exercise’ (Fabulous, 2009: 7). From the point of view
of the journalist Rachel Richardson, ‘Mel B and The Body don’t disap-
point. The rippling abs glistening in the sun, may not be to everyone’s
taste – some have sniped that she looks more bodybuilder than babe –
but you can’t fail to be impressed by the work that must have gone into
sculpting them’ (Fabulous, 2009: 4). As well as this, Mel B establishes
herself in the interview as a ‘nymphomaniac’ (her own word) who
has sex five times a day with her husband Stephen or with her ‘Pocket
Rocket’ if he is unavailable. She is then doubly transgressive, a Sable-
Saffron Venus alter/native who has built The Body and is insatiable. Her
ownership of insatiability reproduces the known of the Sable-Saffron
Venus’s hypersexuality but returns it through mimicry as something
different than was expected by the continuing gaze of the coloniality
of ‘race’ and gender. What she reproduces is monogamy focused on her
husband as well as delight in her own pleasure and self-pleasuring with
her BOB. Interestingly, Mel’s body has become her. We were fixated on
what she did with it, what she put in it and what she wore on it as the
then face and body of Ultimo and as celebrity. We read virtually noth-
ing about her breasts which have clearly been augmented so this must
be just commonplace if you want to be a babe but much more about
her muscles which are not babe-like. The crafting of the masculine onto
the female celebrity body still causes unease if one markets oneself as
a babe, a sex symbol. One can’t be Sable-Saffron Venus and have bulky
muscles at the same time, as feminine heterosexuality means being
de-muscled. Thus, we can say that regimes of visibility on decorum,
muscles and aberrant flesh are played out on Black women’s bodies
irrespective of skin shade. However, what happens when those very
muscles become emblematic for the nation through racial branding as
is the case for Black/white ‘mixed race’ Jessica Ennis?
Jessica Ennis: fascination and racial branding
Focusing on muscles, skin and the British nation necessitates initially look-
ing at two athletes in the run-up to the last Olympics – lighter-skinned,
Black-white ‘mixed race’, Jessica Ennis MBE and darker-skinned Jeanette
Kwakye. They were chosen as brand ambassadors throughout 2012
by the US multinational Proctor and Gamble (P&G). The other brand
ambassadors were Mark Cavendish, Sir Chris Hoy, Keri-Anne Payne,

Victoria Pendleton, Jenna Randall, Paula Radcliffe, Ben Rushgrove, Liam
Tancock and Sophia Warner. Ennis was the brand ambassador for Olay
and Kwakye for Ariel. The athletes were linked with the P&G brand and
their bodies/characters were also branded as ‘the best of British’. Ennis, a
World and Olympic champion heptathlete, has been the face and body
for Powerade Zero, Adidas, Aviva, British Airways, Jaguar, the cosmet-
ics brand Olay Essentials 24 Plus range, has appeared in television and
billboard advertisements for Banco Santander in 2013 and 2014 and is
the face for Olay Glow Perfectors, as well as appearing as a cover girl
for numerous magazines. Kwakye was a finalist in the 100 metres at the
Beijing Olympics, was not chosen for the Great Britain (GB) Olympic
team (Team GB) because of injury and worked with the detergent Ariel
on the PG Capital Clean Up Campaign to make London spotless for the
Olympic Games.
As muscular Black women their bodies enable us to think through
their very skin about how it is that ‘race’ still matters for who can repre-
sent the national GB brand and become its global icon for the Olympic
Games, as well as how it is that through branding, the racially ambigu-
ous muscular body (Ennis) can come to represent the nation even given
the continuing racism of our ‘post-race’ times. In analysing this skin
trade, what becomes clear is the continuing coloniality of ‘raced’ gender
dynamics in defining national identities.
Great Britain (GB) and Team GB as brands were marketed throughout
the Olympic year and the year preceding it. As brands GB and Team GB
are things
to which some feeling or action is directed […they are] an object-ive

in that [they are] the object of ‘a purpose or intention’, or even a
whole series of purposes […] the brand is not a closed object, but is,
rather, open, extending into – or better, implicating – social relations.
It is something that is identifiable in its doing [as] a market cultural
form [… as] the marketer imagines the consumer. (Lury, 2004: 1–7)
Brands produce and act on identifications. Thus, they are both per-
formative (Butler, 1993) and affective (Ahmed, 2004). I would like to
add here that brands also engage ‘race’ and gender performativity (Tate,
2005) as well as racial affective economies (Tate, 2013). Brands enable
some national racialized relationalities, identifications and co-optations
while negating others. The GB brand with its globally viral ‘Union
Jack’ has changed over the centuries of decolonization from that of
world dominant Empire to that of a nation which prides itself on being

democratic, tolerant, inclusive and diverse while maintaining a global
cultural, political and economic presence.
The Union Jack has ‘significance in the brand’s relation to consumers
since personalization is what underpins the affective relations between
brands and consumers, which typically include some degree of trust,
respect and loyalty but may also include playfulness, scepticism and
dislike’ (Lury, 2004: 10). As a sign of trust, respect and loyalty the
flag forms the positive affective bond between the body which wears
it and the GB brand. The national flag reproduces its wearer as both
patriot and citizen. However, in terms of disgust and fear, the GB brand
facilitates the (dis)location of the bodies of racialized others through
national discourses on citizenship, immigration, integration, belonging
and whiteness by compelling affective identification/disidentification.
As the sign of the GB brand the flag has positive or negative affective
value (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010) which is transferred to the body of
the athletes as they are branded by the interpellating gaze as British,
‘others’ and ‘other-others’ (Ahmed, 2000). For Ahmed (2000) ‘oth-
ers’ are the people the nation can incorporate into its economy and
culture in order to become multi-cultural, whereas ‘other-others’ are
those who are beyond this possibility. However, the bodies of ‘others’
and ‘other-others’ are necessary to defining the national body in which
‘other-others’ are placed as infrahuman threat to the nation (Wingard,
2013; Gilroy, 2004) and ‘others’ are located at one step removed from it
though still part of its history.
The racial branding of bodies turns ‘others’ and ‘other-others’ into
products for affective dis/identification much like consumable products
in advertising (Wingard, 2013). The affective dis/identification which
circulates through racial branding uses both image and language to cre-
ate visceral responses based on racial ideology (Wingard, 2013). Racial
branding intensifies identification and affect to move us in construct-
ing national and individual identities. Depending on our positioning
within the nation as a white brand we will have different affective
responses to seeing Jeanette Kwakye wearing the Team GB uniform.
We would also have different responses to Jessica Ennis as the face of
Olay or as a member of Team GB. As racially branded bodies within the
GB/Team GB brands their bodies became objects of capital, producing
economic, cultural, political and affective surplus value nationally and
globally (Wingard, 2013, Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010) through fascina-
tion. This was especially the case when they were draped in the Union
Jack or wore Team GB’s colours when ‘race’ set them apart from the
nation or alternatively constructed the nation as ‘post-race’ because of

the inclusion of their bodies.
At the same time as being branded as ‘others’/ ‘other-others’ because
of ‘race’, both women’s bodies became brands and none more so than
Jessica Ennis. As lighter skinned Sable-Saffron Venus her Black/white
‘mixed racedness’ made her more palatable to a nation still embedded
in colonial pigmentocracy than Jeanette Kwakye’s darker-skinned body
(Tate, 2007). The cross-over value of Ennis’s skin enabled her to be
emblematic of a nation which imagines itself as tolerant and multicul-
tural while at the same time interpellating her as ‘other’ to the nation
itself. This is the doubleness of a ‘race’ performativity (Tate, 2005) where
she is ‘other’ because of the fact of her mixedness but that very mixed-
ness prevents her location as ‘other-others’.
Her racially branded body is affective as it enables both racial iden-
tification and disgust/contempt. However, never before has a woman’s
musculature been so inscribed in the UK’s collective psyche or embed-
ded in its social skin. GB knows the contours of her abdominals,
shoulders, arms and legs as much as it knows her skin colour, her
bleached blonde hair and her facial features. Her body has become a
brand within the GB brand and she is the most globally recognizable
Team GB woman athlete to date. As brands, and the scene of fascina-
tion, Kwaye’s and Ennis’s affective, economic, political and cultural
surplus value is what underlies the politics of the ‘post-race’ skin trade.
This skin trade is composed of both skin colour and what lies under
the skin, muscle, bone and fat. Taken together these construct differ-
ential corporeal value depending on where and how they emerge. For
example, if the context is athletics then muscles that bulge are part
of the terrain of femininity, whilst if it is beauty then lighter or white
skin colour is necessary. Affect allied with differential corporeal value
help us to account for Jessica Ennis’s national cross-over appeal as an
individual athletic brand.
This claim can be made because GB has had other Black women cham-
pion heptathletes like Denise Lewis, for example, who did not become a
national or global GB icon. Thus, it is difficult to make the claim that it is
solely the sport’s rigours and Ennis’s Olympic supremacy that account for
her appeal. If we think about why Jeanette Kwakye was not the national
sporting icon for the London 2012 Olympic Games or why she was the
brand ambassador for Ariel and not Olay, we have to go back to racial-
ized skin politics, brands and branding through which darker skinned,
muscular women’s bodies are kept apart. Racialized skin politics mean
that Kwakye continues to be a body out of place (Puwar, 2004; Tate, 2012)
so that even while she represents the nation on the athletics track she is
not taken up as a national child (Gordon, 1997).
In the Ariel campaign Kwakye’s body confronted us as in colonial
times, with the darker-skinned Black body’s use to advertise soap
(McClintock, 1995; Pieterse, 1995). Indeed, ‘washing blacks white’ was
a popular idea in the colonial advertising of soap (Pieterse, 1995). This
racial branding juxtaposed a body which was impossible to cleanse
because of its ‘physical and moral impurity’, with the white need for
cleanliness, and the assumed desire for whiteness on the part of Black
people themselves (Pieterse, 1995). Therefore, as object soap was not
just about cleanliness, because these ideas on Black and white bodies
were at the very foundations of racial thinking (Pieterse, 1995).
Given this historical context, P&G’s choice of Kwakye for its deter-
gent rather than the cosmetics brand Olay does make us wonder at
this 21st-century repetition of colonial racialized body politics. Her
refusal as the face of Olay implied that darker-skinned Black women
do not have ‘cross-over value’ as they cannot occupy the space of all
women that skin lightness enables for Ennis. The connection between
Kwakye and soap is also relevant for thinking about gender, ‘race’,
class and the positioning of darker-skinned women in the national
imagination. This positioning is still embedded in the coloniality of
labour where household work rested in the hands of the enslaved
African or indigenous domestic worker (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010).
Aligning Kwakye with soap also produces affective, political, economic
and cultural outcomes through her body being placed as labourer in
the Clean Up London campaign. That is, that her darker-skinned body,
historically the location of hypersexualization and masculinization
in the diaspora, has been returned to the site of domestic labour and
disgust. Her value as marketable commodity was thereby erased. Her
darker-skinned, Black muscular woman’s body was domesticated and
its threat to the (white) body was negated through the construction of
her body’s negative value.
Negation was necessary even though Brand GB has asserted that it
is a tolerant, multicultural nation. This makes us remember that toler-
ance always implicates disgust as its negative axis (Ngai, 2005). The
disgust generated by Kwakye’s skin is triple because of racial branding.
It is that disgust for the labouring Black female body and the darker-
skinned, muscular, unfeminine body, as much as it is about the white
tolerant nation’s disgust at its own racializing, objectifying gaze that
locates Kwakye outside of the possibility for national iconicity because
of her darker skin (Tate, 2012). The national white psyche is riven by
ambivalence towards its own politics of tolerance which it claims into

existence but which it knows simply does not exist unconditionally
because of its disgust and contempt for ‘other-others’. Within the zone
of contempt for darker skin, she plays a minimal part in the Ariel adver-
tisements. Thus, being Black darker-skinned and muscular places her
body within the continuum of disgust/contempt without a possibility
of tolerance.
Jessica Ennis as national icon for the Olympic Games based on her
skill and her obvious Black/white ‘mixed raced’/racial ambiguity is
an interesting choice. Such racial ambiguity made her more palat-
able to a nation that still speaks of ‘half castes’. ‘Half caste’, much like
‘mixed race’ and ‘dual heritage’ involve thinly veiled racial disgust of
those who dare to mix or to be mixed (Gilroy, 2004; Christian, 2008;
Carby, 2007). Racial disgust generates an atmosphere (Brennan, 2004;
Gutíerrez Rodríguez, 2007, 2010) because of its intensity which means
that disgust of racial mixing is never ambivalent about its object. As
such, national exclusion of its Black-white ‘mixed race’ object enables a
strange kind of white anti-miscegenation sociability.
This sociability in which Jessica Ennis has emerged as icon is one
of provisional inclusion and ‘exceptional other’ relationality with
the national white social skin because of her white English mother.
However, her ‘exceptional other’ status means that she is also being
kept apart because of the mark of Blackness on her skin from her
Black Jamaican descent father. Even as the national icon, racialized
skin disgust is not far from the nation’s psyche and her body is asked
to do triple representational work – represent the nation as a patriot;
represent the Black-white ‘mixed race’ body’s value within the nation
as the embodiment of its tolerance; and represent the super-human,
muscular femininity of a Team GB Olympian. Representational tri-
pleness allied with her iconicity has enabled the emergence of a new
Sable-Saffron Venus within the nation. In the case of Ennis, like Rachel
Christie/Beyoncé/Rihanna, this is the Black/white ‘mixed race’ beauty
that in the Euro-American imagination, since the time of slavery, has
blended Black sexual expertise and passion with white physical beauty
(Sharpley-Whiting, 2007; Mohammed, 2000; Tate, 2012).
Brand GB has a very particular Sable-Saffron Venus in the muscular
body of Ennis. She is a Venus of our times as she is in control of her
body – even if not of how it is represented – and produces a new brand
of Black/white ‘mixed race’ femininity. Further, as Sable-Saffron Venus
her very body, its skin, muscle, bone, fat, remains racialized in the
national consciousness. Although a positive force for change in terms
of Black-white ‘mixed race’ women’s representation, her body is always

located in the nation’s established racial hierarchy as ‘not quite white’.
We can see this, for example, in the British Airways (BA) advertisement
which was in place from 14 June, 2012 in the run up to the Games. BA
painted a giant image of Ennis, strategically placed in the flight path
to Heathrow, in Thornbury Playing Fields in Hounslow about 3 miles
from Heathrow Airport in London. It took two days to complete the art
work on the grass with 600 litres of red, white and blue weatherproof
paint. Millions of passengers including fellow competitors would have
seen Ennis with the caption ‘Welcome To Our Turf’. This advertisement
used white paint for Ennis’s body shaded by grey and black to show her
body’s contours. In the 21st century it is possible to have more accurate
‘flesh-coloured’ paint. Such inaccurate representation reveals active
whitening of Ennis as an ‘exceptional other’ so that she can occupy her
place within the GB/ Team GB brands. Therefore, though she is an icon
her body is also a location of racial disgust/contempt even while her
Black/white ‘mixed race’ embodiment had affective, political, cultural
and economic value for the multicultural nation.
‘White blood’ makes Ennis racially palatable, politically mute and
available for consumption by the dominant national culture as the en
vogue ‘Generation Ethnically Ambiguous’ (Ellam, 2011; Hunter, 2005;
Sharpley-Whiting, 2007). We can see this in brand Ennis as Olympic
icon, the face and body of Powerade Zero, Adidas and Olay 24 Plus, and
post-Olympics as participant in the Santander advertisements, as well as
the face of Olay Glow Perfectors and star of her own wedding in Hello
magazine in 2013. She has also been a cover girl for various magazines
in which she is also represented in fashion shoots, some examples of
which are: Cosmopolitan (August 2012), Marie Claire (August 2012), Time
(2012), Athletics (2012), ES (2012) and Fabulous (2013).
The spread of Ennis’s image from high-end Cosmopolitan magazine to
the pull-out magazines in the Sun and London Evening Standard which
are high circulation tabloid newspapers, demonstrates the penetration
of brand Ennis as desirable, glamorous, feminine fashionista. The work
of racially branding her as Black-white ‘mixed race’ has already been
done so needs no repetition. Ennis’s body emblazoned on magazine
covers gives us the feeling that racial equality is part of the British
political, social, economic, affective and cultural landscape as we are
lulled into believing that its very ubiquity is a symbol of racial social
change. That is, if she can represent ‘us’ to ‘ourselves’ then the nation
is no longer trapped in raciology. However, if we look at the political
economy of ‘race’ we can see that ‘race’, gender, class, age, ability and
heterosexuality are part of the global market in Sable-Saffron Venus,

Black/white ‘mixed race’ bodies and post-race sensibilities, even while
racism remains. The necessity for the in-between, the ambiguous, pro-
jects a national anxiety with seeing ‘race’ but repressing such seeing
and, indeed, forgetting it.
Forgetful seeing means that the nation exists within ‘race’ melan-
cholia (Tate, 2010; Khanna, 2003; Cheng, 2001; Gilroy, 2004). Here, as
the nation projects its identity as tolerant, ‘post-race’ and multicultural
it has to engage in acts of swallowing whole that which goes counter
to its identity. So, in order for Ennis to be national icon within brand
GB it selectively forgets the ‘multattaroon’ (DeVere Brody, 1998), the
‘one drop rule’ of slavery and colonialism and the post-colonial ‘half
caste’. However, as is the case for all melancholic objects her muscles
and the skin which covers them continue to haunt the nation’s racial
imaginings of itself as they refuse abjection (Khanna, 2003; Gilroy,
2004; Cheng, 2001; Tate, 2009). We can see this in the everyday ‘race’
making which is carried out on and through Ennis’s body as no matter
how much the ‘post-race’ white eye is trained to see her as ambiguous
she cannot pass into whiteness. Her body is too affective. However,
the browning of the nation by the muscles and skin of Ennis as Sable-
Saffron Venus alter/native has implications for ‘post-race; aesthetic
politics as she has been passed into a new beauty category that has
been some time in the ascendency. That is, Black/white ‘mixed race’/
racially ambiguous.
This implicates a new mode of interpellation for her lighter-skinned
Black/white ‘mixed race’ body. As we know, historically, the Black
woman’s body is linked to the history of normative whiteness, for
instance as fear, desire, terror and fantasy, which lead to the ‘distor-
tional seeing’ of whiteness and through affect and discourse whiteness
objectifies the Black woman’s body (Yancy, 2008: xviii). What happens
discursively, affectively, politically, culturally, economically and aes-
thetically when the muscular Black-white ‘mixed race’ body is being
passed into a third form as in the case of Ennis? Alongside her racial
ambiguity which aids her being temporarily passed by whiteness with
provisos, she has been interpellated as patriot through her prominent
role in Team GB’s World and Olympic successes as seen in her being
awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE). She
has also been returned to feminine glamour from the location of the
masculinized athlete through her magazine covers and her continuing
work as the face of Olay and Banco Santander which has guaranteed
that her muscles have ceased to be a threat. Instead, they have become
the mark of a woman who has taken the ethic of care to heart, much
like Michelle O (Edgley, 2006; Tate, 2012).
Through white forgetful seeing, millionaire Ennis occupies a deracinated
positioning as an object to be consumed. This has meant that the white
gaze elides her Black/white ‘mixed racedness’ and makes her ‘race’ not
worthy of attention. Through the marking of her Black/white ‘mixed
racedness’ as un-noticeworthy, we see the possibility for contempt
seething beneath the surface of her being provisionally passed by white-
ness. Thus, Ennis continues to occupy the ‘not quite white’ location
prescribed by her ‘race’ and will be relegated to that space of otherness
when she is no longer useful to the nation.
Being named beautiful is an essential form of value as it can grant
power to those excluded from privilege (Edmonds, 2010). We can see
this in Ennis’s current wealth and social standing. The possibility for
power and privilege based on publicly acknowledged beauty helps
to explain why the lines of beautiful/ugly have been so prescribed in
terms of ‘race’. Here Black ancestry typically relegates one to ugliness in
beauty regimes centred on whiteness (Nuttall, 2006). As beauty is racial-
ized (Tate, 2009), Ennis’s body being placed as universally relevant for
the body of the nation through Olay, Santander, Jaguar, BA, magazine
covers and her place in the brand team GB, produces a question. That
is, ‘what is she?’ This is closely followed by the questions, ‘who can or
does she represent and who will identify with her?’
These questions arise because ‘race’ inhibits the transracial relational-
ity necessary for identification. In such transracial identification her
body has to be seen as extendable to whiteness so that young white
women can pass through her body as consumers. Such extension
towards and passing through the body of the ‘other’ would instantiate
a new ‘race’ performativity (Tate, 2005) in which racialized beauty iden-
tifications do not begin with whiteness as the norm. This would enable
a ‘browning’ of the nation, its passage beyond ‘race’ beauty regimes as
well as the removal of white beauty as the aesthetic ideal. However, at
best, what we have alongside the aesthetic ideal of whiteness is lighter-
skinned, racially ambiguous beauty as exotic, much as we had in colo-
nial times (Ali, 2005). Jessica Ennis’s body as commodity marketed to
a national/global audience does not negate the fact that Black/white
‘mixed race’ bodies continue to have an uneasy relationship with the
nation of which they are a part and from which they continue to be set
apart (Ellam, 2011). Her body wrapped in the Union Jack to mark her
Olympics victory makes us think about issues of equality and citizen-
ship as well as national aesthetics which continue to make whiteness
iconic. This is the work of Ennis’s muscular, lighter-skinned body as

Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native.
Conclusion
Heterosexuality has crafted various ideals of ‘race’, beauty and gender

into an idealized feminine form which repudiates the possibility of
muscles. To incorporate muscles into your body is to destabilize this
ideal and to place yourself as transgressive. As transgressive other the
only location available to you is that of ‘woman?’ Perhaps what makes
heterosexual women with muscles so unsettling is that they are estab-
lishing a new corporeal economy in which muscles that bulge have
begun to be seen as a possible part of the norm. These bodies also map
out women’s incorporation into the body politic on their own terms as
women who are in control rather than out of control of their bodies.
So, although the women discussed above exemplify traditional femi-
nine discourses of control of the body they control their bodies in ways
which run counter to this idea as they add bulk to their bodies.
As Black women who resist fatness and thinness they show us the
complex psychic interweaving of ‘race’, gender, class and sexuality in
the construction of bodies. The question for us is when there are con-
trolling images of women like Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Sable-Saffron
Venus, why do we have to choose to be any one of those? The reading
of muscles undertaken here reproduces their wearers as women pro-
foundly aware of the impact of their bodies on those around them and
that their bodies are the one sure place from which stereotypes can be
tackled. Women’s muscles, their bodies, become a location of critique
of the possible and expected from the margins of idealized femininity.
Their body work denies the cultural imperative of slenderness which
seems to be the preoccupation of other public women such as Oprah,
Tyra Banks and Janet Jackson who are represented as women constantly
struggling with being overweight.
Iconic muscular Black women are cannibalized by the white media
focus on their bodies, where cannibalism is ‘domination, fear, absorp-
tion, revulsion and dehumanization’ (Owens and Beistle, 2006: 207–8).
In this domination women are their bodies. If we look again at the
media assessments of the bodies of Williams, Obama, Brown and Ennis
we can see that we still live with an aesthetics which links back to slav-
ery and the defeminization of Black women’s muscularity. Perhaps this
explains why it is that Brown’s abdominals and Obama’s arms come
under such intense scrutiny from the white media as their body parts
assail their gaze. These parts are designated ‘not feminine’ and become
the locus of fascination whether as fear, disgust and/or contempt. These
women carry the burden of the differential meaning of whiteness and
femininity on their bodies and this is what we see being displayed in the
media coverage. Muscle removes women from hypersexualization and
produces something other, a third form, a Sable-Saffron Venus alter/
native which asserts its femininity against the grain of the norm. Let
us now turn to look at the pleasure politics of slimness and mulatticity.
5
Pleasure Politics: The Cult of
Celebrity, Mullatticity and Slimness
In contemporary culture white upper/middle-class celebrity women’s

‘race’ aesthetic power continues to be shown in the bone which juts out
of the skin, physical frailty and psychic vulnerability. However, Black-
white ‘mixed race’ women continue to represent sexual desire through
Sable-Saffron Venus’s curves, or assumed physical/ psychic sturdiness
and reproductive vigour. This chapter looks at the Black, lighter-skinned
celebrity body in the UK placed as thin (Thandie Newton) or representing
a voluptuous but flat-stomached slimness that is not size 0 (Alesha Dixon
and Beyoncé) in order to show that there is always already a corporeality
of white class and gender related to thinness, to visible bone but that this
is not exclusive to white women. The discussion questions how the Black-
white ‘mixed race’ celebrity woman’s body extends transracially through
British advertising.
After looking at whether or not Black women have disordered eating
the discussion moves to Beyoncé, the former face and hair of L’Oreal,
Alesha Dixon, the spokes-body/voice of UK Weight Watchers and for-
mer judge for ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, and
Thandie Newton, the face, skin and body of Olay, within the national
‘post-race’ politics of pleasure in which these women’s bodies bridge the
bodies of Black and white consumers through the social, economic and
cultural capitals of skin, size, class and celebrity. As such, all women are
asked to share the pleasure of beauty and slimness but it is now a body
shape that can be reinterpreted away from size 0. In terms of this Sable-
Saffron Venus alter/native intervention, the chapter examines the pos-
sibility of extension from Black to white bodies through identification
so that a process of catharsis incites transformation of post-racial white
guilt and shame because of racism to white pleasure because of what is
seen as tolerant inclusion. Pleasure emerges through Newton’s, Dixon’s
118
Mullatticity and Slimness 119
and Knowles’ space in the public sphere as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/

natives whose bodies stand in for that which is not desired and con-
stantly disavowed – the darker-skinned Black woman’s body – and the
fact of their very mixedness itself which provides proof of UK/US racial
tolerance. Their bodies show that lighter-skinned Black women can also
be the face of traditional white UK/US products. However, this has the
effect of simultaneously pointing to racism in advertising and continu-
ing mulatticity in the 21st century in terms of whose bodies represent
whom as well as making a claim for Olay, Weight Watchers, L’Oreal and
the nation as ‘post-race’ zones beyond the pull of compulsory raciology.
First, let us now turn to looking at racializing disordered eating.
Racializing disordered eating
There were many women who claimed not to eat anything apart from
the Eucharist and survive in the 13th–15th centuries. Many women
refused food in mediaeval Europe particularly between 1200 and
1500 when fasting for long periods was considered a female miracle
(Brumberg, 2000). In mediaeval times fasting and restricted eating was
a fundamental aspect of spirituality for women as there were very few
male saints who could not eat (Brumberg, 2000).These starving women
were regarded as saints and the best known was Catherine of Siena
(1347–80). She ate only a handful of herbs each day and shoved twigs
down her throat to induce vomiting so as to eject any other food she
was forced to eat (Brumberg, 2000). In the 13th century Mary of Orgnes
and Beatrice of Nazareth vomited when they smelled meat and their
throats swelled shut at the sight of food (Brumberg, 2000). Columba
of Rieti died of self-starvation in the 15th century. However, for Joan
Jacobs Brumberg (2000) this need not indicate anorexia nervosa as
there are two periods at least in Western civilization when there has
been female non-eating and control of appetite – 13th to 16th century
Catholicism, where not eating was linked to piety, and the post-indus-
trial period where not eating is a function of class, gender and family
relations as girls strive for the perfection of the thin physical ideal.
Doris Witt (2009) has developed a very insightful critique of feminist
writing on eating disorders by asking where African American women
were and how they were present in feminist work on eating disorders. In
Brumberg’s (2000) Fasting Girls she found that the sole entry was in the
index which read ‘Blacks as anorectics, 284n14’. Brumberg’s take-up of
the medical researcher George Hsu’s idea that young Black women are
protected by their culture from the negative self-image and pressure to
be slim faced by young middle-class white women with the conclusion

that ‘these data if correct, are telling evidence of the separateness of
black culture and white culture and their differential strengths’, is also
criticized by Witt (2009). For Witt, if Brumberg had pursued her unease
with the conflation of negative self-image and pressure to be slim she
would have had to look at the appetites, diets and bodies of African
American women. This would have collapsed the discourse of eating
disorders that has been very carefully constructed by seminal feminist
work and made it obvious that Black women ‘are not just an absence
in eating disorders but a constitutive absence’ (Witt, 2009: 244; 1999).
In her genealogy of anorexia nervosa Helen Mason’s (1998) concern
was looking at the social and cultural conditions that enabled anorexia
to become a distinct diagnostic category. Anorexia nervosa emerged as
a discourse in medicine in the 1870s almost simultaneously in England,
France and the United States (Brumberg, 2000). White women’s ‘nerves’
became ‘hypochondria’ and ‘hysteria’ (Mason, 1998). In hypochondria
nerves related to the stomach and hysteria initiated the feminization of
nerves and the pathologization of women. Anorexia was constituted as
a white feminine nervous problem through ‘the nervous woman’ at a
time when women’s status, rights and nature were contested (Mason,
1998; Brumberg, 2000). Since white woman was inherently pathologi-
cal she needed masculine medical supervision. Therefore, anorexia was
brought into existence as relevant for white women’s bodies before our
21st-century mass cultural focus on the disappearing white female body.
In the 20th century there have been various academic and medi-
cal discourses which have produced ‘anorexias’ and determined how
women and girls with eating problems should be viewed and diag-
nosed (Mason, 1998). Anorexia is not a fact or naturally occurring. It
is a discursively constructed diagnosis which has changed since it first
emerged in the 19th century in the work of Lasegne (1873), Gill (1874)
and de Berdt Hovell (1873) (Mason, 1998). Medical and psychological
discourses reify anorexia in a context in which the distinction between
‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ eating, which is at the heart of diagnosis, is
problematized by the prevalence of body dissatisfaction, dieting and
weight concerns amongst all ‘Western’ women (Mason, 1998). The food
refusal of starving saints as holy mutated into anorexia as pathological
through secularization and medicalization (Brumberg, 2000). By the
late 20th century anorexia became ‘a secular addiction to a new kind of
perfectionism, one that links personal salvation to the achievement of
an external body configuration rather than an internal spiritual state’
(Brumberg, 2000: 10).
According to Brumberg (2000) 90–95 per cent of the anorexics in

the US are young, female, majority white and from middle and upper-
class families. Anorexia has become an ‘in’ diagnosis amongst affluent
young women and adolescents and eating disorders are big business in
the USA. However, Brumberg also states that anorexia is not a problem
among contemporary African Americans or Chicanos and neither was
it a conspicuous problem among first and second generation white
minority migrants such as Eastern European Jews. Claiming that African
Americans are not affected by anorexia erases Black women from
‘Western’ culture and its prevailing discourses. However, Brumberg goes
on to say that increased vulnerability to anorexia occurs as these groups
become socially mobile. In her analysis class is more important than
‘race’ or ethnicity and the implication is that Black women who want
to remain anorexia and bulimia free should not aim for upward social
mobility. Brumberg also locates anorexia geographically within the US,
Western Europe, Japan and other areas which are ‘undergoing rapid
Westernization’ (Brumberg, 2000: 16). The mention of Westernization
locates anorexia as a ‘Western’ issue and its subjects as ‘Western’ or
‘Westernizing’. So anorexia is a Western, middle- and upper-class prob-
lem and ‘race’ is not significant. If this is so what can we make of the
fact that young white women have this disordered eating? Brumberg
makes it clear that for her ‘race’ or ethnicity does not relate to white-
ness because it is the ‘race’/ethnicity which needs not say its name as
the silent, invisible norm against which all else is judged. At the same
time she does not mention parts of the world which have always been
of the West and intimately connected to Global North Western domina-
tion (Europe and the USA), that is, Latin America and the Caribbean.
In feminist literature on anorexia and bulimia there is a division
between those who speak about eating disorders and those who focus
on eating problems. This distinction is important because the first
equates women’s approaches to eating linked to individual psychic
conflict and women’s self-absorption while the latter places eating
within culture. In her chapter on Hunger Naomi Wolf (1991) speaks at
length about the modern thinning of the feminine in a cultural context
in which female thinness is not about beauty but about an obsession
with female obedience. If women are too emaciated by anorexia and
bulimia to think about anything but dieting and food then the gains
of feminism will perish and feminist politics will fail. Orbach (2006)
continued the focus on culture when she maintained that patriarchy
is at the heart of women’s eating problems and pioneered second-wave
feminism’s exploration of dieting and obsession as normative female
behaviours (Witt, 2009). However, both feminists ignored women of

colour and Black women.
Other feminists also saw the pressure to be thin as a form of cultural
gynophobia. For example, Kim Chernin (1981) noted that there has
been a patriarchal backlash against women’s increasing economic, legal
and sexual power. This backlash demands that women are thin and
childlike to decrease the threat to patriarchal dominance. For Chernin
(1981: 94), ‘large size, maturity, voluptuousness, massiveness, strength,
and power are not permitted if we wish to conform to our culture’s
ideal’. It is clear here that the ‘we’ of whom she speaks is white given
that ‘strength’ and ‘power’ have historically been attributed to Black
women, particularly during enslavement in the USA, Latin America and
the Caribbean in order to construct iconic frail whiteness. Further, she
‘never explicitly addresses the fact that her model for the anorectic is
an adolescent white female […] Chernin even includes a chapter [...]
called “The Matriarch” that invokes a mythic past of female power and
has no reference to race’ (Witt, 2009: 244). As we saw in the chapter on
fat the demand for thinness highlighted here is upheld by a weight loss
industry and medical profession which sees fat as unhealthy and to be
eliminated, as well as a labour market and advertising sector based on
the thin ideal of femininity. In the United States this is aligned with an
insurance industry based on medically prescribed standards of a healthy
body size (Thompson, 1994).
As these examples illustrate, seminal feminist scholarship on eating
problems focused on gender to the exclusion of ‘race’, sexuality, age and
class, creating a false universalism (Thompson, 1994). The link between
patriarchal backlash and women’s social status relates to white, middle-
class, heterosexual, able-bodied, young women. This again makes
bulimia and anorexia amongst Black and working-class women, for
example, invisible even though sexism is not the only cause of eating
problems (Thompson, 1994). We should take it as a given that thinness
is not universal or equally far-reaching across race/ethnicity. However,
it is also the case that Black women are not unaffected by or uninter-
ested in the culture of thinness. Indeed, for Margaret Bass (2001) in cel-
ebrating food and body fat, Black culture can provide some protection
against the internalization of thinness but this can also disguise eating
problems. Bass’s point is well worth noting because of the widespread
stereotype about Black culture which would lead us to say that only
white women restrict their food intake or throw up their food.
However, let’s look at the example of Tyra Banks in order to get
another perspective in terms of this cherished stereotype. Tyra, the
host of America’s Next Top Model, made headlines when she went from
9 stone 5 pounds to 11 stone 7 pounds and told reporters to ‘kiss my
fat ass’. By October 2009, she weighed 9 stone 5 pounds again and was
a size 8 after she went on a diet with her ‘food obsessed friends’ to see
who could get fitter fastest. She ‘ditched the ice-cream and salad with
croutons and bacon bits’ (Look, 26 October 2009: 28). She attributed her
weight loss to both a change of diet and exercise but as someone who
can afford it she could also have had liposuction to sculpt her body and
weight loss surgery to curb her appetite. The example of Tyra Banks
shows that there is no monolithic Black community so there is no single
idea within it about weight, size, shape or eating (Thompson, 1994), as
well as the fact that celebrity necessitates weight and size consciousness
transracially.
The stereotype that only white women have eating problems is very
pervasive even with examples like Tyra Banks and Janet Jackson. Indeed
Closer (2 October 2009), a weekly magazine in the UK, had a picture of
Posh Spice on the cover, who at 6 stone 12 pounds was finally being
publicly called anorexic. Again seeing anorexia as a ‘white woman’s
issue’, means that women of colour and Black women are not diagnosed
and that Black women are somehow located outside of society’s norm of
slenderness (Thompson, 1994). White women as thin means in US cul-
ture that Black women are unattractive Mammies who can’t be slim or
are not affected by the pressure to be thin (Thompson, 1994). In the UK
Black women are similarly positioned once again outside of the pressure
to be thin as they are popularly constructed as voluptuous, ‘naturally
slim’ or athletically muscular. In Unbearable Weight Susan Bordo (1993)
highlighted the idea that the hegemony of Western culture and upward
class mobility has produced increasing pressure on Black women in
the United States to become slender, to emulate white middle-class
femininity. The link between class mobility and thinness naturalizes
working-class Black female appetite. This makes Mammy a white origi-
nated stereotype of the fat Black woman which is hyper-visible in the
spectacle of Black female corpulence in the USA. However, many African
American women have appropriated the large Black female body as a
sign of political protest (Witt, 2009; Shaw, 2006).
The mammy figure is not so deeply rooted in the UK psyche but there
is a view that the Black community appreciates fat women and finds fat
a sign of sexual attractiveness. There is also an array of body types from
slim to fat which we again see as giving the impression of a healthy
approach to size/shape. This does not mean that this has emerged with-
out interaction with the wider society. If, for example, we look at past
covers of Pride or Arise magazines in the UK we would be hard pressed

to find a fat Black woman. This is telling if we take into account that
the Black community supposedly lauds fatness and appreciates curves.
Of course, we could say that these magazines aimed at a Black audi-
ence have fallen prey to the dictates of white slenderness, much as we
used to say that magazines which had only lighter-skinned models had
capitulated to whiteness and lacked any appeal to ‘authentic’ Black
people. However, again we should look a bit further back historically so
as to see that Black body norms are not recent. Caribbean enslavement
produced its own set of bodily aesthetics in which the enslaved woman
was the other of fragile white femininity which was the classed, ‘raced’
and heterosexual norm. The nearer one got to that particular norm the
more beautiful one became. As Shaw (2006) shows, however, the desire to
become a fat Black woman also co-existed with slenderness because
during slavery food was scarce and this was a way of showing both pros-
perity and attractiveness. Within the Caribbean there have always been
multiple body norms because if we see fatness as the epitome in terms
of Black aesthetics then women would have had bodies at various stages
of being and becoming fat. In the Caribbean, as elsewhere, the fat/thin
binary and its aesthetics is also impacted on by class. In Jamaica, for
example, it is among the working classes that fatness is feted – as we can
see in the use of the ‘fowl pill’ to gain weight by adherents of dancehall
culture – whilst what is seen as healthy curves is a middle- and upper-
class aesthetic. Slenderness has been on Western Black women’s agendas
since slavery whether as a sign of bodily beauty or lack, although what
was once slender might now be regarded as decidedly plump.
We can see if we look at beauty pageants in Jamaica that the beauti-
ful body still has slender curves. As Rochelle Rowe (2009: 44) states,
the ‘selected beauty queens were all, unsurprisingly, slim and petite
in frame. The array of slim-figured women in identical poses […] sug-
gested a universal beauty standard to which all Jamaican women could
conform and that […] the differently raced ethnic groups of Jamaica
could assimilate to modernity’. Unless we believe that Jamaicans are
all naturally slim we can see that Jamaican women were in control of
their appetites in the early 20th century. Even within the Miss Jamaica
Nation in 1964 which rivalled Miss Jamaica and was opposed to mim-
icking white beauty and instead asserted pride in African features, the
contestants would also have been slim. We could say at this point that
this is because the beauty queens were chosen either to compete on a
global stage or using aesthetics which were marked by the white slender
body norm. However, this would erase local body size/shape variety
and aesthetics. In these aesthetics it could be argued that the fat Black
woman’s body as a sign of working-class status was used to bring the
slim, darker-skinned/ lighter-skinned/white beauty queen into being.
Thus, in the Caribbean as in the UK/US, Black fat women’s bodies have
this productive performative function.
In the UK the coexistence of Black fat as a sexualized sign of health,
prosperity and beauty versus Black slimness as beautiful and sexualized
and their mutually constitutive nature have a long tradition drawing
from the Caribbean context. The development of these body norms in
the Caribbean has occurred within a transracial-transcultural contact
which still exists today in which Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and the United States have been and continue to be constituent forces in
determining what counts as Black women’s bodies and what will be recog-
nized as such. However, notice that I said ‘slim’ not ‘thin’. The calendars
of Caribbean Fashion Week show what is meant by this distinction as all
the models are slim and flat stomached but not a bone is in sight.
The governmentality of visible white bone has been with us for some
time and this is especially the case if one looks at eating problems.
Through anorexia and bulimia women mould their bodies to standards
created by designers, advertisers and celebrities like Victoria Beckham,
Lindsay Lohan, Cheryl Cole, Princess Diana and Nicole Richie. These
women are not usually seen by the media as having an eating disor-
der just as ‘frail’/‘troubled’/‘over-worked’/‘out of control’/‘unhappy’.
Unfortunately, non-celebrities are seen to have some psychological
inadequacy if they are bulimic or anorexic and as the cause of their own
troubles (Thompson, 1994). This belittles the ‘victims’ who are assumed
to be white, heterosexual and middle class whilst excluding lesbians,
women of colour, transgender and working-class women who have
disordered eating. In her in-depth interviews with 18 Latina, African-
American and white women both lesbian and straight, sociologist Becky
Thompson (1994) found that the origins of eating problems have little
to do with vanity or obsession with appearance. Rather, eating problems
begin as survival strategies in response to racism, sexism, homophobia,
classism, the stress of acculturation and emotional, physical and sexual
abuse (Thompson, 1994). Thus, Thompson asserts that eating problems
are logical creative responses to trauma. On a political level she notes
that bingeing, starving, purging will continue as long as injustice per-
sists. The answer to the question ‘are there Black anorexics and bulim-
ics?’ must be ‘yes’ but let us look at this further.
Are there Black bulimics and anorexics?
In the Global North West we do not read about fasting Black women but
instead we are presented with the representation of ‘fattening houses’
as in Pride magazine’s November, 2009 international report ‘Dying to be
fat’ in which in Mauritania girls as young as 10 are force-fed in order to
create the flesh which men find erotic and comforting. Shaw (2006) also
talks about fattening houses as being part of a revered African tradition
in which fat women are feted and slimness is viewed with contempt.
However, in ‘Western’ contexts eating disorders are seen in all ethnic
groups but there are differences across groups in clinical manifestation
and prevalence (Waller et al., 2009). For example, higher rates of eating
disorders have been reported in young British Asian women than their
white counterparts. However, there is a substantial under-detection
of eating disorder cases in primary and secondary care and this could
explain the cross-group differences as well as the under-representation
of ethnic minorities in eating disorder units (Waller et al., 2009). In
their cohort study Waller et al. (2009) considered whether referrals to
two local eating disorders units in a multi-ethnic urban catchment area
in the United Kingdom reflected the local population, whether compa-
rable diagnoses were given to patients from different ethnic groups and
whether comparable treatment was offered to patients with different
ethnicities. They found that the number of white patients was dispro-
portionately large relative to the local population whereas the number
of patients from all other ethnicities is low compared to the local popu-
lation. Therefore, whites are more likely to be referred.
Diagnosis also differed significantly across ethnic groups with Black
and minority ethnic patients being more likely to be diagnosed with
bulimia and the white group more likely to have a non-diagnosable
eating disorder although they were treated as if they had an eating psy-
chopathology that caused functional impairment (for example, extreme
fear of weight gain, body shape concerns or bulimic behaviours) (Waller
et al., 2009). The proportion of Black and minority ethnic women with
a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa was relatively high compared with the
prevalence rates reported for Black populations in other cultures. The
reason for this could be that in the area studied there is a large Indian
Subcontinent population and it has been suggested that this group has
a relatively higher proportion of eating disorders even compared to the
white population (Waller et al., 2009). As Black and minority ethnic
patients are referred less it seems that cases are not being identified
in primary care and not being referred through to specialist services.
For example, African Caribbeans are under-represented by about 70 per

cent. Black and minority ethnic women were more likely than whites
to be diagnosed as suffering from bulimia nervosa but this might be an
artefact of the referral process where clear cases are sent for specialist
care. Although ethnicity impacted on referral, treatment was compa-
rable across all groups. However, clinicians might continue to be influ-
enced by the stereotype of the eating disorder patient as white and will
be less likely to ask other women the relevant questions (Waller et al.,
2009). Thus, far from being a white only problem anorexia and bulimia
are transracial issues.
For Mervar Nasser (2009) eating disorders were thought to be unique
to ‘Western cultures’ an idea substantiated by their supposed ‘absence’
elsewhere. ‘Westernization’ and identification with ‘Western’ cultural
norms has since been seen as the reason for the ‘spread of eating dis-
orders’. However, what needs to be looked at are the forces behind
Westernization, for example, increased consumerism, individualism,
changing gender roles and increased individual alienation (Nasser,
2009). The individual had to resort to ‘the body’ as a new medium of
expression of cultural change and distress so eating disorders should be
seen as a socio-pathology which is a marker of transition and a symptom
of cultures in a process of change (Nasser, 2009). While it is noteworthy
that Nasser breaks down the monolith of Westernization, to talk about
socio-pathology is somewhat troubling and we again see ‘Western’ ideas
about the impact of social change being used to understand change
elsewhere, without necessarily understanding the differences that exist
across so many different contexts. Further, as cultures around the world
have never been static but have always been in a process of change,
what is it about Westernization specifically that affects appetites?
Changing gender roles have been looked at for their impact on
appetite in feminist work in terms of backlash. What was not looked
at to any great extent was the place of Black women in this equation.
During enslavement in the English-speaking Caribbean, Black women
were units of labour in the field alongside men; they also reproduced
the enslaved labour force, bore the master’s children and cared for the
master’s household. The idea of ‘changing gender roles’ cannot relate
to these women, therefore, or to Caribbean societies in general as ‘race’
and status kept them outside of normative white-English inspired gen-
der roles. It is interesting that individualism and individual alienation
are always seen to be part of the price that societies have to pay for
‘progress’. It is unclear, though, what individualism really means. The
assumption can be made that what Nasser means by this is that these
Westernizing societies are moving from being based on ‘the communal’

to being focused on nuclear families and the personal achievements of
individuals within them, which is where alienation emerges. Why is it
that the assumption is always made that ‘out there’ are zones which are
not of the West where pre-industrialization communal life still exists. It
is almost as if we need this romance of ‘the communal’ as the cure for
our alienating existences and we go in search of this communal when-
ever we go to non-Global North Western zones to get in touch with our
feelings, to heal, to become whole. We need this collective fiction about
the rest of the world as totally different from ‘us’ but now being at risk
because ‘they’ are allowing creeping Westernization to occur.
Why is the individual turning to the body in these contexts seen as
a new medium for expressing cultural change and distress which leads
to eating disorders? Have Black and minority ethnic people around the
world always been alienated from their bodies too? These are interesting
questions because as the binary to whiteness, Black and minority ethnic
people around the world have been constructed as only bodies whether
as labouring, sexualized, or reproductive, for example. The space of the
mind was the preserve of whiteness. Surely it must be the white turn to
the body which is being spoken about by Nasser as Black and minority
ethnic people have always been bodies which have been able to express
cultural change and distress as they have been constructed as outside
of white civility constraints? Turning to consumerism, we can say that
it makes sense that media has an impact and that the ready-to-wear
market will affect size norms. As we know, though, size varies across the
world so we cannot assume that one size fits all in terms of aesthetics or
measurement. For example, US and designer size 0 has not yet become
commonplace on high streets in the UK and sizing does not go up in
increments of 1, nor is there as big a plus size range as in the USA. What
is interesting in Nasser’s viewpoint, though, is that we can see how it is
that the social psychology of eating disorders as a social pathology in
the Global North West can be explicated.
Ellen Willemsen and Hans Hoek (2006) state that reports of anorexia
nervosa in non-Western countries have been published since the 1980s
but although binge eating and purging are reported among Black women
and white women with at least equal frequency anorexia is rarely found
among Black women. In their ‘comprehensive epidemiological study’
conducted on the island of Curaçao in the Caribbean, they claim that
anorexia occurred among white women and women of mixed ethnic
origin and no cases were found among Black women. They report
on the case of one Black woman from Curaçao, who on living in the
Netherlands realized that slimness was attractive and became anorexic.

They made this claim even though they acknowledged that within her
own island context she had lost weight to become less attractive after
breaking up with her partner. For Willemsen and Hoek this case high-
lights the contribution of the socio-cultural influences of local norms
on body size and shape to the development of anorexia (Willemsen and
Hoek, 2006). Their findings are consistent with the assumption that
acculturation to white middle-class values are a risk factor for anorexia
in Black communities because of the internalization of the Western
thinness ideal.
What it also shows is that discomfort with body shape and size and
restricted eating occurs in the Caribbean context without it being called
anorexia or bulimia by these experts. It is merely seen as losing weight
to be less heterosexually attractive. What makes one event disordered
eating and another just something that can happen when you lose out
in love? The other point is, why wasn’t she affected by the anorexia
among her fellow white and ‘mixed race’ country women? It doesn’t
make sense that it wasn’t until she went to the Netherlands that she saw
that slenderness was attractive and became anorexic. We also cannot
assume that within Curaçao the white, ‘mixed race’ and Black popula-
tion are so absolutely segregated from each other that body norms vary
to this extent. Also what about the impact of Westernization that is
always spoken about? Does it only begin once she is in the Netherlands?
This article leaves more questions than it provides answers. Perhaps,
again, what we are seeing is a reflection of the existing ‘truth’ in the
Global North West that Black women do not have eating disorders
because their community gives them protection from this. What we
should think about here is that the lack of a prevalence of eating disor-
der discourses, ready-made diagnoses, a medical industry geared up to
dealing with obesity, anorexia and bulimia as well as institutionalized
beauty empires, for example, on a local level can affect what is seen as
pathological and what is not.
In a Guardian article (7 April 2009) Lola Adesioye declares that Black
girls in the UK have body issues too, as not all of them like to be booty-
licious, so disordered eating is not relevant only for white women.
She states that while white women celebrities starve, Black and Latina
women are lauded for their curves (for example, Beyoncé Knowles and
JLo). One reason for this could be that as racialized women they are
constructed as nearer to nature so that as the possibility of beauty is
removed from them so are the constraints of thin celebrity status. Being
‘bootylicious’ does not mean being fat but being curvaceous in the
way white women like Marilyn Monroe were in the 1950s. At any rate,
for Adesioye the popular conception is that Black women love their
hips, thighs and bottoms unconditionally because beauty is not just
based on body size but on how women carry themselves and are styled
and a more ‘thick-set body’ is seen as desirable. However, all of these
taken-for-granted ideas are changing and becoming far more complex
(Adesioye, 2009).
The same complexity is the case in the USA as shown in a study by
economists from the University of Southern California, Michelle Goeree,
John Ham and Daniela Iorio. In a ten-year study of more than 2,300 girls
in schools in California, Ohio and Washington DC they found that:
a) Black girls were fifty per cent more likely than white girls to be bulimic
b) Girls from the lowest income families were more likely to experience
bulimia than their wealthier peers
c) Black girls had more severe bulimia than their white counterparts.
(Medical News Today, 2009)
These US findings seem to show bulimia as most definitely an issue

of low income as well as ‘race’. One is left to wonder, though, if the
‘race’ finding is an artefact of diagnosis as in the UK study or a ‘fact’. If
bulimia is expected because we know that Black women and girls are
more bulimic then it will be found. It does not make sense that anorexia
does not occur among Black women and girls as this study seems to
imply. In a study in South Africa, eating disorders were said to be on the
rise among Zulu girls in 2002. This study was done by the Universities
of Northumbria (UK) and Zululand (South Africa). The rise in anorexia
was blamed on girls wanting to be less like their mothers and more
like ‘Western girls’, resorting to diet pills and laxatives to control their
weight (BBC News, 2002). Weight control through diet pills and purging
with laxatives imply both anorexia and bulimia within this population.
Cultural assimilation was also looked at by Kay Abrams et al.’s (1992)
study of Black and White female college students in the United States.
Their study was the first to provide evidence that restrictive eating disor-
ders among Black women were related to their degree of assimilation to
‘mainstream culture’. This study assumes that Black and White women
live in segregated worlds in the USA. There is considerable assimila-
tion by both groups to social norms even given the continuing racism
in the US. Perhaps what the authors are referring to here is the social
mobility issue which has been noted by numerous studies. According
to Debra Franko (2007) bulimia nervosa and binge eating is higher in
African American women and Latina women. However, her work finally
affirms anorexia in Black women when she states that the age of onset
for anorexia nervosa in African American women is 15.9 years. Further
differences were reported in rates of anorexia between Caribbean Blacks
and African Americans which reminds us of the importance of look-
ing within racial groups rather than just between them when looking
at eating disorders (Franko, 2007). Binge eating disorder occurs most
frequently as a diagnosis among ethnically diverse populations in the
USA; women are less likely to be referred for eating disorders and detec-
tion of eating disorders in women of colour is problematic (Franko,
2007). These findings echo those of the UK study looked at earlier and
intimate that there is already a predetermined diagnosis that is circulat-
ing about Black women as bulimic so we are gripped by a self-fulfilling
prophecy. ‘Black women as bulimic’ continues even in the face of other
studies such as Taylor et al. (2007) which found that African Americans
more than Caribbean Blacks are at risk of anorexia with a younger age
of onset than the general US population and that binge eating had the
highest age of onset (22.75 years). African Americans do have anorexia
and for Taylor et al. (2007), the era, social climate and milieu in which
a person is raised impact on the risk of developing eating disorders.
Indeed, Ruth Striegel Moore et al. (1995) showed that from the late
1990s at least the era, social climate and milieu was one in which there
was a greater drive for thinness among young Black girls in the USA.
This was an interesting finding at the time and still continues to be so
given the higher prevalence of Black obesity and the assumed lower
prevalence of anorexia among Black women. If African Americans have
anorexia and the drive to be thin then Black people in the rest of the
Global North West cannot be exempt from this as the era in which we
live is one in which bone is becoming more and more visible.
Bulimia and anorexia in Black women means that we have two fetish
objects in play which are both the focus of revulsion and attraction:
fat and bone. Within Black communities ‘fat’ and ‘slim’ as objects of
aesthetics and eroticism have never been difficult to reconcile and
they have always co-existed. What is difficult to reconcile is bone and
its 2013/14 manifestation in the popularity of the thigh gap, which is
thought to be unattractive on the Black woman’s body. There is a dual
economy of the spectacle of bone at work in which whether from the
Black or white communities we look compulsively at increasing bone
as the skin shrinks back to its framework exposing the impossibility of
assimilation into femininity or heterosexual desire. Like muscle, bone is
a fetish which is both desired and feared on Black bodies. It is endowed
with sexual significance at the same time as it represents a threat to the

social skin of Black femininity which sees itself as more amply propor-
tioned in opposition to whiteness and a white femininity which has to
continue to shrink even further in order to be thin in the face of Black
anorexia.
What is interesting about this very brief look at eating disorders in
Black women is that they are recently being looked at by researchers
with the same discourses on eating disorders as everyone else. If the
woman from Curaçao became anorexic, South African girls display
anorexic behaviour in fear of fat by taking diet pills and some studies
show that Black women are anorexic, why do the medical profession
and academics reproduce their constructed myth that Black women
are bulimic and not anorexic? Is there any more honour in one eating
disorder rather than the other? I wonder if white women as anorexics
is linked to the starving saints as holy and bulimic Black women who
binge and then vomit or purge are linked to the sins of gluttony, narcis-
sism and waste? It would not be the first time that there has been a (mis)
use of Black women’s bodies and appetites to shore up whiteness and
its normalized certainties. Princess Diana stated that she was bulimic
at various points in her life so if one woman can confess that must
mean that there are many white women out there who also have the
same eating problem. In the same way there are also Black anorexics.
However, Black obesity continues to be focused on whilst the fetishiza-
tion of white bone continues unabated even whilst it is clear that there
are Black binge eaters, bulemics and anorexics as these are equal oppor-
tunity disordered eating conditions. This leads us to thinking about
mulatticity, celebrity, slimness and pleasure.
Mulatticity and celebrity
The invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by the sub-Saharan Almoravids in

1086 and the existence of the Córdoba Caliphate for several centuries in
what is now Spain has led José F. Buscaglia-Salgado (2003: 79) to claim:
The mulatto world also has its origins in the Iberian contact zone.
In fact, the practices and realities of mestizaje in the New World were
so far predated by the more ancient practice of mulataje in the Old
World that we can speak of a Euro-mulatto (Spaniard).
Transracial relationships were common in al-Andalus and in Christian

kingdoms because of the slave trade conducted by Castilians, Portuguese
and Genovese in North and West Africa where the mulatto was first
named (Buscaglia-Salgado, 2003). The etymology of ‘mulatto’ could
also be Arabic as in muwallad – the offspring of Arab and non-Arab –
but the consensus today is that it is from the Latin or Romance mula
(mule). This is similar to the Arabic which originally meant a hybrid
animal. Much before the fall of Granada in the Reconquista, mulatto
was in common usage to describe someone with black and white
parentage. Mulatto has never been used to describe a specific colour
of skin but an epidermal colour range which marks one’s lesser social
standing (Buscaglia-Salgado, 2003). This inability to stabilize ‘mulatto’
as skin means that it stands in opposition to the necessity for fixity
which is instantiated in the coloniality of power. Thus, within the
coloniality of power the mulatto has been made to either practise the
movement of being towards Blackness or whiteness, whilst being kept
apart from either category (Buscaglia-Salgado, 2003). Two centuries
before Columbus’s voyage, Blacks, mulattoes, Jews, Muslims, Gypsies
and Castilians walked Seville’s streets and the oldest surviving Sevillean
religious brotherhood – the Cofradia de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles
which dates back to the 14th century – was exclusively Black until the
18th century (Buscaglia-Salgado, 2003). Portuguese expansion of the
slave trade into the Gulf of Guinea meant that Seville was the main
Castilian port for slave purchase and distribution. In 1565 about 7 per
cent of Seville’s residents were slaves, free blacks and mulattoes, who
along with their descendants were scorned as vicious, barbaric, criminal
and irrational (Buscaglia-Salgado, 2003).
The ‘mulatto’ has a long presence in the European construction of
otherness because of its refusal to be kept apart and threat to undo
the framework of the coloniality of power where blood fraction was
very carefully noted, named and enforced to keep whiteness pure.
This is shown very clearly in a depiction of Mexico’s ‘races’ which I
saw in a Banomex exhibition of Pinturas de Las Castas in Mexico City
in July 2009. I found it fascinating because of the clearly elaborated
idea of racial mixture and what was produced with which degree of
Black, indigenous and white mixing. For example, ‘negro y Española sale
mulato, Negro y India sale lobo, Español y India sale mestizo, Indio y mestiza
sale coyote, Español y mulata sale morisco, Español y marisca sale albino,
Español y albina nace torna atrás, morisco con Española sale chino, chino
con India sale saltá atrás, salta atrás con mulata sale lobo’. Racial and gen-
dered terror of mixture is clearly shown where a society takes so much
effort to show who is not white because of blood and gender and who
are the mestizos. Superiority is asserted in terms of those constructed
as lesser because of ‘racial mixing’ and the superiority of white male

blood over that of their female counterparts, as they are cast out and
vilified. I find the figure of the albina and the torna atrás fascinating.
The albina is the threat to the white nation as she has the potential to
produce a throw-back, a much more clearly Black offspring, so she is a
figure of disgust in waiting, as she is the ultimate pollutant, the hidden
threat which makes its appearance when it is already too late to react.
Since what comes out of her womb is the defiled offspring of a white
man because of ‘her blood’ both the torna atrás and the albina are seen
in disgust related ways as defiled or abhorrent. This disgust arises from
fear because of the risk of contagion of the white social skin. Further,
with all the dividing lines in place in the Pintura de Las Castas we can
see that feelings of disgust can be projected onto the in-between which
is cast as dirty, decadent, immoral, dangerous and fearsome.
The mulatto was already well understood within Black Atlantic
cultural traffic in the British Empire focused on the reproduction of
Englishess as white male subjectivity. Indeed, in the 1860s a range of
discourses promulgated the miscegenated couple as a Black woman
and a white man because of its desirability for economic gain as it was
seen as fecund whilst the reverse was seen as sterile (DeVere Brody,
1998). When the mulatto is classified as in-between, hybrid-octoroon,
quadroon, quinteroon, this confirms the racial taxonomy and the pos-
sibility of white purity as light/white skin is imagined as something
superficial because of the inheritance of impurity through Black blood
(DeVere Brody, 1998). Following Jennifer DeVere Brody (1998: 17–18)
I would like to use the word ‘mulattaroon’ to stand in for a figure
which is an ‘unreal, impossible ideal whose corrupted and corrupting
constitution inevitably causes conflicts in narratives that attempt to
promote purity […as woman] she must be either black or white-never
a subject in-between […] [because] her own overtly hybrid roots recall
the miscegenated borders of the culture itself’. This is where we see the
subversion of established epidermal orders by Beyoncé, Alesha Dixon
and Thandie Newton as they point out the tenuous racial, gendered,
purity boundaries which exist through white pleasure in identifying
with them as celebrities.
‘Celebrity’ derives from the 19th century and continues to be linked
to the rise of capitalism. Celebrity is capitalism’s product because of
the evolution of public visibility through the rise of the mass media
and transformations in how personal achievement is judged (Holmes
and Redwood, 2006). Fame is now democratized but there is still a
hierarchy of fame as we can see in the phrase ‘A-list’. For Su Holmes
and Sean Redwood (2006) adulation, identification and emulation

of the famous are key elements in celebrity culture. In contemporary
society, where being famous seems to give enormous material, social,
cultural and psychic value, we desire fame, stars and celebrification so
that if one is not famous one becomes a fan that celebrates the famous
and co-creates the fame of celebrities through fandom practices such as
purchasing their perfume, getting their ‘look’ through hair, make-up,
clothes and jewellery and being avid followers (Holmes and Redwood,
2003). If it is the case that we are atomized individuals who reach out
for idealized celebrities in order to engage in a healing process directed
by the self, based on developing ‘intimacy’ with the celebrity, we can
see how the once undesirable mulattaroon body can become a site of
pleasure. This body as celebrity is an affective force for attachment to
itself and others as fans pass through the very body of the mulattaroon
to become other than they once were, to find themselves anew. Such
affective attachments to mulattaroon corporeality illustrate the social,
political, cultural and psychic value of a skin which looks Black-white
‘mixed’, as does that of Knowles, Dixon and Newton, and its impact on
public consciousness.
This trio is interesting because they put into retirement the hack-
neyed trope of the ‘tragic mulatta’, that feminized, pathological object
of the white imagination, who like Peola in Imitation of Life (1959, direc-
tor Douglas Sirk), hates Blackness, desires whiteness but fails to pass and
has to return to that which she despises. These women as ‘mixed’ form
part of a Black Atlantic desiring machine which places their looks, skin,
bodies and shapes as highly exoticized, glamorous and transgressive.
They have not found a post-racial home as respectable bodies/national
citizens but are the archetypes for the changing Sable-Saffron Venus as
desired. Thus, the mullatticity of celebrity is what is significant here and
the possibilities it presents for white identification and passing as ‘post-
race’, because these women’s bodies have been made to stand in for all
women’s bodies whilst being racially branded.
The terror and fascination of Sasha Fierce aka Beyoncé Knowles is a
case in point. Her fascination crosses racial lines and that fascination
deepens with her increasing global fame. She added to her fascination
for us when she became the aka Sasha Fierce, her stage persona which
she said took over when she was onstage. She ceased to be Beyoncé
Knowles, Mrs Carter, a Christian, hard-nosed business woman and
became almost nude Sasha who displayed her cleavage, bottom, legs
and is the hyper-Sapphire/Jezebel. In ‘Single Ladies (Put a ring on it)’
(2008) for example, we see the emphasis on her gyrating body parts
and those of the backing dancers as very specifically placed on the

bottom and legs as she says ‘If you want it you gotta put a ring on it’.
We are left with no doubt that the ‘it’ being spoken about is the body
and the monogamous heterosexuality that wanting ‘it’ implies. We are
also left with the morality that as women who want more we should
hold out and not give in so easily to the abuse of our bodies and emo-
tions by male sexual predators. Her ‘all you single ladies’ is spoken to
a straight audience so no fear is felt there, no-one has to be appeased.
However, as Sapphire/Jezebel she will never be taken home to meet your
mother, she is too much physically and too emotionally demanding.
Her hypersexualization is a threat to monogamous heterosexuality and
it is this that is both feared and the root of Sasha’s fascination. As she
reproduces the Sable-Saffron Venus/Sapphire/Jezebel on stage through
Sasha she replays the white history of sexual and social fear of the Black
temptress which sticks to her very body and makes her more fearsome
than other women. The historical fear of Sable-Saffron Venus/Sapphire/
Jezebel remains alive in the present through traces of past racialized
constructions of Black women’s bodies and psyches so that white
bodies, psyches and societies remain under threat from Black women’s
bodies. Within this economy of racialized fear Beyoncé chose to con-
struct a stage persona to separate herself from the sexualized ‘race threat’
that is Sasha. She describes herself as a business-woman who wants to be
taken seriously so the separation from herself as performer, as product to
be consumed, inevitably had to be made. We cannot do business with
that which we fear though we can have desire for them. There is no
doubt that many white women and men desire Sasha but it is her very
untouchability so carefully established through tracing Sable-Saffron
Venus/Sapphire/Jezebel that reproduces her as fetish object, to be looked
at, loved secretly, but never possessed and as such the endless source of
white fascination.
In Sasha Fierce we also see the curvaceous, excessive, ‘bootylicious’
body that must be possessed to be a Black feminist glamazon. We see
this in her music videos such as ‘Telephone’ in which she appears
as a feature artist with Lady Gaga and ‘Why don’t you love me?’.
‘Telephone’ (written by Lady Gaga and Jonas Åkerlund, directed by
Jonas Åkerlund and starring Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Tyrese Gibson)
was released in 2010. We see Lady Gaga arriving in jail being escorted
by two butch transgender prison guards who strip her to her underwear
and then comment that it was a shame she didn’t have a d…. as had
been rumoured, linking back to her real life persona. She goes on to
be kissed by a butch, muscular, tattooed inmate in the prison exercise
yard and appears in her underwear throughout the prison sequence of

the video. We see what the white celebrity body should look like, pale-
skinned, thin, small breasted and small bottomed with a toned stomach
without noticeable muscle but hyper-feminine enough to be the object
of desire of butches. She is bailed and leaves while the prison guard is on
the online lesbian dating site ‘Plenty of Fish’. Beyoncé with her ample
cleavage on display picks her up in a yellow car with the licence plate
‘Pussy Wag’ and the key-ring ‘Pussy Wagon’. Her breasts and curves are
again on display in the yellow dress she wears in the diner to meet the
man who they would jointly poison. In the end Lady Gaga commits
mass homicide with her ‘Cook n Kill Recipes’ prepared in the kitchen
with men who appear to be gay and of colour. Beyoncé watches Tyrese
die and then says to him ‘I knew you would take all my honey you
selfish mother fucker’, then smiles coyly behind her hand to dimin-
ish the swearing’s impact. The celebratory dance scene sees them both
dressed in red, white and blue as patriotic Americans and Beyoncé the
most patriotic of all with her Wonder Woman outfit. The video actively
queers the US public sphere as well as the personae occupied in its
9 minutes by these women. Choosing mass homicide and each other
rather than relationships with oppressive men such as the Black man
who was killed here and withdrawing from straight law-abiding society
represented by the other diners and the police helicopter, they drive off
into the distance like Thelma and Louise, vowing never to return as we
see their clasped hands before the ♀ appears prior to the credits. Hers
is a feminist performance as described by Shayne Lee (2010), which is
about a Black sex-punanny power Third Wave feminism in which the
body is used as cultural, political, social and economic currency. The
body, which is excessive, is that of Sable-Saffron Venus, Sapphire/Jezebel
now placed as queer, woman centred, feminist and as such alter/native.
We see woman centredness repeatedly in Beyoncé’s work such as
‘Why don’t you love me?’ where as B.B. Homemaker her barely clad
body re-presents men’s sexual fantasies including the dominatrix with
the riding crop who is also the homemaker. Her last words to answer the
song’s question are ‘Maybe you’re just plain dumb, dumb, dumb’. As for
‘Telephone’, Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives are carried in the lyrics
and her use of the body as a signifier of what is desired, which negates
the need for respectability. Her celebrity has extended beyond music
where she is both a singer and songwriter to film, entrepreneurship,
being a hair model for L’Oreal, a cover girl, a wife and a mother. She is
an internationally recognizable and transracial celebrity icon for mil-
lions of women who identify with her feisty feminism, her curves and
her blonde wig/weave irrespective of their own ‘race’. Desire to become

Beyoncé diminishes the threat of her body which is marked as non-
white because of its excessive display of hips, booty, breasts and racially
branded skin. However, as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native Beyoncé the
celebrity is not just desired but as object of pleasure provides a doorway
to connecting women through her Third Wave feminist message. This
message is contained in her interviews, Black political activism and her
website where she reproduces respectability and gives us a peek behind
the mask of Sasha Fierce so that as fans we can believe that we have
found the authentic person.
Though not international like Knowles, Alesha Dixon occupies a simi-
lar space in the UK of the Sable-Saffron Venus as sexualized. Much was
made in the media of Alesha after the birth of her daughter Azura in
2013 when she was pushing her in the park, ‘fresh faced’ without make-
up. As an unmarried but partnered mother, the millionaire appeals to
a broad cross-section of the British public. She rarely faces the public
without her ‘mask’ or casually dressed. In the widely publicized picture
of her in the park in 2013, the British public got unfettered access to her
as a person without ‘slap’ or finery and we could look at her flaws – her
post-birth body and her eye-bags. This made her even more pleasur-
able for us as we could identify with her as someone whose flesh could
also disappoint and be disappointing for her as a person. So Alesha’s
appropriation by mothers-to-be or mothers with post-baby bodies
produced pleasure as she was identified with by her fans. Alesha also
shows us how fame has been democratized in contemporary times. The
model, singer, dancer, rapper, entrepreneur, children’s clothes designer
(launched in Marks and Spencer), LA Fitness creative director since 2009
and TV personality, grew up in Welwyn Garden City but her parents –
Melvin Dixon of Jamaican descent and her white British mother
Beverley (née Harris) – split when she was 4 years old. She describes
her family as dysfunctional – she witnessed the domestic violence that
her mother endured – and her own marriage to So Solid Crew’s MC
Harvey broke down in 2006 because of his infidelity. She was part of the
all-female R&B/garage group MsTeeq from its inception in 1999 until
they split in 2005. She has since had a solo career and is known for her
‘endless legs’ which she showed to good effect when she won ‘Strictly
Come Dancing’, on her album covers and in public life.
Her hair has become increasingly blonde with her rise in celebrity
status whether worn naturally curly or GHD straightened. Her eyebrows
have also morphed from jet black to ‘fade to brown’. Hair, brows and
skin reproduce the UK’s own ‘golden girl’ who replays the sexualized
Sable-Saffron Venus for us on her album covers such as ‘The Alesha Show’
(2008) from which ‘Breathe Slow’ earned her a Brit Award nomination.
She has signed deals with Toblerone, Avon, Thomson Airways and Ford
cars. In her Ford Focus commercial she performs her song ‘For you I will’
for an imagined lover, the Ford Focus with ‘Alesha’ on the licence plate in
the shot and an orchestra playing instruments made from Ford car parts.
Her glittery stiletto placed on the car itself extends the machine into her
body as does her name on the licence plate. Thus, the car can be read
as Alesha who sings ‘just for you I will’. The seductive, sexualized Sable-
Saffron Venus body can now be consumed as a machine which wraps
around the body of the driver imagined as white, middle-class, male and
straight much like that body to which Black/white ‘mixed race’ women
had to submit during enslavement and colonialism. However, now it is
Dixon who is in charge.
In the 20th century aesthetics moved from the face to the body and
dieting became a part of many US women’s lives by the 1920s when
beauty culture (modelling, beauty pageants, fashion, the movies, the
cosmetics industry) was instituted and with it the cultural imperative
to be thin (Brumberg, 2000). From 1900 to 1920 in the US, medical and
insurance industries using weight as an indicator of risk promoted a
body type that was thinner than 50 years earlier. The dissemination of
medico-actuarial tables on weight and height (BMI), the emergence of
home economists, nutritionists and paediatricians made women respon-
sible for weight within families. The science of nutrition was feminized
and this led to a heightened sensitivity to body size (Brumberg, 2000).
Further, the turn to standard sizing in order to sell ready-to-wear clothes
in the 1920s emphasized body size because of the idea that there was a
normative size range for style. Fat women were precluded from style as
fashion was best worn on a slim body.
Lulu Hunt Peters’ (1918) Diet and Health with a Key to the Calories
became the first best-selling weight control book (Brumberg, 2000). For
her, fat was a failure of personal morality as it was for beauty experts in the
fashion and cosmetics industry like Helena Rubenstein who sold advice
on how to stay beautiful. The new woman in the 1920s had a body with
small breasts and narrow hips which symbolized an increased hetero-
sexual freedom helped by the diaphragm and the condom. The physical
culture movement also produced its own discourses on the svelte trained
body and a hatred of fat (Brumberg, 2000). During the 1940s adolescent
girls were the target audience for diet information based on parental and
medical awareness of ‘childhood obesity as pathology’ and the beauty
industry expanding its markets (Brumberg, 2000). The ‘popularization
of adolescent female weight control in the post-war era is a prime

component of the modern dieting story and a critical factor in explaining
anorexia nervosa as we know it today’ (Brumberg, 2000: 250).
In the US the diet industry is a multimillion dollar one and weight
control is a subspecialty in US medicine. The emergence of the American
Society of Bariatric Surgeons shows that US Americans do seek help with
appetite and weight control. After a period in the 1950s of full-breasted,
curvaceous figures the ideal body size has become slimmer, and since
the 1970s there has been an emphasis on athleticism. This means that
‘compulsive exercising’ and ‘chronic dieting’ have now joined ‘eating
right’ as discourses of weight and appetite control (Brumberg, 2000).
These discourses are used and understood by all women in the Global
North West whether they fetishize bone or not.
The rapid increase in the demand for slimming products in post-
war UK resulted from a concern with the growth of illnesses related to
obesity, such as diabetes, which was linked to over-eating and lack of
exercise. Medical concerns were legitimized, there was a demonization
of weight above ‘a set standard’ and the creation of ‘the saleable counter
image of a slim, beautiful and healthy body’ (Wilks-Heeg, 2006: 80). The
US life insurance industry had a part to play in judgement of overweight
in the UK through, for example, the 1959 Build and Blood Pressure Study,
which was quickly adopted internationally because it showed the dan-
ger of weight to Western populations (Wilks-Heeg, 2006). Even though
this study subsequently came under very strong critique – for example,
for the use of an arbitrary ideal to reduce women’s desirable weights
in the tables – the Actuaries’ weight tables were often quoted in the
UK in advertisements for slimming products such as Mead Johnson’s
Metrecal (Wilks-Heeg, 2006). Slenderness became the increasing norm
for UK women’s bodies in the most popular women’s magazines during
the 1950s to the early 1970s, a norm which emerged with increasing
concerns about obesity and the beginning of the slimming industry
(Wilks-Heeg, 2006). A growing market for slimming products emerged –
foods, pills, commercial slimming clubs, nutritionists and slimming
gurus – for example, the banana and milk diet advocated by Woman’s
Own, and Weight Watchers – a US organization founded in 1963 by
Jean Nidetch and introduced into the UK in 1967 by American Bernice
Weston (Wilks-Heeg, 2006).
This brief exploration of the struggle with weight and dieting is rel-
evant for Dixon as one arena in which her body did not fit was in the
Weight Watchers ‘Do it our way (Play)’ advertisement, even though
it shows how as celebrity she has crossed over into representing all
women rather than just Black-white ‘mixed race’ women. Her body has
transed to other women’s bodies in effect, women who we see perform-
ing her song and joining her on the street in its finale. However, this
trans-ing did not go unquestioned but it was not her ‘race’ which mat-
tered but her body itself. Alesha has never had a weight problem and
scores of women used Twitter to vent their anger about her size 10 body
being chosen for the Weight Watchers £15 million campaign (Mirror
News, 2012). Her size 10 body was placed as flawed in the tweets. This
was the longest (3 minutes, 10 seconds) and most expensive advertise-
ment to ever appear on British television. It doubled as a music video
for Alesha’s song ‘Do it our way’ which she also wrote and which was
simultaneously released in the charts. A good piece of self-marketing
no doubt, but the problem was that she was not like the 180 Weight
Watchers members who had lost a total of 422 stones between them
who appeared in the advertisement. She had never dieted and only had
indirect experience of weight issues by her own admission. Her slim,
curvaceous body could not represent that of women struggling with
weight even if the song’s ‘do it our way’ had a strong solidarity message
and did show successful slimmers. As failure she was reproduced as a
body out of place, a Sable-Saffron Venus interloper whose alter/native
body in terms of size disturbed the UK norm of size 14–16. The politics
of (dis)pleasure and the halting of identification flow from Dixon’s slim
body to that of all women was accomplished without ‘race’ being men-
tioned, itself productive of the ‘post-race’ pleasure of inclusion.
As Sable/Saffron Venus alter/native Alesha also has political projects.
For example, she works with Avon on domestic violence; she led a walk
in March 2013 to the Houses of Parliament in London to highlight
domestic violence; she climbed Mt Kilimajaroo for Comic Relief; she is
a patron of the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust (ALT) which aims to
increase the numbers of Black and Black-white ‘mixed race’ people on
the national Bone Marrow Register; and she also backed Nickleodeon’s
anti-bullying initiative, ‘See Something, Say Something’. Alesha speaks
herself as not just body, hair and skin and in so doing refuses to repro-
duce the racial, heterosexual and patriarchal gaze which her very body
draws in as artiste. Her political projects enable oppositional readings
to emerge which can also be reinscribed on her body to produce a
different matrix of corporeality, power, gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality
and celebrity in which the body does not speak her but speaks back to
our very imaginings of her as Sable-Saffon Venus. As alter/native she
re-presents to us those very guilty pleasures in gazing at the racialized
subject which we deny in order to prove our ‘post-race’ credentials.
However, she illustrates that such credentials do not exist because her
body has been packaged very much with the white imaginary in mind.
Pleasure in the Sable-Saffron Venus body is deeply melancholic as it
replays corporeality as the basis for the consumption and production of
the Black-white ‘mixed race’ celebrity body in the UK. A body which we
can love but despise in equal measure so that pleasure is always tinged
with a negative underside which becomes clear whenever celebrity bod-
ies slip from grace. Dixon consciously celebrates her body as we can see
in her often revealing attire. This display of the Black-white ‘mixed race’
woman’s body opens up challenges to the white female body which
occupies so much of the media by using the alter/native skin economy
of mulatticity to occupy that space of body icon within the nation. This
shift in body iconicity is interesting for thinking through the white fan
extending to the body of Alesha Dixon and passing through that body
to become an-other white person, one who is no longer ruled by the
psychic dominance of white iconicity but is now more open to other-
ness and in fact might also desire and get pleasure from that otherness.
What Dixon shows is that ‘race’ hegemony always brings into view
that which it seeks to marginalize and estrange but in this movement
it also opens up a counter location from which otherness can resist.
A British Black-white ‘mixed race’ global celebrity who has spoken
convincingly on ‘otherness’ in a TED lecture is Thandie Newton (TED
Global, 2011). By her own admission Newton was a bulimic who sought
therapy because as Black-white ‘mixed race’ (father white English,
mother Black Zimbabwean) she was placed as other. She had to occupy
that space for much of her formative years because as other her self was
rejected and she was faced with shame, anxiety, hopelessness and low
self-esteem. She had to face the fact of her otherness because her skin
colour was not right, her hair was not right nor was her history. She
was a noticeable no-body. She began acting at 16 and faced the sexual
abuse of the casting couch at 18. A recording of this was then replayed
by the Director late at night for anyone who wanted to watch. At 19 she
went to Cambridge University as an Anthropology student. This latter
made her realize that ‘race’ has no validity and we are all descended
from an African woman ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ but she still faced her
‘race’ demons. Her work was her saviour as the key to being an actor for
her is that she can lose her self in a character so that her very lack of
self is the reason for her success. She still has therapy and is attuned to
her self’s dysfunctional behaviour. Placed unwittingly as Sable-Saffron
Venus at 18 she has since then had a prominent position as an actor
in Hollywood and British films and has also starred in a US American,
Direct TV 10-episode series ‘Rogue’. She plays an undercover cop, Grace

Travis, who is trying to find the killer of her son who was killed in a
drive-by shooting. She oversaw casting aspects for this series which took
her beyond just being a lead actor.
Newton is perhaps most recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic
through her work as the face of Olay Total Effects. There is brand loy-
alty for Olay across the colour line but nonetheless it is interesting that
Newton was chosen as the trans-ing face of a cosmetic which fights
the visible signs of ageing, two of the effects of which – ‘brighten’ and
‘even skin tone’ – relate to skin bleaching (Mire, 2000). Olay has made
her a UK/US Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native who is asked about beauty
tips that all women can identify with and use. For example, in ‘Makeup
How to and Beauty Tips with Thandie Newton for British Vogue’ she
fills us in one woman to another. She loves make-up but it has to be
invisible and accentuate rather than obscure. She cleanses with Total
Effects cleanser, applies CC cream and eye shadow from a Chanel
palette, shapes her brows and last applies some Bobbi Brown rouge.
In an interview with Glamour magazine ‘Make up and beauty secrets
revealed’ she shares her skin care rules – cleanse after make-up with a
thick cleanser like Bobbi Brown and a warm flannel to take that all off
and then moisturize. There should be no over-cleansing but dark spots
and under eye shadows should be concealed and, in a boost for women
who can’t afford them, she admits that she rarely goes for facials. Her
worst habits are also ones that all women can relate to – she never takes
care of her hands but has stopped chewing the skin around her nails
since realizing that that represses emotions. She also has dry skin on
her feet which she removes with the micro-pedicure given to her by
her husband Ol Parker. For Newton we should find confidence within
ourselves and from the good we do, because if make-up is about cover-
ing up it comes from a place of neurosis. The sexually abusive director
attempted to place her as his image of the Sable-Saffron Venus but she
proves repeatedly that as respectable, married, mother and tireless sup-
porter for ‘1 Billion Rising’ an organization aimed at fighting domestic
violence globally, she sees herself as much more than the latest in vogue
Black-white ‘mixed race’ body in the celebrity machine. Olay has also
made hers a body that speaks across the colour line to those ordinary
white women who would use their product and to those Black women
like her mother who already do.
She has been passed by whiteness as her body comes to speak for and to
all women. This is not a position of her choosing as we can see by the fact
that she speaks about being a Black-white ‘mixed race’ child of a Black
Zimbabwean mother. She also does not occupy this space of being passed
by whiteness easily because of her own understandings and experiences
of the dynamics of racialized otherness which mean that she does not
perform Sable-Saffron Venus. It is this being passed by whiteness through
celebrity and respectability rather than passing as white which makes
us see Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives as a catachresis (Spivak, 1990).
For Gayatri Spivak (1990) catachresis is the act of reversing, displacing,
grasping and transforming the value coding apparatus, thus pointing to
the Derridean idea that originary incompleteness is part of all meaning
systems. Sable-Saffron Venus is always subject to slippage as there are no
‘true’ examples of her because she is an ideological proxy allowed into
the circle of representation where she can only ever be subaltern (Spivak,
1995). These proxies speak for the constituting of ‘race’ in and through
the white world and speak Black-white ‘mixed race’ women as a unified
object. However, Newton’s body being passed by whiteness transforms
the value coding apparatus of beauty, skin, ‘race’ and whose body can
extend to whiteness and stand in for all women so that Sable-Saffron
Venus alter/natives can emerge through this very incompleteness.
Newton’s body speaks white shame in ‘post-race’ societies at the discovery
that racism still maintains the borders of whiteness as relevant for those
who have never mixed. Her being passed by whiteness has a positive
outcome for the white self and nation as a post-racial condition can
be claimed. Claiming ‘post-race’ status erases shame and enables cathar-
sis. In this case the emotional discharge of white shame produced by the
pleasure of identification with the body of the Black-white ‘mixed race’
other as those ‘race’d as white, pass through them. This is a peculiar ‘race’
performativity of the opposite as whiteness looks into the face of Newton
and envisages her as non-threatening, as friend (Derrida, 2005) rather
than that which can only be consumed as racialized object. Perhaps it
is her very celebrity body’s slimness which allows this to happen as she
does not occupy the Sable-Saffron Venus space of bootyliciousness, has
admitted to struggles with bulimia and needing therapy. Her slim refusal
of bootyliciousness and bulima place her body within a location of the
always already known in the corporeality of white class and gender as
bone, to which we have become accustomed in the UK. Her very respect-
ability, dedication to her craft, international celebrity status, non-diva
demeanour, iconicity that speaks to all women and very posh English
accent make Newton a Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native unlike any that
the UK has imagined or reproduced. She is one as much sexualized as
de-sexualized through the body she inhabits, a slender body which refuses
the sexualizing gaze through presentation and comportment.
Conclusion
The discussion has shown that the question of whether it is only white
women who can be anorexic needs to be addressed so as to enable
Black disordered eating to be fully recognized. It has also shown that
far from being an object of disgust and loathing as during enslavement,
slim mulatticity has been remade in 21st-century UK/USA as an object
of white pleasure through the identification produced by cannibalism.
This is especially so if, like Newton, this body is twinned with celeb-
rity and if it shows its vulnerabilities through confession. As audience,
we feel that we must unmask the Black-white ‘mixed race’ celebrity to
see the woman beneath who is like us. This unmasking, viewing the
revelation, identifying with and passing through the bodies of these
women, leads to pleasure. Their bodies, whether slim by the design of
bulimia or diet (Newton), exercise (Dixon) or slim but bootylicious ‘by
nature’ (Knowles), help us to question the hold of the necessity for white
bone on women celebrity bodies. These women’s bodies also enable a
critique of ‘Sable’, ‘Saffron’ and ‘Venus’ as descriptions of Black women’s
bodies which linger in her melancholic repetitions as lighter skinned.
The discussion of lighter skin and affect continues in the next chapter.
6
Skin Lightening: Contempt,
Hatred, Fear
I sat bemused watching ‘This Morning’ in December 2011. There were

two Black British women – one Asian, one African Caribbean – talking
about why they ‘bleached’ their skins and why they would continue.
Both women placed skin-bleaching within the preference for lighter
skin and contempt for darker skin within British society in general
and within the employment market in particular. Although they spoke
openly about anti-Black racism’s preference for whiteness and discrimi-
nation based on skin colour – colourism – the discussion was contained
by the show’s presenters within the taken for granted discourse of
‘individual preference for whiteness’ and ‘self-hatred if darker-skinned’.
Encouraging the audience to think through individual Black patho-
logy and Black communal and global hatred of darker skin denied the
need to talk about the racism of colonialism and enslavement which
cemented the value of lighter skin within the Global North West; the
existence of racism and colourism as part of structural inequality; that
what we should note is that skin lightening is practised by women and
men around the globe; and skin lightening is a big money earner for
many multinational beauty companies based in the USA and Europe.
Skin lightening is so normalized that you can buy these products in the
world’s marketplace, Amazon, including creams for lightening armpits,
inner thighs, elbows, knees, face, anus and vagina as well as lightening
pills. You can, of course, also buy products such as Fashion Fair Vantex
Skin Tone Cream from the beauty counter in department stores.
Skin shade matters much as it did during exploration, colonization
and enslavement across the Black diaspora from which this chapter
draws its examples (Hall, 2012; Williams, 1998). The examples drawn
on are the controversy over Beyoncé being lightened in the L’Oreal
Feria hair colour advertisement and the cover of her fourth album;
146
Skin lightening 147
the TVJ documentary on skin bleaching in Jamaica; and the Jamaican

dancehall artists Vbyz Kartel and Lisa Hyper speaking on skin bleaching
on YouTube. These were chosen because of their global reach and influ-
ence across the Black Atlantic. Choosing Jamaica, the site of emergence
of Sable-Saffron Venus, is significant because it makes us note that the
Black Atlantic has always been a cultural circuit (Gilroy, 1993) in which
the politics of the colour complex is shared. Skin bleaching is practised
in the UK/US but it seems to be only in the elsewhere of Jamaica that
it has been so publicly problematized. What is the political work being
done by skin bleaching in this site that means that it must be branded
as anti-Black spectacle in order to undermine its decolonization of skin
colour hierarchies?
This chapter discusses how in the very act of skin bleaching the Black
woman’s body becomes the Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native-body of
normative beauty politics based on the white or light-skinned ideal as
well as revealing the continuing colourism of the Black Atlantic space.
The lightened body refuses the white or light ideal in favour of the in-
between space of ‘browning’, a Black Jamaican aesthetic ideal. It also
shows the white/light-skinned ideal’s tenacity in the racialized aesthetic
space of the ‘post-race’ UK/US. The discussion looks historically at skin
colour in terms of gender, ‘race’ and class before turning to the ‘racial
grammar’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2012) of skin lightening. The necessity to think
of colourism and anti-Black racism in terms of a skin shade habitus
where lighter skin has cultural, symbolic and economic capital in the
UK/US much as it does in Jamaica follows, before the discussion moves
to skin lightening products and global capital. Finally, the chapter looks
at the emergence of Saffron-Sable Venus alter/natives through the ‘race’
performativity of skin lightening as a Black mask that defies domination
by revealing the affective, political and economic politics of colourism.
The act of skin lightening contains within it the decolonial moment of
contestation about a specifically Black place in the world, of the Black
gendered biopower of a Saffron-Sable Venus alter/native body. First, let
us move to looking at skin.
Skin
Skin is the biggest organ, a container for who and what we are and can
become. What is under the skin is important for how the skin lies, how
it frames us, how our muscles make it bulge, how our fat fills it out, how
it falls back onto the framework of our bone. Skin is also a zone of affect,
the awe produced by muscularity, the desire for curves, the pleasure of
bone, the hidden delight of flawlessness. Skin is not just organic matter
but is the most visible signifier of racial difference (Mercer, 1994). Like
Steven Connor (2004) and Kobena Mercer (1994) we should see skin as a
powerful but everyday milieu in which all of our complex relationships
with self and other occur. Skin colour has been the building block of
nations, racial affective economies and structural inequality within the
USA, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the African continent.
Skin and what is under it – muscle, bone, fat – is both constituted by
and constitutive of the self.
In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud
sees the skin as a crucial component of the ego (Lafrance, 2009). The
ego, derived from bodily sensations springing from the skin, is a mental
projection of the surface of the body (Anzieu, 1990). Didier Anzieu uses
Freud’s ‘ego’ to coin ‘the skin ego’ to represent skin’s impact on the
mind. Skin is also ‘a surface on which signs are inscribed, and guardian
of the intensity of instincts that it localizes in a bodily source, in this
or that sensitive zone of the skin’ (Anzieu 1990: 63). Skin is material,
discursive, psychic, affective, social, political and skin colour continues
to be fundamental to our identities and constructions of the world.
The documentary Dark Girls (2011, directors Bill Duke and D. Channsin
Berry) explores the racism, ostracism and bullying experienced by darker-
skinned women in the US today. These experiences are linked to the 64
distinctions in shade existing in the US based on enslavement’s past, as
well as ‘the brown paper bag test’ and preference for ‘snow’ (light skin)
and ‘blow’ (straight hair) which still impact today (Dark Girls, 2011).
Although these named minute distinctions in shade do not exist in the
UK the preference remains the same. These are the very understandings
of Black/white skin engaged by Fanon’s historico-racial schema. These
understandings racialize ‘the skin ego’ and make us think that at the time
of Freud’s meditations on the human psyche Black women and men were
not deemed to have psyche, soul or intellect. It is not surprising given
this shared UK/US past/present of anti-Black racism and colourism that
skin lightening is practised. Skin and skin lightening have continued
to have deep political and personal implications in the Black Atlantic
diaspora but let us not forget that whiteness also has a place in skin
lightening history.
Skin lightening/whitening history: gender, ‘race’ and class
Whiteness and lightening, whether through reproduction ‘to lighten the

family line’ or skin lightening through make-up, chemicals or lack of
Skin lightening 149
exposure to the sun, had a place in colonial British Caribbean life. Here
it has been played out on the body of the woman – Black, ‘mixed’ and
white. As such the discourses around skin lightening demonstrate the flu-
idity of racial boundaries even within the fixity produced by racial com-
mon sense in colony and metropole. In the colonies, whitening through
miscegenation was a slow and circumscribed transgenerational process
in which freedom was given to Blacks and mulattoes in the Caribbean,
‘whereby white men copulated with their mixed-race offspring over
several generations, with the object of producing “pure” white progeny’
(Coleman, 2003: 171). ‘This whitening the line’ was a white supremacist
fantasy of interfamilial, interracial and intrafamilial miscegenation. In
Candid Reflections (1772) Edward Long, Jamaican planter, white suprema-
cist and historian, also spoke about the painful practice of flaying or
skinning the body with astringent lotions in order to achieve whiteness
(Coleman, 2003). In the 1770s Julius Soubise was a well-known example
of this. He was born into enslavement in St Kitts but entered high society
through being made the Black manservant of the Duchess of Queensbury.
‘Mungo Macaroni’ as he was also called, allegedly washed himself white
with corrosive washes and cosmetics from the Caribbean used by Black,
‘mulatto’ and white alike (Coleman, 2003).
James Grainger’s (1764) poem The Sugarcane revealed that white
Caribbean creole women practised skin lightening through using the
highly caustic cashew nut oil to remove freckles and sunburn. White
creole women were repeatedly described as ‘flaying their skin white’
during the 1700s as they literally burned layers of skin off to main-
tain their whiteness (Coleman, 2003). What can white skin bleaching
mean in this context if those who are not white are said to be try-
ing to become white? In a situation in which carefully marked skin
colour was linked to rank, privilege and freedom, shades of white and
being white was an indispensable element of white hegemony and
governance. For instance, Long claimed that the ‘mulatto’ preoccupa-
tion was with lightening their complexion through miscegenation so
that as ‘quinteroons’ they could become legally white and entitled to
all rights and liberties of white subjects (Coleman, 2003). In the face
of the blurring of whiteness and Blackness, cashew nut oil preserved
white hegemony even whilst its use illustrates that skin shade is an
unstable racial boundary marker. As the female Black-white ‘mixed
race’ population became increasingly lighter through descent and it
became difficult to ascertain who was white by sight alone, white creole
women had to endeavour to be lighter still. Whiter-than-white creoles
sent their daughters to the UK to transform their complexion ‘from
the sallowness of the tropics ‘to the red and white roses of the classic
English complexion’ (Coleman, 2003: 173).
However, the red and white complexion of ‘the English Rose’ was
produced by cosmetics. There was an explosion of manufacturing,
using and denouncing cosmetics in the latter part of the 16th century
(Poitevin, 2011). In the 16th and 17th centuries rouges and face whiten-
ers were utilized and ceruse was in use as a skin whitener by women like
Elizabeth 1. Ceruse was highly toxic as it was made from lead and dam-
aged the skin as well as leading to hair loss, with continued long-term
usage leading to death. The use of cosmetics was so pervasive that by
1601 the meaning of ‘complexion’ had changed from its 1568 version
of ‘the natural color, texture and appearance of the skin’ to ‘a coloring
preparation applied to give a complexion to the face’ (Poitevin, 2011:
64). Skin whiteners were popular at the same time as marking racial
difference on the stage through ‘black/brown face’, Thus, women with
white-face cosmetics were important in the construction of the binary
of white Englishness as the default position for the human and the dif-
ference of racialized others. What these women also showed was that
being literally ‘made up’ to be white constructed colour as an ‘unreliable
marker of race, class or moral worth [and] the notion of race itself as
artificial, a charade’ (Poitevin, 2011: 63). Women did not darken their
skins and to be ‘truly beautiful [one had to be] rosier than paled skinned
sisters and whiter than brown ones [such] perfect in-betweenness [was]
achieved only through make-up [with ] ground alabaster being used in
early modern skin whiteners’ (Poitevin, 2011: 70–2).
The English Rose was the desired complexion in white Caribbean creole
society even though white ‘brown beauty’ was an acceptable English
woman’s whiteness in the metropole (Coleman, 2003). However, such
‘brown beauty’ would have been too close to mixed shades to qualify as
white in the Caribbean. Thus, it had to be disavowed in the Caribbean
through lightening but also bonneting and masking of the face prior to
sun exposure. Creole white women guarded ‘lily whiteness’ and had an
unhealthy pallor as a result of the cultivation of whiteness. As for 16th-
and 17th-century white English women, (re)producing whiteness in the
Caribbean marked it as a racial category. Masking, bleaching and the
return to the UK to restore the complexion demonstrate that ‘the rigid,
inflexible obsession with purity of blood and whiteness, needs to be seen
as the irrational symptom of a society that is in fact too fluid, too given to
racial and sexual intermixture. And it is this fluidity that was leading to an
inauthentic whitening of the population, making it sometimes impossible
to distinguish between “real” and imitation whites’ (Coleman, 2003: 179).
Skin lightening 151
The ideological fabric of enslavement was based on a combination of

sex, gender and ‘race in which the ‘whiter than white’ woman’s body
came to represent freedom (Coleman, 2003). The white woman’s purity
was so essential to this ideology that numerous instances of white
women having children with Black men in the early 18th century were
erased from public memory. The sexuality of white creole women was
strictly policed from the mid-18th century onwards and Black men ran
the risk of castration, execution or dismemberment as punishments for
involvement with white women (Coleman, 2003). By the 1770s the
future of whiteness and Britishness were dependent on the purity and
virtue of white women as the men were largely involved in concubinage
which threatened racial purity and cultural identity. Interestingly, at
this time Dr Thomas Beddoes also conducted experiments with oxygen-
ated air on himself and Black people in order to establish the ‘cosmetic
art’ of skin bleaching (Coleman, 2003).
Colour formed the basis of Caribbean society when enslavement
ended. For example, in Jamaica there was a three-tier hierarchy in
which darker-skinned African descent Jamaicans were unskilled or
semi-skilled labourers; lighter-skinned African descent Jamaicans were a
secondary school educated middle class engaged in teaching and office
work; and the less than 2 per cent whites ranging from sugar plant-
ers and colonial officials to missionaries and managers of small firms,
constituted the top tier (Altink, 2013). The colonial government clearly
discriminated against African descent Jamaicans and inserted them in
a system that defined them as second-class citizens. This was the racial-
ized metropolitan context into which the Empire Windrush sailed with
Caribbean migrants into Tilbury Docks in Essex post-World War II.
In contemporary times, Jamaica is seen as the site within the
Caribbean of the ‘epidemic’ of skin bleaching if we notice the flurry of
scholarly articles on this (Brown- Claude, 2007; Hope, 2009; Charles,
2003, 2009) and the videos on YouTube. Jamaica’s plantation pigmen-
tocracy left a residual hierarchy of colour linked to class privilege. Here,
and in the Jamaican diaspora, lighter skin is the aesthetic ideal and
its embodiment is in the ‘browning’ body read as ‘mixed’. Although
colour is significant, there are discontinuities based on darker-skinned
people’s mobility within the middle and upper classes represented,
for example, in dark skinned, former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson’s
declaration ‘Black man time come now’ on taking office. ‘Race’ and
skin colour are still correlated with class and the smallest percentage
of racial/ ethnic minorities – Jews, whites, lighter-skinned Chinese and
Lebanese – run the economy and are located at the highest levels of the
Jamaican class structure. This is in a society where more than 97 per

cent of the population is Black – African descent – and the chronically,
transgenerationally poor, un-/under-employed and urban/rural dispos-
sessed continue to be darker-skinned (Brown-Claude, 2007).
This makes us question the current medicalized debate in Jamaica
on whether or not skin bleaching speaks to the pathology of wanting
to be white, which also forms the basis of the Black Nationalist anti-
racist aesthetics claim that bleachers are ‘race’ traitors. Going beyond
these explanations engages bleachers’ analyses of the very colour of
status and prestige in the society in which they find themselves. This
would mean that their bleaching as practice is a queering of ‘brown’ in
the sense of producing a creolized ‘browning’ as a third space of Black
identification. This is a browning refashioning against a gaze of brown-
ness as essentialist eye of power which seeks to maintain lighter-skinned
privilege by reproducing discourses of cultural, racial, social and politi-
cal inadequacy within which bleachers are interpellated.
Indeed, bleachers speak against such privilege as for Donna Hope
(2009: 103):
Many bleachers in contemporary Jamaica […] view skin lightening/

bleaching in much the same way white Europeans or Americans view
skin tanning/ darkening – as a technology of the body that refash-
ions towards an idolized ideal that has positive connotations for a
particular group where it may denote wealth, luxury or economic
and social privilege.
Thus, it is that campaigns by the Jamaican government – the Ministry

of Health’s clampdown on bleaching products in 1999 and 2007’s
‘Don’t Kill the Skin’ – did not succeed as they only medicalize bleaching
in terms of health risk and pathological self-esteem. The point is that
people in Jamaica speak about the use of ordinary household products
such as cake soap, curry and toothpaste, and food such as ackee, as
being useful for bleaching the skin (TVJ, 2013). This highlights the eve-
ryday nature of skin bleaching even before the availability of products
in the mass global market in skin bleaching. Bleachers spend two thou-
sand Jamaican dollars a week on products which they mix together,
keep in the fridge and apply to their bodies, which they then wrap in
plastic film. In this very painful process they remove layers of skin until
the desired colour is achieved (TVJ, 2013). Boys as young as twelve are
bleaching, as well as men as part of grooming (TVJ, 2013).The govern-
ment campaigns are also part of the gaze of brownness which dissects
Skin lightening 153
the darker-skinned Black body and ‘bleached brownings’. This gaze

reproduces shade governmentality through discourses of pathology and
risk (medical), Black anti-racist aesthetics and colour privilege as ‘being
born’ not ‘made’ (Brown-Claude, 2007).
These discourses emerge within a neo-liberal frame of brown fear
which leads to the spectacularization of the bleached browning. Within
this spectacularization ‘bleached browning’ bodies are out of place in
the prevailing societal chromatism and must be returned to their proper
position of darker-skinned African descent subordination. Therefore, it
can be said that the ‘neoliberal project […] is not merely one of econom-
ics and institutions: it is indeed a cultural project as well. Its cultural
arm is concerned with individual conduct which spills over from the
economic realm and is coterminous with the new economics of mana-
gerialism, audits and performance indicators, competitiveness and,
most important, the market’ (Walcott, 2009: 78). As someone involved
in the beauty trade, the market means that for women like Pebbles who
works in downtown Kingston, Jamaica, skin bleaching is an essential
professional practice as she won’t get any customers unless she ‘turns
it up’ a bit (TVJ, 2013). Lighter bleached skin is an essential part of her
image as a beautician who has to show success through the appearance
of bleaching on her very skin, which in turn is given economic value.
That is, her skin means that she has enough spare cash to spend on the
bleaching creams which she needs to maintain her image (TVJ, 2013).
In Jamaica, brown people control the economy. They are also over-
represented in better neighbourhoods and professional jobs, while
darker-skinned Blacks are socially, spatially and economically segregated
(Brown-Claude, 2007). The past few decades have seen a continuing
and deepening downward spiral in the Jamaican economy. There have
been further reductions in formal sector jobs because of structural
adjustment policies which have devastated Jamaica’s poor in terms of
access to education, jobs, housing and health (Brown-Claude, 2007).
However, the brown middle and upper class continue to be untouched.
‘The rise of skin bleaching in Jamaica correlates with the contraction of
the economy, especially in the 1990s when the society was still reeling
from the effects of structural adjustment’ (Brown-Claude, 2007: 49).
As social mobility diminishes, as neo-liberal subjects, bleachers engage
in body transformations in order to acquire racial, class and aesthetic
privilege denied to the darker-skinned (Brown-Claude, 2007; Hope,
2009). As for the beautician mentioned above, the very fact of being
able to buy the products means that you have excess cash to spend on
enhancing your look which already produces social capital. Bleaching is
strategically engaged for specific purposes as bleachers read the society

in which they are located, unmask shade privilege and transform their
own class and aesthetic position within their own class through the con-
spicuous consumption involved in shifting shade boundaries. Being
seen to be a bleacher does not speak notoriety as much as it speaks
money and the leisure time to spend on enhancing one’s body through
beautification. Beyond their own class, bleachers destabilize popular
Black Nationalist conceptions of Blackness which are based on the fixity
of the body permanently marked by ‘race’ (Brown-Claude, 2007). Thus,
‘depicting skin bleaching as deviant in public discourses attempts to
recenter hegemonic conceptions of blackness and to discipline bodies
so that they adhere to these conceptions for a variety of political and
social reasons’ (Brown-Claude, 2007: 35). Colourism impacts on both
lighter and darker-skinned Black women (Tate, 2005, 2009).
Colourism: shade and symbolic capital
It can be said that skin lightening has a specific ‘racial grammar’

(Bonilla-Silva, 2012) based on looking ‘mixed’ as the aesthetic ideal.
Indeed, this has been shown to be the case even in Ghana where bleach-
ers reference Caribbean mixed looks as the ideal (Pierre, 2008). It is this
looking ‘mixed’ that is at the base of continuing colourism (coined
thus by Alice Walker in 1983 according to Wilder, 2010) in Black com-
munities and nations as we see from the Jamaican bleachers’ quest for
‘browning’. In the racial grammar of colourism the ideology of light
skin privilege produces rules and statements of skin shade differences
as seen, felt and performed. The grammar of colourism and anti-Black
racism can also be seen in the controversy faced by Beyoncé in 2008 in
the US/UK when her skin appeared several shades lighter in the L’Oreal
Feria Hair Colour print campaign. In the face of public outcry L’Oreal
denied that the pictures had been digitally altered and Beyoncé did not
comment. The New York Post called the advertisement shocking and
accused L’Oreal of making the singer a ‘weird, nearly white version’ of
herself. For her fourth album cover Beyoncé caused more controversy
as the promotional picture showed her looking much paler. In February,
2011 a very pale-skinned light blonde haired Knowles was seen shop-
ping in Los Angeles. It has even been alleged that she bleached during
her time with Destiny’s Child on the advice of her father, Matthew
Knowles (Eriksen, 2012).
The controversy over skin bleaching is relevant for the US/UK and it is
interesting to see that white mainstream press also has a stake in keeping
Skin lightening 155
the boundaries of Blackness firm by denouncing skin bleaching, as in the

New York Post comments above and in the Daily Mail Online (17 January
2012) with the headline ‘White out of order: Beyoncé is looking shades
lighter in promo shot for her new album’. The grammar of colourism
and anti-Black racism was contested from the perspective of Black skin
valorization by Black Nationalism, struggles for independence from the
British Empire, decolonization and the ‘Black is beautiful’ movement,
but, what is important is how both ends of the spectrum were focused on
carefully maintaining the boundaries of Blackness/whiteness. However,
the grammar continued unabated within the subterranean psychic world
of light skin shade preference. Lighter skin as norm still determines one’s
life chances, partner choices, socio-economic status, aesthetic standing
(Thompson and Keith, 2001). This is especially the case if you are a
woman, but as Vybz Kartel, Jamaica’s most famous bleacher shows, it is
also fast becoming a male practice. Indeed, for Trina Jones (2000) dis-
crimination on the basis of skin shade (colourism) will assume increasing
importance into the future so much so that the legal system in the USA
must develop an understanding of it in order to ensure the success of
equal opportunity.
Colourism produces a contemporary ‘colour habitus’ (Wilder, 2010)
in which lightness is iconic not whiteness. Far from being localizable
just in the Black Atlantic diaspora, the colour habitus can be seen
locally globally (Lewis et al., 2012; Glenn, 2008). Lightening the skin is
a glocal (Robertson, 1995) phenomenon even with all the harm it has
been shown to do to the body. Such harm stretches from kidney/liver
disease to contact dermatitis, eczema, bacterial and fungal infections,
acne, skin cancer, leukaemia, irreversible skin damage and exogenous
ochronosis (Lewis et al., 2012). Harm is especially intensified if bleach-
ing creams are mixed with household products. People do risk their
lives and skins to allow their lightness to emerge because of its social,
economic and symbolic capital. In Jamaica, a distinction is also made in
class terms between those who ‘bleach’ – the urban, poor dispossessed
who mix creams and household products – and those who ‘tone’ – the
middle and upper classes who use prescription medication or expen-
sive lightening cosmetics (TVJ, 2013). On the TVJ (2013) documentary
which dealt with urban, poor, dispossessed bleachers, various reasons
were given for this practice. These included being light and pretty,
professional advancement, being light is temporary and does not mean
one hates being Black, style and to show one is better off than others.
Eveleyn Glenn’s (2008) research on Internet sites showed that it was
not white skin that was being sought after but light skin, such as that
possessed by Halle Berry and Beyoncé Knowles. Women who used skin
lighteners wanted to be 2–3 shades lighter and even out their skin tone
which was, indeed, what was offered by the products themselves in
their marketing. One has to pay for lightness if one wants to look like
the lightened Beyoncé in the L’Oreal advertisement by mixing ingre-
dients, buying creams such as Ambi, Nadinola and Ponds which have
permeated the Black cosmetics market for decades, or using prescription
corticosteroids.
Colourism is still rampant in the USA and this is especially clear if we
look at the forty colour terms used to describe what JeffriAnne Wilder
(2010) called light, medium and dark skin shades in her research with
college students. What she found in terms of the attributes attached to
the bearers of these skin shades was instructive. Wilder (2010) found
that the terms and attributes associated with light and dark skin were
numerous and derogatory whereas the medium skin tones are not often
referred to except as ‘brown’. These findings led Wilder (2010) to assert
that colourism does not operate with the light/dark binary only but
is a tripartite system within which there still remains a sophisticated
vocabulary for distinguishing between hair textures and skin shades
(Hunter, 2005). For example, skin shade descriptions extend to everyday
food terms such as vanilla (light skin), caramel (brown) and chocolate
(dark) along with epithets such as chocolate drop, brown sugar, mocha,
charcoal and tar baby (Wilder, 2010).
The colour habitus is well established in the US/UK/Caribbean and
the colour terms ‘red’, ‘brown’ and ‘black’ which have not changed for
generations are phenotypical descriptions as well as shapers of expecta-
tions of, emotions about and beliefs pertaining to, individuals. In all
three locations, lighter skin provides more social, economic and sym-
bolic capital whilst being oppressive for darker-skinned women. Perhaps
brown is as positively viewed in the USA, UK and the Caribbean because
it is a skin shade that can be achieved by either lightening or tanning.
That is, it can be brought into being on the surface of the skin through
stylization technology which racialize as they are used by those not
born brown.
The traffic in light skin is not new as we have seen above. According
to Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2008) there were references as early as the
1850s to African American women using powders and skin bleaches in
the Black press. African American women entrepreneurs such as Anne
Turbo Malone and Madame C.J. Walker refused to sell skin bleaches.
However, after Walker’s death in 1919 her successor, F.B. Ransom
introduced ‘Tan-Off’ which was a best seller in the 1920s and 1930s
Skin lightening 157
and other Black owned companies like Dr Palmer advertised and sold
skin lighteners (Glenn, 2008). Today African Americans are sold Ambi,
Palmers, Dr Dagett, Remsdell, Swiss Whitening pills, Ultraglow, Skin
Success, Avre, Essence (Glenn, 2008). Many of these products have
permeated European, African and Caribbean markets.
Desire for ‘brown’ shows the underlying affective economy of colour-
ism, as do derogatory epithets and food names attached to skin colours.
These illustrate the contempt in which darker skin continues to be held
in some quarters, the dislike of being too light in others and the fear
that if one desires lighter skin then that admits to pathology in terms of
‘poor self-esteem’ and ‘self-hatred’ (Charles, 2003, 2009; Wilder, 2010).
However, Christopher Charles (2003, 2009) in his work on skin bleach-
ing in Jamaica negates the existence of self-hate or low self-esteem.
These do not exist but these ideas also do not give a sense that there are
a plurality of Black identities and skin shades. Further, low self-esteem
and self-hate discourses deny the fact that brownness, Blackness and
whiteness are strategically used to navigate the Jamaican socio-cultural
landscape. This can also be shown to be the case in other Black Atlantic
sites. The colour habitus produces multiple locations of the Black
woman’s body and leads to multiple consciousness in contexts ruled
by colourism. Thus, as in Jamaica, if you are a darker-skinned, middle/
upper class, educated woman who can call on economic and cultural
capital, toning is not necessary as your skin is outweighed by status.
There is more to this than all darker-skinned people especially women,
want to be lighter skinned, and indeed, must adhere to the imperative to
be lighter. The dispersal of skin lightening ideology that both supports
colourism and emanates from it is maintained by global capital.
Skin lightening and global capital
In a 1992 article in the British Medical Journal, Hywel Williams called

for the manufacturers of skin lighteners to establish their safety. In his
view, if these creams had been a drug rather than cosmetics they would
probably have been withdrawn from the market because of concerns
about the limits set on hydroquinine use in cosmetics which was not
based on any logical taxological limit. What Ronald Hall (1995) called
the ‘master status’ of skin colour has led to the global production and
sale of skin lighteners within a multi-billion dollar industry to women
around the world (Lewis et al., 2012). The transnational pharmaceutical
and cosmetic corporations do play a decisive role in developing mar-
kets for skin lighteners through advertisements in a variety of media
that link light skin with modernity, youth, beauty and success (Glenn,
2008). Skin lighteners are interwoven into the global economic system
and its flows of goods, people, capital, lightening culture and colour-
ism awareness in formal and informal economies. Large transnational
corporations spend substantial amounts of money on research and
development, advertising and marketing (Glenn, 2008). In the highly
decentralized market in lightening there is segmentation along class,
age, national, ethnic, racial, gender and cultural lines. Small local entre-
preneurs or large multinationals use varying marketing strategies to
reach distinct consumers but the Internet has emerged as a major tool
(Glenn, 2008). In the European Union (EU), soaps containing mercuric
oxide have been illegal since 1989 but their manufacture is still legal as
long as the soaps are exported. These soaps are labelled as antiseptics
and deodorizers but are used in the African continent for skin lightening
and can be found within the EU despite the ban (Glenn, 2008). There
is a healthy market in skin lighteners within the UK from supermarket
shelves, to Boots the Chemist, Black cosmetics and hair stores, to the
doctor’s prescription pad. Multinational biotechnology, cosmetics and
pharmaceutical corporations as well as local entrepreneurs have merged
to blur the lines between pharmaceuticals and cosmetics in the produc-
tion and marketing of skin lightening. The multinational corporations
have enlarged the field of ‘lighteners’ and ‘correctors’ developing lines
for sale to different parts of the world.
Three of the largest multinationals are: French based L’Oreal, which
is the largest cosmetics company in the world with various subsidiar-
ies and a $15.8 billion turnover in 2006; Shiseido, the largest Japanese
cosmetics company with net sales of $5.7 billion in 2006, markets in
65 countries and regions and operations in Europe, the Americas and
Asia; and Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch company with a turnover of more
than €40 billion and net profits of €5 billion in 2006 (Glenn, 2008).
Three L’Oreal subsidiaries produce the best-known skin lightening lines
marketed around the world – Lancome Blanc Expert with Melo-No
Complex; La Roche Posay Mela-D White skin lightening daily lotion;
and Vichy BiWhite, containing procystein and Vitamin C. Shiseido’s
two main luxury lightening lines are White Lucent (for whitening)
and White Lucency (for spots/ageing). Ponds is Unilever’s most famous
skin care brand with whitening creams being sold in Latin America
and the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East (Glenn, 2008). Their ‘Fair
and Lovely’ brand from their Indian subsidiary Hindustan Lever Ltd is
the largest selling skin cream in India and is also now penetrating the
Caribbean market. There is a lot of money to be made globally from
Skin lightening 159
colourism and multinationals have not been slow in taking advantage

of this market segment in skin lightening. However, we should not
assume that bleachers are passive dupes of global capital but we should
think instead about what skin lightening means, what it does in the
moment of the application of the cream and the emergence of lighter
skin as a mask, so to speak.
Masking: skin lightness, revealing colourism

and decolonization
Vybz Kartel, dancehall recording artist, entrepreneur owner of a rum

factory and his own line of skin bleaching products, is Jamaica’s most
famous bleacher. He describes himself as outrageous and controversial
and sees himself as the mirror for all dancehall people irrespective of
gender whether that is through intellect or bleaching, as he is by, for
and from the people. He speaks openly about skin bleaching because for
him this is a practice in which a majority of Jamaicans engage. Indeed,
bleaching does not mean the same today as it did 25 years ago as with
other body modification practices. Bleaching is not about self-hate or
self-esteem and is not counter to the Garvey message of Black pride in
Kartel’s view. Black people can bleach if they like as it is about style and
bleaching alone will not lead to social mobility within such a divided
society. His bleaching is not being done in opposition to Garveyism or
Black pride nor is it about poor self-esteem but dancehall – its culture
and practices – is a social commentary which reflects on the duplicitous
nature of Jamaican society. This society is not ‘Out of many one peo-
ple’, as the national motto says, but is divided by ‘race’, ethnicity and
class. For him dancehall culture speaks from the Paul Bogle message of
rebellion as one would presume does his skin bleaching, as he aligns
himself with this radical Black tradition of breaking from hegemony
(Vybz Kartel lectures at UWI, 10 March 2011; Vybz Kartel live CVM-TV
Onstage, talks about bleaching).
The Jamaican recording artist Lisa Hyper (formerly Hype, aka Felicia
Goody) was Kartel’s mentee, once a member of his Portmore based Gaza
Empire and is a vociferous supporter and practitioner of skin lightening.
She is part of both a Jamaican and dancehall culture which sees skin
lightening as being about style. Dancehall culture at large sees the ideal
woman’s body as ‘big batty’, ‘stiff breasts’, ‘flat belly’ and bleached skin
(Caribbean Fashion Week – Dancehall and Skin Bleaching, 2012). The
young women interviewed on Waltham Park Road, Kingston, Jamaica
for Caribbean Fashion Week – Dancehall and Skin Bleaching in 2012
stated that bleaching ‘tun up di ting’ (turns up the thing). That is, it
makes one more attractive because bleaching is about fashion, peer pres-
sure, showing that one has disposable income and whatever Americans
do, they do. Within this culture Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are viewed as
iconic beauty figures with sought after body contours who lighten their
skins (Caribbean Fashion Week – Dancehall and Skin Bleaching; Nikki
Z Journeys with Lisa Hyper, Official Interview Sting 2013). Lisa Hyper
is feminist in orientation as she says about dancehall as a business ‘Lisa
Hyper only works with girl. Shi nuh need man fi bakkative […] If it was
up to me woman wud ah run di business […] woman power wi ah gi’
(‘Lisa Hyper only works with girls. She doesn’t need men for support. If
it was up to me women would run the business. We are giving woman
power’ – Nikki Z Journeys with Lisa Hyper, Official Interview [Sting
2013]). This is a bold statement to make in a society and a business that
is patriarchal and misogynist.
Whether as Felicia Goody or her alter ego Lisa Hyper she makes her
pro-bleaching stance clear in her songs ‘Bleaching fit mi’ and ‘Proud
ah mi bleaching’. In the former she sings ‘bleachin go well wid mi hair
mi nuh ciarry map head, mi kyan bleach all mi want, louw mi mek
mi bleach ah it mek mi happy’ (‘bleaching goes well with my hair
I don’t have a mop head, I can bleach all I want, leave me alone so
that I can bleach it makes me happy’). She also takes up the accusation
that bleaching causes cancer by saying that cigarettes do the same. She
relates bleaching to style in terms of it going well with her hair as well
as asserting the affective value of bleaching in giving her happiness.
In ‘Proud ah mi bleaching’ she names the products that are used, for
example ‘Maxilight’, ‘Fair and White’ and ‘Bioclear’ and sets herself and
her crew up as bleaching experts as she tells her fans which products do
what for the body. She establishes bleaching as a competitive practice
between women with ‘gyal whe a bleach an kyaan reach some gyal naah
admit’ (‘girls that are bleaching and can’t get lighter as light as me some
girls won’t admit that’). The chorus for this song speaks back to both
those who would contend that she is a ‘race’ traitor and hates being
darker-skinned and those who would say that she has low self-esteem
because she engages in bleaching by making herself ‘I’ in Christina
Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful’ ‘I am beautiful in every single way, words can’t
bring me down. I am beautiful no matter what they say, words can’t
bring me down’.
In her interview for Caribbean Fashion Week – Dancehall and Skin
Bleaching, Lisa Hyper speaks out against the real risk of cancer from
bleaching when she says that what one gets from bleaching is beauty.
Skin lightening 161
Then when asked if she bleaches she says that she ‘tones’. She makes a
distinction of class and money but admits that she still tones because
most people like having ‘toned skin’. That is, looking ‘brown’, although
everyone has different reasons for their skin lightening practices. She
also said that toning should be regulated as 15-year-olds are ‘toning’
with ‘rubbings’ because they are allowed to do so by their parents.
The issue of looking brown and not being anti-Garvey’s teachings
on the valorization of Blackness as well as ‘colour bending’ within
dancehall culture through bleaching are worthy of explication in terms
of ‘browning’ within modern Blackness. Alongside the turn to Africa
following independence in Jamaica there was also an attachment to
‘brown’. ‘Brown’ was not solely a phenotypical hangover from enslave-
ment but a way of life ‘as it signifies respectability or at least aspirations
towards respectability’ (Thomas, 2004: 24). Thus, ‘brown’ is a becoming
category in post-independence Jamaica (Tate, 2009). As well as this,
there were much more racialized understandings of belonging that
emerged at different points in time – Rastafarianism, Back to Africa,
Pan-Africanism, Black Power, for example. Browning emerged in 1980s
Jamaica in the space between ‘brown’ and previously marginalized
urban expressions of Blackness, termed ‘modern Blackness’ by Deborah
Thomas (2004).
In modern Blackness there has been a break with the colonial past
and invocations of ‘Africa/African-Jamaican historical struggles still
resonate powerfully with many Jamaicans’ (Thomas, 2004: 14). The
globalization of US racial hierarchies has also re-inscribed racial and
cultural hierarchies in the Caribbean (Thomas, 2004). As a result, there
are not unlimited hybridities even though there has been a decline in
the previous hegemony of British colonial class and colour hierarchies
and its focus on brownness/whiteness. ‘Browning’ represents the ongo-
ing negotiation of systems of power and domination in Jamaica today
in which subaltern aesthetics and politics lay claim to Jamaicanness
(Tate, 2009). Browning has ceased to be a bracketed Blackness outside of
the realm of the national and is a part of Black national and Jamaican
diasporic identity and class politics. It is removed from the ‘mulatto’
of slavery and the ‘brown’ of independence because of its Jamaican
modern Blackness heritage (Tate, 2009).
Shade governmentality spans the divide between the economic sphere
of neo-liberalism and its cultural arm of ‘race’ performativity. Relating
this to skin bleaching, individuals choose to involve themselves in the
market in browning bodies in order to be competitive. In entering the
neoliberal market as bleached brownings, those who engage actively
with the ing, these bodies queer both darker skin and brownness as fixed
stable categories of being and embodiment. This queering produces the
‘third body’ of the bleached browning kept outside of the privilege of
skin shade by reiterating it as artificial, pathological and transgressive
of ‘race’ and colour norms that enable the society to still function as a
21st-century plantation system. Twenty-first century plantation socie-
ties facilitate skin surveillance practices within continuing regimes of
unfreedom for the darker skinned urban/rural dispossessed.
The darker-skinned become an internal colour colony within the
nation, one that is feared because of the possibility of violence, immo-
rality, illiteracy, for example, spreading out from their communities to
engulf middle/upper class Jamaica. Their vernacular bleaching as opposed
to middle/upper class respectable, unproblematized ‘toning’ speaks to
their continuing subaltern position within representations of who is
Black and who is not as well as their economic repression. Indeed, the TVJ
documentary makes plain that jobs are not offered to Jamaicans when
they look like bleachers, so being a bleached browning does not lead to
social, symbolic or economic capital. Notwithstanding this, performa-
tively reproducing copies of the browning through bleaching points
to new interpretations of Blackness within Jamaica and beyond where
through bleaching, skin colour and one’s place in the racial hierarchy
becomes malleable.
As we saw in the example at the beginning of the chapter, UK Black
women engage in a critique of colourism and anti-Black racism through
skin bleaching. This has nothing to do with low self-esteem or Black
self-hatred. Like Lisa Hyper they know that changing to a lighter skin
tone makes them more marketable as bodies because of the prevailing
preference for lightness/whiteness. Wilder (2010) also illustrated that
the mid-term brown was a category which did not have negative conno-
tations, unlike white or Black. US women then engage in acknowledge-
ment of that society’s shade preference when they lighten their skins.
Skin lightening in the US/UK is normalized even in the face of white
and Black critique as Black women seek a different look.
Conclusion
What does skin lightening in an elsewhere which is also here in the UK/
USA because of skin lightening’s glocality illustrate? What skin lightening
shows is that there is no unitary, authentic or essential Black woman’s
skin shade. There is only a contradictory range of subject positions
and identifications that Black women become for the duration of skin
Skin lightening 163
lightening. Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives deconstruct the ideological

fiction and psychic fixations of colourism and anti-Black racism through
refusing to stabilize the stereotypes of Black toners/bleachers as having
low self-esteem or hating being Black. In creolizing brownness through
skin lightening bleachers refuse to affirm the colour sovereignty of
brown/white by showing the material process involved in the production
of brown on the skin. Through this process Sable-Saffron Venus alter/
natives emphasize that skin colour is no guarantee of mobility in unequal
societies where class and ‘race’ still matter despite national claims to
the contrary. They unmask the aesthetic, social, economic, political and
cultural relations of power embedded in 21st-century colourism and anti-
Black racism which continue to dynamize the political economy of skin
into the 21st century across the Black Atlantic.
7
Coda – Decolonization and Seeing
through Black Women’s Bodies
This book has looked at the journey of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an

alter/native-body from the slave plantations of Jamaica to contemporary
times to show her constitutive absence in Europe/the USA/the Caribbean.
The insistence throughout the book has been that Black British and
Caribbean women’s bodies should be taken account of in any discussion
of the Black Atlantic as a site of culture so that African American women’s
bodies are no longer the sole location of Black women’s representation.
In the process, what has been shown is the flow of Black woman body
politics across time and space. The book has illustrated that Sable-Saffron
Venus alter/natives are produced through disalienation (Césaire, 2000)
with its twin processes of disidentification (Muñoz, 1999) and inscrib-
ing new autographies (Hall, 1996) in a re-epidermalization of the Black
woman’s body. A Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives perspective on bodies
enabled us to see that there is a corporeality of class, ‘race’, gender, age,
(hetero)sexuality, ability and the power of celebrity within representa-
tions of iconic Black women in the US, Europe and the Caribbean. Such
an intersectional, disruptive corporeality underlies a decolonial approach
to making Saffron-Sable Venus alter/natives visible within the nation as
a Black Atlantic (trans)national versioning of female iconicity no longer
dependent on whiteness to come into being. A decolonial approach
through the use of the disalienation of Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives
has meant that the focus has been to change the perspective from Black
women’s absence from white authored discourses on the body. Instead,
the foci have been how Black women are present, how their bodies dis-
rupt norms and the ways in which their bodies become alter/native as
they produce new ‘race’ and gender body politics. This has meant that
the Black woman’s body’s size/shape, skin, muscle, bone, fat ceased to be a
constitutive absence so that white women’s bodies can come into being.
164
Decolonization 165
Instead, Black women’s multiple bodies have been shown to be the site
of resistance and a zone where newness enters the world.
This resistance involves seeing through the naturalization of what the
Black woman’s body should look/be/comport like and what this out-
ward appearance means for her psyche. Seeing through Black women’s
bodies and their multiple positionings enabled critique of dominant
white aesthetics and inscription of Black women’s bodies with value.
This meant that erasure was resisted and there was an assertion of Black
women’s subjectivities from the viewpoint of multiply muscled/sized/
shaped/skinned and affective celebrity bodies. Such Black women’s sub-
jectivities demand (re)possession of bodies if Black women are to resist
being placed as value-less, abject but affective other for the nation. The
subject of ‘bodies of value’ has material, political, cultural and ethical
dimensions, no more so than in that subaltern zone erased from repre-
sentation of Black, aged, non-celebrity women’s bodies with dementia
and physical disability. It is to this erased zone that we now turn to see if
these subaltern bodies can exert agency, can continue to be Sable-Saffron
Venus alter/natives in their insistence on a liveable life.
A liveable life: dementia, ageing and inscribing

glamour on the Black woman’s body
When she was 78 my mother Beatrice no longer remembered me as her

daughter. I was just someone who has the name of a child she once had.
Like many others with dementia my mother remembers the past with
great clarity, but the present, remembering to eat and who everyone is,
remains elusive, fleeting. What was intriguing, though, was her continu-
ing insistence on glamour through make-up and styled hair. In insisting
on glamour – hair dyed black, dark pencilled brows and red lipstick – my
mother could be said to resist her generation’s idea that beauty comes
from within and that artifice is a clear sign of vanity which must be
avoided. In reaching for another body through glamour, one that does
not ‘look too old’, could an older Black woman living with dementia be
asserting the right to still be able to occupy the space of beauty? Could
this beauty agency bring a new subjectivity into being other than that
of ‘the old Black woman living with dementia’, as my mother struggled
to be herself as she imagined herself to be? How does this make us see
current beauty culture with its age and ‘race’ specificities?
Hollywood actresses often say that as they get older they get fewer
roles. This example shows that ageing is considered a plague which
must be resisted, as we can also see in the boom in aesthetic surgery
and cosmetics to reverse the signs of ageing. In our culture, beauty is

not for the aged or ageing body. Non-celebrity women or those with-
out the finances to pay for aesthetic surgery are expected to ‘grow old
gracefully’ and not appear to be ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. ‘Growing
old gracefully’ produces its own body discipline as women should not
appear to be vain by engaging in artifice. So my mother has already bro-
ken the first rule of this governmentality. She insists on vanity and in
that insistence normalizes its value for herself as an older woman. It is
perhaps just about herself and the positive affect she feels when the mir-
ror shows her the results of lipstick, eye-brow pencil and hair dye, as she
has no other point of reference in her very enclosed world of fleeting
memory. She perhaps doesn’t remember from one minute to the next
the flash of pleasure she shows on her face when we compliment her on
her appearance. All that we know is that she thinks that the labour of
beautification makes her feel that she looks like she once was, less old.
She would never leave the house without being ‘dressed up’ as was the
case throughout her life. This sense of ‘putting oneself together’ for a
public has not been lost with dementia so there is still a trace of the self
which lingers that cannot be verbalized but can be seen in the ‘dressing
up’. As she performatively brought this self into being she conformed to
discourses on the older Black woman’s body and contested them.
According to Pierre Bourdieu (1995: 165–6):
The body is not only a text of culture. It is also […] a practical, direct
locus of social control [...] through the organization and regulation
of the time, space and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are
trained, shaped and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical
forms of selfhood.
This has particular resonance for the body of the older, Black woman liv-
ing with dementia as discourses of age, ‘race’ and mental health locate
such bodies as marginal, abject, other, valueless and fearful. As locations
of fear, valueless bodies like those of my mother are deeply affective. This
is so because at the same time as eliciting fear they also elicit sympathy,
disgust and tolerance. The binaries of fear/sympathy, disgust/tolerance
speak not only about ambivalence but also about the guilt/shame we
feel. We feel guilt/shame because we think that these bodies should be
kept out of sight as they remind us too much of our own future physical
and mental demise and our inability to deal with these failed bodies as
people, as well as our impending and inevitable loss of control over our
own body, mind and dignity. Societal tolerance of old age is perceived as
Decolonization 167
necessary but this has not erased the continuing disgust of sagging skin,
wrinkles, grey hair, diminished libido and physical/ mental demise. How
is glamour possible with this as a background which controls the posi-
tioning of the older, female, Black body living with dementia as other
and abject? Indeed, how is self-hood itself possible?
Glamour was first used in the 19th century when it meant sorcery or
magical charm and men, women, places, things and objects are ‘glamor-
ous’ (Dyhouse, 2010). Glamour was associated with American cinema
between the 1930s and 1950s and the screen and still photography of
female movie stars. However, Black women like Dorothy Dandridge and
Lena Horne were ambiguously located within Hollywood’s regime of
glamour because of ‘race’ and the ‘tragic mulatta’ space in which they
were positioned. As such, they constructed glamour for Black women
restricted to mimicking white women within the racialized space of
Hollywood (Tate, 2012).
Like Dandridge and Horn, Black women who venture into the realm
of glamour are haunted by the spectre of the figure of the Black Venus, a
stereotype which relegates them to the zone of hypersexuality and con-
structs them as bodies out of control. As a Black middle-class Jamaican my
mother grew up within the injunction not to be the Black Venus through
the necessity for respectability. Now resident in the United States, she
remains aware of the need to dress conservatively in terms of not too
much flesh on display. So for her, glamour is understated and reflects a
Black middle-class habitus of neatness (ironed clothes, clean, feminine
shoes), styled hair which is not too stylized, minimal make-up but with
red lipstick and manicured nails with natural or pearl nail polish. She
continues to embody the specificities of respectable Black glamour which
has to do with trans-national and trans-racial translations of status and
style using clothes, accessories, make-up, hair styling and the exposure of
permitted body parts – arms, neck and legs below the knee.
Judging glamour is subjective and glamour has been coupled with
artifice, performance and sophisticated sexual feminine allure (Dyhouse,
2010). It is subject to changing ideas about femininity, consumerism,
popular culture, fashion and celebrity. As an older Black woman with
dementia we can say that there is still pleasure gained from performing
feminine beauty through stylization. Glamour can also offer a route to
a more assertive and powerful female identity (Dyhouse, 2010). The
idea of assertive and powerful female identity is interesting when allied
with the body of an older Black woman living with dementia. This is so
as we can never be sure that she has the construction of an assertive or
powerful female identity as her focus, as this is never verbalized. What
is verbalized is her pleasure in her transformation from being someone

who looks too old to someone who looks good in her gaze, which gives
her control over her body and ageing. Control over her body is what
we can read as her version of an assertive and powerful female identity.
However, her desire for glamour has its own parameters: as a middle-
class Jamaican she is constrained by norms of class and gender while as a
Black woman who must be respectable, she is imprisoned by the impera-
tive to not be the Black Venus even if an aged one. As respectable in
doing glamour she establishes that glamour goes beyond age, perceived
physical beauty, adornment and body work to also being about attitude
(Dyhouse, 2010).
For Carol Dyhouse (2010: 45) ‘what a glamorous female star needed
above all else […] was personality: she needed to ‘dare to be herself’.
Glamour involved confidence and self possession: it didn’t sit easily
with more traditional feminine virtues of innocence and modesty’.
Daring to be herself as an 89-year-old with dementia who has not
given up on her right or need to look good and to insist on exhibiting
her good looks, speak confidence and self-possession. This sets up an
interesting critique of the second wave feminist position that glamour
is not about female agency and power but false consciousness fostered
by patriarchy and capitalism (Dyhouse, 2010).
Instead of this positioning as ‘beauty dope’ I would like to read my
mother’s stylization and her pleasure in seeing her transformation as
being very agentic. This is especially so, given that we inhabit socie-
ties in which Black women’s glamour is always put into question.
That is the case even with the list of glamorous divas – for example,
in the 1960s and 1970s Black Motown performers like Diana Ross
were decked out in floor sweeping dresses, furs and diamonds, Shirley
Bassey’s glamour extended from the 1950s while Adelaide Hall had
been glamorous post-World War II. We could read these women’s per-
formance of glamour as being defiant reinventions of the Black woman
as glamorous within societies in which this was not seen as a Black
woman’s prerogative.
She does not need the approval of others to know that she looks
good. She clearly knows what she wants to look like and when that
is achieved that is when she perceives herself as herself. There is still a
latent image of respectable glamour which she does not/cannot articu-
late verbally but which guides how she perceives her looks before and
after stylization. As she makes herself the object of her own gaze she
recoups power because she becomes invisible as the source of the gaze.
That is, she becomes the one who is looking without being looked at
Decolonization 169
(Tseëlon, 1995). This is significant because it locates her outside the

image of women as objects of male desire, outside of racialized images
of Black women and outside of ageist and heterosexist common-sense
pejorative perspectives of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ and ‘glamorous
grannies’. She constructs herself through the power of her own gaze
as the object of her own desire to look good as she makes her latent
glamour image obvious on her body. She becomes her own significant
audience, mediating between the reflection in the mirror and her latent
image. She constructs herself from the inside out and this inscription of
glamour comes to represent her at the moment of her stylization. Her
identity is not ruled by the tyranny of the gendered habitus which says
that older women living with dementia should sit in the shadows and
wait to die. Rather, she seizes power over a system which would judge
her solely through her dementia, her ‘race’, gender and age by saying
‘hey, I am still here’, as she struggles to define her own beauty by becoming
that beauty through stylization.
In this process she produces a challenge to the gaze of the other
embedded within the norms of the beauty system. This is so as she
rejects ‘being for others’ and adopts the agentic position of defining her-
self within her own personally defined beauty boundaries even whilst
these continue to be impinged on by the need for respectability. Rather
than being seen as a vessel emptied out by age and dementia her body
continues to be used by her as a project which is worked on in order
to become. ‘Become what?’ might well be the question. However, if we
see the pleasure on her face and her really confident bearing as being
markers of what she wants to become, we can say that she enters into
a reflexive process of becoming what she still images latently as herself.
As an individual she still continues to be interested in and concerned
about the appearance of her body in which she is prepared to invest
time and effort. This takes us beyond the routine maintenance which
she has to be encouraged to remember because of her dementia and
the stigmatization of the older Black woman’s body as not worthy of
beautification time or effort. Insisting on beautification and glamorous
stylization transgresses common-sense locations of Black women’s bod-
ies in terms of both age and dementia as outside of ‘the beautiful’ and
instead actively transforms and extends this category through its pur-
posive construction by stylization. This undermines the natural order of
‘race’ and gender in which only the young, white, flawless – here both
physical and mental – celebrity body can occupy the category beautiful.
What happens when that body becomes physically disabled through a
stroke? Can we still see agency?
Physical disability and a valueless body
My mother had a stroke in January 2014 which she was not expected
to survive. At the time of the rush to the hospital and her diagnosis she
was given two days to live as she lay unconscious in the hospital bed.
As her children all we could think about was that we would now be
without her. We had to take the terrible decision of non-resuscitation
if ‘heroic measures’ were needed to save her life. She survived the two
days. After the third day of her not being fed as she was expected to
die and us being very upset about that, my big sister asked my mother
a simple question and gave her the option of life: ‘Do you want us to
fight for you? If you want us to fight for you squeeze my hand’. My
mother did that and with her desire for life we fought for her to be
fed, receive physical therapy and other medical treatment both in the
hospital and the rehabilitation facility to which she was subsequently
transferred before she returned home. She lived to see her 90th birthday
in February 2014 and she is still with us now. Though she needs 24/7
care she is still living each day as it comes which has always been her
life philosophy and trying to walk, speak, eat and smile again.
This story is significant for what it tells us about bodies of value.
As an ageing, disabled Black woman body my mother ceased to be
Beatrice in the eyes of the medical community. She became an equa-
tion in terms of quality of life over years of life and the result for her
was negative. As an equation she was not seen holistically but only in
terms of what medical intervention was being paid for by her medical
insurance and what made financial sense for someone so old, living
with dementia and now so disabled. In all of her time in the hospital
and rehabilitation there was only one person who bothered to ask
what our mother did before she retired, who her siblings and children
were, what things she liked to do. She was the only one interested in
the fact that in her native Jamaica my mother had been a civil servant
and a magistrate until her retirement and migration to the USA. That
was her speech therapist, who enabled her to continue to fight for a
dignified life by showing us that she could still read, speak, connect to
the world and her children, as well as swallow. She refused to treat our
mother like just a piece of valueless, aged flesh and saw her humanity,
her will to life. Our mother continues to astound us all with her will to
life. She shows us daily that the ageing, disabled, older Black woman
living with dementia still insists on being, disrupting societal scripts
which would place her as valueless, disposable, abject and a thing to
be hidden from sight.
Decolonization 171
What her insistence on life against all the odds reminds us all of is that
there we will also be. It is a place which we attempt to erase, to margina-
lize, to hide from consciousness and, indeed, to hide from. As such her
very body produces a melancholic (Khanna, 2003; Cheng, 2001) reminder
based on both fear of ageing and mental/ physical decline as well as
shame and guilt for feeling that so very viscerally. This toxic bundle of
negative affect fear-shame-guilt, is something that we swallow whole
but which still emerges to haunt us as we look at what we will become.
We even have phrases for it which say so much, ‘old and decrepit’ is
one which springs to mind. This fear-shame-guilt is what underlies our
drawing away from the aged Black woman living with dementia and
disabilities, our pulling into ourselves when we see sagging flesh as if to
get near might invite contagion by her very value-less-ness. Ageing and
illness produce other becomings which we must embrace rather than
spiralling downwards into despair at increasing decrepitude, ever devel-
oping value-less-ness as we continue to see ourselves only as the sacks we
stand in, only as what is reflected back as we look into the eyes of others.
Like my mother we should disalienate (Césaire, 2000) ourselves from this
look and remake ourselves as other to that which is expected of us by the
racialized, ageist, disabilist, gendered, classed and heteronormative look
from the space of the other. The movement of disalienation is necessary
so as to insist on agency within alter/native bodies and subjectivities as
we valorize that which is seen as a valueless body.
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Index
Abrams, K.K., Allen, La Rue and Banks, Tyra 74, 78, 116, 122
Gray, J.J. 130 Barnes, N. 15
Aderotini, Claudia 47 Bartky, S. 4, 99
Adesioye, Lola 129–30 Bass, M. 122
aesthetic 3, 58, 73, 79 Bassey, Shirley 168
debasement 65 batty 9, 47, 59, 64, 66, 72, 159
hegemony 51 über 47, 63–5
intersectional 79 Baudrillard, J. 39
labour 49, 57–8, 63, 65 Bauman, Z. 97
power 118 Beauboeuf-Lafontant, T. 62
surgery 47, 55, 63, 165–6 Beaumont, Carolina 54
affect 7–9, 12, 16, 17, 33, 37, 43, 73, beautification 166, 169
83, 85–6, 94–5, 97, 105, 109, 145, Beavers, Louise 68
147, 165–6, 171 Beckles, H. 18
affective economy 63, 157 Belle, Dido 25
affective flow 43–4 Berry, Hallé 156
affective labour 49, 63 Bertha 68, 86, 90–2
affective relational 15, 44 Beyoncé 3, 8, 18, 44, 46, 54, 56,
affective value 64 62, 93, 112, 118, 129, 134–8,
Agamben, G. 17 145–6, 154–6, 160
age 3, 9, 165–70 Sasha Fierce 19, 37–8, 134–8
Ahmed, S. 65, 97, 108–9 Bhabha, H. 5, 14, 37, 64–5, 87, 97
Ali, S. 9, 115 big Black Mamma 32, 68–9, 75
alienation 32, 83 bio-politics 5
alterity 9, 36, 47 bio-power 5, 147
alter/natve 3, 8–10, 16, 34, 42, 47–8, bio-text 51
52, 61, 63, 66–7, 75, 79–80, 83, Black Barbie 57, 63–6
90–2, 99, 101–2, 107, 114, 116, black face 69, 87–8
137, 141, 143–4, 147, 163–5, 171 Black feminism 46
Altink, H. 151 punnany princess of power 39
ambivalence 87, 112 third wave ‘power-punnany’ 38,
anatomical economy 24 65, 137
Anijar, K. 76–7 Black-philia 44
anorexia 4, 61, 78–9, 119–23, bleach 9, 143, 146–7, 151–5,
125–6, 128–32, 145 159–63
anxiety 32, 87, 100, 142 BMI 69–71, 81, 139
Anzieu, D. 43, 64, 95, 148 body 12, 44, 50–2, 61, 128, 135,
Arise 124 137–8, 141–4
autography 13–14, 16, 84, 164 aesthetics 93, 124–5, 131, 139
docile 3, 16
Baartman, Saartje 18, 34, 47, 52–3, 56 politics 42
Baker, Josephine 18, 19, 34, 38, racialized politics 111
42–3, 46, 54 rule system 99
183
184 Index
body – continued catharsis 118, 144

shape 3, 99–100 Cavanagh, S.L. and Sykes, H. 100
size 3, 75, 86, 100, 123, 129–30, celebrity 8, 9, 16, 43, 47, 56, 76,
139, 141 100, 103–4, 107, 118, 123, 129,
size acceptance 73 132, 134, 137–8, 140–5, 167,
size zero 47, 61, 128 169
Bonilla-Silva, E. 147, 154 cult of 118, 135, 144, 164–5
bone 7, 9–10, 18, 33, 43, 51, 80, celebrification 135
95–6, 110, 112, 118, 125, 131, ceruse 150
140, 144–5, 147–8, 164 Césaire, A. 9–10, 14, 63, 65, 164, 171
boom boom brasilera 47, 62 Charles, C.A.D. 151, 157
bootylicious 62, 79, 129, 136, Cheng, A.A. 34, 42–4, 64–5, 114,
144–5 171
Bordo, S. 4, 99, 123 Chernin, K. 122
bottom 2, 37–8, 42, 47–58, 60–2, Christian, M. 12, 112
65, 90, 98, 136 Christie, Rachel 10, 12–13, 15–16,
über 63 78, 112
Bourdieu, P. 80, 166 Christie, Linford 10, 12
brand 44–5, 89, 108–10, 113, 115, chromatism 153
143 Closer 48
Brennan, T. 112 Coco 64
Brown, J. 53, 87 Coleman, D. 149–51
Brown, S. 76 Coleman-Bell, R. 48–9
Brown-Claude, W. 151–4 Collins P.H. 2, 3
browning 114–15, 147, 151–4, colonialism 1, 64, 139, 146, 161
161 colonial hygiene 16, 31, 33
Brumberg, J. 119–21, 139–40 coloniality 8, 108
bulimia 4, 62, 121–2, 125–7, coloniality of gender 65, 86, 92, 107
130–1, 142, 144 coloniality of knowledge 44
burlesque 53, 59 coloniality of labour 86, 111
Buscaglia-Salgado, J. 132–3 coloniality of power 8, 133
Bush, B. 19, 24–6 coloniality of ‘race’ 65, 86, 92, 107
bustle 53, 64 colourism 146–8, 154–9,
butch 45 162–3
Butler, J. 97, 102, 108 compassion 85
concubinage 17, 24–5, 29
calypso 57, 60–1, 65–6 Connor, S. 148
Camp, S.M.H. 51, 60 contempt 12, 15, 44–5, 52, 94, 96,
Campbell, Naomi 3, 13, 18, 19, 102–3, 110, 112–13, 115, 117,
39–46 126, 146, 157
cannibalize 53, 90, 104, 116, 145 Cooper, C. 58–60, 105
Carby, H. 12, 112 corporeality 1, 16, 80, 91, 110, 118,
Carey, Mariah 78, 81–2 135, 141–2, 144, 164
Caribbean Fashion Week 159–60 corporeal economy 63, 116
Caribbean feminism 66 corporeal enactments 102
Carlene 66, 78 corporeal integrity 83
carnival 60 corporeal strategy 102
carnivalization 90 inter-corporeal 94
catachresis 144 correctors 158
Index 185
covet 104 disordered 62, 118–19, 121, 125,

Craig, M.L. 79 129, 132, 145
Crais, C. and Scully, P. 2 problem 121–2, 125
creolization 29 psychopathology 126
economies of the flesh 49
dancehall 38, 47, 54, 57–61, 63, Edgley, C. 104, 115
65–6, 124, 147, 159–60 Edmonds, A. 115
Dandridge, Dorothy 167 Edmondson, B. 58, 60
Dantas, B.G. 101 Edwards, B. 20, 21, 23
Dark Girls 148 Ellam, M. 113, 115
debodying 47, 61–2 Ellis, N. 58
decolonial 7–10, 16, 147, 164 empathy 85
decolonization 48, 55, 57, 65–6, English Rose 10, 11, 13, 15, 85, 150
108, 147, 155, 159, 164 Ennis, Jessica 3, 93, 107–11, 113,
dementia 165–7, 169–71 115
deracinate 13–14, 39, 115 epidermalization 64
derision 85–6, 91–2 epidermal orders 134
Derrida, J. 144 epistemology 59
desire 17, 18, 29, 31–2, 37, 42–3, embodied 51
45, 47–9, 54, 62, 66, 80, 85–7, of ignorance 44, 92
89, 147, 157 91, 100, 114, 118, Eriksen, A. 154
124, 131, 135, 142, 169–70 erotic capital 47–8
desire-repulsion 12, 15, 50, 94 estrange 4, 14, 53, 63, 142
De Vere Brody, J. 33, 85, 87–8, 114, excess 36–7, 44–8, 62–3, 65, 101,
134 136, 138
diet 4, 69, 72, 75, 106–7, 120, 123, rear end 46–7
139–40, 145 exercise 4, 62, 69, 71–2, 75, 78,
disability 9, 165, 169–71 106, 123, 140
disalienation 9–10, 16, 63, 65–6, Ezra, E. 34
164, 171
discourse 4–9, 17, 19, 44, 65, 71, 83, Fanon, F. 3–4, 6, 9, 36, 51, 65, 83,
97, 105, 153 86, 102
disgust 9, 12, 15, 17, 44–5, 49, 52, historico-racial schema 4, 6, 9, 36,
63–4, 66, 72–3, 80, 85–7, 94, 96, 84–5, 97, 100, 102, 148
100, 102–6, 110, 112–13, 117, racial epidermal schema 4, 6
134, 145, 166–7 fascination 9, 44, 48, 52, 64, 66,
dis/identification 10, 14, 16, 32, 64, 93–6, 102, 107, 109–10, 117,
66, 109, 164 135–6
dissection 3, 9 fat 2, 4, 7, 9–10, 18, 24, 33, 43, 47,
diva 33, 35, 39, 40, 46 51, 62, 66, 68–73, 82, 85–6, 89,
Dixon, Alesha 3, 118, 134–5, 138, 92, 95–6, 110, 112, 122–5,
141–2, 145 131, 139, 147, 164
drag 69 acceptance 71–2, 74, 76, 78
Dyer, R. 90 phobia 75, 77, 139
Dyhouse, C. 103, 167–8 Fausto-Sterling, A. 2
fear 17, 37, 52, 72–3, 75, 87, 91–2,
eating 119, 123 94, 96–8, 100, 102, 104, 109,
compulsive over- 62 114, 117, 131, 134, 145, 153,
disorder 4, 47, 119, 125–8, 130–2 157, 162, 166, 171
186 Index
feeder sites 76 Hope, D. 57–8, 151–3

femininity Horne, Lena 167
transgressive 1, 116 horror 37, 41, 64
fetish 18, 24, 37–8, 43, 50, 53, 55, Hudson, Jennifer 78
57, 100–1, 103, 131, 135 Huffington Post
Fisanick, C. 75 humour 85–6, 88, 90–2
Fortier, A. 32 disparagement 68, 90
Foucault, M. 3–4, 6 Hunter, M. 113, 156
‘fowl pill’ 63, 124 hydroquinone 157
Frank, K. 56–7, 60 Hyper, Lisa 147, 159, 162
Franko, D.L. 130 hyper-presence 36
hypodescent 14
Gilman, S. 2, 19, 50, 69–70 one drop rule of 30, 96
Gilroy, P. 63, 109, 112, 114, 147 hysteria 32
glamazon 33, 45–6, 136
glamour 101, 103, 114, 165, iconicity 7, 8, 16, 43, 93, 97,
167–9 103–4, 111, 112–13, 116, 142,
Glenn, E.N. 155–8 144, 155, 160, 164
Glissant, E. 15 iconography 17, 18, 21, 49, 84
glocal 155, 162 Ifekwunigwe, J. 14, 33
gollification 86, 88–9, 91 implants 62
Gordon, L.R. 111 infra-human 50, 84
governmentality 4, 6, 97, 125, intercorporeality 95
152–3, 161, 166 interpellation 86, 114
griinin 58 invisibility 6, 16–17, 84
Grogan, S., Evans, R., Wright, S. and
Hunter, G. 99 Jackson, Janet 78, 116, 123
Grosz, E. 4 jamette 60
grotesque 48, 50, 53–4, 92 Jones, Grace 3, 18, 19, 34–6, 40,
Gruys, K. 49 42–3, 45, 46
guilt 118, 166, 171 Jones, T. 155
Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E. 65, 86, 109, Joyner, Flo-Jo 99
111–12 Jules-Rosette, B. 34
Guy-Sheftall, B. 100
Kardashian, Kim 48–50,
Hadreas, P. 83–4 54–6
Hakim, C. 47 Kartel, Vbyz 147, 155, 159
Hall, Adelaide 168 Kempadoo, K. 33
Hall, R. 13, 146, 157 Keyes, Alicia 55
Hall, S. 13, 164 Khanna, R. 114, 171
Hartman, S. 17 Kyrölä, K. 75
hate 32, 85, 146 Kristeva, J. 64
Hatton, Paula 81 Kwakye, Jeanette 107–11
Hinds, Alison 61
hip hop 37–8, 47, 54–5, 63, 65 Lady Saw 59
Hobson, J. 1, 2, 19, 33–4, 47–8, Lafrance, M. 148
51–5 Law, I. 41
Holmes, S. and Redwood, S. 134–5 Lee, S. 37–9, 46–8, 65, 137
hooks, b. 2–3, 6, 61, 64 les goutes de sang noir 96
Index 187
Lewis, Denise 110 ‘mixed race’ 10, 12, 14–16, 27,

Lewis, K., Gaska, K., Robkin, N., 29–31, 110, 112–13, 115,
Martin, A., Andrews, E. and 118, 139, 141–5
Williams, J. 155, 157 Mohammed P. 2, 21, 23, 25,
Li’l Kim 63–4 112
livity 67 Monahan, M. 32
Long, E. 23, 105, 149 Mo’Nique 81
Lopez, Jennifer 55–6, 62, 129 Morgan, J. 1, 2, 50
Lott, E. 87 mulataje 132
love 83–5, 95, 97, 130 mulattaroon 85, 114, 134–5
-sex 32 mulatticity 9, 117–19, 132, 135,
personal 83 142, 145
Lury, C. 108–9 mulatto/a 133–4, 149, 161, 167
Muñoz, J.E. 10, 64, 164
McCrea, R. S. 20, 21, 23–4 Munroe Smith, H. 60
MacRae, F. and Bates C. 78 Murray, S. 73
Malone, Anne Turbo 156 muscle 3, 7, 9–10, 18, 21, 23, 27,
Mammy 24, 32, 68, 74–5, 80, 86, 33, 43, 51, 93, 95–6, 98–101,
116, 123 104, 106, 110, 112, 114, 116,
anti- 19, 75 117, 131, 147, 164
Martin, R. A. 90
Mason, H. 120 narcissistic 95
Mbembe, A. 51 Nasser, M. 127–8
McClintock, A. 111 Nelson, S.C. 93
McDaniel, Hattie 68 neo-liberal 13
McQueen, Butterfly 68 Newcome, Johnny 18, 27, 30–3,
Medical News Today 130 85–6, 89
melancholia 3, 142 Newton, Thandie 3, 118, 134–5,
melancholic remainder 64 142–5
melancholic reminder 171 Ngai, S. 80, 95, 111
melancholic repetition 6–7, 10, NHS Information Centre 70
14, 16, 42–3, 64, 145 Now 49
‘race’ 114 Nuttall, S. 115
Mel B. 93, 104, 106
Mercer, K. 148 Obama, Michelle 3, 8, 16, 78, 93,
métissage 15 100–4
mestizaje 132 Oprah 8, 19, 68, 75, 78, 81, 116
Mignolo, W. 8 Orbach, S. 70–1, 75–6, 79, 121
Miller, S.B. 104–6 Owens, E. and Beistle, B. 104, 116
Mills, C. 44, 92
mimetic 15 Pacteau, F. 35–7
mimicry 37, 41, 65–6, 107 Parasecoli, F. 61–3
Minaj, Nicki 3, 8, 47, 49–50, 55, Pierre, J. 154
63–4, 160 Pieterse, J.N. 111
minstrel 86, 88–9 pigmentocracy 110, 151
blackface 87–8, 90, 92 Pilkington, E. 81
Mire, A. 143 Pinho, P. 105
mixedness 3, 110, 118, 135, 154 Pintura de las Castas 133
mixing 98, 134 pity 41, 85
188 Index
pleasure 63, 132, 134, 138, 141–2, re-epidermalization 13, 164

144–5, 147, 166–8 relationality 53
politics 117–18, 141 transracial 115
Poitevin, K. 150 revulsion 82, 85
political economy of ‘race’ 113 Rice, C. 71
(post)colonial 14 Rihanna 3, 8, 18, 35, 38, 46, 112
hygiene 6, 8, 17, 20, 85 Robertson, R. 155
‘post-race’ 7, 13–14, 88, 91, 101, Ross, Diana 168
110, 114, 118–19, 135, 141, 144, Rowe, R. 124
147
Precious 68, 81, 83–4 Sauers, J. 36
Precious Little 68, 86–92 Sedgwick, E. 64
Pride 100, 124–5 seduce 94
Probyn, E. 77 Sewards, L. 35
Prosser, J. 65 sexism 15, 92
psyche 3, 94–5, 97, 104, 111, 165 shame 49, 55, 60, 63–6, 72–3, 84,
psychic integrity 83 118, 142, 144, 166, 171
psychic labour 63 Shantz, J. 76
Puar, J.K. 98 shape 78, 126, 129, 135, 164
Puwar, N. 101, 110 Sharpley-Whiting, T.D. 18, 33, 56,
65, 96, 112–113
‘race’ performativity 6–7, 10, 14, 43, Shaw, A. 3, 68–9, 74–5, 79–80,
45, 74, 88, 102, 108, 110, 115, 124, 126
144, 147, 161 Shell, E.R. 69–71
racialization 1, 51, 97 Sheller, M. 30
racial affective economies 108, Sidibe, Gabourey 81
148 simulacra 39, 45
racial ambiguity 112, 114–15 simulation 39
racial branding 44–5, 107, size 78, 80, 90, 118128, 164
110–11, 135, 138 skin 7, 9–10, 12, 15, 18, 33, 35–6,
racial equality 113 42–3, 46, 51, 94, 95–6, 98–9,
racial feeling, structure of 89 104, 110, 112, 114, 118, 133–5,
racial gender politics 6 142, 144, 147–8, 150, 153,
racial regimes 97 163–4, 167
racialized aesthetic profiling 98 colour 3, 30, 44, 147–9,
racialized aesthetic relationality 162–3
10 colour bending 161
racialized cultural politics 10 colour colony 162
racialized economy 32 colour habitus 155–6
racialized gender 85, 94, 99 dark 3, 15, 43–6, 84, 86, 96, 102,
racialized grammar 49 118, 146, 148, 151–4, 156–7,
racialized sensing 160–2
racialized skin politics 110 economy 142
racialized technologies 10 ego 43, 64, 95, 97, 148
racism 13, 15, 40–1, 83, 91, 92, light 3, 84, 110–11, 116, 119, 124,
103, 105, 118–19, 130, 144, 145–6, 151–9
146, 148, 155, 162–3 lighten 145–50, 157–63
technology of 12 racialized 15, 43
Ransom, F.B. 156 second 34, 65, 88
Index 189
shade 146–8, 153–4, 156–7, tone 155, 157, 161–3

161–2 trans 141, 143
social 80, 100–2, 110, 112, 132 translate 53, 167
surveillance practices 162 trans-racial 48, 137, 167
trade 34, 103, 108, 110 intimacy 14, 17, 32, 44, 135
slackness 59 stylization 74, 103
slim 117–18, 120, 125, 129, 131–2, Truillot, M-R. 3, 7–8
139–41, 144–5 Truth, Sojourner 100
slimmas 4, 62, 66 Tseëlon, E. 169
Smith, Toukie 54 Turner, P.A. 86
soca 47, 54, 57, 61, 65–6 TVJ 147, 153, 155, 162
somatic
norm 101–2 una gota de sangre negra 96
politics 51 untranslatable 94, 97
spectacularization 6, 50, 55–6, 78, Ussher, J. 106
152–3
spectacle 12, 16, 43–4, 46, 53, value 24, 48, 53–4, 63–6, 71,
64–5, 78, 93, 101, 131, 147 83–4, 86, 91, 109–13, 115, 135,
Spillers, H. 18, 101 144, 153, 160, 165–6, 170–1
Spivak, G. 6, 144 Vamp 36–8
Springer, J.T. 60–1 Venus 17, 21, 23–5, 27, 34, 37, 40,
Stanley-Niah S.N. 58–9 54, 86, 89, 96, 167–8
Stockton, K.B. 53, 64–5 Hottentot 1, 2, 7, 19, 34, 42–3,
Stoler, A.L. 5, 32 48, 50, 52–3, 63–6
Striegel Moore, R., Schreiber, K. P., Kallipygos 56, 61, 65, 67
Wilfley, D. And Rodin, J. 131 Noire 34
stylization 156, 159–60, 167–9 Ode, the Sable 19
subaltern 12, 14, 51, 68, 101, Sable-Saffron 2, 6–10, 13–17,
161–2, 165 23, 24, 27, 30–5, 37, 39, 41–3,
Sullivan, S. and Tuana N. 44 46–7, 51–2, 61, 63, 66–8, 75,
symbolic capital 154–6 83, 90–3, 100–2, 107, 110,
sympathy 82, 166 112, 114, 116–19, 135–7, 139,
141–4, 147, 163–5
tanning 156 Voyage of the Sable 18, 21
Tate, S.A. 6–7, 10, 64, 79, 99, 101, Willendorf 69
103–4, 108, 110–12, 114–15, vernacular
154, 161, 167 feminist project 60
Taylor, J., Caldwell, C., Baser, R., violence 85
Faison, N. and Jackson, J. 131 visual 10, 21, 43–4, 73
TED Global 142 voyeurism 54
thin 3, 75–6, 103, 118–19, 121–3, 129,
131–2, 139 Wallace-Sanders, K. 75, 80, 86
third Wallcott, R. 153
body 162 Waller, G., Schmidt, U., Treasure, J.,
space 64, 66, 100, 152 Emanuelli, F., Alenya, J., Crockett, J.
Thomas, D. 161 and Murray, K. 126–7
Thompson, B. 122–3, 125 Walker, Madame C.J. 156
Thompson M.S. and Keith, V.M. 155 Waters, Ethel 68
Throsby, K. 77–8 Weaver, S. 91
190 Index
Weekes, D. 3 Williams, Venus 98–9

weight 62, 78, 123, 126, 130, Willis, D and Williams, C. 33
139–41 Wilson, J. 41
loss surgery 77, 123 Wilson, N. 78
Weight Watchers 78 Wingard, J. 44, 109
West Indian Washerwomen 18, 26 wining 54, 58
whitening 113, 148–9 Witt, D. 62, 119–20, 122–3
Wilder, J. 154–7, 162 Wolf, N. 99, 121
Wilks-Heeg, M. 140 womanist 25
Willemsen E.M.C. and Hoek wukkin up 60–1
H.W. 128–9
Williams, H. 146, 157 Yancy, G. 3, 19, 44, 82–4, 92, 114
Williams, Serena 3, 48–50, 93, 98–100 Young, M. 76
Williams P.J. 146
Williams, Vanessa 93 Zack, N. 14

Black Women's Bodies and The Nation

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Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

Series Editors: Victoria Robinson, University of Sheffield, UK and Diane

Editorial Board: Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, Australia, Kathy Davis,

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

Shirley Anne Tate

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-35527-0

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

ISBN 978-1-349-67542-5 ISBN 978-1-137-35528-7 (eBook)

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

List of Figures viii

Introduction – Iconicity: Black British Women’s Bodies

I.1 Rachel Christie, Miss England 2009 11

I thank my family Encarna, Soraya, Damian, Jenna, Tevian, Lachlan,

The history of the Black woman’s body in the European-North American

Collins, 1991; Weekes, 1997; Streeter, 2012) depending on such

Race-ing docile bodies

In Discipline and Punish (1977) and the History of Sexuality Volume 1

produces historically specific forms of subjectivity as well as silencing

white colonial gaze homogenizes Black women’s bodies as it dissects and

Beyond victim or parody: decolonizing Black

The discussion in this book places the racialization of Black women’s

of agency, a blank canvas to be written on. That is, it speaks against

through which the semblance of consensus on the national citizen body

Figure I.1 Rachel Christie, Miss England 2009

Venus trope. Hardy oriented his audience to a reading of Christie as

super-model Naomi Campbell. This latter comparison, alongside the

deracinated meritocracy constructed in the UK’s ‘post-race’ state-speak,

she used to be a tomboy and the constant reminder of her athleticism.

Bodies that continue to matter in Europe/the US are those that are

For Saidiya Hartman (2008: 2):

what we know about Venus in her many guises amounts to little

What I am interested in as I borrow ‘from the world of her captors’

artefacts of Caribbean enslavement iconography: ‘the Voyage of the

The Black woman’s body as fetish object – the Black

During the Middle Ages, (1119–1142) the religious scholar Peter

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my

treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not

If Black women were not here they would have to be invented so

women represented as willing and submissive sexual partners. It erased

O Sable Queen! Thy mild Domain

Do thou in gentle Phibia smile,

The Englishman Teale, was employed as a teacher in the ‘learned

I shall therefore conclude the present chapter by presenting to my

Should then the song too wanton seem,

Both Teale’s poem and Stothard’s painting were used by Bryan

women as an element of white masculinist culture (Bush, 2000). We see

Her skin excelled the raven plume,

This construction prevailed even within the deeply significant

to the picture painted here by Maria Belle’s servitude, as concubines

Figure 1.2 Agostino Brunias (1728–1796) West Indian Washerwomen, c. 1773–75

Here, Saffron Venus is represented pornographically as is the case for

Her Black-white ‘mixed race’ body is curvaceous with clearly demar-

‘Johnny Newcome in love in the West Indies’

The hand-coloured aquatint etching satirical print, ‘Johnny Newcome

to the descriptions of his Black-white ‘mixed race’ children. It enables

The figure of the ‘mammy’ is present in Johnny Newcome, which is

Bodying 20th–21st century Sable-Saffron Venus: divas,

In freedom the Saffron-Sable Venus disappeared but the younger

Black Venus master narrative is reasserted in contemporary historical

Jamaican-born, US American raised model, singer and actress, Grace

womanhood and the construction of the white racist imaginary. She

this excessive production of iconic images of Black female sexualization

is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: