Black/Female/Body<i>Hypervisibility</i>and<i>Invisibility</i>

Mowatt, Rasul A.; French, Bryana H.; Malebranche, Dominique A.

doi:10.18666/jlr-2013-v45-i5-4367

Cited by 101 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…They come across, especially through their lyrical content, as not expressing entitlement over women's bodies. This is an observation that may be appreciated by several pockets of feminist scholars (Sommers-Flanagan et al, 1993;McRobbie, 2004;Bretthauer et al, 2007;Mowatt et al, 2013;Ligaga, 2014;Ligaga, 2020 etc) who have partly spoken truth to power as it relates to heteropatriarchal men and their relationships with women's bodies.…”

Section: The Façade Of the Empowered Agentic And Self-determining Woman In Afrobeats Music Videos: The Intersection Of Post-feminism And mentioning

confidence: 93%

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Rens

2021

Front. Sociol.

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Stemming from a broader PhD project, this article argues that neoliberal post-feminist cultural sensibilities–entrenched in contemporary popular culture–about empowered, agentic and self-determining women, are regressive for the feminist advancement of gender-relational equality in the African context. To arrive at this conclusion, the central aim was to elucidate whether the gender-performative representations prioritised in the multimodal discourses of Afrobeats music videos are implicated in post-feminist sensibilities and if so, in what ways and to what effect? Given the continent’s richly diverse, yet largely heteropatriarchal, sociocultural formations, I argue that ideas about empowered, agentic and self-determining (black) African women are–based on the limited purview offered through the multimodal discourses of a small corpus of Afrobeats music videos–no more than sociocultural façades as opposed to gender-relational realities in our context. The article relied on a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a total of nine music videos drawn from the PhD project’s larger corpus of 25 Afrobeats music videos, their accompanying song lyrics, as well as a selection of YouTube viewer comments extracted from the analysed music videos. In critically exploring the gender-relational depictions prioritised in the analysed music videos, I argue for the consideration of what I am coining “misogyrom”; a gender-relational cultural sensibility which, in tandem with a post-feminist sensibility partly undergirding the multimodal discourses of these music videos, effectively veil this popular musical genre’s evidently sexist and misogynistic undertones that subvert potentialities of empowered, agentic and self-determining black African women.

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Section: The Façade Of the Empowered Agentic And Self-determining Woman In Afrobeats Music Videos: The Intersection Of Post-feminism And mentioning

confidence: 93%

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Rens

2021

Front. Sociol.

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“…It is unclear how informed Sartjie was about what was to be the true purpose of her time in England, but records show she entered into a specious contract to "share in the profits made on her exhibition in Europe" by Dutchman Henrik Cezar [34] (p. 90). Baartman had what the colonizers viewed as a fascinating, inferior, and oversexed body due to its size and her "unusually large" buttocks [34][35][36]. Sartjie arrived in England, where she became a spectacle, half-clothed in a cage, in London's Piccadilly circus.…”

Section: Colonizing the Black Female Body And Running-historical Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She would eventually be moved to France in 1814, where she worked for a man who showcased animals and treated her as such, forcing her to perform shows for private audiences. In both England and France, Saartjie was ridiculed and commodified, while her British and French superiors exploited the financial reward of her body as a spectacle [35]. Usiekniewicz highlights how Sartjie's legacy formulated the notion of "Black fatness" as "a sign of degeneration" and "different manners of body policing" that are still to this day perpetrated on those living in fat, racialized bodies [37] (p. 12).…”

Section: Colonizing the Black Female Body And Running-historical Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mind Your Business and Leave My Rolls Alone’: A Case Study of Fat Black Women Runners’ Decolonial Resistance

Ashdown-Franks

Joseph

2021

Societies

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The Black female body has been vilified, surveilled, and viewed as ‘obese’ and irresponsible for centuries in Western societies. For just as long, some Black women have resisted their mischaracterizations. Instead they have embraced a ‘fat’ identity. But little research has demonstrated how Black fat women participate in sport. The purpose of this study is to show how Black fat women who run use social media to unapologetically celebrate Blackness and fatness. This research uses a case-study approach to illuminate a broader phenomenon of decolonial resistance through running. In addition to analysis of websites, blogs, and news articles devoted to Black women’s running, we discuss the (social) media content of two specific runners: Mirna Valerio and Latoya Shauntay Snell. We performed a critical discourse analysis on 14 media offerings from the two runners, including websites, Twitter pages, and blogs collected over a five-month period from September 2020–January 2021. The analysis examined how they represent themselves and their communities and how they comment on issues of anti-fat bias, neoliberal capitalism, ableist sexism, and white supremacy, some of the pillars of colonialism. Whereas running is often positioned as a weight-loss-focused and white-dominated colonial project, through their very presence and use of strategic communication to amplify their experiences and build community, these runners show how being a Black fat female athlete is an act of decolonial resistance. This study offers a unique sporting example of how fat women challenge obesity discourses and cultural invisibility and how Black athletes communicate anti-racist, decolonial principles.

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“…This developing body of work though tends to focus on three main areas. First, almost a third of all the research was specifically about African American women (good examples include but are not limited to Adjepong, 2015;Armstrong, 2007;Bruening, 2004;Mowatt et al, 2013;Ross, 2009;Van Ingen, 2013;Withycombe, 2011). This perhaps reflects the dominance of the U.S. context more broadly in the sociology of sport.…”

Section: Reviewing the "Critical" In Critical Studies Of Race Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What is central here, in the words of Gupta and Ferguson (1992), is the naturalisation of difference. For example, representations of African American sporting women's physicality as "naturally" powerful and muscular (see Mowatt et al, 2013;Vertinsky and Captain, 1998).…”

Section: Colonial Re/presentationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color

Ratna

2018

Sociology of Sport Journal

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When even the so-called “critical” scholarship about women of color and sport, mostly speaks to cultural tropes of difference, the possibility of recovering alternative knowledges becomes limited. For me, uncovering persistent problems from within this field of study, is an essential step to better recovering diverse representations of difference, that are sometimes consciously, and at other times inadvertently, erased. Adding my voice to a number of sport scholars who advocate a decolonising approach, I urge contemporary researchers to theoretically reconsider, and to re-frame, their analysis of difference. In this paper, I do so by utilizing a transnational feminist lens; addressing the transient boundaries of space, identity, belonging, and knowledge production. I specifically elucidate how difference is made, and not just experienced. Through this theoretical intervention, I make an original case for how the “critical” can be put back into critical studies of race, sport and gender.

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Black/Female/BodyHypervisibilityandInvisibility

Cited by 101 publications

References 99 publications

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

Women’s Empowerment, Agency and Self-Determination in Afrobeats Music Videos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

‘Mind Your Business and Leave My Rolls Alone’: A Case Study of Fat Black Women Runners’ Decolonial Resistance

Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color

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