Non fiction

The Black Female Body

Last Sunday afternoon I found myself in one of those department stores that somehow seem to stock everything, yet nothing you essentially need or want. While casually browsing through the piles and rows which formed the women’s department, I came across something which struck me as strange: a pair of Boost Me Up Padded Jeans, which boasted ‘an instant, easier way to achieve the bigger butt you’ve longed for. Welcome your rounder, bubbly, curvy bottom!’
Having briefly considered what it would mean to wear such a thing, I quickly dismissed the idea as absurd and offensive—but then I began to wonder, was I missing something? The jeans were situated within the midst of all the other items as if they had always been there, so clearly this seemingly alien concept may not be so alien after all. What first seemed amusing is, in actuality, revealing.
The growing presence of body-shaping clothes designed to accentuate the buttocks signifies a shift within the mainstream perception of beauty. Although this body shape can be seen in women across all ethnicities and races, when thought about through the lens of colonialism it serves as a painful reminder of how black female identity has been perceived and interpreted in the past.
In 1814 Saartjie Baartman, a young woman from South Africa became enslaved and exploited as a ‘freak show’ and prostitute in London. The main attraction: her prominent buttocks, disproportionately large, a genetic characteristic known as Steatopygia. Her stage persona, the Hottentot Venus, was based on a Dutch racial slur designed to imitate the language of the Khoikhoi tribe.
Baartman is perhaps the most well-known and extreme example of the commodification of the black female body. Marketed as, ‘the only one ever exhibited in Europe! Declared to be a great natural curiosity/Over her clothing, is worn all the rude ornaments worn by that tribe’, the exhibition of her physicality was constructed by the European imagination, for the European imagination. Through her and other remappings, the African female became a hyper-sexualised, highly erotised being, based exclusively on physicality and sexuality. After she died Baartman’s buttocks and genitals were dissected and showcased in museums for many years.
We live in a society free from the domination of political Empire, yet the reductive colonial presence of the black female body can still be felt. In 2015 iconography displaying the curvaceous female form is more prominent than ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs
Rap singer Nicki Minaj’s music video for Anaconda is a prime example of how black females continue to be hyper-sexualised within the media. With the repeated line ‘oh my god—look at her butt’ and salacious camera angles, the focus on buttocks perpetuates the colonial cultural apparatus which led to the ‘Hottentot’ stereotype. Only, in the case of Minaj’s video, the images we are faced with are delivered through a different cultural medium. It seems colonisation has re-emerged in the disguise of mainstream rap music.
Within our era, rap and hip-hop has altered dramatically. After being seized by the music industry, misogynistic representations of the black female body were amplified to generate capital from the patriarchal, voyeuristic gaze of an androcentric society. Rap culture enables and reifies the hyper sexualised image of the black female body.
This method of representation of the ethnic other is understood by post-colonial theorist Edward Said as an unavoidable consequence of the interchange between coloniser and colonised. He states, ‘the Orient […] is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire’. Through re-energising the myth of the hypersexual black woman, Western cultural productions function in a manner which purport neo-colonial ideologies. By reducing the presence of the black female to sexualised body parts, black women are rendered powerless, reinforcing the Occident’s position of superiority in the process. The media, by continuously producing this idealised image of the female body, generates a demand amongst women to fulfil this ideal. Thus, the dissemination of cultural products such as ‘Boost Me Up Padded Jeans’ are a clear indicator of the extent to which our society has been indoctrinated by the media’s concept of desirability.

Of course, not only black women are subject to the voyeuristic and patriarchal gaze. The shifting perceptions of beauty and its ideal body shape pose a challenge to womanhood regardless of age, race or ethnicity. When forming the female identity, clothing plays an essential role in signifying the idealised image of womanhood.

In the case of padded jeans, the desirability of the characteristically ‘black’ female buttocks has become a fashion trend, a commodity accessible to all ethnicities. The garments enable women to remain ‘on trend’ and possess the ideal body while unattached to the stigmas of the black body, thus demonstrating the imbalance of power between the orthodoxy and the colonized.
When exploring this cultural trend from a historical perspective, shifting perceptions of the ideal body shape arises. Similar to the size zero phenomenon, and the idealised body trends prior to this, the idealisation of this body type will eventually run its course. But when this shift takes place, the fluidity of the Western female enables them to remain unmarked. The jeans are disposable. The black female body is not.
Within the discussion of the black female body, the term ‘post-colonial’ is highly problematic. It creates an assumption that the breakdown of Empire enables the colonised to assuage themselves of an extensive period of domination and forced assimilation. In reality, the black woman remains as a truly distinctive identity. Their position of marginality, as a consequence of Africa’s colonial past, is further reinforced by their female identity. As a result, the black female, being bound by both gender and race, is a cultural figure faced with many challenges. The construction of hyper-sexualised images not only serves as a painful reminder of the colonial conquests of the past, but also re-establishes the exhibition of the black female body, a consequence of the racially prejudiced and patriarchal gaze of Western media.

Within the vast realm of post-colonial discourse, a solution which arises is situated within the practise of ‘decolonisation’. Through continually challenging and discussing the damaging naturalised stereotypes of the black woman, progress towards achieving total liberation and fluidity can be achieved, ultimately dispelling the dehumanising and demeaning myth of the black woman as a static, ethnic identity.

"All my life I have wanted to be free. In order to claim that freedom, I had to resist the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy every step of the way"

Kiran Dosanjh