Fascination: Muscle, Femininity, Iconicity

Abstract

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 bodies 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 issuing 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.