Sister Style

Abstract

Abstract Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites centers Black women’s bodies, specifically their hair texture and skin tone, to argue that phenotypic differences among Black women politicians directly impact how they experience political office and how Black voters evaluate them. The book brings together an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and blended epistemological approach of positivism and interpretivism to ask whether African American women’s appearances provide a more nuanced lens through which to study how their raced-gendered identities impact their candidacies and shape their political behavior. The authors take a deep dive into intersectional theory-building, through which they examine the intra-categorical differences among Black women. They find that Black women vary in their political experiences because of their appearances, and that dominant, Eurocentric beauty standards influence the electoral chances of Black women. They observe that skin tone and hair texture, along with the historical legacies that have shaped the current cultural and political contexts, dictate Black women elites’ political experiences and voter evaluations of them. The book asks the following questions: What do the politics of appearance for Black women mean for Black women politicians and for Black voters who evaluate them? What are the origins of the contemporary focus on Black women’s bodies in public life? How do Black women politicians themselves make sense of the politics of appearance? Is there a phenotypic profile into which most Black women politicians fit? What is the effect of variation in Black women’s phenotypes for candidate evaluations? And how do voters process the appearances of Black women candidates?