The “O” Factor: Foucault, Race and Oprah’s Body Journey

Abstract

This chapter speaks to the gaps on race and gender within Discipline and Punish (1977) and cements itself within the wealth of black feminist scholarship on the body (see Hine in We specialize in the wholly impossible: A reader in black women’s history. New York University Press, New York 1995; Poran in Sex Roles 55(11–12):739–755, 2006; hooks in Selling hot pussy. Turnaround, London, 1992; Collins 1993; Thompson in Feminist Media Studies 15(5):794–812, 2015; Wallace-Sanders in Skin deep, spirit strong: The Black female body in American culture. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2002; McElya 2007). Using the narratives surrounding Oprah Winfrey’s dieting journey, I explore how the black woman’s body is deeply symbolic of racialized and gendered disciplinary powers. Historically, black women have been positioned into a binary of either the desexed “Mammy” or the hyper-sexual “Jezebel”, ubiquitous racist stereotypes which seek to exert control over black femininity (Thompson in Feminist Media Studies 15(5):245, 2015). Within this chapter, therefore, I explore the ways in which Winfrey’s presentation of her body and the dieting discourse which she engages in is symbolic of a cultural shift in the way that black women view their bodies. Despite this, Oprah’s public weight-loss journey is deeply symbolic of the middle-class black woman’s desire for thinness (Kyrola in The weight of images: Affect, body image and fat in the media. Routledge, London, p. 805, 2016; Suddath 2011; Thompson in Black women and identity: What’s hair got to do with it? Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2009; Patton in NWSA Journal 18(2):24–51, 2006). As white beauty standards were entrenched as the norm, black femininity became disciplined through a “straight, white male gaze” that demands complete control of the body (Joseph in Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(3):237, 2009). The book finds that the notion of control was cemented within Winfrey’s Weight Watchers campaign, demonstrating the ways that fat black women are presented as “disobedient” (Farrell in Fat shame: Stigma and the fat body in American culture. New York University Press, New York, 153, 2011; hooks in Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. South End Press, Cambridge, 1989). Next, the chapter will discuss the ways that neoliberalism has played an essential part in the changing roles of black women in dieting discourse and how it has affected their disciplinary practices. The use of Soul Food in Oprah’s Weight Watchers’ recipe book is integral to a shift in the way that black women have been re-positioned in dieting discourse. The final section of the chapter, however, will explore the hostile environment that black women are often met with when they do conform to white standards of beauty, noting the double burden they face.