White fantasies, black bodies: Racial power, disgust and desire in American popular culture

Abstract

Our concern in this paper is to explore the psychosexual logic that supports and constitutes the grammar of racist discourse in early twentieth‐century American popular media culture. Images of “grotesque” Black bodies represent the “Otherness” which was excluded in the process of white, middle‐class identity formation in this historical period. Through examination of the visual aspects of these ethnic caricatures we display how a re‐articulated racist ideology was sustained through specific strategies of iconographic representation. Racialized gender relations were depicted as symbolic inversions of bourgeois sexuality, with African American women masculinized and African American men symbolically castrated. The pervasive “bathroom humor” and sexual jokes of these images portray the Black body as contaminating, dirty, and repulsive. These postcards made use of protuberant and repugnant bodies to transform white fantasies of racial denigration into supposedly benign humor, turn racial panic into perverse pleasure.