Representation Of Black Women Research Articles

“It’s a Man Thing, Gina”: Watching Gender inMartin

AbstractIn the almost three decades since the hit situation-comedy Martin (1992–1997) originally aired on Fox, the show has not only enjoyed a vibrant second life through syndication and streaming platforms, but has functioned as a form of television heritage, reflected in fashion, music, games, and memes. Martin has developed a particularly loyal following among black millennials, many of whom were too young to watch the show during its original network television run. In this article, I explore the series’ representations of black women through individual and focus group interviews with 26 black viewers. My interviews reveal that participants have ambivalent relationships with the show. While several cite Martin as their favorite show of all-time, they were disturbed by the show’s troubling depictions of black heterosexual romantic relationships and its reliance on stereotypical representations of black women.

Representation of Minority Groups in Key Pelvic Floor Disorder Trials.

Multicenter randomized clinical trials on pelvic floor disorders (PFDs) support evidence-based care. However, many of these studies include homogenous study populations lacking diversity. Heterogeneous sampling allows for greater generalizability while increasing knowledge regarding specific subgroups. The racial/ethnic makeup of key pelvic floor disorder (PFD) trials has not been examined. This study aimed to investigate racial/ethnic representation in major PFD clinical trials in comparison to racial/ethnic distribution of PFD in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES). Demographic data were extracted from completed PFD Network (PFDN) and Urinary Incontinence Treatment Network studies, which have resulted in nearly 200 publications. Prevalence of PFD by race/ethnicity was obtained from the NHANES. A representative index (Observed "n" by PFD study/Expected "n" based on the NHANES-reported prevalence) was calculated as a measure of representation. Meta-analyses were performed for each outcome and overall with respect to race/ethnicity. Eighteen PFDN/Urinary Incontinence Treatment Network studies were analyzed. White women comprised 70%-89% of PFD literature; Black women, 6%-16%; Hispanic women, 9%-15%; Asians, 0.5%-6%; and American Indians, 0%-2%. Representation of White women was higher in 13 of 18 PFDN studies compared with the NHANES prevalence data. Representation of Black women was either decreased or not reported in 10 of 18 index studies compared with the NHANES prevalence data. Hispanic women were absent or underrepresented in 7 of 18 PFDN studies compared with the prevalence data. Our examination of PFDN and other landmark trials demonstrates inconsistent reporting of minority subgroups, limiting applicability with respect to minority populations. Our study suggests that PFD research would benefit from targeted sampling of minority groups.

Untangling discrimination in the private sector workplace in South Africa: Paving the way for Black African women progression to managerial positions

Black African women in South Africa are poorly represented at managerial levels in the South African private sector since the advent of democracy. Their exclusion at these occupational levels persists despite the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998 (EEA) requiring that the private sector must ensure that all occupational levels are equitably represented and reflects the demographics of South Africa. The South African private sector demonstrates its lack of commitment to proliferating black African women into managerial positions by deliberately engaging in race-based recruitment and failing to develop and promote suitably qualified women into managerial positions. As such, the private sector is failing to create upward mobility for black African women to break the glass ceiling. The EEA requires the private sector to apply affirmative action measures in order to achieve equity in the workplace. It is submitted that since 1998, the private sector has been provided with an opportunity to set it own targets in order to achieve equity. However, 22 years later, black African women are still excluded in key managerial positions. However, the EEA does not specifically impose penalties if the private sector fails to achieve the set targets.This approach has failed to increase the representation of black women in managerial positions. However, the EEA does not specifically impose penalties if the private sector fails to achieve the set targets. Whilst this approach seeks to afford the private sector importunity to set its own target, this approach has failed to increase the representation of black women in managerial positions. Employing black African women in managerial levels enhances their skills and increases their prospects to promotions and assuming further leadership roles in the private sector. This paper seeks to show that the progression of black African women requires South Africa to adopt a quota system without flexibility that will result in the private sector being compelled to appoint suitably qualified black African women in managerial levels.

Black Women in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

In this paper, I focus on the representations of Black women in contrast to Black men found within Frantz Fanon’s philosophical work Black Skin, White Masks. I propose that while Fanon’s racial dialectical work is very significant, he often lacks acknowledgement of the multidimensionality of the Black woman’s lived experience specifically. Drawing on the theory of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, I argue that Fanon does not recognize the different layers of oppression operating in Black women’s lives to the degree that he fails to include them within his framework of both liberation and resistance from racial oppression.

Branquitude, discurso e representação de mulheres negras no ambiente acadêmico da UFBA

RESUMO As elites simbólicas perpetuam as formas mais importantes de racismo, o que aponta a importância de nos dedicarmos à análise de como discursos racistas são construídos, com foco específico no discurso da elite branca e, neste trabalho, da branquitude soteropolitana conforme plasmada por estudantes da Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA). Para tanto, reunimos dados, gerados na UFBA, oriundos de questionários abertos e grupo focal com estudantes de graduação. Nesta análise discursiva crítica (ADC), utilizamos recorte de uma pesquisa mais ampla, na qual se investigou a percepção da branquitude por discentes autodeclarados/as brancos/as da UFBA. Nossa análise sugere que a percepção do privilégio branco, mesmo quando afirmada, é permeada de ideias que podem fundamentar práticas e/ou discursos racistas, e que a representação de mulheres negras ainda é calcada em estereótipos socialmente construídos numa sociedade fortemente racista como a nossa.

Relações de representatividade e consumo, a mulher negra e os cabelos crespos no Youtube

Este estudo visa tratar sobre a representatividade da beleza negra, mais especificamente do cabelo crespo, levando em conta os estudos já realizados sobre a estética negra, assim como a agenda do feminismo negro. Através de uma etnografia digital em canais do Youtube que tratam sobre cabelos crespos, busca-se compreender a relação entre o consumo de produtos para o cabelo crespo, e como se dá a representatividade das mulheres negras em meios digitais e a construção de uma beleza negra. Por fim, visa-se analisar esta interação na tentativa de compreender dimensões da estética negra percebidas também como resistência política e social pelas mulheres negras.

‘All the women are White, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave’: The (mis)representation of Black women in the media

Western media is dominated by ‘whiteness’ although little research has been produced to provide empirical evidence for this, or investigated how it may harm those excluded – particularly Black women. This study sought to account for the underrepresentation of Black women in the media, and see how racialised appearance ideals relate to the character and job status of Black women. Sixteen of the UK’s 20 most binge-watched series in 2017 were analysed in relation to representations of physical appearance, character status (extra or substantial role) and job status. The majority of Black women featured in the programmes (N=59) had medium sized lips (59.3 per cent), darker skin (64.4 per cent), medium sized noses (50.8 per cent) and the most common hair type was type one (straight hair/no curl pattern) (35.6 per cent). Black women were rarely represented in these Netflix series (N=325, 6.19 per cent) and when they were represented, were most likely to be an extra (66.1 per cent) and thus not represented in any job. This study emphasises the stark under-representation and stereotyping of Black women in popular television shows.

“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.

Depicting Black Women, the Politics of Respectability, and HIV in Precious

This article analyzes how Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (2009) makes implicit the connection between Black women, welfare, and HIV when the lead character, Precious, an obese teenage mother, is eventually diagnosed as HIV positive. Building on scholarship that examines media representations of Black women living with HIV, this essay examines how Precious mediates respectability politics (a conservative strategy to counter racist constructions of Blackness, gender, sexuality, and class) in order to delineate racialized and gendered authenticity. We argue, by compartmentalizing Precious’s HIV diagnosis as simply another tragic life circumstance and inconsequential to her Black womanhood, the film forecloses possibilities to critically engage mediated depictions of low income Black women living with HIV. We consider the ways the film dismisses Precious’s HIV diagnosis in order to forefront her potential for respectability, thus designating her as deserving of welfare benefits.

Beyoncé’s Soft Power

This article charts Beyoncé’s multimedia intervention into the politics of the Trump presidency as she draws on the work of black Muslim and Latinx artists to challenge white monopolies on representation in the Breitbart era. It specifically looks at the political interventions Beyoncé staged through collaborations with Warsan Shire, a British poet born in Kenya to Somali parents; Awol Erizku, an Ethiopian-born American artist raised in the Bronx; and Daniela Vesco, a Costa Rican photographer. This collective of artists forge a black aesthetics at a heightened level of visibility, using new performative technologies to intervene in the politics of #BlackLivesMatter, crackdowns on Muslim and Latinx refugees and immigrants, the proposed wall with Mexico, and neo-Nazi mobilization. Focusing on Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement, the article explores the politics of representation of black bodies and black lives, as she transforms the trope of suffering black mothers and their martyred black youth into a celebration of black motherhood and the pregnant body. These images are consciously rooted in a genealogy of black women’s representations of black women’s bodies. Despite the political power of these interventions, accusations were leveled at Beyoncé of cultural appropriation and exploitation of suffering by the neoliberal entertainment machine. By mentoring these artists, Beyoncé sought to convey the fertility of creative foment across borders and power hierarchies, even if her star power ultimately eclipsed the message as well as the marginalized artist that she sought to highlight.

To Be Black and Beautiful in Israel

This article reviews works of contemporary female artists of Ethiopian origin active in the Israeli art field. I analyse the subjects in their work and argue these artists are presenting their attitudes towards the ‘white gaze’. Though constantly subjected to it by the Israeli hegemony and the Western masculine discourse, they are notably decreasing their consideration of it. They broaden the restricted field of action that seems designated for them and alter its boundaries. Drawing on theorists of gender, postcolonial theory and theory of art, I demonstrate how these artists are promoting an agenda that reflects their lives as black women in Israel. Influenced by recent socio-political changes and a decline in representations of black women on TV and in visual arts, these artworks were increasingly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions.

Never Black and White: Representing Black Women in Revolutionary France

My research focused on Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait d’une Femme Noire, exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1800. This remarkable picture of a free woman of African descent was painted in the decade between the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s reinstatement of it in 1804. I addressed the question of what we can make of the existing visual and literary representations of black women in this period, and how these representations can be used to understand something of the kind of roles or experiences the women had in French society. In the absence of firsthand accounts of art and writing by black women, I have analyzed the conditions of their existence, ideologies that shaped their experiences, and a varying range of representations of them made by white artists and writers.

The Stereotypical Representation of Black Women in Caryl Phillips’ "Cambridge"

The Stereotypical Representation of Black Women in Caryl Phillips’ "Cambridge"

A representação de mulheres negras na literatura afro-brasileira: Uma leitura de “A escrava”, de Maria Firmina dos Reis e “Minha mãe”, de Luis Gama

Este artigo busca estudar a literatura afro-brasileira produzida no século XIX, em particular o conto “A escrava”, de Maria Firmina dos Reis, e o poema “Minha mãe”, de Luís Gama, verificando como ambos os textos, publicados em 1859, embora em gênero distintos, tematizam e representam a mulher negra. Ao adentrarmos nessa discussão, algumas considerações se fazem importantes no que diz respeito ao conceito de literatura afro-brasileira e, para isso, apoiamo-nos no referencial teórico de Eduardo Assis Duarte (2010, 2011). As representações de mulheres negras em “A escrava” e “Minha mãe”, Joana e a mãe do escritor Luís Gama, frutos de uma escrita afro-brasileira, são construídas pelas vivências desses escritores, que desafiam a lógica das representações que circulavam pela sociedade da época acerca da população negra, desafio esse que produz narrativas necessárias em nossa sociedade, onde construções sociais baseadas no racismo se mantém de forma estrutural, por isso também a importância dessa discussão nos espaços escolares.

Black Girls Matter: Black Feminisms and Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer Trilogy

Media platforms frequently report on “Black Lives Matter” in order to raise awareness about institutional racism. However, these platforms often focus on African American male teenagers (Trayvon Martin in a hoodie and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” for Michael Brown). Noticeably absent are images of Black girls. As a response to these male-focused images, the hashtag movement #BlackGirlsMatter draws attention to the injustices Black girls face. Unfortunately, the reach of this hashtag movement is limited; only select outlets mention the significance of #BlackGirlsMatter. This limited reach is problematic given that many public schools—where many Black girls experience oppression—are still unaware of the institutional racism within their own policies and procedures. In order for educators and children to become cognizant of the systematic oppression at the intersection of race and gender, they must read texts that clearly align with cultural theories, such as Critical Race Theory and Black feminism, in order to potentially empower young readers. This article demonstrates how Black feminist theory can provide a useful framework for exploring the nuances of children’s novels, using Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer trilogy as an example. One Crazy Summer (Amistad, New York, 2010), P.S. Be Eleven (Amistad, New York, 2013), and Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015) contain representations of Black women and girls that assist readers in recognizing and naming systematic racism and sexism so that they may become more aware of paths for social justice.

넬라 라슨의 『패싱』속에 나타난 과장과 반복으로서의 여성 재현 - 버틀러의 수행성 이론을 중심으로

Judith Butler argues the possibility of subverting patriarchy from within the system (as the term “subvert” suggests), while other feminists have dreamed ‘subverting’ from the outside. Butler insists that the Others within the system, for example, homosexuals within the heterosexual system, can reveal the artificiality and fictionality of the dominant system by repeating and exaggerating the given/prescribed roles. Nella Larsen’s Passing meets Butler’s concept of performativity as the title itself implicates an African-American subject pretending to be white and following white norms. Passing in Passing, however, is acted not only on race, but on gender and sexuality as well. The fact that the two heroines of Passing are black females makes feminism, along with racial discourse, the main analytical frame of the novella. In particular, under the dominant normative ideology of the Harlem region in the 1920s, the two heroines, black middle class housewives, strive to survive as either white or black and their struggling becomes complicated and severe. However, through this complexity and severity of their lives, which neither fit the norm nor deviated from it completely, Passing discloses the fictionality of white, heterosexual, and patriarchal ideology. This article reexamines the issue of female representation in Passing, especially the representation of black women, through Butler’s concept of performativity: Clare’s (overt) representation of women’s beauty and Irene’s performance of the Angel in the House. Clare’s excessive representation of female beauty debunks the male subject’s or observer’s standard on aesthetics, according to which, only women “proper” enough to be contained within the male’s scope of understanding can then be judged “beautiful.” Irene’s repetition of an angel in the house also represents the dilemma of the “true (white) woman”– or a slave master’s wife in the antebellum South – who had to maintain the “house” in the face of her husband’s tacit infidelity with the other woman, the black slave. Hence, the two females’ passings represent the myth of ‘true womanhood,’ but the representations in repetition and excess as everyday performance denaturalize the discourse on black women’s gender.

Abstract P6-08-01: Race and recurrence by PAM50 intrinsic subtype and ROR-PT score: The Carolina breast cancer study

Abstract Compared with white women, black women have higher breast cancer mortality. Racial differences have been reported in frequency of PAM50 intrinsic subtypes, and PAM50 intrinsic subtype is associated with prognosis. However, there is a paucity of data from large population-based studies with adequate representation of black women to evaluate its role in racial differences in breast cancer outcomes. We studied breast cancer recurrence in relation to PAM50 intrinsic subtype using data from the Carolina Breast Cancer Study Phase III (CBCS3), a large population-based prospective cohort study oversampled black women. The current analysis included 472 black and 463 white women with stage I-III tumor and available Nanostring gene expression data for PAM50 subtype and risk of recurrence score (ROR-PT, a score calculated based on subtype, proliferation level, and tumor size; categorized as low, medium, and high). Cox proportional hazard regression was used to estimate the association of recurrence with PAM50 intrinsic subtype and ROR-PT, overall and stratified by race, adjusted for tumor size, grade, and lymph node status. During a median follow-up of 5.78 years (range=0.39-8.22), 110 recurrent cases were identified (68 blacks and 42 whites). Consistently with previous data, basal-like tumors had the highest risk for recurrence (reference=luminal A, adjusted hazard ratio [HR]=2.85, 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.44-5.66), followed by luminal B (adjusted HR=2.35, 95%CI=1.18-4.69) and Her2-enriched (adjusted HR=2.19, 95%CI=1.01-4.74). High-ROR-PT score was also associated with increased risk in both black (adjusted HR=1.55, 95%CI=0.93-2.60) and white (adjusted HR=2.07, 95%CI=1.04-4.11). Recurrence rate for black women with medium/low ROR-PT scores was suggested higher than that for white women with similar scores (adjusted HR=1.54, 95%CI=0.69-3.42). Our results demonstrate that PAM50 subtype and ROR-PT score are associated with breast cancer recurrence in both black and white women. Given the higher relative frequency of poor prognosis subtypes in black women, these findings help explain prognosis disparities by race. Citation Format: Sun X, Reeder-Hayes KE, Kirk EL, Olsson L, Tse C-K, Bell MB, Earp HS, Carey LA, Perou CM, Olshan AF, Troester MA. Race and recurrence by PAM50 intrinsic subtype and ROR-PT score: The Carolina breast cancer study [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2017 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P6-08-01.

My Mother’s Best “Set”: Diasporic Threads of Crochet

In an oral history workshop as part of the installation-based exhibition The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ at the FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2016), black women from Soweto shared stories about the crochet doilies they had made and brought with them, which resonated with me on a trans-diasporic level by invoking memories of how my mother acquired crochet ‘sets’ from friends and work colleagues. They often made their crochet doilies as domestic labourers in the homes of white employers under apartheid in South Africa, and before my mother came to England in 1960, she worked as a maid for a Dutch family for six years in Curacao. As a form of knitting thread with a hooked needle, black women across the African diaspora have transformed colonialised crochet into colourful three-dimensional sculptural pieces where each doily is unique to the individual maker. This essay will look at how crocheting in the diasporic domestic interior create express postcolonial modernity, aspirations, creative agency, entrepreneurship, creolised aesthetics, femininity, belonging and becoming that challenge and resist colonial representations of black women as not respectable, good spouses and home-makers.

Fraught Starts, Fragmented Twists, and Forged Endings: (Re)Imagining and (Re)Imaging Black Womanhood in <em>Zulu Love Letter</em> and <em>Yesterday</em>

This article explores the representations of black womanhood in the postapartheid films Zulu Love Letter (dir. Ramdan Suleman, 2004) and Yesterday (dir. Darrell Roodt, 2004). Drawing on African feminist theories, I examine how both films grapple with the complexities of visualizing race and gender against the backdrop of a changing South Africa. I also consider the ways in which Zulu Love Letter and Yesterday negotiate a language and gaze to represent black female subjectivity, as well as their focus on the female body as the embodiment of experience. Thus, I read the two films as feminist countercinema texts, because of their practices of challenging and subverting constructions and representations of black women in mainstream South African cinema and, by extension, their countering of the politics of exclusion, more broadly.

CORPO-COLÔNIA: UM ESTUDO PRELIMINAR SOBRE A REPRESENTAÇÃO DAS MULHERES NEGRAS AFRICANAS DURANTE A GUERRA COLONIAL A PARTIR DA “QUE SE PASSA NA FRENTE” DE AUGUSTO CID

O trabalho apresenta-se como um estudo preliminar sobre a representação das mulheres negras em Portugal durante os anos da guerra colonial (1961-1975). Seguindo as sugestões dos actuais movimentos globais das mulheres (Ni una menos, Women's March, Non una di Meno…) o artigo quer investigar a dupla hirarquização sofrida das mulheres negras e ao mesmo tempo analisar como e se as resistências contra o fascismo e o colonialismo português influíram nas representações. As imagens das mulheres negras em Portugal ao longo do século revelam corpos sexualizados, objectos à disposição dos colonizadores. Porém, centrando a reflexão na a Banda Desenhada, é preciso lembrar com Luís Cunha (1995) como a representação dos homens negros na BD mudou ao longo do século e sobretudo durante a guerra colonial. O artigo analisa os desenhos de Augusto Cid publicados em Que se passa na frente (1973), no intento de verificar se a guerra e as resistências levaram algumas mudanças na representação das mulheres feitas pelos colonizadores. Estas análises permitem reflectir sobre como os estereótipos racistas e sexistas mudaram nos últimos anos no regime fascista português, construindo as bases para interrogar a sociedade do pós-25 de Abril e ver assim se os rastos destas violências chegam até hoje.