Classed Femininities of Black Women: Subjectivities and Agency in Body Reshaping and Body Management Practices
Creators: name: Bewaji, Oluwatoyin
Publisher: name: Leeds Beckett University
Year: 2024

description: This thesis presents research investigating how Black women’s intersecting racialised, gendered, and classed identities shape their body management and body reshaping practices through a critical and feminist relational discourse analytical lens. This represents a move away from positivist and essentialist epistemologies which have been used to subordinate and pathologise Black women’s bodies and body management practices. There is vast scholarship on the subordination and marginalisation of Black women by hegemonic cultural ideals typifying Whiteness, White facial features, and thinness as the ideal standard of beauty. This marginalisation has been posited as disadvantageous and impacting upon Black women’s wellbeing (see Bryant, 2013). There is also a call for research to explore the role of social and cultural identities on body reshaping practices in British ethnic minority women (Swami &amp; Hendrikse, 2013) and in Black women (Tallyrand et al., 2017). It is therefore imperative to understand the discursive negotiations of classed femininities of Black women (i.e., class, gender, and race) in the context of their body reshaping and management practices as there is under-representation of Black women in research on body management practices (Goode et al., 2017). As such, this study aims to examine how Black women’s multiple identities influence their body reshaping and body management practices using a two-study analysis: a media-text study and an interview-based study.
For the first study, a Critical discourse analysis (Mullet, 2018) was used to analyse video introductions and talk from the comment sections of five YouTube videos. Three discourses originated from this analysis. First, the curvy body was constructed as natural for African/African-heritage women. Second, the curvy body was constructed as a form of Black female empowerment – where empowerment was constructed through a neoliberal rhetoric of autonomy, choice, and empowerment. As such, participants drew on racialised body discourse and post-feminist/neoliberal discourses. The third discourse pertained to female empowerment and body acceptance. This was found to be contradictory to the second discourse, as female empowerment was related to and performed within a feminist-politics context where body acceptance and self-love were key to doing gender.
The second study of this research adopted a Feminist relational discourse analysis (Thompson et al., 2018) to analyse the discourse and voices in the interviews with Black women and their self-written diaries. Two discourses originated from the first phase of the analysis: curvy body as the ideal body, and reshaping as a (un)healthy pursuit. The I-poems in the second phase demonstrated how Black women position themselves within these broad discursive patterns and dominant discourses through several voices, such as guilt, constructing the self as deficient, normalising pain, constructing feelings of injustice and resistance to a class-based deficient self, and, as such, presenting body work as not providing the desired freedom sought but an arterial for continuous domination. In conclusion, this thesis has focused on Black women's voice and posited that the curvy body, and indeed any body ideal, should be seen as potentially both an oppressive ideology and a form of resistance for Black women. Therefore, targeting healthy body reshaping and body management practices in minority communities is paramount, requiring education and health initiatives that consider and properly understand the multiple and often intersecting identities of Black women.