Abstract
Although Janelle Hobson’s book Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender was intended for a humanities audience (Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and Media Studies), aspects of it may be useful for psychology of women scholars as well. Hobson’s primary aim is to call attention to the continued importance of raced and gendered bodies within a society that is sometimes portrayed as having moved into a “post-feminist” and “post-racial” age. In tackling subjects such as cultural appropriation, sex work, and popular music videos, Hobson emphasizes that issues of historical, socioeconomic, and cultural power are intertwined with and written onto bodies, and therefore, that the particular body one inhabits still bears significantly on one’s experiences within contemporary U.S. culture. It is for this embodied approach that many psychologists will find the book useful: Hobson’s work underscores the importance of taking bodies into consideration in feminist scholarship of all disciplines.
Body as Evidence comprises six chapters, which are divided into two overarching parts. In Part 1, Hobson takes readers through a number of examples from the media, popular culture, and academic scholarship to demonstrate that contemporary U.S. culture fosters an “illusion of inclusion” (p. 41), in which the recent election of a Black president and the popularity of television shows like American Idol seem to suggest that anyone can achieve power and success in this country. Hobson, however, reminds us that such spectacles are illusory by offering numerous examples of how bodies that deviate from the White male norm continue to be sidelined in popular representation.
In Part 2, Hobson narrows her analysis to focus on the meaning of race and gender within an increasingly digitized world. One of the most compelling aspects of her investigation is analysis of films such as The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Strange Days, which illustrate a racialized “digital divide” in which Black bodies (both female and male) are positioned in popular media as “primitive” and in opposition to technology, whereas White (primarily male) bodies are aligned with progress and the online world. Hobson also discusses race and gender in the context of the Internet. Despite popular rhetoric focused on the liberatory potential of the Internet, which seemingly leaves all visible traces of gender and race behind, Hobson argues that digital culture perpetuates racist and sexist ideologies in new ways. She suggests, for example, that the costs of technology are borne overwhelmingly by women whose unacknowledged assembly-line labor produces the very equipment that is used to disseminate their objectification through the online pornography industry.
Although many individual aspects of Hobson’s analysis (such as her discussion of the digital divide mentioned above) are novel and insightful, she may be preaching to the choir to some extent with her overall argument, given that her primary audience of Women’s Studies scholars will already be convinced of the continued importance of race, gender, and the body in current U.S. society. Furthermore, Hobson’s treatment of gender and race issues could have profited from more explicit use of intersectionality frameworks (e.g., Berger & Guidroz, 2009), given the importance of considering the impact of one dimension (e.g., race) on the other (gender) in determining a person’s experience. Nevertheless, Hobson’s exposure of the raced and gendered meanings hidden within popular media is thoughtful and compelling, and her message that sexism and racism are alive and well in contemporary society certainly bears repeating. For this reason, the book may be particularly relevant to those teaching the Psychology of Women/Gender at the undergraduate level because it offers a number of accessible and current-day media examples of how sexism and racism are embedded in U.S. culture. Overall, Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender is recommended for psychologists who wish to step outside disciplinary boundaries to engage with a thought-provoking and embodiment-oriented text.