Abstract
On Facebook recently, a young, black blogger named shannelle (@TheShanelleM) described becoming aware of the ways she had been giving away her bodily autonomy. To free herself and release her anxiety, she said, “I stopped sucking my stomach in.” Many of us may like to follow suit. But as Kamille Gentles-Peart’s book Romance with Voluptuousness demonstrates, black Caribbean women in the United States might reject this advice even as they eschew the thin body ideal that is sought, performed, and replicated so ubiquitously by white women. Sucking in the stomach is a practice associated with what Gentles-Peart calls the “thick body ideal,” in which black Caribbean women attempt to manipulate their bodies to approximate the shape of a glass Coca Cola bottle, with small waists and curvaceous hips and buttocks. They are celebrated for this shape, punished for it, and disciplined by it.
The celebration is communicated culturally, apparent in forms such as the lyrics of popular dance-hall reggae songs. In this music, men proclaim the desirability of Caribbean women’s thick bodies, which, along with particular dancing abilities, are implied to be these women’s natural birthright. However, Gentles-Peart also describes the pressure black Caribbean women feel—communicated by men, their mothers, and even religious leaders—to achieve the “proper” size and features. Women understand that while they will be praised for thick hips and thighs, they cannot be wagga wagga, a Jamaican phrase meaning big and out of proportion. They must, then, suck in their stomachs, but not too far, because if they are skinny they will be judged as inadequate as well. The romance with voluptuousness does not signify black Caribbean women’s freedom or a carefree corporeal orientation. Rather, it reflects a challenge to racist American discourses of propriety even while it serves as a patriarchal, neo-imperialist form of control.
This control can result in the indirect constraint of black women’s professional opportunities, to name just one source of the punishment meted out on the basis of thickness. When the only clothes available in mainstream U.S. stores are designed to fit slender white bodies, for example, voluptuous women in the workplace may seem “off” to their white coworkers in their ill-fitting or unstylish outfits. Participants in the study recite the comments they hear at work about their pants being too tight, which the author explains as a form of racism that is particularly powerful because it is indirect: a way of interpreting black women as abnormal, inappropriate, and even grotesque, and being able to exclude them for these reasons without having to rely on the signifier more directly associated with race: skin color.
This example suggests that black Caribbean women in U.S. institutions may find themselves in the same position as U.S.-born black women. However, one of the most subtle but theoretically rich points of Romance is Gentles-Peart’s analysis of how race and ethnicity are neither synonymous nor synchronous in perceptions of the thick body ideal. In focus groups and interviews, the black Caribbean women in the study talked about women like Tracy Ellis Ross from the tv show blackish and singers like Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé as embodying the voluptuous ideal to which they aspire. It struck Gentles-Peart that none of the women named black Caribbean women who embody the thick ideal, even though the participants remain connected with Caribbean music and media. This identification with U.S.-born black women directly contradicts the contempt that some of the women in the study express for black American women. In what the author calls a “discourse of superiority,” some first-generation black Caribbean women position themselves as better and harder workers than Americans. Compared to U.S.-born black women, they believe themselves to have stronger values, more discipline, and a wiser approach to education. Thus, in these aspects of “culture” or ethnicity, these women set themselves apart from black American women, with whom they are racially categorized. They face some of the same discriminatory racist treatment as black American women and identify with black American women on television who embody the voluptuous ideal, but maintain their own ethnic differentiation from them.
This is only one of the complex contradictions Gentles-Peart addresses in the book, which is based on eight years of ethnographic research with first- and second-generation English-speaking Caribbean women in the United States. Gentles-Peart’s own social location as an immigrant from Jamaica facilitated her access to participants and allowed her to foster a sense of community, connectedness, and collaboration with them. While, in my reading, this resulted in a deep, familiar, and engaging presentation of their perspectives, the book is not an idealized report of black Caribbean women’s perspectives. Gentles-Peart critically addresses the problematic implications of some of the impressions of her participants, and does not gloss over the contradictions she encounters, either in the data or, analytically, in possible interpretations of them.
The author’s treatment of both the romance with voluptuousness and black Caribbean women’s resistance to its disciplinary power is subtle and skillful. The book has a sort of spiral form of organization, which can make it seem repetitive. The absence of any discussion of the perspectives of lesbians in a book about women’s sexual desirability is a flaw, as is the implicit assumption of heterosexuality apparent in the data presentation. But students and scholars who imagine that black women in the current American moment are free from the discipline imposed through ideal body types will benefit from Kamille Gentles-Peart’s intricate work on this subject. Her book serves as an invitation not to “Tuk in Yuh Belly,” as the popular song goes, in pursuit of bodily autonomy.