Hello!

A few posts back I discussed a paper I was doing for my intro to theatre class relating to the racial politics of the body of Serena Williams and I would like to share with you all the finished product.

The Racial Politics of the Body of Serena Williams

Serena Williams is world renowned tennis star. Her powerful strikes, and backhand smashes have captivated the nation and have earned her twenty-one Grand Slam titles, five Wimbledon titles, seventy-four million and eighty-three thousand and four hundred and twenty-one dollars, and the #1 ranking in the World Tennis Association (WTA) World Ranking. With a lot of success comes a lot of attention and Williams is not the exception to this rule. A lot of the attention surrounding Williams has related to her aesthetic.

Despite being one of the most successful female athletes in history, the public has not been kind to Serena Williams. Williams has been forced to deal with countless ridicule about her body. This living legend has been saddled with endless demeaning labels regarding her shape and femininity. These racist and sexist attacks have run rampant throughout the media. Throughout her career Williams has endured a variety of different attacks on her appearance. All of this came to a peak on July 11th, 2015. This was the date where Williams once again made headlines for winning her twenty-first Grand Slam title. With her victory came an endless amount of disparaging attacks referring to her as things such as a “monkey”, “fat”, and “manly”.

Williams is facing a reality that many black women in this nation are being forced to deal with. Black female bodies are constantly judged and dehumanized and Williams is another example of this. The hatred Serena Williams has gotten for her body is racialized.

Serena Williams has been body-shamed like no other in tennis history. Williams is not a size zero. Williams is not a slim woman. And while Williams has embraced her muscular physique, the media has taken a different approach. As Huffington Post writer Zeba Bay points out, Williams has been saddled with dehumanizing labels such as a “gorilla”,” manly”, and a “savage” throughout social media. She notes that crowds laughed at Caroline Wozniaki’s impression of Williams during her match against Sharapova, which was deemed by Yahoo! Sports as “hilarious”. In a 2009 article discussing Williams’ achievements, FOX Sports columnist Jason Whitlock refers to her as “fat” and suggests she should lose weight throughout it. Even The New York Times published an article concerning the majority of female tennis stars’ desire to not look like Williams. Bay also makes a point that Williams is fighting an uphill battle. “No matter her success, her intelligence or her graciousness, her humanity is consistently denied.” (Bay). Williams is always fighting a doomed battle no matter what she does and no matter who she attempts to appease. A lot of the issues Williams has been having has one underlying factor: race.

The discourse surrounding Williams’ body is racialized. This did not just begin with her victory in July. In an article discussing Williams and the response she received for her outfit at the 2002 US Open, written by scholar Jaime Schultz, Schultz points out that the complaints were not directed at Williams’ clothes, but at her visible physique. Schultz begins illustrating how this was racialized by sharing the story of Anne White, a tennis player who wore a similar outfit at the 1985 Wimbledon tournament and became a fashion icon overnight. Schultz notes that “there is a striking discrepancy in the ways in which she and Anne White were framed and discussed by the popular media” (Schultz). It begins with the word catsuit. Unlike White, Williams’ outfit was often referred to as a catsuit a term “frequently used to refer to a similar style of lingerie” (Schultz). By using the word “catsuit” the media gave Williams’ outfit a sexual connation, thus sexualizing Williams herself. Another point Schultz makes is that equating Williams to a cat “draws on longstanding, racist ideologies that equate African heritage with animality” (Schultz). Comparing Williams to a cat dehumanizes her and this form dehumanization has continued today with her comparisons to gorillas and monkeys. Schultz also notes that Williams as seen as unnatural and “the other” when compared to white femininity. The dehumanization, otherness, and hypersexualization Williams received in 2002 still carries over today and has to do with how black female bodies are viewed as a whole in the United States.

Black women are often portrayed as one dimensional characters which leads to their dehumanization. Human beings are complex beings with many different layers making up their identities. The media is constantly filling heads with images of different people and when certain groups of people are being portrayed stereotypically and not in a humanizing matter, it becomes exactly that; dehumanizing. Sara Zayad for The Daily Targum states that “Stereotypical representations of minorities perpetuate cultural ideas that encourage racism and sexism. They influence attitudes and reinforce gender and racial segregation still present in society, no matter if messages you might receive tell you otherwise. And worst of all, they dehumanize people and reduce them to one or two characteristics associated with a race or gender.” (Zayd). When people are not shown as the complex beings they are, they become one-dimensional caricatures and people begin to devalue them in real life based off of the stereotypes that are given to them. This is particularly true for black women. According to scholar Carolyn West from Iowa State University, when it comes to black women in the media there are three common stereotypes. The

Mammy Type, the poor hard-working motherly black woman, the Sapphire type, or the “angry black woman”, and the Jezebel type, the hypersexualized woman. All of these paint a single story of black women which leads to their dehumanization. This is especially problematic because “in addition to manifesting themselves in general prejudicial attitudes, stereotypes also influence power dynamics in personal interactions. Finally, the popular culture and media perpetuate stereotypes in ways that foster the belief that these images are accurate representations of particular groups” (West). These images can cause very real harm and Serena Williams and the rest of black women just like her have been feeling the brunt of it.

Serena Williams and other black women are held to different standards that white women. One might ask whether in the case of Williams if race truly plays a part in the discussion. Would her body be accepted if she was white? The answer is yes. Bay also points out that “Martina Navratilova, Justine Henin, Victoria Azarenka, and Samantha Tosur aren’t subject to the same disdain and body-focused critiques that Williams is” (Bay). These are all women with similar figures to Williams who have received almost none of the negative reception. The only major difference in the bodies of Williams and the women listed above is that they are all white and that Williams is black. One might call this an isolated incident that does not truly reflect the way that black women are viewed in this nation but prominent black women in the United States have always dealt double standards like this, a recent example being the artwork for Nicki Minaj’s artwork for her single Anaconda. One could not go through social media without finding a joke, complaint, or some sort of dehumanizing comment about Minaj’s body. On the other hand, as Minaj pointed out through Instagram, white supermodels like Kate Upton for Sports Illustrated are able to pose for photo-shoots in just as little clothing as Minaj and receive almost none of the blowback. I recently spoke to University of Minnesota professor Yolanda Y. Williams who spoke on this issue. Y. Williams states that “Black women are denied their womanhood, because it does not match the white stereotype of what a woman is, or of what feminist is. This is why a black female child can be wrestled to the ground and sat on. It’s why a black child can be pulled out of a chair and thrown to the ground. It is why the many women’s organizations in this country have been largely silent about the treatment of Black women” (Williams). Black women being denied their womanhood which leads to their dehumanization which leads to the further injustices black women are forced to face today with Yolanda Williams alluding to a very recent event regarding a black school girl who was recently attacked by a police officer in the middle of her classroom. It is these double standards that put black women at a disadvantage. Black women are held to unfair standards in comparison to white women in relation to their bodies

The only way to solve problems like this is to change how black women are perceived in America as a whole which is not simple. A way to do this would be to start with the media. Showing black women in more leading roles and playing more complex characters would do wonders for how black women are perceived. If people are used to seeing black women as normal humans it will lead to people treating black women has normal humans and will ensure another black woman is not dealt the same fate as Serena Williams.

As Boal says theatre is inherently political and what better way to spark a political movement than to attack a nation’s very own beauty ideals. Through the lens of Williams, the story of millions of black women can be told. Seeing the Williams experience on stage would not only do wonders for the movement but also create a beautiful piece of theatre, carried by the inspiring story of a hard working brave woman who continues to succeed against everyone’s wishes and rises above the criticism.

Black women have it hard in this nation. Their bodies are constantly under scrutiny and their held to standards that other women are not held to. Serena Williams in particular felt the brunt of this after her most recent Grand Slam victory when the haters came out in full force to attack her looks. Despite this Williams held her head up high and has her sights on winning her next Grand Slam title, but she should not have to. No one should be forced to go through what

Williams went through. Perceptions of black female bodies need to change. We can deliver this message through theatre and make a political statement and share an inspiring story at the same time.