10.

1177/0891243202238981
GENDER
Beauboeuf-Lafontant
& SOCIETY / STRONG
/ FebruaryAND
2003LARGE BLACK WOMEN ARTICLE

STRONG AND LARGE

BLACK WOMEN?
Exploring Relationships between
Deviant Womanhood and Weight

TAMARA BEAUBOEUF-LAFONTANT
DePauw University

This article questions the societal and cultural image of Black women as strong and suggests that this
seemingly affirming portrayal is derived from a discourse of enslaved women’s deviance. In highlight-
ing connections between perceived strength and physical size among Black women, the analysis extends
current feminist theory by considering the ways in which the weight many strong African American
women carry is reflective of the deviant and devalued womanhood that they are expected to embody both
within and outside their culture.

Keywords: Black women; body image; feminist theory; Black feminist theory; eating
disorders

Within the U.S. imagination, Black women have typically represented a “deviant
womanhood” (Townsend Gilkes 2001) in terms of both physical and psychological
characteristics. While white women have fought against assumptions of their pas-
sivity and weakness, Black women have had to contend with the myth of the strong
Black woman, a historically complex distillation of images derived from two
sources: the rationalizations of a white slave-holding society and Black culture’s
attempt to define womanhood for itself.
Understanding that societal and cultural images of Black womanhood too often
have been rooted in “negative anti-woman mythology” (hooks 1981, 86), I draw on
the work of Black and white feminists sensitive to the reality of multiple
oppressions in Black women’s lives. In particular, my analysis is rooted in Becky
Thompson’s (1992, 1994b) contention that eating problems—such as anorexia,
bulimia, compulsive overeating and/or dieting—are common for diverse women
given their origin as sensible “survival strategies” that use food to cope with experi-
ences of oppression, trauma, and pain. Because eating problems are the embodi-

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful and
thoughtful comments and Lesa Carter for her encouragement.
REPRINT REQUESTS: Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Department of Sociology, DePauw University,
104 Asbury Hall, Greencastle, IN 46135; e-mail: tbeauboeuf@depauw.edu.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 17 No. 1, February 2003 111-121

DOI: 10.1177/0891243202238981
© 2003 Sociologists for Women in Society

111

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112 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2003

ment of social inequalities, my analysis also extends recent work focused on the
meaning of body image among Black women (Lovejoy 2001). In this article,
however, I specifically examine how the presumption of strength and deviance
may push Black women to develop eating problems—particularly compulsive
overeating—that they and others are unable or unwilling to name as such. Thus, this
article uses an oblique reading of much of the body image and Black feminist litera-
ture, bringing them in conversation to develop a new approach to examining Black
women’s weight and perceptions of their bodies. As a result, the following analysis
focuses on two areas typically left out of body image discussions of Black
women—a critical understanding of the particular social assumptions held of them
and their own voices and reflections on their social realities. Drawing on a small yet
currently undertheorized area of overlap between feminist and body image investi-
gations of Black women’s weight, I illuminate how the discourse of strength is a key
oppressive experience that results in the genesis of eating problems among African
American women as well as masks them.
To focus on Black women’s social context and lived realities as a critical back-
drop to discussions of their weight and body image, I organize the rest of the article
around the following three themes: historical views of strength in Black women,
contemporary Black feminist critiques of these images and their distortions of
Black women’s realities, and current research focused on eliciting Black women’s
actual voices on the subject of their bodies and lives.

MAMMY: A DISCOURSE
OF DEVIANCE EMBODIED

A persistent “controlling image” of Black womanhood is that of the Mammy

(Hill Collins 1991, 68). Designed to make the exploitation of Black women appear
“natural, normal, and an inevitable part of everyday life” (Hill Collins 1991, 68),
the large, dark-skinned, sexless Mammy was central to the rationalization of slav-
ery as a “peculiar institution” of human bondage. A “passive nurturer, a mother fig-
ure who gave all without expectation of return, who not only acknowledged her
inferiority to whites but who loved them” (hooks 1981, 84-85), Mammy was
rewarded and elevated for being, simultaneously, a capable, domesticated woman
and a dutiful, grateful slave. Physically removed and distinguished by her size, skin
color, and age from the ideals of true (white) womanhood, she embodied a devi-
ance—a “dark heaviness” (Williamson 1998, 66)—that allowed a slaveholding
society to see itself as “benign” in both its exploitation of Blacks and its domestica-
tion of women (White 1985, 58).
Physical deviance among Black women has been closely tied to perceptions of
their emotional and spiritual strength (Townsend Gilkes 2001). A key example of
such deviance exists in the appropriation of Sojourner Truth by nineteenth-century
white feminists. Fabricated by Francis Dana Gage 12 years after the fact, the 1851
“Ain’t I a woman?” soliloquy attributed to Truth was based on images of her as a

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 Beauboeuf-Lafontant / STRONG AND LARGE BLACK WOMEN 113

deviant: “The weird, wonderful creature, who was at once a marvel and a mys-
tery . . . this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high” whose perfor-
mance of the speech had a “magical influence” on the audience and contributed
greatly to the efforts of Gage and other reformers (Irvin Painter 1996, 165, 167,
168). While Truth’s experiences as an enslaved woman are noted, the focus on her
physical form and strength depicts structural oppression as having little real nega-
tive influence on her. She exists somehow outside of and in spite of slavery and
sexism.
A modern-day example of attributions of strength based on perceptions of phys-
ical deviance is revealed in Retha Powers’s (1989) account of her own battle with
compulsive overeating and dieting. After admitting her struggle to a white high
school counselor, she received the following response:

You don’t have to worry about feeling attractive or sexy because Black women aren’t
seen as sex objects, but as women. . . . Also, fat is more acceptable in the Black commu-
nity—that’s another reason you don’t have to worry about it. (Powers 1989, 78, 134)

Despite the counselor’s voiced desire to value Powers (1989) as a woman, her
implicit view was of women as thin, white, and sexual. Furthermore, she viewed
Powers’s physical deviance from this norm as evidence of her emotional deviance—
her stability and potential to help others “with more serious problems.” In the pro-
cess, the counselor revealed that her presumption of Black women’s strength and
physical deviance completely overshadows and rejects Powers’s reality of having
an eating problem. Resisting this image of deviance and the erasure of her reality,
however, Powers titled her essay “Fat Is a Black Women’s Issue” to point to this
denial of both her eating problem and her humanity in a world that sees fat as an
exclusively white feminist issue (Orbach [1978] 1988).

INVERSIONS OF OLD
STEREOTYPES: FROM MAMMY
TO THE STRONG BLACK WOMAN

While Powers (1989) focused on an oppressive societal image of Black woman-

hood, within African American culture, there are also troubling perceptions of
Black women. Although most Black women would not see themselves as nor aspire
to be Mammies, they do closely identify with the image of the strong Black
woman—the African American woman who struggles to “make a way outa no
way” (Reagon 1980, cited in Thompson 1994b), who single-handedly raises her
children, works multiple jobs, and supports an extended family. As Angela Mitch-
ell and Kennise Herring (1998, 67) wrote, “If there’s one prevailing image we have
of ourselves, it’s that we can survive anything. We get that image from our mothers,
who frequently shield us from the truth of their feelings.”

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114 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2003

Rather than take care of her white owners like her Mammy predecessor, the
Black superwoman now withstands adversity for the sake of her own family and
community. However, many of the characteristics of fortitude and caretaking
ascribed to strong Black women are an inversion of the Mammy myth and a contin-
uation of the extreme selflessness that the Mammy role expected of Black women.
Consistent in both stereotypes is the idea of a Black woman as a “longsuffering,
religious, maternal figure,” loved for “her self-sacrificing self-denial for those she
loves” (hooks 1981, 66). While in some ways, an affirmation of women’s capabili-
ties, particularly within a society that associates femininity with passivity and
weakness, the strength of Black women is often an ironic inversion of their devi-
ance and a reflection of Black culture and white society’s failure to take seriously
Black women’s oppression.

CONFLICTED INNER VISIONS

AND THE MASK/ING OF STRENGTH

Black women’s relationships to their bodies occur within overlapping cultural

contexts that offer contradictory messages about their value and function (Lovejoy
2001). A self-described “dark, plump, African-American woman,” sociologist, and
ordained minister, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes (2001) wrote about the ambivalence,
the “conflicted inner visions,” that shaped her relationship to her own body during
her youth:

At the same time my peers and my mother impressed me with my visual deviance, my
peers, my family, and my church encouraged me to occupy leadership roles and to
excel in other ways. The negative voices about my size often came from the same cho-
rus as the positive voices about other aspects of myself. (Townsend Gilkes 2001, 193)

The push-pull of criticism and then acceptance for her size seems to reflect what
Townsend Gilkes (2001) also noted as the cultural reverence for the large Black
woman:

In spite of the high premium placed on culturally exalted images of white female
beauty and the comedic exploitation that surrounds the large black woman, many
African-American women know that the most respected physical image of black
women, within and outside of the community, is that of the large woman. (Townsend
Gilkes 2001, 183, emphasis added)

However, within the context of expectations for selflessness, the strength attributed
to Black women is contradictory. As bell hooks (1981, 83) noted, “Much of what
has been perceived by whites as an Amazonic trait in black women has been merely
stoical acceptance of situations we have been powerless to change.” Thus, rather
than a reflection of agency and influence, the strength demonstrated by and seen in
Black women is too often a sign of their resignation to the oppressiveness of their

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 Beauboeuf-Lafontant / STRONG AND LARGE BLACK WOMEN 115

social context. That is, even within a culture that respects “large” Black women, the
deviance “is not necessarily loved. It is an image of power in a community where
women need to be fortified and empowered. Yet some of the most powerless
women in the community struggle with overweight and its unhealthy conse-
quences” (Townsend Gilkes 2001, 183).
Because the strong Black woman discourse is upheld both within and outside of
the Black community, there is very little resonance for any African American
woman who acknowledges or desires to speak about her weaknesses, pains, and
frustrations. A clear example of this erasure and denial of pain is revealed in Meri
Nana-Ama Danquah’s (1998, 20) autobiographical account of depression. The
incongruity of the “weakness” that depression suggests to many outsiders with the
strength Danquah was assumed to embody meant that she could find “no acceptable
ways, no appropriate words to begin a dialogue about this illness.” In the words of a
white woman speaking to Danquah (1998, 20), “It’s just that when black women
start going on Prozac, you know the whole world is falling apart.” Furthermore,
Danquah was vilified by members of her own culture as a race traitor who had for-
gotten the therapeutic aspects of religion and the cultural legacy of strength that
runs through her blood: “Girl, you’ve been hanging out with too many white folk”;
“What do you have to be depressed about? If our people could make it through slav-
ery, we can make it through anything”; “Take your troubles to Jesus, not no damn
psychiatrist” (Danquah 1998, 21). In such a context of pressure from both within
and outside their communities to be strong, Black women suffering from depres-
sion often meet others’ expectations of strength by engaging in “stoicism . . .
denial . . . [and] a complete negation of their pain” (Danquah 1998, 277).
Based on their clinical work with Black women, Mitchell and Herring (1998)
elucidated the behavioral consequences of such stoicism and of Black women’s
seeing themselves as the “mules of the world” (Neale Hurston 1937).

Many Black women find it hard to admit they are overworked, overwhelmed,
underloved, and depressed. . . . So instead of complaining or asking for help, many
Black women try to keep on while they medicate their pain in self-destructive ways:
by overeating, smoking, drinking, or using drugs. (Mitchell and Herring 1998, 67)

Two intriguing possibilities emerge from Mitchell and Herring’s (1998) analy-
sis: first, that Black women may unconsciously participate in their own dehuman-
ization by seeing themselves through this discourse of deviance and strength as
“mules of the world,” rather than as human beings with capabilities as well as needs
and vulnerabilities; and second, that overeating may be a form of self-medication
for women/mules who are overburdened and burden themselves with too much car-
ing and responsibility for others. From a symbolic approach to the body and weight,
we may view some overweight and obese Black women as literally carrying the
weight of the world on their bodies. However, because overweight Black women
are not as stigmatized by the larger society or by their own culture as are white
women (Hebl and Heatherton 1998), a Black woman’s “survival strategy” of

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116 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2003

overeating would remain invisible to many around her (Thompson 1994b). This is
one potential connection between the higher weights observed among Black
women and the emotional strain of having to minister to the needs of many. Further-
more, an uncritical acceptance of overweight as normative among Black women, as
is currently found in much of the mainstream body image literature, may reflect
research complicity in expecting Black women to represent a deviant, not fully
human, womanhood, as well as a lack of interest in seeing Black women show a full
range of emotions and needs that are not permitted by the stereotype of strength.

STRONG AND LARGE BLACK

WOMEN SPEAKING OUT IN
THE BODY IMAGE LITERATURE

Telling information about the presence of eating problems among Black women
and the influence of discourses of strength and deviance on the interpretation of
such problems is found largely in the few qualitative studies conducted on Black
women and weight. In this research, we hear Black women, particularly those who
are poor or struggling financially, facing societal and cultural expectations to be
emotionally strong and physically large.
In their interviews with 36 college-educated Black women, Walcott-McQuigg
et al. (1995) found that feelings of being overworked and depressed influenced
women’s eating patterns. In the words of one interviewee,

I think overall weight management is not as important because we have too many
other things that we have to worry about. . . . Many of us are managing homes as single
parents, trying to raise children as single parents, and trying to make financial ends
meet as single parents. I mean survival is what our concern is, not being the right size
or weight. (Walcott-McQuigg et al. 1995, 513)

This woman’s comments reflect the sense that strong Black women are given a
cultural imperative that makes concern for self the equivalent of trivial self-
indulgence—“I certainly have other things that preoccupy my mind as opposed to
watching every pound I gain” (Walcott-McQuigg et al. 1995, 513). However, the
fact that she is steadily gaining weight might reveal that she is barely surviving her
responsibilities to others. As another interviewee noted, “food is a vehicle that is
used to comfort us when we may not have much else” (Walcott-McQuigg et al.
1995, 512). Eating can also become a way of meeting social responsibilities and
superficially taking care of oneself: “The only thing that I had time to do for myself
socially to feel good was to eat” (Walcott-McQuigg et al. 1995, 507). And while
overweight is caused by a combination of genetic, biological, and psychosocial fac-
tors, the concern we develop from a sensitivity to the discourses of strength and
deviance is that the weight-related diseases that plague the Black female commu-
nity (adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, hypertension) may be embodied manifes-
tations of the contradictory distinction of being strong and powerless like a mule.

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 Beauboeuf-Lafontant / STRONG AND LARGE BLACK WOMEN 117

While individual Black women struggle with their myriad responsibilities to

others, African American culture also assumes that substantial weight is an unre-
markable, if not normative, aspect of Black women’s lives. In their interviews with
24 lower- and middle-income rural Black women, Baturka, Hornsby, and Schorling
(2000, 235) found common themes of personal dissatisfaction with weight as well
as “strong cultural pressure to be self-accepting of their physical shape, to ‘be
happy with what God gave you,’ and to make the most of their appearance.” The
researchers identified the existence of two voices among the women: cultural pre-
scriptions to be self-accepting that clashed with their individual desires to manage
their weight. The fact that 87.5 percent of the sample was either overweight or
obese suggests that at least for these women, the weaker voice is their own. As the
researchers noted, the influence of “significant male partners” to be self-accepting
was considerable: “Half of the obese and one third of the overweight respondents
reported that their husbands or boyfriends did not say anything about their weight.
Another third of the overweight women said their male partners complimented
them on their figures” (Baturka, Hornsby, and Schorling 2000, 238).
Although cultural variations in ideals of female physical attractiveness exist,
that Black women prefer to be “thick” rather than “thin” is not simply their own
construction of attractiveness or a reflection of their association of “positive charac-
teristics, such as power and well-being, with heavy women” (Flynn and Fitzgibbon
1996, 627). Several studies reveal that Black women often explain and adjust their
body sizes to meet the approval of Black men in their lives (Allan, Mayo, and
Michel 1993; Ofosu, LaFreniere, and Senn 1998; Thomas 1989; Walcott-McQuigg
et al. 1995). Unlike Black men, Black women describe beauty in psychological and
attitudinal, rather than specific physical, traits (Gore 1999). For example, while
Black adolescent girls identify style and attitude as key markers of beauty, they are
simultaneously “aware that African American boys had more specific physical cri-
teria for an ‘ideal girl’ than they had themselves” (Parker et al. 1995, 108). Thus, it
seems that the physical traits that Black women embody and claim to prefer are
often a reflection of Black men’s desires. As one woman recalled, “[Black men]
didn’t want a neck bone. They liked a picnic ham” (Thompson 1994b, 30).
Among African American women who prefer to be “healthy” or “thick” in
appearance, Allan, Mayo, and Michel (1993, 329) concluded that “ ‘healthy’ con-
notes solidness, stamina, attractiveness, and being well-nourished, or a woman who
can ‘handle the rough times better’ ” (emphasis added). However, the researchers
also astutely remarked on a painful irony among the lower-income Black women
who seem most supportive of a higher weight for themselves: Their association of
size with stamina obscures the fact that many such women experience economic
and social powerlessness (Allan, Mayo, and Michel 1993, 331; see also Flynn and
Fitzgibbon 1996). Thus, a culture that prefers strong-looking, heavier women also
seems to overlook the fact that such women, particularly those with lower incomes,
have limited power in and over their lives.
Becky Thompson’s (1994b) interview-based investigation of problem eating
among 18 Black, Latina, and lesbian women found these women were living the

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118 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2003

contradictions of oppressive images of womanhood. While participants had prob-

lems with anorexia, bulimia, dieting, and compulsive eating, all 5 Black women in
her sample were compulsive eaters and dieters, and none was anorexic (Thompson
1994a, 357). As Thompson noted, precisely because Black women often “grow up
amid positive messages about eating” (Thompson 1992, 554), compulsive eating
may be a culturally acceptable way for these women to speak the unspeakable.
Thompson’s overall assertion that eating problems are not uncommon among
Black women suggests to me that what may distinguish Black from white women is
not their different levels of preoccupation with a culture of thinness but their
expression of trauma and powerlessness in distinct, culturally influenced manners
(Williamson 1998). That is, whether engaged in overeating or self-starvation,
women with eating problems are clamoring for recognition within a society that
systematically ignores, belittles, and violates them (Orbach [1978] 1988). This
would explain the tentative finding that as Black women’s socioeconomic status
improves, the incidence of anorexia and bulimia among them increases (Abrams,
Allen, and Gray 1993; Ofosu, LaFreniere, and Senn 1998; Wilfley et al. 1996). The
appearance of these particular eating problems suggests that in contradiction to the
discourse of strength and deviance, Black women are not impervious to socially
induced eating problems. However, the presumption of an extraordinary strength
renders this fact invisible to many around them, and it also makes Black women less
likely to acknowledge their own vulnerabilities (Root 1990).
While the longings for power and validation among African American women
are real, so are the systemic obstructions to their attainment. Could it be that Black
women’s bodies become the playing field for such contradictions between personal
needs and cultural norms, between the desire for control and the persistence of
oppression, between the voicing of pain and the denial of its existence? While such
examples are far from conclusive, they do suggest that a necessary question to ask
of Black women is not why they are overweight but what may be weighing them
down. If we follow the feminist lead of taking a symbolic approach to weight
(Chernin 1981), then we need to know the language of the weight, the voice of its
hungers, and the tabooed conversations (cultural and societal) it attempts to hold. If
we recognize that the strong Black woman stereotype is a mask, then we need to
learn how it is hiding tears, projecting control and strength, and denying human
pain in a way manifest by covering up a body in excess weight. In short, a focus on
this stereotype of strength and deviance enables us to recognize how Black
women’s particular “multiple jeopardy” (King 1988) takes physical and emotional
form.

CONCLUSION: MOVING
BEYOND DENIAL AND DEVIANCE

Images of strength and deviance are myths that distort the reality of Black
women’s existence at the bottom of two patriarchies. In this article, I have main-

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 Beauboeuf-Lafontant / STRONG AND LARGE BLACK WOMEN 119

tained that what appears on the surface to be a protective factor may in fact be mask-
ing lives that are often exploited, unsatisfying, and overburdened—problems from
which Black communities and the larger society do not protect African American
women. Thus, it is both disingenuous and premature to extol the strengths and free-
dom of Black women with regard to their bodies. Rather, we need to prioritize
research on how Black women understand their weight and their lives. If and when
we ask Black women to speak with courage and honesty about their strengths and
weaknesses, their dreams and disappointments, their loves and their angers, we
may come to hear stories that are disturbing. Based on my reading of the discourses
of strength and deviance, I believe it is unlikely that the predominant theme in con-
versations about weight will center on self-satisfaction, style, and looking good for
Black men, as some studies have argued (Parker et al. 1995; Thomas 1989). We
may find that rather than an assertion of agency and power, the weight that some
Black women carry is a sign of dis-ease and un-ease, of problematic divisions of
labor within Black families as well as between Black and non-Black communities.
Future studies, both quantitative and qualitative, are needed to distinguish Black
women’s individual choices about the size and shape of their bodies and their
attempts to speak oppressive realities through their bodies. I am currently engaged
in an interview study of Black women of varied weights to investigate the pressures
they feel to embody their womanhood in particular physical forms and psychologi-
cal traits. Exploring the thoughts and struggles of Black women clients of weight-
reducing programs is another important avenue for research. Conducting such
research will help generate more realistic standards of weight for all women so that
health, rather than thinness or thickness, becomes a universal and attainable goal.
My argument for such research centers not on committing Black women to a set of
unhealthy weight norms, but on refashioning our approach to women’s weight by
illuminating, in the case of Black women, one of the most troubling discourses used
to contain them as well as other women who are deemed their opposites. We cannot
have realistic views of women’s healthy weights until we acknowledge that many of
our perceptions of women are based on flawed and controlling images of who they
are expected to be and the physical forms that they are pressed to embody.
Finally, while I do not believe that every overweight Black woman has an eating
problem, I do maintain that Black women’s tendencies to mask their emotions, frus-
trations, angers, and fears, all in an attempt to live up to the image of the strong
Black woman, contribute to some of the weight that individual Black women
carry—through overeating, lack of regular exercise, or a general sense that focusing
on their own health needs is trivial or selfish. As a result, I wonder if we change our
cultural and societal expectations of Black womanhood, whether African Ameri-
can women will still be among the most overweight, obese, and prone to debilitat-
ing and fatal adult-onset diseases. When Black women feel empowered to enjoy
their lives, to speak and be heard, and to choose their destinies, when they “learn
how to put [their] needs first, [g]iving both Guilt and Struggle the finger” (Morgan
1999, 108), we may become compelled to adjust our cultural and societal expecta-
tions regarding weight and Black women.

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120 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2003

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Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant is an assistant professor of education and sociology at DePauw

University. She has published articles on women teaching for social justice and has research
interests in constructions of beauty, strength, and power among diverse women.

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