Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance
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The defining quality of Black womanhood is strength, states Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman. But, she argues, the idea of strength undermines its real function: to defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women's experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger.Interviews with 58 Black women explore the restrictive myth of the "Strong Black Woman." In particular, Beauboeuf-Lafontant highlights the physical and emotional toll of this performance of invulnerability, which leaves many Black women suffering from eating disorders and depression. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, cultural studies, and voice-centered research, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman traces the historical and social influences on normative Black femininity. This provocative book lays bare the common perception that strength is an exemplary quality of "authentic" Black womanhood, maintaining that the expectation of strength creates a distraction from broader forces of discrimination and imbalances of power.Publishers WeeklySociologist Beauboeuf-Lafontant explores the "sociocultural lore" invoked in imaging the strong black woman. Bypassing familiar literary recreations of the oversacrificial Mammy and the oversexed Jezebel, she attends to the "growing autobiographical and clinical literature by Black women experiencing compulsive overeating and depression." She foregrounds the intersection of race and gender with fresh and thought-provoking insight as she challenges "the racialization of depression as a white illness" and of eating problems as exclusive to the privileged. She interviews 58 black women ranging in age from 19 to 67 about "what strength means to them." While many of her subjects reveal the involvement of familial communities in setting "the standards of stoicism, care, and selflessness that Black women encounter from girlhood through adulthood, at home and at work, among intimates and strangers," one-third were "strength-critical women," proponents of "self-care rather than self-neglect." This book may be too academic in tone to appeal to the popular reader, but one hopes her message will trickle out. (Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction: A Half-Told Tale of Black Womanhood 1. More Than “the Historical, the Monolithic Me”: Deconstructing Strong Black Womanhood 2. Living the Lies: Embodying “Good” Womanhood 3. Keeping up Appearances: The Performance of Strength 4. Lies Make Us Sick: Embodied Distress Among Strong Black Women 5. Coming to Voice: Transcending Strength Epilogue: Mules No More, Just “Levelly Human”: A Societal Challenge Acknowledgments Appendix: Table of Participants
