Preview

Jennifer Morgan Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder Analysis

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
237 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Jennifer Morgan Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder Analysis
Society’s perspective of beauty customarily causes men and women to attempt to conform to a standard sought suitable through the eyes of their peers. Jennifer Morgan, the author of “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology”, was biracial, however, identified as being African American. Morgan never felt beautiful in comparison to society’s standards and wrote this article in order to determine why the images of African American women were hypersexualized as well as when society began viewing these women this way. She also wanted to know how the male gaze contributed to slavery and why black women can’t be the standard of beauty even in today’s world. Even though Morgan’s rhetoric

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    New travelers went to the New World and African with the expectation of women with long breasts and dangerous sexuality. The physical aspects of the Native and African Women gave European travelers a reason to disregard the idea that they could be “innocuous, unremarkable or even beautiful.”…

    • 573 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In this essay, I defined that a historical painting is not pretty pictures of family portraits and landscapes, but can document events that spark the imagination, awaken emotion and capture truths about the black female body. I have highlighted two paintings by historical painters whose artwork offers a way of rethinking how the black…

    • 604 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Per society, African American women, are not smart, must have a big butt, and if you are not lite-skin you are not pretty. Davis, asks her peers to discuss what the standards are for “a girl like me”. Most of the girls believe if they have blonde permed hair their better, never want to marry a darker male, or that having natural hair makes them African looking. I strongly believe white America has brainwashed African American women into idolizing what is “right” for them. I believe that they are looking to be accepted into a culture because they lack knowledge of their culture. For example,…

    • 285 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    This quoted sentence shows the racial prejudices were prevailed in the white dominant society and how much African Americans have suffered from it. The selected sentence emphasizes the inequalities the colored women faced and disadvantages they had to embrace in the white dominant community. The author uses literary devices not only to describe but also signify the cruelty of the prevailed racial prejudices and biases in the society. This passage is initially brought by a rhetorical question, “What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like?” vividly through the usage of the literary devices.…

    • 438 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Studies by the journal of Qualitative Sociology found that racial beliefs and stereotypes of mainstream media shape how people think about identities and ethnicities that fall outside of the American hegemonic norm. Hegemony is a word that describes mainstream ideologies that have been normalized. In the United States, for example, the hegemonic beauty standard is a Eurocentric one, one that values thinness, White, straight hair, and thin noses (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 16). People’s perception about what is pretty or beautiful does not exist in a vacuum. It has been informed by the time period they are born in and by the culture around. By transmitting selective images and ideas of female beauty, television not only teaches women to accept certain beliefs or values, but that they have to fit into a certain hegemonic body type to be seen as beautiful (Pyke and Dang…

    • 1432 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The horrors of slavery is one that should not be made light of. The dehumanization of blacks during this time, forced our ancestors to endure the most devastating genocide in human history. On one episode of the tv show, Saturday night live, Host and cast member Colin Jost and Leslie Jones discuss the actress Lupita Nyong’o being named as People Magazine's “Most beautiful person”. Jones questions the standards that defy beauty by comparing America today to America in slavery times. Although Jones's rant is seemingly subversive because it emphasizes the fact that black women are undervalued, while simultaneously challenging the standards of beauty, Jones reference to a sensitive topic in our county’s history in order to prove this point-…

    • 724 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Society by default places people into categories. The most prominent example of this is the gender binary, where each person is labeled and judged based on where they fall within that binary. Male versus female, one side is already at a disadvantage. Described in the films The Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture and Miss Representation, women face many obstacles in today’s society, such as objectification and scrutinization. Media illustrates and reinforces these issues by portraying women as subordinate sexual objects for a man’s pleasure. Codes of gender breaks down the methods in which photography portrays the subordinate female. In Miss Representation, we see the analysis of the hypersexualized objectified female.…

    • 1734 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The portrayal of black women remains a representation of how people see them; treat them and how they observe themselves. From how they wear their hair, how they look, how they dress, their assets, skin color and ethnicity, they are being picked apart from things that serve no importance of how a black woman should be respected. In the article, “Mentoring and Mothering Black Femininity in the Academy: An Exploration of Body, Voice, and Image through Black Female Characters” by Devair and Rhonda Jeffries it examines the social construction of the identity of black women in the media. For example, most of what we see on the media is never accurate about black women; it is used to tear a community down because of the past racial attitudes. The article says, “A pressing issue is the lack of Black women’s voice and presence in both media productions’ illustra¬tion of them and the scholarship about them. Therefore, much of what is consumed by mainstream culture is a skewed, caricatured perception of Black women created by those outside o f their demographic”. (127). I believe the past has significance in the present about how black women are perceived in the media since it continues to put exclusion on black women and we continue to not stand up for how we should be characterized therefore, our identity becomes invisible to the…

    • 2507 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Both lesbians and African American women were thought to have “an abnormally prominent clitoris” (27), and their labia were even compared to men’s testicles (28). While black and lesbian women are classified as abnormal or inferior, the straight white woman is upheld as normal and superior. These “facts” are stereotypes in modern times. Modern pop culture perpetuates the stereotype that black women have larger breasts and buttocks than white women. Black and lesbian women are also seen as inherently sexual and…

    • 772 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In today’s society, there are intricate and subtle racial patterns in the mass media that show how powerful images play a significant role in shaping the attitudes of Whites toward Blacks. White Americans, they show, learn about African Americans not through personal relationships, but through the images shown by the media. . In short, they conclude that although there are more images of African-Americans on television now than ever, these images are often harmful to the prospect of unity between the races. With the advancement of technology such as advertisement, there has always been a stereotypical view of how women are portrayed in the media. For hundreds of years, women have been viewed as sexual objects in the eyesight of many people. And for that women have fought for equality, recognition and an identity for them to prove that they are just as capable as any male. However, it seems to go even further when there begins to be a difference of how White women are viewed incomparably with Black women. There have been many opposing arguments of which race (black vs. white) has been more inferior of women being represented with both decency and respect.…

    • 983 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Who are you? Are you a unique individual? Does your appearance really reflect you? Deborah Tannen’s “There Is No Unmarked Woman” exemplifies how normal it is in this society for women to be superficially judged and “marked” on the basis of appearance. This is in contrast to men, who are given the social option to remain incomparably “unmarked” by attire. Tannen uses two specific term throughout her entire essay, marked and unmarked. Tannen analyzes our society’s peculiarity of judging women based on their appearance but not judging men based on the same circumstances throughout her essay. Tannen points out, everything a woman wear and her appearance “marks” her about while in contrast, men, can remain “unmarked” by choosing the standard regulation of dress and appearance. The appearances of these individuals are presented through the use of tone, diction, imagery, characterization and allusion.…

    • 618 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In this piece Mickalene Thomas challenges not only how beauty is typically represented but she also challenges the heterosexual normative. Beautiful images of nature are cut, torn, and collaged over one another with a portrait of two African American women romantically embracing each other placed dead center. These women are clearly embracing each other romantically and their embrace showcases their bodies in such a natural state that would never be shown in mediums such as mainstream magazines. What I mean by this is their skin is folded, "fat" is shown, and they…

    • 2063 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The media has always played a big role in how people perceive different cultures through such media outlets such as radio, television, and internet. I felt that the portrayal of African-American women would be a good topic for this paper, because all race of women but especially black women have had negative stereotypes in media and I feel that they have had the most tainted image in people’s eyes. This paper is important because a lot of people can learn about the struggles that these women have had to overcome through these years. This is a part of American culture no matter if we are male, female, black or white. Topics like this need to be brought up more often so people can learn from mistakes and learn how to forgive people for past judgments’. Addressing these issues can also help social behavior.…

    • 1639 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    My topic for this paper is body image and African American women. I have chosen this topic because I am an African American girl who has struggled with my body image all of my life so I feel that I can easily connect to this topic. When I was younger, I mostly played with white Barbies because they had better accessories and clothes than the black Barbies. This reinforced in my head that white was better than black and this mind set took years for me to reverse. The subject of the people affected by this issue is African American girls of all ages, but more heavily from early childhood to young adulthood, especially if they are surrounded by media.…

    • 1511 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Flappers Disadvantages

    • 1183 Words
    • 5 Pages

    This source will provide solid background information for my research topic, particularly on how flappers in the 1920s challenged the traditional gender roles in the United States. Specifically, this source approaches my research topic from a fashion point of view and demonstrates how the fashion trends alter Americans’ beauty standards. Specially, this article series aligns with my argument on how the overall American population…

    • 1183 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays