Black Female Bodybuilders

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burst through, no millisecond record to shatter. Even though this display is both celebratory and voluntary, for the black women on some level the stakes are the same as those placed on the bodies of the African women, our ancestors, who survived the Middle Passage3 only to be corralled and sold to the highest bidder upon their arrival. We have all been taught: Whenever you so much as step outside your house, you are representing the race.
Black females have historically not been in the position to determine either their individual or collective images in the popular consciousness. The black female image has generally been polarized into stereotypes of the oversexed Jezebel and the asexual, castrating mammy,4 with only biology, not self-determination as a contributing factor. In certain arenas, however, black females have established a strong voice with regard to bodily matters: for example, from the early blues music of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith in the 1920s to the ...

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act of self-presentation black women have begun to challenge and reinvent what it means to be black and female within a culture that values neither. Through their extreme manifestation of control over their own bodies, black female bodybuilders represent in physical strength the power that eludes black women in general in society.



II.

The Beacon Theatre is a garishly decorated landmark on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. A largely working-class crowd has paid nearly two hundred dollars for both the afternoon pre-judging contest and the evening finals of the "Wimbledon" of women's bodybuilding,6 the Ms. Olympia competition, which is to take place in the Beacon.7

It ...

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