About This Unit

The body is where racial meanings are most intimately produced, marketed, performed, and resisted, and this unit takes embodiment as its subject. Its first movement examines how racial meaning is imposed on bodies from the outside. Sabrina Strings's Fearing the Black Body shows that something as seemingly personal as the preference for thinness has a racial genealogy: fat phobia emerged from race science and Protestant moralism as a way of distinguishing white women's supposed discipline from Black women's alleged excess, long before "health" entered the argument. Read alongside Strings, the unit treats aesthetic judgments about bodies — what counts as beautiful, healthy, or respectable — not as neutral preferences but as sedimented racial history.

The unit's second movement turns from imposition to production: how racialized people make culture that contests the meanings assigned to their bodies. Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces Black hair as a visual and tactile material through which Blackness is both ascribed and reclaimed; Terrell Winder and Anthony Ocampo follow young queer men of color as they negotiate race, sexuality, and family on and through the body. Across these readings the unit treats popular culture, in the spirit of the essays gathered in Black Popular Culture, as contested terrain — at once a place where racial difference is commodified and a place where subordinated groups produce pride, authorship, and dissent. Learners are asked throughout to read a single cultural object in more than one way: as resistance, as commodity, or as both.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain how racial meanings are produced on and through bodies, using fat phobia (Strings) and the visual and tactile coding of Black hair (Cobb) as contrasting mechanisms of embodied racialization.
• Analyze cultural production as a site of racial politics, distinguishing representation imposed on a group from representation produced by it.
• Apply the idea of popular culture as contested terrain — developed across the essays in Black Popular Culture — to a contemporary case, identifying both its resistant and its commodified dimensions.
• Evaluate competing readings of a single cultural object or performance — as resistance, as commodity, or as both — and defend a position using evidence from the unit's materials.

Keywords

• Embodiment
• The body
• Cultural production
• Representation
• Controlling images
• Queer of color critique

Open Educational Resources

• NPR Short Wave. "Fat Phobia and Its Racist Past and Present." Interview with Sabrina Strings. July 2020. Listen to the episode.

Podcast episode (with transcript) · Open access.

In this Short Wave interview, the sociologist Sabrina Strings condenses the central argument of Fearing the Black Body into accessible audio form: the modern preference for thinness arose not from health science but from race-making. Strings traces how, beginning in the era of the transatlantic slave trade, European thinkers and later American moralists coded fatness as Black, "savage," and immoral in order to discipline white women's appetites and degrade Black women's bodies — well before medicine supplied a health rationale through tools such as the body mass index. She discusses how these older racial meanings still shape contemporary beauty standards and clinical judgments. Because the episode includes a full transcript, it is accessible to learners who read rather than listen, and it serves as an entry ramp to the book excerpt in the unit's Key Scholarship. It introduces the unit's central claim that aesthetic judgments about bodies carry a racial history.

• "LGBTQ+: Why Race Matters." PBS Wisconsin, 2024. Watch the video.

Video · Open access.

Produced by PBS Wisconsin, this short video examines what it means to live at the intersection of race and queer or trans identity, foregrounding experiences that are, as the program notes, often underrepresented or untold. It centers Black queer and trans people describing how they build community and claim space, and it presents the intersection of multiple marginalized identities not as a sum of separate categories but as a distinct, lived position. For the unit, the video offers an accessible moving-image introduction to queer-of-color experience and a contemporary counterpart to the ethnographic studies of Winder and Ocampo in the Key Scholarship, showing embodiment as something negotiated in everyday life, visibility, and belonging. It also previews the unit's case study on Stonewall and the longer history of LGBTQ organizing led by people of color.

• Braithwaite, Ronnie. He They. Short film, 2022. Watch the film.

Short film

Ronnie Braithwaite's short film is a contemporary moving-image text on Black queer and nonbinary embodiment. It extends the unit beyond the scholarly readings into explicitly gender-nonconforming experience, and it gives learners a piece of visual culture to read closely in the way the unit's reflection and case-study work asks — attending to how the body is filmed, framed, and made legible on screen. Paired with C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides in the Further Readings, it opens the unit's thread on how race and gender are co-produced on and through the body.

• "June 28, 1969: Stonewall Riots." Zinn Education Project, This Day in History. Read the entry.

Teaching resource (short) · Open access.

A short Zinn Education Project entry marking the June 28, 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn and the days of resistance that followed, with links to teaching materials and primary accounts. The entry foregrounds the leadership of queer and trans people of color — figures often written out of mainstream commemorations — in events widely treated as a catalyst for the modern LGBTQ movement. For the unit, it supplies historical grounding for the Stonewall Forever case study and connects the embodied, everyday negotiations described in the scholarly readings to a moment of collective, public refusal.

Key Scholarship

• Winder, Terrell J. A. Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in Los Angeles. New York: New York University Press, 2026. Publisher page.

Book.

Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork — observations with more than two hundred young men at a Los Angeles community health organization, interviews with self-identified Black queer men, time spent with "gay kinship families," and analysis of media — Winder examines how young Black gay men learn to navigate racial and sexual stigma in everyday interactions. He argues that classic strategies for managing a discreditable identity, such as passing and covering, become untenable for those facing several stigmas at once, and he traces how these young men come to experience their racial and sexual identities as sources of pride rather than shame. The study brings queer-of-color analysis into the unit through lived, intersecting experience rather than law or theory, and it offers a sustained account of cultural production from below: the kinship, naming, and self-presentation through which a community reworks the meanings assigned to its members.

• Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Publisher page.

Book.

Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured hair from the nineteenth century to the present, treating it as a visual and tactile material through which Blackness is made simultaneously visible and palpable. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary film, photography, and contemporary art by figures such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson, she shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent are registered not only in how the body looks but in how it is felt and handled. From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, "natural" hair has been bound up with the Black freedom struggle; Cobb examines both that political charge and the commercial promotion of styles such as the Afro through outlets like Soul Train and Ebony. For the unit, New Growth demonstrates how the surface of the body becomes a site of both imposed meaning and active reclamation, and it anchors the CROWN Act case study on hair discrimination.

• Ocampo, Anthony Christian. Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Publisher page.

Book.

Ocampo's interview-based study follows second-generation gay sons of immigrants in Los Angeles — many of them Latino and Asian American — as they negotiate race, sexuality, family expectation, and masculinity at home, in school, and in nightlife. He shows how these men manage belonging and exclusion in embodied, everyday registers: in how they dress and speak, in which spaces they make themselves visible, and in how they reconcile the demands of immigrant families with queer identity. The book brings queer-of-color analysis into the unit through lived experience rendered ethnographically rather than through legal or theoretical material, and it foregrounds dimensions of overlapping identity that a policy analysis could not capture. Alongside Winder, it lets learners compare how race and sexuality are worked out on the body across different communities of color.

• Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Strings traces two centuries of art, philosophy, medicine, and magazine culture to argue that fat phobia originated in race science and Protestant moralism rather than in health science. Fatness, she shows, was coded as Black, "savage," and immoral in order to discipline white women's bodies and degrade Black women's — long before medicine supplied a health rationale, and well before the body mass index was repurposed as a clinical measure of individual bodies. The book develops "thinness as a racial project," showing how an aesthetic preference many experience as personal carries a sedimented racial history. For the unit, Fearing the Black Body gives the clearest demonstration of meaning imposed on bodies from the outside, and it provides the conceptual ground for the unit's first movement. The argument also reaches into medicine, showing how clinical standards can carry the racial assumptions of their history.

• Dent, Gina, ed. Black Popular Culture. A project by Michele Wallace. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. Read at the Internet Archive.

Edited volume (essays and discussions) · Open access (Internet Archive).

This volume gathers critics, scholars, and cultural producers — among them Stuart Hall, whose essay "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" opens the collection — to debate directions in film, television, music, and writing made by or with Black artists. The essays treat Black popular culture not as a settled body of work but as contested terrain: a space in which racial difference is at once commodified for mass markets and made into a vehicle for authorship, pleasure, memory, and dissent. Hall's contribution in particular argues that popular culture is a site of strategic struggle rather than a fixed expression of identity, and that no cultural form carries a guaranteed political meaning. For the unit, the collection supplies the framework of popular culture as contested terrain that the reflection questions ask learners to apply, and it situates the more recent studies of hair, performance, and queer-of-color life within a longer debate about representation, authenticity, and ownership.

Case Studies

• The CROWN Act: Race, Hair, and Workplace Discrimination

Source: thecrownact.com (Dove and the CROWN Coalition), 2019 · Policy-analysis activity.

A policy-analysis activity on the CROWN Act — model legislation introduced in 2019 by Dove and the CROWN Coalition to bar discrimination based on race-linked hairstyles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in workplaces and schools. Building on Cobb's account of hair as a racialized surface of the body, learners examine how an everyday matter of grooming becomes a site of legal contest over race.

• Stonewall Forever: Memory, Movement, and the Queer of Color Archive

Source: Stonewall Forever (documentary and digital collections) · Media and primary-source activity.

A media-and-archive activity built around Stonewall Forever, a documentary and digital collection drawing together voices from more than fifty years of LGBTQ activism to trace the ongoing legacy of the 1969 Stonewall uprising. Learners use the film and its collections to ask whose bodies and labor are remembered in the movement's origin story, connecting the embodied negotiations described by Winder and Ocampo to a longer history of public, collective refusal.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Strings: Strings argues that fat phobia predates — and produced — its medical justifications. What changes when an aesthetic preference turns out to have a racial genealogy? Identify one present-day body norm (in fitness, fashion, medicine, or social media) and assess whether Strings's framework helps explain where it came from and whom it serves.
2. On Cobb: Cobb argues that Black hair is racialized through both look and feel — that Blackness is made visible and tactile at the surface of the body. Choose one example of Black hair in public life (a style, a product, a controversy, an image) and analyze it as Cobb does: as a site where meaning is both imposed from outside and reclaimed from within.
3. On Ocampo: Ocampo's interviewees manage race, sexuality, and family expectation through and on their bodies — in dress, speech, and where they choose to be visible. Choose one of his findings and explain what the embodied, everyday register reveals about overlapping forms of belonging and exclusion that a law or policy analysis could not capture.
4. On Black Popular Culture: The essays in this volume treat popular culture as contested terrain — at once commodified and a vehicle for authorship and dissent. Choose one contemporary cultural form made by or with artists of color (a genre, a platform, a viral form) and argue whether, in a specific instance, it does more to commodify racial difference or to contest the meanings assigned to racialized bodies — or both at once.
5. Synthesis across the unit: Strings (aesthetic norms imposed on the body), Cobb (the body's racialized surface, reclaimed), and Winder — or the essays in Black Popular Culture — (cultural production and pride from below) name three different ways bodies acquire and rework racial meaning. Choose one cultural object you know — a performance, image, product, or song — and analyze it using two of these three frameworks. What does each reveal that the other misses, and where do they pull against each other?

Further Readings and Resources

• Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Snorton writes a history of how race and gender have been co-produced on Black bodies, from the medical and legal regimes of slavery through twentieth-century cases and culture, arguing that Blackness and transness have long been entangled. For the unit, it deepens the He They thread on gender-nonconforming embodiment and supplies a historical account of how the body has been made legible by race and gender together.

• McMillan, Uri. Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Performance. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Publisher page.

Book.

McMillan examines how Black women performers — from a nineteenth-century "exhibited" figure to contemporary artists — have used the body as an avatar, a deliberately staged object, to claim authorship over racialized and gendered looking. It extends the unit's account of cultural production into performance art and gives a vocabulary for reading the body as something made and managed rather than simply seen.

• Young, Harvey. Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Publisher page.

Book.

Young argues that recurring experiences — being watched, hunted, or rendered invisible — have produced a shared "phenomenal Blackness" registered in the body across generations. Moving through photography, performance, and everyday life, the book offers learners a way to connect the imposition of racial meaning on the body to memory, repetition, and embodied experience.

• Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Publisher page.

Book.

Ferguson develops "queer of color critique," bringing together women-of-color feminism, queer theory, and historical materialism to analyze how race, gender, sexuality, and class are produced together. For the unit, it provides the theoretical frame behind the ethnographic studies of Winder and Ocampo, accounting for why queer-of-color experience cannot be reduced to race plus sexuality treated separately.

• Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Publisher page.

Book.

Johnson asks who gets to define "authentic" Blackness and how Blackness is performed, claimed, and contested across contexts from the church to the stage to the law. The book sharpens the unit's questions about cultural production and ownership, examining how the boundaries of a racial identity are policed and remade through performance.

• Collins, Patricia Hill. "Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images." In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. Publisher page.

Book chapter.

Collins names the "controlling images" — mammy, matriarch, jezebel, and others — through which dominant culture has represented Black women in ways that rationalize their treatment. The chapter is the source of the unit's "controlling images" keyword and gives learners a framework for analyzing how representation operates as a mechanism of racial and gendered power. (This is a different Collins work from the one discussed in Unit 2.1.)

• hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Read the chapter.

Book chapter.

hooks examines how racial and ethnic difference is commodified — how the bodies and cultures of people of color become objects of mainstream desire and consumption, marketed as spice or adventure. The essay sharpens the unit's reflection questions on popular culture as contested terrain, giving learners a precise account of how "difference" can be sold even as it appears to be celebrated.