What is black feminist theory? Thoroughly describe how mass media representations of Black sexuality may have harmful consequences.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Black feminist theory, also known as intersectional feminist theory, has a rich history in the United States. The concept of analyzing gender and race was introduced by Black women long ago. At a women's rights convention in 1851, Sojourner Truth gave an impromptu speech, "Ain't I a Woman," that questioned the ways women's rights were characterized based only on White women's struggles (Brezina, 2005). Later, in 1892, Anna Julia Cooper echoed Truth's point in "The Colored Woman's Office," which argued that the Black woman was "confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and [was] as yet an unknown or an acknowledged factor in both" (Cooper, 1892, p. 182). But it was not until the 1980s that critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in response to second-wave mainstream feminism's inattention to race and racism as well as the sexism within anti-racist activist campaigns (Adewunmi, 2014). Now, intersectionality enjoys renewed interest, as scholars, activists, and Internet commentators deploy the term to analyze many aspects of social life.
In her 2005 book, Black Sexual Politics, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins applied black feminist theory to mass media representations of women and men. She argued that mass media is an important site to analyze how ideas about Black sexuality are represented. As an influential institution in society, media can shape how people perceive reality. Controlling stereotyped images of Black women and men in movies, on television, and in music videos may be interpreted as authoritative (Collins, 2005), especially to youth who lack the media literacy required to analyze them.
Patricia Hill Collins (2005) argued that media that depict Black people as hypersexual and wild can help justify racial inequality to White people. "Representations that reduce Black men to the physicality of their bodies, that depict an inherent promiscuity as part of authentic Black masculinity, that highlight the predatory skills of the hustler, and that repeatedly associate young Black men in particular with violence converge in the controlling image of Black men as booty call-seeking rapists" (Collins, 2005, p. 166). Commercial hip-hop videos that portray Black men as sex-obsessed and Black women as perpetually sexually available can lead viewers to internalize these stereotypes.