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Abstract
Through an interdisciplinary lens, this paper proposes two concepts for Black feminist analysis (visibility and hypervisibility) to augment feminist leisure scholarship. We examine questions of invisibility in relation to the systematic oppression that besets Black women in society, and in the academy, through their absence as research participants and researchers. This raises a new sense of invisible marginality that may exist in scholarship, and otherwise. With hypervisibility in body politics, Black women are represented in stereotyped and commodified ways throughout leisure spaces and scholarship. The critique of historical and contemporary representations of hyper-visibility is conducted through representations of Black women's bodies. We conclude with specific implications as Black feminism provides a culturally congruent epistemology to advance the field and augment third wave feminism.
Keywords: Black feminism, womanism, Black studies, body politics, racial identity
"Only the Black Woman can say, when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole., .race enters with me."
-Anna Julia Cooper, 1892, A Voice from the South, p. 144-145
Invisibility is a fundamental aspect of being Black in a White-dominated society. The Black body comes into view, however, when conceptions of sexual-subjection or social disparities are discussed. That is, when Black women's bodies are on display to be ridiculed (e.g., the focus on Serena Williams' buttocks), or when sociopolitical agendas use Black women experiences as scapegoats (e.g., Black women targeted in welfare reform). The ways Black women's bodies are viewed as spectacles in the general public and especially in sex industries, for the leisure and pleasure of men, is rooted in racialized gendered intersections of power, privilege, and oppression (as noted by Shaw, 1999). In response to the call for this special issue of the Journal of Leisure Research on feminist contributions, this paper explores the roles of Black feminism as a theoretical framework that will center Black women's experiences and challenge intersecting identities of race and gender, and intersecting oppressions of sexism and racism. Ultimately this paper calls for a new centering of the Black woman to augment feminist discourse and research in leisure studies.
To achieve this goal, we unpack the intersectional experiences of race and gender specifically pertaining to...