ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the prevalent treatment of black female bodies as grotesque figures, due to the problematic fetishism of their rear ends, and considers how an aesthetic based on a black feminist praxis might offer a different way of treating the representation of black female sexuality. It provides an historical overview of black women's performances that resist dominant culture's problematic views of their bodies and that run counter to an ideology of black female deviance and hypersexuality. The chapter examines discourses of sexual desire for the black female backside, in contemporary mainstream popular, hip-hop, and dancehall cultures, and how this desire frames the body in terms of humor or "vulgarity," which challenges aesthetic values but also reinforces the exclusion of black women from categories of beauty. It also considers the role of dance and performance in repositioning the black female body—specifically the "batty," or rear end—as a site of beauty and of resistance.
