ABSTRACT
In contemporary Britain anchored by racialised and gendered discourses of the nation and national belonging (Erel 2015), key constructions of black womanhood have been mobilised to legitimise gender and racialised ‘otherness’. Within this article, the key constructions specifically highlighted are the Black Mammy, Dominating Matriarch, ‘Baby Mother’ and the Jezebel. At the root of these images, there exists a complex and denigrating mythology about black women’s sexuality. In this chapter, I explore how sexuality provides an important starting point for understanding and contextualising black women’s experiences. The fact that these images maintain a long-lasting appeal is because they provide ideological justification for the persistent racial and gender oppression experienced by black women. These images also mask the structural arrangements that maintain systemic racial inequality, which result in black women being blamed for their ‘failed’ gender performances rather than the broader systems and structures of inequality that persist in society (Hill-Collins 2004). Black feminist theory, and its approach to intersectionality, has been pivotal to understanding the way in which structural power determines black women’s societal position as ‘other’ or ‘different’. I therefore draw on an intersectional approach to identify the extent to which issues of sexuality and sexual identity act as markers of being non-normative, deviant and ‘pathological’ for Black women, specifically those of African and Caribbean parentage or heritage.
