Review of Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood, by Marquita M. Gammage

New York, NY: Routledge, 2016, 158 pp., $145 (hardcover), ISBN-13 978-1-138-94519-7.

Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood is packed with substantial empirical and theoretical material. The text is organized into six short chapters flanked by an introduction and conclusion. Author Marquita M. Gammage combines Africana womanism, Black feminism, and Media Studies in her analysis of visual media representations and the subsequent valuations of Black women and womanhood.

The Introduction begins with a brief discussion of the damnation of Black womanhood in Western societies. Gammage summarizes for the reader W.E.B. DuBois’s view that the damnation of womanhood was tied to the devaluation of motherhood resulting from Western societies’ reductionist understanding of femininity. From the outset, Gammage charges that contemporary media are powerful and effective sites through which to perpetuate, recycle, and promote an “anti-Black woman agenda” thereby securing the continued dehumanization of Black people (1). Echoing DuBois, she argues that this agenda is informed by Western conceptions of femininity and the sexism and racism birthed through slavery to which Black women have been the primary targets. She highlights how few studies have charted the significance of this imagery of and for Black women and emphasizes that previous studies have also neglected culturally congruent analyses. Gammage outlines an Africana womanist theoretical methodology, presents the definitional contours of “damnation,” and closes with an overview of each of the six chapters.

Gammage’s approach to Black womanhood privileges wholeness and is rooted in an Africana womanist conceptual framework, informed by the work of Clenora Hudson-Weems, Delores Aldridge, Pamela Yaa Asantewa Reed, and Nah Dove. In drawing on these Africana womanist “foremothers” as she warmly refers to them, Gammage underscores the need to advance “Africana Womanism” into a methodology. Key to this is the complete engagement “in an agency-driven investigation of Africana womanhood in order to conceptualize and unshackle the realities of Africana women” (2). Gammage underscores the need for a recovery and restoration that centralizes Africana women’s vantage points and stresses that such a methodology must necessarily be African-centered.

Chapter 1, “From Sara Baartman to Michelle Obama,” highlights the distinctions between indigenous African and European value systems regarding Black womanhood. Gammage traces a variety of African ideas about women, gender roles, and the organization of indigenous African societies along the lines of womanhood, kinship networks, reproduction, and fertility. Citing Zulu Sofola, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Walter Rodney, and Niara Sudarkasa, Gammage stresses how African societies revered women for their roles as cultural guardians and bearers of future generations. Her examples include Yoruba, Igbo, Ashanti, and Nupe societies where women hold positions of great responsibility and power, without which the organization and operation of society would crumble.

Gammage discusses how African women have been subject to systematic devaluation outside of their cultural context, particularly as the European encounter produced “a fetishized relationship of dominance” (18). From the colonial order of society that displaced previously held roles and responsibilities that African women enjoyed to the destruction of kinship networks, Gammage shows how African women came to be socially inferior. As an example, Gammage writes of the treatment Europeans subjected Saartje Baartman and others to as “sexual terrorism” (19). She stresses that this and other historical events where Europeans explicitly associated African physical characteristics with savagery, a lack of personal restraint, and lasciviousness provide context for a continuing “anti-Black woman agenda” (19). Chapter 2, “From the Auction Block to Hip Hop,” focuses on rap music videos and the “impact of the spectacle culture on Black women’s imagery” (35). This chapter provides empirical evidence from a 2010 study of perceptions regarding the content of then popular rap music videos as well as whether Black women identify with and are influenced by such media. Three major concerns structure this chapter: (1) perceptions about rap music video representations of Black women; (2) whether Black women who consume these visuals are influenced by their content and; (3) gauging popular American views about Black women based on rap music videos.

The first concern is addressed through a video description panel of four randomly sampled top ten rap music videos in 2010 featuring Black women “as artists, dancers, and general performers” (36). Based on her findings, Gammage warns that such visual arrangements can (and do) easily influence popular beliefs about Black people. Gammage’s second concern is addressed through a quantitative study about Black women’s perceptions of rap music videos gathered through in-person and online administered questionnaires. She found that Black females did not internalize the negative stereotypes of Black womanhood in the media. Instead, they rated themselves very positively and this was particularly the case among those who identified with an African-centered sense of self. Participants also rejected the negative media representations of Black women as an accurate reflection of Black womanhood. To address the third concern of this chapter, Gammage surveyed popular American perceptions regarding Black women and whether they were influenced by the images of Black women in rap music videos. This survey was also administered in-person and online. The data revealed that “significant associations between race and the perceptions of Black women” existed and that “Blacks rated Black females more positively than Caucasians” (64). Regardless of racial identification, the overall evaluations of Black females were low to moderate such that “the larger general public perception of Black women is moderately negative” (64).

These data support the media representation scholarship of Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, and the work of other scholars such as Angela Davis, Barbara Ransby, Tracye Matthews, and Margaret Beale, who highlight the political economy of Black womanhood. To counter its damaging effects, Gammage emphasizes the significance of inserting Black women’s voices in the industry and the literature to promote “self-defined” representations of Black womanhood.

In chapter 3, “The Reality of Reality TV,” Gammage analyzes how “media’s animalistic portrayal of Black women has damned them publicly and leads to their damnation” (72). She links present day phenomena to early stereotypes of the savage, sexually unrestrained, and uncivilized Black person propagated in the 19th century. Gammage contends that these stereotypes are central to reality TV, which, despite its putative claim to “real life” portrayals of ordinary people in everyday settings “set[s] the tone for what it means to be a Black woman despite age, class, or level of education” (71). Drawing on Media Studies about how Blackness falls prey to the logics of business in broadcasts about Black life, Gammage demonstrates the racial capitalist objectives of this genre. Gammage’s arguments against this form of representation as well as the historical backdrop to such renderings of Black women’s sexuality make a convincing case for why viewers ought to be careful of unquestioning buy-in of such depictions because it can easily lead to the belief that we have, indeed, surpassed previous eras of racist- and sexist-defined narratives of Black peoplehood.

Chapter 4, “Ain’t I a Woman? Cause I Damn Sure Ain’t a Man,” analyzes the hyper-masculinization of Black women in television dramas such as The Game, Single Ladies, Scandal, Being Mary Jane, and How to Get Away with Murder, all of which have been written and produced by Black women. Gammage points to the unidimensional image of Black womanhood proliferated by such shows, stating that “Within these dramas Black women revolve around their careers and use their power to emasculate the men in their lives” (95). She describes various scenarios from each of these shows to substantiate her claim and maintains that representations of Black women as angry and aggressive are what make them hyper-masculine caricatures. Further, Gammage argues these shows consistently lack a representation of sincere Black sisterhood while elevating relationships with White women. Reciprocal bonds of sisterhood are customary within indigenous African structures and Black communities aiding in domestic affairs, child rearing, and the development of friendships. Gammage charges that “the absence of sisterhood in these television dramas may help rationalize the bad decisions that these Black female characters make” (105). According to her, the tropes of “anti-sisterhood” present in Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and Being Mary Jane help advance the notion that Black women are inherently incapable of building meaningful bonds with other Black women.

It is also in this chapter that Gammage introduces the reader to the “anti-Black marriage agenda,” a concept she coins to reflect the existing mainstream American notions about Black women that reverberate across these television dramas. This is characterized by representations of “Black women as emasculating and rendering the Black man unworthy of a relationship, love, or marriage,” who are also “verbally insulting, aggressive toward their partners, and economically independent to the point of demeaning Black men” (98). Gammage argues that these portrayals present Black women as difficult partners undermining the prospect of marriage between Black men and women while advancing Moynihan-like ideas about Black male– female romantic partnerships.

Chapter 5, “I am Mom-in-Chief,” takes up the question of the increasing criminalization of Black mothers. Gammage writes of the criminalization of Black women as the final means of attack on the African race. She stresses, “Media systems have adopted centuries-old stereotypes of Blacks and have systematically co-opted Black women’s public image. In particular, media-generated images of Black motherhood validate political and economic targeting of Black women as criminally unfit mothers” (113). Here too, Gammage links this impulse to racist and sexist practices that emerged under slavery where treating African women as “breeders” and exploiting their reproductive labor “placed a crushing blow on the essence of motherhood” (113). She views today’s criminal Black mother figure in the media as an evolved stereotype of previous images of the jezebel, mammy, and sapphire. Speaking to the “systematic institutional damnation of Black motherhood,” Gammage turns to Michelle Obama. Despite the former First Lady’s declaration about her prioritization of motherhood, Gammage persuasively details how the media has continuously denied this by unceasingly devaluing her self-representation.

What stands out in chapters 4 and 5 is Gammage’s conception of “the Black family” and “motherhood” as strictly heteronormative and biologically bound. In chapter 5, Gammage is concerned with the absence of “motherhood” in television dramas and criticizes high-powered Black female characters like Annaliese Keating, Melanie Barnett, and Olivia Pope for being averse to motherhood in favor of advancing their careers. However, since there is considerable scholarship about Black women enacting “mothering” in a range of relationships and contexts, is it possible to consider that Annaliese Keating, for example, exhibits qualities of mothering with her small cohort of student apprentices?

Chapter 6, Redefining Black Womanhood: An Africana Womanist Approach, is significant as it provides empirical evidence to the author’s overall arguments. Gammage discusses a content analysis of photo-biographic evidence of how Black women understand their womanhood and define themselves. One of the key features of this methodology is that it relies on one of the 18 characteristics of Africana womanism that Clenora Hudson-Weems has identified, the tenet of Gammage’s analysis of the photographs yielded themes of self-pride and joy, family and love, community responsibility, education and talent, religion, friendship and fun, beauty, admiration, and independence (138). Further, it revealed that from a position of agency Africana women reject media depictions of their womanhood and humanity, instead offering more holistic and positive characterizations of their being.

Since Gammage privileges the vantage point of Africana women in her studies, she advances both Africana womanist and Black feminist theorizations of Black women’s representation. Representations also speaks directly to Black Women’s Studies and situates Africana Womanism more firmly therein. It contributes empirically to the advancement of Black feminist thinking itself in the realm of media representations and Black women. Gammage intervenes where few Black feminist studies have examined what meanings and values Black women themselves assign to visual media representations. However, although she desires a systematic methodological formulation of Africana womanism, her substantial dependence on the scholarship of Black feminists who make clear their work and ideological moorings are not located in an African-centered framework is not ever reconciled in the

Another concern in Representations is the underlying hint of respectability politics that suggests Black women’s sexuality, womanhood, and being must be pure, restrained, and private, evoking similar ideas to those circulated during the Reconstruction era. Gammage refers to media representations that render Black women “overly sexual,” “hyper-masculine,” or “sexually promiscuous” without clarifying what an appropriate and liberatory range of sexual expressions might be within an Africana womanist framework. Similarly, Gammage’s discussion of Black female sexuality is limited to a discussion of the commodification of the Black female body but lacks engagement with Black female sexual agency. Some scholars argue that while Black feminist theorizations have made possible an awareness of the elisions of Black female sexuality, it has been at the expense of a true understanding of the range of Black female sexual Such a discussion in Representations would yield a more nuanced interpretation of sexuality in terms of sexual orientation and sexual desire, which are parallel themes present in the visual media in Gammage’s analysis. Moreover, whereas older generations of Black feminists have argued that Black women’s sexuality has been invisible, absent, or negatively constructed, a cohort of contemporary Black feminists have decried critics who believe Black television shows do not properly portray Black They assert that Black viewers need to be able to enjoy a mainstream media portrayal of Black people and step outside of that conditioned viewing practice that sees Black women solely in terms of controlling images.

In sum, what is unique about Gammage’s work in the context of Africana Studies, which maintains an Afrocentric/African-centered paradigmatic position, is that she contributes empirical evidence of a culturally situated critique of Black women’s media representations. This is an important development in Africana womanism specifically, given that a methodology specific to this subfield has not previously been advanced. Representations speaks volumes about the contradictions and disparities at the crossroads of Black women’s lives and views about themselves, visual media representations, and the American public’s perceptions about them. This text also points to the chasm between what is consumed as a realistic representation and Black women’s self-definitions of womanhood. Representations is a well-crafted and accessible text suited for both undergraduate and graduate students interested in the convergence of media, Black woman-centered analyses of the current social and racial order, as well as African-centered approaches to issues concerning Black women. It raises many questions and challenges readers to consider more carefully our engagement with the current high saturation of Black women in visual media representations.