Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance

by Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant

Overview

The defining quality of Black womanhood is strength, states Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman. But, she argues, the idea of strength undermines its real function: to defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women’s experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger. This provocative book lays bare the common perception that strength is an exemplary or defining quality of “authentic” Black womanhood.

The author, a noted sociologist, interviews 58 Black women about being strong and proud, to illustrate their “performance” of invulnerability. Beauboeuf-Lafontant explains how such behavior leads to serious symptoms for these women, many of whom suffer from eating disorders and depression.

Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, cultural studies, and women’s history, Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman traces the historical and social influences of normative Black femininity, looking at how notions of self-image and strength create a distraction from broader forces of discrimination and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592136698
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	06/26/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
Sales rank:	840,585
File size:	336 KB

About the Author

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education Studies at DePauw University.  She is co-editor of Facing Racism in Education, 2nd edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Half-Told Tale of Black Womanhood 
1. More Than “the Historical, the Monolithic Me”: Deconstructing Strong Black Womanhood 
2. Living the Lies: Embodying “Good” Womanhood 
3. Keeping up Appearances: The Performance of Strength 
4. Lies Make Us Sick: Embodied Distress Among Strong Black Women 
5. Coming to Voice: Transcending Strength 
Epilogue: Mules No More, Just “Levelly Human”: A Societal Challenge 
Acknowledgments 
Appendix: Table of Participants

Editorial Reviews

Sociologist Beauboeuf-Lafontant explores the "sociocultural lore" invoked in imaging the strong black woman. Bypassing familiar literary recreations of the oversacrificial Mammy and the oversexed Jezebel, she attends to the "growing autobiographical and clinical literature by Black women experiencing compulsive overeating and depression." She foregrounds the intersection of race and gender with fresh and thought-provoking insight as she challenges "the racialization of depression as a white illness" and of eating problems as exclusive to the privileged. She interviews 58 black women ranging in age from 19 to 67 about "what strength means to them." While many of her subjects reveal the involvement of familial communities in setting "the standards of stoicism, care, and selflessness that Black women encounter from girlhood through adulthood, at home and at work, among intimates and strangers," one-third were "strength-critical women," proponents of "self-care rather than self-neglect." This book may be too academic in tone to appeal to the popular reader, but one hopes her message will trickle out. (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly

Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman makes an important contribution to the literature. No other work systematically studies the ways black women internalize and resist strong black woman discourse. Beauboeuf-Lafontant convincingly argues that investment in the strong black woman myth injures black women and strengthens the racist divisions between women.”—Maxine Craig, author of Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race

From the Publisher