The Other Side of the Looking Glass: The Marginalization of Fatness and Blackness in the Construction of Gender Identity

This essay interrogates tensions between varying cultural notions of beauty and explores the complex nature of the historical relationship between black and white women. It also illustrates how constructions of beauty were used to enforce the hegemonic agenda of the patriarchy and how the Western conceptualization of idealized femininity as exclusively white is an important means of sustaining racialized hierarchies because it is able to concurrently devalue both race and gender.