Bodies of the State: What Condoleezza Rice and Michelle Obama Share in Common

• In Event: 322 - Regular Session. Feminist Thought/Theory

Abstract

This paper draws on two theoretical concepts--“carceral genealogies” and “bodies of the State”—in order to demonstrate a rationale for the unlikely comparison of similarities shared between Condoleezza Rice and Michelle Obama. Drawing on an antebellum legal case, State v. Celia, I argue from that case emerges a literal and figurative genealogy in which a history can be mapped, revealing how the bodies, and by extension, the actions, of black women become culturally imprisoned. Thus, through sartorial politics and beauty aesthetics, highly educated black women like Rice and Obama are subjected to an imprisonment not so different than that of their foremother, Celia. While they are legally free, mobile, and in control of their sexual lives, they have little control over their raced and gendered bodies continuing to be read by the public sphere as objects of possession. My examination of the logic of possession framing each of these women’s public personas reveals that that Black Nation is often complicit in [white] State commodification and maligning of black female bodies.

Author

• Simone Drake, The Ohio State University