But Isn't That for White Girls? Black Women and Disordered Eating

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Rethinking Safety, Violence, and Embodiment

Abstract

This theoretical paper places in conversation health research, Black Feminist thought, and theories of coloniality to better understand the multilayered structural mechanisms and sociocultural constraints that situate Black American women as uniquely excluded from necessary support for feeding and eating disorders. To do so, this work centers Black American women as colonized subjects by contextualizing Black American women’s distinct and ongoing experiences with colonization and coloniality to understand gaps in contemporary health research and discourses that continually center adolescent age, cisgender, heterosexual, white girls as the dominant subject/figure of eating disorder representation. This paper explores three key mechanisms used to exclude Black American women from health narratives on eating and feeding disorders: health sciences, popular media, and food apartheid. By teasing out these mechanisms, this paper provides a necessarily nuanced connection between literatures on health, coloniality, and Black Feminist thought to arrive at an unrealized understanding of the ways colonization continues to construct gendered and racialized subjectivities in ways the reify hierarchal power structures that both marginalize Black American women and invisiblize their ability to be perceived as worthy of help and protection.  

Author

• Isatou Sallah, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign