Black Bodies, White Gazes: Black Female Sexuality and Spectacle in Sport Media’s Coverage of Venus and Serena Williams’ Tennis Careers

Hissa 1 Black Bodies, White Gazes: Black Female Sexuality and Spectacle in Sport Media’s Coverage of Venus and Serena Williams’ Tennis Careers By: Jennie Hissa It is an unfortunate reality that while women’s sport in North America is beginning to grow and develop, its media coverage has not responded with nearly as much salience. Where men’s athletics are frequently aired on major broadcasting networks, women’s are often relegated to less prominent channels. For what little media coverage there is, “the discourse used by media gatekeepers is substantially different between men and women, often serving to diminish women’s athletic achievements” (Billings and Hundley 6). Part of this discourse derives from the representation of women’s bodies. Granted, while athletic bodies are obviously a necessary aspect of sport and thus understandably a major focal point in sport media in that respect, too often the portrayal of female athletes’ bodies is underscored by criticism of their unruly nature. As ample feminist criticism posits, gender hierarchies become threatened whenever women’s bodies are deemed too excessive for the norms of conventional gender representation, whether they’re too fat, too outspoken, too old, too sexual, or even not sexual enough. And, indeed, the strong and muscular bodies of female athletes are also relevant to the long list of corporeal transgressions that women must negotiate on their road to success in sport. As Laura Schulze states, “[t]he deliberately muscular woman disturbs dominant notions of sex, gender, and sexuality, and any discursive field that includes her risks opening up a site of contest and conflict, anxiety and ambiguity” (198). As such, sports media, in its ability to reach millions of viewers and sports fans, acts as a powerful vehicle for oppressive and sexist ideologies to operate, an open forum for the denigration of women who do not fit into dominant cultural norms. Hissa 2 According to Susan Cahn, these ideologies manifest themselves in the stereotype of the “mannish lesbian athlete.” She goes on to argue that “the figure of the mannish lesbian athlete has acted as a powerful but unarticulated ‘bogey woman’ of sport, forming a silent foil for more positive, corrective images that attempt to rehabilitate the image of women athletes and resolve the cultural contradiction between athletic prowess and femininity” (286). In the longstanding disagreement over the effect of women’s athletic activities on their sexuality, ‘mannishness’ was initially explained by the notion of unbridled heterosexual desire but soon began to connote heterosexual failure or rejection of heterosexuality altogether. “The fear of lesbianism was greatest where a sport had a particularly masculine image and where promoters needed to attract a paying audience” (296) The media began to serve a more defensive function, playing a central role in proving the ‘sexiness’ of female athletes and publicly condemning those who were considered ugly and sexually unappealing. Ultimately, “[t]he effect extended beyond sport to the wider culture, where the figure of the mannish lesbian athlete announced that competitiveness, strength, independence, aggression, and physical intimacy among women fell outside the bounds of womanhood” (297). The female athlete came to serve as a visual warning for all women as a symbol of deviant womanhood or, if she was not careful, of being ‘non-woman’ altogether. Interestingly, Cahn notes that although black female athletes may have encountered few lesbian stereotypes (since stereotypes of their unrestrained heterosexual passion discouraged the linkage), racist gender ideologies further complicated the meaning of mannishness. Already excluded from dominant ideas of [white] womanhood, “[b]lack women’s success in sport could be interpreted not as an unnatural deviation but, rather, as the natural result of their reputed closeness to nature, animals, and masculinity” (294). In addition, due to the rise of black athletes as a dominant presence in American sport, “mid-century images of sport, Blackness, masculinity, Hissa 3 and lesbianism circulated in the same orbit in various combinations” (294). This is an thoughtprovoking paradox that Cahn is not able to explore fully in the scope of her essay but certainly deserves some critical merit. What happens when ideologies of gender merge with ideologies of race in the prominently male-dominated sphere of sport culture? Or, perhaps more specifically, how do black female athletes negotiate constructions of masculinity in their representation within sports media? While there has recently been an upsurge in exploration of black athletes, masculinity, and the media – such as Ben Carrington, who observes how sports media has played a central role in biologising the performance of black men – but very little academic criticism, including Cahn’s essay, has managed to delve deeply into how this issue might be applied to black female athletes. Venus and Serena Williams, in particular, are excellent subjects for such an analysis. The two women have been notoriously touted for revolutionizing women’s tennis, not just in breaking racial barriers by entering a conventionally white civilized sport but also in terms of technique and their uniquely powerful and aggressive style. By the age of 12, Venus accumulated a 63-0 record in United States Tennis Association (USTA) sectional play in southern California and, in 1998, earned a woman’s world record fastest serve, clocking in at 127 miles per hour. Serena, in 1999, was the second African American woman to win a Grand Slam tournament in U.S. history, with Athena Gibson being the only other to do so in the 1950s. Together, Venus and Serena have won a combined 24 Grand Slam singles titles, as well as 13 Slam doubles titles, and both own Olympic gold medals in singles and doubles (Edmondson Appendix C and D). Throughout their sports careers, they have been under much media scrutiny. Certainly, as women who do not adhere to conventional gendered and racial social scripts, their perceived masculinity has subsequently been made a spectacle within sports media. Therefore, Hissa 4 with the Williams sisters in mind, I would like to further theorize what appears to be a gap in critical theory, providing a reflection upon the ways that black female athletes, too, become “the spectacle of ‘hyperblackness’” (Carrington 91). First and foremost, it is important to acknowledge that the female body as a subject of spectacle is not necessarily a new matter. As Cahn briefly alludes to when she writes about racial stereotypes of unrestrained heterosexual passion, black women have a long history of being subjects of the white – and predominately male – gaze. Sander Gilman goes so far as to argue that the black female “[came] to serve as an icon for black sexuality in general” (209). He writes that the physical appearance of the Hottentot Venus came to embody the antithesis of European sexual morals and beauty, not just in physicality but also in a larger medical and cultural discourse. The Hottentot Venus was paraded across Europe for the viewing pleasure of a paying white audience. Everything about her, from “her physiognomy, her skin color, the form of her genitalia label her as inherently different. In the nineteenth-century, the black female was widely perceived as possessing not only a ‘primitive’ sexual appetite but also that external signs of this temperament – ‘primitive’ genitalia” (213). The Hottentot Venus was reduced to her sexual parts. In particular, “her genitalia and her buttocks, serv[ed] as the central image for the black female” (216), physical signifiers of her primitive, grotesque, and overtly sexual nature. The central ideological basis for the focus on such risqué bodily aspects was that if black women’s sexual parts could be shown to be inherently different from those of white women, it could be used as evidence to prove that blacks were a separate and lower race. bell hooks expands upon Gilmore’s argument to anchor the sexual iconography of black women in a more modern context. She writes that, “[r]epresentation of black female bodies in contemporary popular culture rarely subvert or critique images of black female sexuality which Hissa 5 were part of the cultural apparatus of 19th-century racism and which still shape perceptions today” (62). hooks traces the sexual iconography of the traditional black pornographic imagination – beginning, essentially, with white society’s fascination with black “butts” – through contemporary cultural representations of women in the media, film, and literature. While, in a sense, the black female body is celebrated as an erotic site of pleasure, at the same time it objectifies and dehumanizes black women. In particular, she notes how “[p]opular culture provides countless examples of black female appropriation and exploitation of ‘negative stereotypes’ either to assert control over the representation or at least reap the benefits of it” (63). Similarly to the way that black women were placed on a pedestal at slave trades for potential buyers to gawk at – their value determined by the desirability of their naked body – the allure of black women in popular culture is almost always associated with erotic representations of their sexual savagery – a more subliminal form of domination and exploitation. Black women are faced with the challenge of having to confront old representations of their sexuality that still haunt our present moment. Indeed, this challenge does not just exist in popular culture but in sporting culture as well, where bodies are also the main focus. Fairly recently, the tennis-star turned broadcaster Annabel Croft reportedly described Serena Williams as having a ‘huge backside,’ in addition to a number of other comments about Serena’s body. An article in The Daily Mail quotes an anonymous Lawn Tennis Association member as saying: Annabel made many personal asides about Serena, saying that she was huge. She said all Serena's dresses were very carefully designed to hide her bulk. She then moved on to concentrate on what she termed as Serena's huge backside. She said she was in the ladies' changing room and wondering who was going to wear what looked like a wedding dress. She then saw Serena getting into this dress and that the train had been carefully designed to wrap around Serena's huge backside. It was quite offensive. (Sale n.p) Hissa 6 We see again the strange white obsession with black butts as a marker of racial difference. The comment that the train of Serena’s dress “had been carefully designed to wrap around [her] huge backside” is suggestive that Serena fails to meet – or even mimic – white standards of beauty. Croft did eventually issue a public apology, adding that her comment was taken out of context. She stated, “I apologise to anyone who might have taken offence, but it was meant as a harmless piece of banter. Serena has a magnificent bottom that every woman should aspire to” (Sale n.p). Even so, it is clear that this is a back-handed slight, one that brings Serena’s body to the forefront of discussion once more rather than the apology itself. Another memorable attack came in 2001, where American radio personality Sid Rosenberg commented – on air – that Venus and Serena Williams were too masculine. “I can’t even watch them play anymore,” he said, “I find it disgusting. They’re just too muscular. They’re boys” (Kilgannon n.p). He then went on to say that Venus Williams was an “animal”' and declared that the sisters had a better chance at posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. While Rosenberg was fired, he was also given the opportunity to apologize on the air where he insisted that his comments were “not racist.” Not long after, he was rehired by the same radio station. Certainly, women, in general, face challenges in negotiating their sexuality in the masculine sphere of sport but instances such as this demonstrate how the same circumstance is further complicated for black women. Their strong muscular bodies contradict an iconographic history that constitutes all black women as feminine and overtly sexual creatures. When their appearance challenges dominant notions of black sexuality, they are not only dismissed as women, but their humanity is denied altogether. They become mere savages. Ultimately, the media is unable to get past the physical strength of the Williams’ sisters bodies and instead they become a spectacle of what is perceived to be their grotesque masculinity. The fact that sports Hissa 7 media would much rather talk about Serena’s unruly body rather than focus on her athletic accomplishments also suggests that, because of her difference from her competitors – who are predominantly white conventionally attractive women, such as Croft herself – she does not fit into the world of tennis either. The sport of women’s tennis is very much like a beauty contest in itself. It is one of few sports that encourages women to wear typically feminine attire, such as tank tops and short skirts, and tennis fans are constantly bombarded with images of its athletes, like Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova, who are tall, slender, and physically attractive white women. These women are popular features in sports “Hottest Female Athlete” lists, make millions of dollars in endorsement deals, and very rarely face the discrimination of masculinity so often associated with women in sport. Why? Because sex sells and tennis is conventionally a sexy sport. Mary Festle notes that whiteness and femininity have both been inscribed into its history since its very beginnings and, as such, “[t]ennis traditions meant that female tennis stars enjoyed greater status than other female athletes” (54). Indeed, historically, tennis has been considered a “genteel sport” (Festle 54), meant for the upper-class white elite. The game was not played aggressively by anyone, including men, and thus women’s participation was not objected since their femininity was not at risk. It wasn’t until the 1950s that, pioneered by Athena Gibson, participation of black women was (grudgingly) permitted and, even then, “the combination of class and racial factors proved extremely difficult for an African American athlete to overcome” (74). The sport of tennis very much relies on what Krane et al. would define as “hegemonic femininity” (82), which is constructed within a white, heterosexual, and class-based structure. Venus and Serena Williams – the “Ghetto-Cinderellas” (Rodgers 353) of the lily-white tennis world – coming from a black working-class family and beating civilized upper-class white Hissa 8 women are consequently an affront to the social hierarchies that tennis is founded upon. Already excluded from dominant ideals of (white) womanhood, their success in tennis is rationalized by emphasizing their biological inclination towards primitive strength and masculinity. On more than one occasion, “[t]ennis commentators such as Chris Everett, John McEnroe, and Tracy Austin [have ] often described Venus and Serena after matches as sloppy, careless, or that they relied too much on their athletic ability rather than playing the game right” (Wigginton 102). This line of thoughts aligns itself with John Hoberman’s Mortal Engines, which attempts to explain the reasons behind Western society’s fixation on black athletic accomplishment. He writes about how scientific speculation first attempted to explain their superior physique. “[T]he superior physique of the primate became reinterpreted as a sign of inferiority […] because the important mental faculties seem to be deficient in all the dark races” (39). In other words, as a way for ‘civilized’ whites to assert their positional authority over the seemingly physically superior ‘savages,’ Victorian anthropologists “pursued the brain-versus-brawn idea to its logical conclusions” (40). Hoberman is certainly correct in asserting that, as Western society, “we continue to look at the issue of racial aptitudes in sport through nineteenth-century eyes” (50). Indeed, racial comparisons and speculations about racial difference are still very much present and, I would argue, are most visible in representations of black athletes in the media. At the same time that successful athletes – such as Venus and Serena Williams – are celebrated, they are also underscored by anxieties about the physical fitness and dominance of the white race inside and outside the realm of sport. Whether consciously carried out or not, institutions such as sport and sport media are “important sites for the production and contestation of competing narratives of race and ethnicity” (McDonald 154). The powerful ability of television, newspapers, magazines, Hissa 9 advertising and the internet have played a significant role “in encouraging the processes of racism, racialization, and racial formation” (154); not only does the media reflect dominant racial ideology, but it also shapes that ideology. Stuart Hall calls this “inferential racism [whereby] apparently naturalised representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’, […] have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions” (91). Ben Carrington’s essay, “Fear of a Black Athlete,” expands on this notion of inferential racism by examining the way that sports media has played a central role in biologising the performance of the black male. He argues that “the black [masculine] body has come to occupy a central metonymic site through which notions of ‘athleticism’ and ‘animalism’ operate” (91). Using black supermodel Tyson Beckford as an example, Carrington demonstrates how “the black male sporting body has now attained equal prominence in the degree in which it has become sexualized and transformed into an object of desire and envy” (97). Essentially, by commodifying the black male athlete, “consumers can now enjoy the spectacle of blackness in a way that is no longer threatening by its presence” (91). While he does briefly mention the way that female athletes are similarly “often subjects to a systematic process of sexualisation that devalues their sporting achievements” (97), he chooses to focus solely on the hyper-masculinity imposed upon black men by the media. However, hyper-masculinity, as I’ve already established, has been projected upon representations of black women, as well, which is perhaps most blatant in depictions of Serena and Venus Williams. The success of black women in sport, especially predominately white sport, makes them “the spectacle of ‘hyperblackness’” (91), too. But rather than emphasizing a form of masculinity inferior to that of the dominant white, the masculinity of black women is established as a threat. Hissa 10 This is blatantly exhibited in a 2013 Rolling Stones issue featuring Serena Williams. The article begins by asking, “Who is the most dominant figure in sports today? LeBron James? Michael Phelps? Please. Get that weak sauce out of here. It is Serena Williams. She runs women's tennis like Kim Jong-un runs North Korea: ruthlessly, with spare moments of comedy, indolence and the occasional appearance of a split personality” (Rodrick n.p). Serena is described as powerful and ruthless – stronger than even the most dominant men in sport. Comparing her to figures such as the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, is not only absurd but is also an interesting and telling example of the underlying fear, danger, and instability associated with her success in sport. Furthermore, it hints at the anxiety surrounding the potential power of her ‘mannishness’ to contend with or even overthrow masculinity in general, white or black. Of course, typical of any representation of black women in the media, the article continues to reinforce her spectacular blackness by comparing her to a prominent white tennis player, Maria Sharapova, who is the number-two tennis player in the world: Sharapova is tall, white and blond, and, because of that, makes more money in endorsements than Serena, who is black, beautiful and built like one of those monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas. Sharapova has not beaten Serena in nine years. Think about that for a moment. Nine years ago Matchbox Twenty and John Edwards mattered. The chasm between Serena and the rest of women's tennis is as vast and broad as the space between Ryan Lochte's ears. Get back to me when LeBron beats Kevin Durant's Oklahoma City Thunder every time for nine years. (Rodrick n.p) Even Serena’s stereotypically black sexuality is underscored by her more masculine qualities. One can’t help but note the tongue-in-cheek way that Rodrick likens Serena’s physique to that of a “monster trucks that crushes Volkswagens at sports arenas.” But with the ridiculousness of Rodrick’s language aside, Serena’s athletic prowess is clearly propagated as being intrinsically Hissa 11 linked to her blackness. Serena’s blackness is not just biological, but verges on that of the superhuman. Indeed, he follows with a list of her most recent accomplishments: The players Serena entered the game with are long retired, burned out and discarded. Meanwhile, Serena came back last year from foot problems and blood clots that could have killed her. Instead, she has gone 74-3 since losing at the 2012 French Open and won three Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal. After each one, tennis gurus whispered, "That was Serena's last hurrah." Not quite. This year she has won the past four tournaments she's entered and is on a 31match winning streak, the longest of her career. If she doesn't pocket her sixth Wimbledon and her fifth U.S. Open titles this summer, check the ground because the world may have spun off its axis. She's never been more dominant than now, at the age of 31, which is about 179 in tennis years. (Rodrick n.p) Despite everything working against her, it would still be considered an earth-altering event if she were not to win. Her athletic prowess is so ingrained into her being that she is able to commit feats beyond that of even the very best white athletes. As Carrington observes “within the post/colonial present, the binary structure of contemporary stereotypes means that the black body becomes either sub-human or super-human – never just common, never ordinary, never defined by its unspectacular humanity” (108). For black men, their sub-humanity is symbolized by their “pre-eminent position as a penis-symbol” (107). Similarly, for black women, their sub-humanity is embodied by their primitive sexuality and feminine disposition which justifies their exploitation by white men. While we can choose read the tone of this article as satirical, we still cannot ignore (and perhaps intentionally so) how, as a black female athlete whose physical body and dominance in sport rejects such dehumanizing stereotypical conventions, Serena is consequently considered something along the lines of a freak of nature, “requiring implausible explanations of black physicality that ultimately serve to devalue [her] feats” (108). In addition to her freakish superhuman strength, sports media also strategically plays up her aggression. In one memorable U.S. Open Semi-Final match in 2009, Serena Williams’ Hissa 12 reaction to being called for a foot foul caused a riot in the media. One article starts off by stating how she had made “a flawless run through the U.S. Open, pulverizing opponents and dominating matches” before going on to state how Serena allegedly told the lineswoman who made the foot foul call, “I swear to God, I’ll f--- take this ball and shove it down your f--- throat.” It is interesting how Serena’s success and her violent behaviour are brought up in the same article – in fact, even within a matter of sentences. The image included with the article depicts Serena towering over a small terrified-looking Asian woman, her racket pointed at the seated woman’s face. People in the audience look at each other, shocked. Another article by The Telegraph notes that, “It was never confirmed what Williams had said to the lineswoman, but the on-court microphones picked up her saying to the official in an argument: “I never said I would kill you, are you serious?” The same Telegraph article also notes that “with Clijsters closing in on a sensational victory, the pressure told on Williams.” Serena’s aggressive behaviour – which is speculated upon and even exaggerated in the media – is negatively linked her dominance in the tournament and is considered an affront to the ‘civilized’ nature of the sport. It is also important to note how this violence is apparently unleashed when her white opponent is “closing in” on her. Representations such as these speak a lot to how masculinity is projected onto black women who act outside of social scripts which demand their silence and submission as gendered and racial subjects. In addition, it also demonstrates how these fears are simultaneously underscored by anxieties about the potential for black women especially – in dominating the traditionally white sphere of tennis – to unsettle the foundational social hierarchies whites depend upon in order to asset their positional dominance of blacks. If the athletic success of black women is able to so easily shatter an iconography that, historically, has asserted their Hissa 13 gendered and racial inferiority, who is to say that – similar to the masculinity of black men – their mannishness is not a threat to white masculinity, too? This question is key to understanding why making the black female athlete a spectacle of grotesque masculinity in the media is so critical in maintaining the positional authority of white society, both from within and without the arena of sport. But perhaps an even more relevant question to ask, is how might black female athletes subvert the oppressive ideology perpetuated by sports media? Carrington says that this depends on “whether the iconic place that the black athlete once held during the high-point of European colonialism during the first half of the twentieth-century, as a metonymic site through which ‘race’ was made meaningful, can now be reconfigured to serve more radical positioning by calling into question the false promise of Western racial meritocracy” (109). He adds that “we also need to more fully understand the precise links between cultural representation and the forms of political representation that are necessary for any effective oppositional politics” (109). More specific to black women but along the same lines, bell hooks states that oppositional images of black female sexuality – outside that of the colonized erotic context where black bodies are on display for the racist/sexist imagination – is important to “make new and different representations of black female sexuality as they appear everywhere, especially in popular culture” (76). She quotes Annette Kuhn’s The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, at length, as she too offers a strategy for exploring gender and representation: …in order to challenge dominant representations, it is necessary first of all to understand how they work, and thus where to seek points of possible productive transformation. From such understanding flow various politics and practices of oppositional cultural production, among which may be counted feminist interventions…there is another justification for a feminist analysis of mainstream images of women: may it not teach us to recognize inconsistencies and contradictions within dominant traditions of representation, to identify point of leverage for our own intervention: cracks and fissures Hissa 14 through which may be captured glimpses of what in other circumstances might be possible, visions of ‘a world outside the order not normally seen or thought about?’ (hooks 77) I would argue that, under this line of thought, Serena and Venus Williams are not ignorant objects of the white gaze. The two sisters certainly understand how dominant representation of black women work and I would say that their notorious experimentation with fashion – which sport media strongly abhors – stands testament to this. Belinda White’s article in The Telegraph, which chronicles the Williams sisters’ “car-crash couture” at the 2011 Australian Open, says that, “it’s impossible to believe that tennis used to be such an impeccably stylish sport” (White n.p ). She blames Venus and Serena for changing the sport forever: For every trophy the pair added to their bulging cabinet, their outfits became brasher, louder and more overtly sexual. Their bold, attention-grabbing attitude was a breath of fresh air for the previously stuffy sport, and they re-wrote the rulebook on acceptable oncourt attire, with dangly earrings, neon colours, cut-away tops and barely-there skirts quickly becoming de rigueur. But where has this revolution left the sport today? The 2011 Australian Open can best be described as a fashion nightmare, with the focus of the competition appearing to shift from, 'who's got the best backhand', to 'who's got the sluttiest outfit'. (White n.p ) Despite what White may think, I do not believe that the Williams sisters’ interest in fashion meant nothing more than causing a stir. Again, I think that the two women are very much aware of the politics of black women’s representation within the media and are using fashion in order to exploit it to their advantage. Their clothes become a part of the performance which satirically illustrates that – actually – sports media does, in fact, focus on women’s sexuality more than their athletic talent and, in the case of black women in particular, the appearance of an athlete’s body becomes a physical discourser for both. The best and most memorable example of this would be Venus’ Williams lingerielooking outfit – a lace corset with flesh-coloured shorts underneath – at the 2010 French Open, Hissa 15 which ignited outraged comments by spectators, broadcasters, and the media alike. Reactions ranged from appreciation to surprise to outright disgust. As an EPSN article reported, “A New York Daily News writer wrote that Williams showed a ‘blatant disregard for traditional tennis attire.’ A blogger said she looked like she was ‘dressed for some late night party.’ An overseas publication referred to Williams' clothing as a ‘negligee’” (Hill n.p). However, as this article is clever enough to notice, it is the exact reaction Williams wanted. “‘It’s really all about the illusion,’ Williams told reporters. ‘What's the point of wearing lace when there's just black under? The illusion of just having bare skin is definitely, for me, a lot more beautiful’” (Hill n.p). Venus’ illusionary commando effect, as the article also observes, proves just how much Western society is obsessed with athletes’ bodies – in particular, black female athletes’ bodies. Judith Butler famously presents how gender as a social construction is produced by “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders” (178). Venus knows that her muscular body is an affront to her prescribed gendered and racial roles and by deliberately wearing a revealing feminine outfit she is in effect mocking the very identities that she is expected to perform as a woman – or, to be more specific, as a black woman. Butler also suggests that the practice of drag has the potential to destabilize and subvert categories of ‘true’ sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality. She argues that “[in imitating gender], this perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialized gender identities” (176). Essentially, in a society that criticizes and publically condemns her masculinity, Venus strategically gives the media the very image of femininity that they would expect but on her own terms. In doing so, Hissa 16 she highlights the inconsistencies and contradictions that remain conveniently ignored within dominant traditions of representation of black women. Certainly, it is fair to say that we live in a modern era dominated by media which both mirrors and shapes prevailing ideologies of gender and race. The pervasive gaze of the predominantly white media continually observes, categorizes, and imposes norms that seek to fix in the Western imaginary the myriad of ways in which black female athletes, such as Venus and Serena Williams, threaten social hegemonies and white superiority. “[T]he socially constructed yet highly visible deviancy” (Collins 130) that is their blackness and their masculinity becomes a spectacle which in turn assists in the detection and further representation of the racial and gendered differences that disrupt the social order of women’s tennis. Audre Lorde observes that “within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on the one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism” (42). In this contradictory and liminal position of the black woman in the eyes of white society, much is at stake in challenging dominant representations. The constant white gaze and demeaning criticism serves as a public reminder that that blacks – even black women – are a threat and, as such, warrant further monitoring and policing. Even so, as Lorde also points out, the “visibility which makes [black women] most vulnerable is also the source of [their] greatest strength” (42). Although the media is undeniably a powerful tool of the white gaze, it is possible for black women to take advantage of its all-encompassing scrutiny and widespread audience. Following hooks and Kuhn, so long as black female athletes are able to identify points of leverage with which they are able to use the media for their own representational intervention, there is hope to create the “cracks and Hissa 17 fissures” within the oppressive lens through which black women’s identities are so often subjected and constructed. Works Cited: Billings, Andrew and Hundley, Heather. “Examining Identity in Sports Media.” Examining Identity in Sports Media. Ed. Andrew Billings and Heather Hundley. Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2010. 1-16. Print. Butler, Judith. “Subversive Bodily Acts” Gender Body: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. 101-180. Print. Cahn, Susan. “From the ‘Muscle Moll’ to the ‘Butch’ Ballplayer: Mannishness, Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S. Women’s Sport.” The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behaviour. Ed. Rose Weitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 285-300. Print. 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