“Roll up your sleeves!”

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Notes

1. I found hundreds of press releases about the film. However, it was surprisingly difficult to find any head-shaking over the project in the press. I found two fairly notable websites—a blog and a news portal—that were dismissive of the film (Cruz 2009; Kyles 2009).

2. Here I use Blackness to describe racial location and social formation, as well as the cultural practices and tropes that make up a Black lived experience, to include histories, rituals, identity investment, power relationships, and even rituals. The literature in the journal over the last decade talks across the range of these definitions and issues.

3. Pamela Thoma (2009) addresses tokenism. Shugart and Waggoner (2005) talk about style among celebrities. Einat Lachover and Sigal Barak Brandes (2009), Rebecca Coleman (2008), Sujata Moorti and Karen Ross (2005), and Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen (2005) attend to beauty and/or body image. Black women are also commented on when Ruby Tapia (2005) takes on unwed mothers and when Rachel Dubrofsky (2009) writes about excessively emotional (“angry”) women on talk shows. Stacy Takacs (2005), Deborah Cohler (2006), and Allison Perlman (2007) all explore issues of bias.

4. The question I pose here is based on a similar question raised by Norma Manatu (2003, pp. 52–53).

5. To this I would add Black women never get to be a “lady.” No, not the historical discourses of a “lady” associated with Southern White womanhood, or even some bourgeoisie attempt to appropriate the optics and performance of that kind of lady. I would like to see Black women viewed as a “lady”—a value independent of such an association and one that stands outside of and in opposition to the skanks, hoochies, tragic mulattos, and the like. There must be a new variable for Black women. The question is, how can feminist media studies get us there?