Black Women as Genres of Skin: A Necropolitical Analysis of US Open Representational Texts of Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka

Abstract

This paper draws from necropolitics to apply an intertextual analysis of representational texts in order to foreground the constitutive role of race and gender in the construction of media texts. This construction is referred to in this paper as a meta-text which obtains from socio-cultural classifications which mark some groups as ‘people’ and others as ‘unpeople’, and thus, some groups as possessing ‘internal lives’ and others as only existing as ‘surfaces’. Out of these grand, racing distinctions emanate the additional layers of gendered femininity, which is marked as white, and de-gendered ‘non-femininity’ which is Black. These meta-texts constitute the building blocks for the construction of meanings which then become representation as understood within textual analysis. The Osaka and Williams final in 2018 provides a highly illuminating instance in which these necropolitical processes occur, even as the paper attempts to demonstrate how African postcolonial [necropolitical] theory and critical cultural analysis complement in textual analysis.

Keywords:

• Misogynoir
• necropolitics
• Naomi Osaka