After reading and discussing Crossing-over the Latina Body in class I came to notice the same preoccupation with showing ethnic women as extremely curvaceous in the media I was watching. One of the characters in the FX animated series Archer, a show about an agency of spies, is an incredibly voluptuous black field agent named Lana Kane. Not only does the vocal portrayal of Lana stress the fact that she is a racial minority, but the way she is presented visually screams it.
In comparison to the other women in the show, Lana is the femme fatale with the over exaggerated drawing style of her breast and backside as well as her sassy personality and get-what-she-wants attitude. However, the way her demeanor is portrayed is not racially neutral. In fact, it is very much stressed that she is different from the rest of the women on the show, who all happen to be white, through her blatant sexuality and seduction and flaunting of her body.
This ultimately brings up the question of why. Why are women of particular ethnicities portrayed in this particular way? What happens if a white woman were cast in a role like this? Would the same effect be achieved or would it just end up lost in translation?
Some women of color bloggers have said that WOC are not even seen as having bodily autonomy in our society. I'll have to get at the posts about that but totally poignant statement about over-sexualization/fetishization of women of color.
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