Research Spotlight: The ‘right’ kind of body — then and now

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we’re spotlighting UNC Hussman doctoral student Contia’ Prince’s research around what history can tell us about stereotypical ideals for women’s bodies.

By Beth Hatcher

What’s Nicki Minaj got to do with 19th-century medical literature?

More than you might think, according to UNC Hussman Ph.D. student Contia' Prince, who is working on research examining connections between descriptions of “ideal” female bodies centuries ago and the physical stereotypes still imposed on women today.

Whether it’s modern-day YouTube commenters or 1800s journals, the media consistently reinforces stereotypical ideals about women’s appearances.

Contia' Prince is pictured above.

Often, these physical stereotypes are disproportionately applied to women from underrepresented groups.

Prince began researching 19th-century scientific racism (and its implications for black women) while at Elon University, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, even designing a student-led course at Elon in 2018 connecting 19th-century scientific racism to sci-fi films: “Black Women in Sci-Fi: What Uniformity in a Fictional Future Says About Contemporary Perspectives on Race, Gender and Ability.”

Then, as a doctoral student at UNC Hussman, Prince learned about Sarah Baartman in a “MEJO 705: Theories of Mass Communication” class. Baartman was an African woman put on public display in 19th-century Europe due to her curvy body. Learning about Baartman led Prince to even more literature of the time that promoted anatomical stereotypes of Black women, as well as to Prince making an interesting modern connection.

Images of Baartman immediately made Prince think about modern celebrity Nicki Minaj, an African American female rapper whose curvy figure is often spotlighted by media.

“It made me think about if there was some kind of connection between women like Sarah Baartman and the choices modern Black women are making aesthetically in terms of how they think they’re supposed to look to be desirable,” Prince said.

Basically, society still doles out “anatomical stereotypes,” Prince said, stereotypes that can vary according to a woman’s race and position in society, and which are often loaded with social and political undertones.

“For example, the idea that Black women are naturally curvy, Black women are supposed to be thick … the reality is that Black women, like all women, have different body types,” said Prince, who linked parts of this stereotype back to Black women’s physical labor being exploited before and after slavery — a stereotype often in juxtaposition to the thinner frames declared “normal” for White women.

As Prince prepares to present her dissertation soon, she’s scouring sources like Stephanie M.H. Camp’s “Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South,” Sander L. Gilman’s “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s "When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland" — all seminal works in forming conversation on the topic.

Prince is also thinking about the women who formed her — a single mother, two younger sisters and a bevy of other strong female relatives who surrounded her during her childhood in Akron, Ohio. It was in them that she first saw female strength.

Prince is also thinking about the women she didn’t see, namely in the films and television she loved as a child. While she’s focusing on research at Hussman, Prince received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Elon University focused on visual communication (film studies and interactive media respectively) and hopes to one day combine her two passions.

“I want to teach and have a multimedia production company. A lot of my favorite films didn’t have Black women in them. That’s part of why I wanted to go into film because I didn’t see myself in the types of films I was interested in making,” said Prince, who loved science fiction and fantasy films like the “Twilight” series growing up.

Ultimately, whether it’s through research or media production, Prince hopes her work helps represent women in all their human complexity.