Romance with Voluptuousness: Caribbean Women and Thick Bodies in the United States

ISBN-13:	9780803290808
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	10/01/2016
Series:	Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	760,221
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Offering a unique vantage point from which to view black women's body image and Caribbean migration, Romance with Voluptuousness illuminates how first- and second-generation immigrant black Caribbean women engage with a thick body aesthetic while living in the United States. Using personal accounts, Romance with Voluptuousness examines the ways in which black women with heritage in the English-speaking Caribbean participate in, perpetuate, and struggle with the voluptuous beauty standard of the black Caribbean while living in the hegemony of thinness cultivated in the United States. It highlights how black Caribbean women negotiate issues of body image deriving from both Caribbean and American pressures to maintain a particular body shape and contend with discourses and practices surrounding the body that aim to marginalize and exclude them from economic, social, and political spaces. By focusing on diasporic Caribbean women's "romance" with voluptuousness, Kamille Gentles-Peart explores the transnational flow of beauty ideals and examines how ideas about beauty in the Caribbean diaspora help to shape the experiences of Caribbean black women in the United States. Kamille Gentles-Peart is an associate professor of communication and media studies at Roger Williams University. She is the coeditor of Re-constructing Place and Space: Media, Culture, Discourse, and the Constitution of Caribbean Diasporas.