“I am not surprised at all. I’ve been to South America. I did very well there.”
For “Parks and Recreation” fans, this is just one of many responses uttered by the quick-witted Donna Meagle, played by actress Retta, to a never-seen camera man in the episode “Sister City” after a Venezuelan emissary to Pawnee requests a sexual favor from her character.
But for Nora Berenstain, professor in philosophy, Donna’s humor marks a distinct misrepresentation in today’s media, highlighting a trope of portraying black women as either “hyper-sexual” or “completely non-sexual” in nature.
As part of Sex Week’s lecture series, Berenstain’s talk entitled “On the Air: Sex & the Media” explained how such sexual punch lines are symptoms of an oppressive realm dominated by a historically white, male population.
“It seems to be that the only funny thing about that was that someone would find [Retta] sexy,” Berenstain said. “She’s a black woman of size and a man thinks he has his choice of women there, and as it turns it out, he wants her. The idea that she might the object of someone’s desire ends up serving as a punch line.”
Berenstain also asserted that African-American women, in particular, receive the blunt end of the mistreatment in media, noting the trend in roles a handful of black, female Oscar winners have received: slaves, maids, abusive mothers and even a phony psychic like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost.
“As audiences, we often demand these [controlling images] and are uncomfortable with seeing marginalized groups that don’t fall in line,” Berenstain said.
Such images, evidencing other tropes like Jezebels, Mammies and the ever-popular “Angry Black Woman,” became new food for thought for Melinda Marrow, a senior in art history.
“I love comedy and just hearing comedians talk about why they love comedy, and what comedy is to them,” Marrow said. “But the question of why something is funny … When you start dissecting it, why it’s ironic, and you get to a very stereotypical assumption, it’s something you wouldn’t have recognized otherwise.”
Marrow said she also took note of Berenstain’s brief discussion of trans-women in the media and the violence exhibited toward their community.
“It’s a terrifying thing to think about it, but I think it’s the kind of terror we need to feel just to be better people,” Marrow said. “It’s really just being interested in learning something new about sexuality beyond sort of the base level discussion.”
Citing the seven trans-women killed in 2015 so far, Berenstain closed her lecture by sharing her own thoughts on why violence is exhibited to trans women of color.
“When women don’t fulfill men’s expectations to be sexualized objects, they’re punished,” Berenstain said. “Trans-women don’t have the option of fulfilling those expectations because the expectations are always systemically supremacist.”
