The only thing that makes this cartoon interesting at all is that the author is afraid to sexualize Michelle Obama by drawing her with breasts. So instead she has what appears to be a slanted cutting board. You can practically see the guy drawing her chest in and going ‘oh shit’.
Not to go into too much detail on this but anyone who has read Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins (which is a great book) probably remembers the themes on sexuality of black women. The gist of it is that there’s a lot of denial of black women of sexuality in the institutional effort to typecast them as controlling bitches, caretakers of children, and welfare cheats — there’s a certain element to that social dictation that just flat out ignores their sexuality or lumps it in with black men’s issues, as Collins writes. I think the author likely had something else in mind (namely, ‘I shouldn’t draw the First Lady as having a big rack because that would be sexist’ which is probably right) but the fact that he drew her chest as an angled sheet of construction paper indicates he probably falls victim to this tendency.
My excuse for this jumbled writing is that I’m still suffering from a hell of a cold that left me a little delirious.
3 months ago • 2 notes
