BATHING BEAUTIES AND PREDATORY LESBIANS

Chapter 3 explains how the Black Press featured the overt display and sexualization of black women’s bodies in the context of bathing beauty contests and recreation on public beaches and pools. The Black Press worked to transform pernicious notions of heterosexual black women as ugly, mannish, and uncivilized and meet their readers’ imagined desire for respectable and sexual images of African American women. However, chapter 3 also argues that this transformation was dependent on the demonization of black lesbians whom the Black Press cast as dangerous and predatory. Chapter 3 concludes that black bathing beauties’ photographs challenged vicious white stereotypes and aided a new generation of African American women’s attempts to reconstruct their public image even as they rendered the black lesbian as the embodiment of depravity.