Rida Fatima

So many young women of colour feel that they have to overperform their femininity to gain some validation that they are woman enough, especially in Cambridge. Femininity is often left for young white women to define, leaving non Eurocentric features masculinised due to their inability to conform to these standards. 

I was talking to a friend from another college about her day, and she was telling me how someone commented that they thought she – a black female – was the “masc gay girlfriend” of her best friend – a white female. These comments have been following her for ages, despite how feminine or girly she dresses. I too have experienced being called “scary” or “intimidating” by men on many occasions. “I wonder if these things would be said to be a young white woman”, one of my friends noted over a late night coffee. 

This is because ‘softer’ features, like lighter skin, button noses and  rosy cheeks are all characteristics that are predominant when it comes to describing “feminine” women. And, unsurprisingly, they happen to be typically Eurocentric features. Throughout literature and pop culture, white female characters that are meant to embody an epitome of beauty are referred to using these descriptions. Examples range from Jane Austen’s Jane Bennet with “curly blonde hair” and “lovely complexion”,  to pop singer Sabrina Carpenter who can easily fit into the mould for coquette culture. When certain women become the signposts for what femininity is, it makes it harder for women who are strikingly different in appearance to partake in this description.

It reminds me of Jean Rhys, where her descriptions of the black women from the Caribbean coast of Jamaica in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, show how they are othered by the white, English observers. How their features are seen as alien, sinister, and the opposite of innocence – that they inhibit a type of disturbing external appearance compared to the alluring and soft depiction of white women in Victorian literature.  

Modern Caricaturization of Black Women 
The historical roots of  how black women have been othered from modern beauty standards and emasculated traces back to social trends such as the sapphire and mammy caricature in American movie and radio culture from the 20th Century. 
Andrea Shaw’s paper looks at this in depth as the introductory paragraph encapsulates how “western conceptualization of idealised femininity as exclusively white is an important means of sustaining racialized hierarchies” and a way to devalue subaltern populations.¹ She notes how black women were not allowed to enter the Miss America competition until 1970, and how even then, the first African American winner, Vanessa Williams, was biracial with green eyes and light skin. Similarly, in the twenty-first century, black women that are accepted as extraordinarily beautiful are those that fit the Vanessa Williams archetype, such as Zendaya and Tyla. Therefore, she highlights how blackness and ethnic features were barred from the get-go in even being allowed to compete with the Eurocentric standard.

However, the more important aspect of her paper was focussing on not which groups of black women have been accepted, but on the history of how the mass majority of them have been successfully excluded from the sphere of femininity. For example, Shaw examines the “Mammy” caricature and how it has served the role of mollifying racial anxieties by reducing the black women to a semi-masculinised non-sexual non-threat to the white slender women they are usually serving. Examples include Hattie McDaniel’s role in “Gone with the Wind” where her large and mother-like figure is written as a social control mechanism that  is encouraged to remind black women to appear “passive, servile, non-threatening and unseen” if they want to be accepted into white households. 

Similarly, the Sapphire caricature also adds onto this degrading image of black women as the “Angry Black Woman”. First brought into the cultural realm by the Amos N Andy Radio Show,  she is a “stubborn, overbearing” and “emasculating” figure, who nags and complains constantly. Her distaste for black men and jealousy of white folk alienates her as a polarising and fear inducing character who displeases all those around her. 

Sports and Transphobia 

The black women who seem to face the worst media attacks in regards to hypermasculinization are black sports women like Serena Williams. The Washington Post notes how following one of her frustrating matches with Naomi Oska, cartoonist Mike Knight draws her as an  “irate, hulking, big mouthed black woman jumping up and down on a racket” whilst her opponent is slender blonde woman. Williams has faced relentless bullying for being too muscular and able to compete well with any gender, which has been used to underplay her femininity.  This unfortunately is a common theme for black sportswomen, where they are falsely linked with being more aggressive or having more testosterone. There is no scientific evidence backing these claims that are rooted in misogyny and transphobia. Athletic black women are seen as a threat to the imagined nature of women as weak and docile, so they become a ruthless target of this beauty standard – the standard that is built to exclude them.

The Disregard of South Asian Women 

Whilst there is a lot of literature on black women, despite the significant othering that brown women also face, there aren’t enough articles or papers researching how they are also othered from this Eurocentric sphere of femininity.

In 1971, Richard Nixon famously remarked that “undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women.” And so this racist comment echoes in modern society with how South Asian women remain significantly underrepresented in the beauty industry. Ayesha Ali highlights how this ethnic group is often overlooked when it comes to foundation shades, lipsticks and even undertones for concealers, meaning they spend more products to get suitability out of products that were never tailored for them in mind.² 

The only South Asian women that do have a platform are those that conform again to high eurocentric appearances. Therefore, many South Asian women can’t relate to their own media because they feel that their authentic features like darker skin, eye colours,  and varied nose and face shapes are not valued or acknowledged. An example of this disparity is Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, a global brand ambassador for L’Oréal Paris. Although she represents South Asia on a global stage, her physical features align with Western beauty standards with blue eyes, light hair  and very fair skin, making her less relatable to everyday South Asian women. 

Additionally, Lamisa Khan points out that South Asians are still not considered beautiful by mainstream Western culture, despite India holding the most Miss World titles.³ This dichotomy showcases the ongoing struggle for recognition and inclusivity within global beauty standards.

So what can we do?

Turning back to my friend, I thought of what I could say to her to make her overlook all those comments or feelings of self doubt. The first thing that now comes to mind is Virginia Woolf’s quote “the eyes of others are our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” My femininity is not for someone to question based on what they wish I looked like and what they know I’m not. Being a young woman and everything that it encompasses is my gift to construct and decode, and if someone is threatened or intimidated by my approach to womanhood because of my race, it’s because they are unable to grapple with their own sense of self.  Their weakness manifests in their desire to inflict structural stereotypes onto others, instead of building their own distinctive identities outside societal standards.

1. Shaw, Andrea. “The Other Side of the Looking Glass: The Marginalization of Fatness and Blackness in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Social semiotics 15.2 (2005): 143–152. Print. ↩︎
2. Ali, A. (2019) Lack of South Asian representation in the Beauty Industry, DESIblitz. Available at: https://www.desiblitz.com/content/lack-of-south-asian-representation-in-the-beauty-industry (Accessed: 28 March 2025).
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3. Khan, Lamisa. and Begum, Tahmina. Where are all the south asian women in fashion?, Sleek Magazine. Available at: https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/south-asia-diversity/ (Accessed: 28 April 2025).
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