Example Of Fetishization Essay

Approximately a week or so ago I attended the event “A Conversation on Women of Color and Domestic Violence” which was held by AU PEERS, Peer Educators For The Elimination of Relationship and Sexual Violence. In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, PEERS hosted this event to focus on women of color specifically and how they are affected by domestic violence as well as how they are treated within society. One of the topics that the group talked about for the longest time, and that I found very thought-provoking, was fetishization. The conversation originally started out talking about how these tropes were everywhere in the media and within everyday life and how that was problematic. We discussed how this is especially prevalent this time of year with Halloween speedily approaching because fetishization and cultural appropriation combine together to create incredibly problematic

Some artificially made their butts bigger, others over-lined their lips, and almost all painted their faces black for the party without second guessing their actions. This reminded me of our class discussion about how bodies, especially black female bodies, are often desensitized and are thusly seen as separate features, not just one singular body. In this case, big butts and big lips are seen as black girl features and are often appropriated, in obscene ways such as the blackface party, but also in subtler ways like getting lip injections and butt implants as a white woman. As a society we often hyper sexualize black women and their features to maintain the hierarchy through desensitizing their body parts, and thus, them as a group. This is problematic because we cannot take a part of someone’s being, someone’s culture, and make it fashionable on a white person while ridiculing it on a person of