Kiera Knightly, Kim K, Nicki Minaj: Female Nudity and Racism

(Note this isn't supposed to be some structured, well thought out argument, I'm actually just typing this as I go and maybe skimming over it for errors.)

I'm going to throw out a term that some of you may have heard before called "intersectional feminism". The idea behind it in a feminist school of thought is that in our society, there are intersections where female oppression faces other oppression like racism, homophobia, ableism etc. So for example, a woman of colour faces both misogyny and racism, lesbians face misogyny and homophobia, and the list goes on. Intersectional feminism aims to incorporate all women's experiences into feminist discourse and understand where different streams of oppression intersect.

So that's the bare bones of what I'm talking about in this blog post.

Now for those of you who haven't heard yet, Kim Kardashian has posed nude for Paper magazine. Photos taken of her in the magazine involve both her naked butt as full-frontal nudity (I'm not linking anything, you can find them yourself). So of course this has attracted a large amount of attention, and the headline on Paper was that Kardashian would "break the internet". And maybe she has, maybe she hasn't, but there has been both a lot of talk, and especially a lot of hate. Go look at your Facebook feed and you'll probably see people chiming in on how much of a slut she is, or even just commenting on how big her butt is.

Now last week, actress Kiera Knightly posed topless for a magazine in protest of magazines photoshopping her breasts to be bigger and fuller, demanding that magazine not retouch her body at all. Knightly claimed that a woman's body is a battleground and that she was tired of having hers retouched. If you've seen her in her busty gowns in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, her breasts were in a way painted on (heavily contoured with makeup) to appear bigger. Most of the feedback on this move of hers was positive, agreeing with her statements and praising her for being brave. By liberal feminism standards which seem to revolve around literally everything being empowering for all women everywhere, this was a Big Step Forward for Feminism.

No, I'm not hating on Knightly at all, but as far as feminist praxis goes (praxis meaning "practice as distinguished from theory"), what she did was more personally empowering and liberating for her rather than women as a whole. It didn't really rock the boat; news outlets were like "oh of course women's bodies are battlegrounds, she's so brave and so smart for talking about feminism!" and now those same news outlets are blasting Kardashian, or being like "oooooh, this is controversial!". But I don't think it was necessarily bad, and if it made her feel better about herself, then good for her. She's a grown-ass woman she can do what she wants.

I agree with Knightly's sentiment of women's bodies being a battleground, however, and it's true that all women face a lot of scrutiny about their bodies, no matter what they look like. But, looking back at the theory of intersectional feminism, it's pretty clear to see that women of colour get even more scrutiny for not living up to beauty standards, which are overwhelmingly white-centric. And, this doesn't just manifest in "white women v. women of colour", there are different prevailing attitudes and prejudices against the appearances of black women, Latina women, Asian women, and the list goes on.

I don't want to speak for women of colour since I myself am white, but I also think as one white woman to another, this is still something we should be aware of. A thin white able-bodied female celebrity posing nude for photos no matter what the context will NEVER face the same scrutiny as a woman of colour, because her body still lives up to Western beauty standards way more than a black woman or an Armenian woman like Kardashian. Do thin white able-bodied women still face scrutiny? Absolutely, but it is not on the same level if they aren't caught in any of the "intersections".

Does this all make sense? I hope this is making sense.

The same thing happened when Nicki Minaj released the cover for her single and her video Anaconda, lots of people were basically, exactly like she says so mockingly in her song, "Oh. My. GAWD. Lookat. Her. BUTT." She has a butt that is disproportionate to the white beauty standards of our Western society, and for her (almost) bare arse shown on the cover of the single, there was a lot of negative attention. It's the same thing that is happening to Kardashian.

I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the the Kim Kardashian hate probably has to do a lot with the fact that a good deal of the population already hate the Kardashians for being rich and famous for basically nothing. And I get it. I'm not going to be leaping to her defence because she's a multi-millionaire grown-ass woman who can do what she wants, she doesn't need randos on the internet defending her. But I do think it's worth criticizing the perceptions on her decision to pose nude when literally just last week a white woman was praised for doing basically the same thing. The difference in reactions doesn't just affect celebrities, it says a lot about our culture.

Anyway, I'll reiterate that I'm not bashing on Kiera Knightly for Mibba's sake, because as far as I know, bashing is still against the journal rules (oh my god, BLOG rules. Who remembers journals?). In fact I'm not pinning any of the hate for Kim K on her, she didn't have anything to do with that. But the reaction to a white woman's nude body was mostly positive and the reaction to an Armenian woman's nude body was so negative just stinks of some real racist misogyny.

Thoughts are welcome.

Oh, one last thing, if you find yourself just not caring about the whole issue because this is a thing surrounding celebrities, just remember that the issue itself permeates into our entire Western society. Separate the issue from celebrity culture and it might mean a bit more.