A Different Take on Sexuality

With the majority of Black actresses playing roles that are heavily sexualized, will the future give way to any improvement or a change in the characters Hollywood has women portray??

I believe that the answer to that question could be a little two sided. For example, Queen Latifah, one of the top A-list African American actresses of this time make it difficult to tell whether she is being sexualized, desexualized or just given a good role in a movie

Queen Latifah’s character Cleo was a complex black lesbian and her performance in “Set It Off” was incredible. It can be argued that Queen Latifah was sexualized in this movie because she featured in a sex scene where she was kissing another woman. Despite this scene not being as vulgar as Halle berry's monster ball scene, it still has elements of sensuality and sexuality. This is the only time that you can actually count Queen Latifah being sexualized in a movie. All other times her love intrest seem as mere boyfriends. Of the very few black actresses, Queen Latifah can be seen as one black actress that is given a positive image. Even with playing some of the stereotypical roles in the early stages of her acting career.

Sexualization...Degradation... or Both?

The media has been notorious for denigrating, hyper-sexualizing and fragmenting womens' bodies to make what they believe to be more interesting films. In Hollywood the defamation of black women is two-prong, in the sense of their race and gender. Many may remember 2002, the history-making year when Halle berry won an Oscar for best actress. Halle Berry made history as not only the first black woman to win an Academy Award for "Best Actress" but also the first woman to do so having lost all of her dignity in one of the raunchiest and self-degrading sex-scenes of that year.

The mini-celebration that broke out when Berry won the award for her role in Monster's Ball came to a screeching halt when some came to realize that she had won the award for whoring herself, something hardly worth applauding. Even more telling was that the "who's who's" in Hollywood made perhaps the most obvious yet subliminal statement about how exactly it is they view black actresses.  If you want to get ahead in this business (no pun intended), you have to take off your clothes.  History was made alright...that day marked the day that we gave the highest accolade to someone who displayed one of the lowest forms of human behavior. let's not fail to mention that the Oscar award was started in 1927 and black actresses have shown up in films since the 1930's. Here it is in 2002 the first black actress to win an Oscar for a leading performance had to "double degrade" herself, but Can we really blame Halle Berry for misrepresenting black women in her film roles?

We Got Our Cilvil Rights Decades Ago....Why Are We Still Fighting This Fight?!?!?!

For all featured films produced, 29% of casting includes actresses (all actresses). This statistic only leaves 10% of African Americans cast in films. which means that 90% of the time there would not be Black actresses cast as lead characters in major films. Consequently, for those who were fortunate enough to get cast.

Racism and the film industry's limited vision created paucity of roles for this "type" of actress. for Black women roles such as, hookers, maids, sidekicks, and bestfriends to the main white actresses just worsened the situation. Black actresses such as Dorothy Dandridge and Josephine Baker were the components that brightened the way for the rising actresses, but they too played in the image defying roles as stated before.