There She Is: An Exploration of the Black Female Hypervisibility and Invisibility Paradox

Abstract

Why aren’t Black women given the benefit of being seen as multi-varied, through multiple lenses, and containing many qualities and traits? How are Black women both hypervisible and invisible in the social spaces they occupy and how does this preclude them from being seen comprehensively? Throughout my thesis paper, I aim to highlight the ways that Black women are hypervisible subjects, which render other parts of themselves invisible. By using a combination of Princeton student interviews and media examples, Black women’s experiences serve as testimony and evidence of the paradoxical experience that impacts Black women in a variety of ways. This thesis aims to put the voices and experiences of Black women forward on their own terms. While all of the women with whom I have engaged are different and share a multitude of experiences, there are similarities based on the stories and experiences they have shared that have allowed me to find patterns, themes, and convergences across their experiences, which allow me to assert that Black women experience a paradoxical relationship in society in which they are placed in hypervisible situations that render them invisible and lead them to act and respond in a variety of ways that either perpetuate their invisibility or that prevent them from being seen comprehensively. In this thesis, I detail how Black women’s hypervisibility/invisibility paradox forces them into a “mold” that requires they act in specific ways to be “accepted” in their environments, places a set of expectations upon them in terms of how they should act, appear, and who they should be, puts their features and their body as the focus, and impacts their sense of belonging and acceptance in space, and how they think about themselves and the ways they come across to their peers.