Why These Aren’t Comparable

In the aftermath of the LeBron Vogue cover, a surely well-intentioned member of the NASSS community posted this billboard image from the 2008 WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx ad campaign depicting who I’m assuming is the Lynx’s Seimone Augustus juxtaposed to a wild lynx. Okay, I can see how someone would want to draw a comparison between this and the LeBron cover. A semiotic analysis of the two should be done the very same way. Yes, we have a black female athlete being juxtaposed with a wild animal. This is not unlike the juxtapositioning of King LeBron versus the King Kong or the US Army recruitment posters (see previous posts). However, in order to read this ad critically, one must go far beyond this superficial analysis. There are significantly different processes (discourses) operating in these two images.

To put it simply, I’ll turn to the words of Sojourner Truth (ca. 1848):

That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best places everywhere. Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place and ain’t I a woman? I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me–and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well–and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen ‘em most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none by Jesus heard me–and ain’t I a woman? (Rhoden, 2006, p. 228).

What we are talking about here, is what’s often referred to as the “double burden” or the double diaspora. This is the condition under which women of color have had to suffer the indignities of both oppression of women, and of people of color.

A relevant case study that will be unveiled in my dissertation is that of Latasha Byears. That chapter is intended to flesh out these differences in black male and female sexuality, and the compounded floating signifier that is “race” when “gender” and “sexuality” is added to the mix. In short, Latasha Byears is an openly lesbian player who was charged with sexual assault of a teammate at an after-party to the LA Sparks’ WNBA championship win. Immediately, she was released by the Sparks’ ownership group, who coincidentally only months later had to deal with another sexual assualt (rape) charge against their own Kobe Bryant. The political salience of black masculinity (in the ideal form of Kobe Bryant) far outweighed the worth of ”the Dennis Rodman of the WNBA” in Latasha Byears, despite her import and role in their championship run. In the end, the charges against both Bryant and Byears were dropped (or cases settled out of court), and Byears reached an undisclosed settlement with the LA owners in her lawsuit against them for wrongful dismissal (their clear exhibition of holding a double-standard).

In close, suffice to say that the reading of black female athleticism cannot be simply mapped the same way it can be for males. The history and the contexts that inform both are far too complex and different to simply say that the “same things” are at play. That is not to discount any critical reading of this image. In fact, I strongly encourage it be done. What I am saying, however, is that it is likely to be more effective if one were to analyze this imagery in question through a somewhat modified lens (gender, race, and sexuality all still are important, just ordered differently). Make sense?

Dig it!