In the summer of 2000, in the middle of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) against the producers of television commercials, Ridley Scott Associates (RSA) took out an ad in Shoot, a trade magazine, that featured a pair of withered, dark-skinned, sagging breasts. The caption read, “In South Africa, this is what SAG means.” The ad signaled the opening of an RSA production operation in South Africa, where actors were not yet unionized. In itself, this strategy was neither surprising nor new. Advertisers, like the leaders of other industries, were simply attempting to use the global economy to drive down labor costs. But what does it mean to use a black woman’s naked breasts as a symbol of this strategy? In this essay, I look for the answer to that question first in the literature of cultural studies and then in the SAG/AFTRA strike itself. Scholars who work in black and feminist and gender studies have argued that the dominant meanings of the black female body today are grounded in a discourse about gender, race, and class that stretches back to the European Renaissance. In Western patriarchal culture, the female body has long been a sign of the Other, and this “otherness” has been especially evident in representations of the black female body. Black women’s butts, breasts, and faces have routinely been represented as repulsive, underdeveloped, exotic, or primitive. Furthermore, these kinds of representations have not been limited to the unenlightened past. Even at the end of the twentieth century, a period when dominant forces in the West embraced certain forms of “multiculturalism,” representations of the black female body have continued to be representations of the Other.
