viz.

Image Credit: cropped version of Karine Percheron-Daniels magazine cover image

Even the First Lady can't escape the objectification of black women's bodies (at home and abroad).

The Internet has had a lot to say about the Spanish magazine cover unveiled last week depicting Michelle Obama bare-breasted, swathed in an American flag.  Most reactions have been vehement condemnations, accusing the artist (Karine Percheron-Daniels) of racism at worst, and poor taste at best.  The image involved certainly raises a lot of questions (about race, art, censorship, and objectification), and I'll get into more detail when you see the (theoretically) Not Safe For Work images after the jump.

H/T Beverly Mireles

The Beyonce video above was launched this month as a part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move Campaign" on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters. The video mobilizes inter-cultural rhetorics in support of public health, most obviously with the shift mid-video from hip hop to Latino-inflected dance moves and music. The 'flash workout' indicates the need for solidarity among minority populations most affected by the state of food and exercise culture in America. Healthy bodies and race relations, the video communicates, are the same cause. The flag waving at the end of the video underlines a populist appeal.

(Photo Credit:  Billboard, Georgia  Childrens Health Alliance, via Body Impolitic)

No one could argue that efforts to promote healthy eating and exercise among school children, such as Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, aren't well-intentioned.  But as Paul Campos argues in this recent Daily Beast article, too often anti-obesity campaigns focused on children stigmatize the very individuals they are supposedly trying to help.  The image above, a billboard produced by the Georgia Childrens Health Alliance, is a case in point.  These scowling children with warning labels slapped across their stomachs seem to have crossed the line from being victims of genetics, environment, lack of opportunities for healthy exertion, and inavailability of affordable healthy meal choices to, I guess, being perpetrators.  Something has clearly gone wrong here.  Seriously, how would you like to be one of the kids in these pictures with your body held up as a symbol of a national crisis?  

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Towleroad

H/T:  Hampton Finger

It’s been hard to miss the recent media coverage of the new Arizona immigration law SB 1070, which allows police to stop individuals and require them to show legal papers proving their citizenship upon “reasonable suspicion.”  Many have interpreted this as legalizing racial profiling, which has caused protests to spring up against this, most recently the one pictured above where individuals smeared refried beans in the shape of a swastika to point out the potentially fascist implications of the bill.  What makes me curious is how racial tensions have been visually deployed during the theoretically post-racial Obama presidency.

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history.  Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares.  The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record.  Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention?  And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

Image Credit: The New York Times

Nestled between the white monuments of Washington D.C. is a new dash of green. On September 17th, Washington D.C. opened a weekly farmer's market near the White House. This opening, ceremoniously attended by Michelle Obama as well as hundreds of shoppers, led me to think about the ways in which the First Lady has championed the sustainability movement. One of her first ceremonial acts as a resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was to plant a garden. The White House website includes a film about digging this garden and compares Michelle Obama to Eleanor Roosevelt, the only other First Lady to plant produce on the White House lawns. In her remarks at the opening of the Farmer's Market, Michelle Obama refers to the White House gardens as "one of the greatest things that I've done in my life so far" and describes supporting the Farmer's Market as an extension of her commitment to making healthy food more widely accessible.

The recent New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in radical drag, as it were, hasn't been discussed here on viz. It deserves a mention, since the nature and definition of satire has been discussed on the site before.

In my opinion, it fails utterly as satire. First of all, anytime anything requires extensive explanation AS SATIRE, it probably isn't the most adept or polished attempt. This week's New York Times "Week in Review" piece, written by Lee Siegel, agrees. In it, Siegel concludes that "By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by neglecting to position the target of a slur — the Obamas — in relation to the producers of the slur, The New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon."

I agree, and not because I think the Obamas are off-limits as targets for satire, or that they themselves think they are off-limits (a conclusion I've heard on cable news from some on the "lunatic fringe" Siegel mentions). To me, the so-called satire of the piece fails because, rather than seeming to satirize the intellectual laziness, the total divorce from reality, required to hold the views depicted here, it seems to satirize the Obamas themselves for producing those views, instead of those who maintain and perpetuate them. The message is confused, the execution, confusing. Grade: F.

Is sarcastic, rather than bitch, the new black? To build on our discussions of the image of women in politics (see John's post about Michelle Obama's halo and Tim's recent post about Hillary and/as the Devil), I find the discussion of the two women's "edgy" humor to be quite interesting and I think it affects the way that their images are produced and read.