Historically, women with bodies like Serena’s—or fellow unruly woman Nicki Minaj’s—have been exoticized, literally put on display, like the Hottentot Venus of South Africa. To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference: they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness. Their bodies are treated as Halloween costumes or jokes, a concept manifested most blatantly when Andy Roddick and Caroline Wozniacki padded themselves up to play “as Serena.”
