Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites

UCL Institute of the Americas was delighted to host our distinguished guest speaker, Professor Nadia Brown (Georgetown University), who spoke about her new book Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (Oxford University Press, 2021), which she co-authored with Danielle Casarez Lemi. The talk centered on Black women’s bodies, specifically their hair texture and skin tone, to argue that phenotypic differences among Black women politicians directly impact how they experience political office and how Black voters evaluate them. It will provide an overview of the book’s interdisciplinary, multi-method, and blended epistemological approach of positivism and interpretivism to ask whether African American women’s appearances provide a more nuanced lens through which to study how their raced-gendered identities impact their candidacies and shape their political behavior.