Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites. By Nadia E. Brown and Danielle Casarez Lemi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 234 pp. $99.00 (cloth), $27.95 (paper). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197540572.001.0001.

Abstract

What constraints are placed on Blackwomenpoliticians’ physical presentation in the United States, and how do Black women candidates navigate choices around their appearance? In Sister Style, Nadia E. Brown and Danielle Casarez Lemi address these questions, examining how Black women political elites make fashion, hairstyle, and beauty decisions with respect to their roles as aspiring representatives and current elected officials. The authors bring forth considerable evidence supporting their hypotheses that Black women’s appearance has political implications and that “dominant, Eurocentric, beauty standards influence the electoral chances of Black women in varied and distinct ways” (16). The book evaluates interpretive, qualitative, and quantitative evidence of how Black women voters and elites modify their appearance to be recognized in politics. This book is a must-read for scholars of gender and politics and offers a serious, well-executed, intersectional analysis of the body politics of Black women. First, Brown and Lemi use the implementation of New Jersey’s Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act (2019), which protects individuals against hair-based discrimination, as a case study of how and why hair texture and styling as a reflection of racial, gendered, and class identities is a novel form of discrimination that state legislatures have recently addressed. The increase in the number of Black women legislators allows for the introduction of such topics, which otherwise would be invisible for nonracialized representatives. Here, the authors point to the importance of lived experiences of Black women in influencing how they represent their communities both descriptively and substantively (19). Next, Brown and Lemi analyze in-depth interviews with Black women political elites at various levels of political office to demonstrate how these women are both agentic and constrained in their hair styling and hair texture choices.