Full Set: Racialized Femininity, Manicured Hands, and High Maintenance Feminism

Full Set: Racialized Femininity, Manicured Hands, and High Maintenance Feminism

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

In recent years, figurations of manicured, brown-skinned hands with elaborately decorated fingernails have appeared as a feminist icon in popular culture, protest art, and contemporary art practice. These images have emerged out of the context of activism against the police murder of Black people, anti-immigrant practices, and the covid-19 pandemic. I will explore how these hands gesture towards radical forms of collective relation. These images articulate a 21st century aesthetic and practice of radical femininity that I call high maintenance feminism in my developing book project.

Jillian Hernandez studies the autonomous aesthetics, genders, and sexualities of Black and Latinx people. Her scholarship crosses the fields of art history, performance, gender, ethnic, Latinx, and Black studies, and is informed by her work as a community arts educator, curator, and cultural producer. Her book Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, published by Duke University Press, traces how the body practices and art making of Black and Latinx women and girls are intertwined, and how they complicate conventional notions of cultural value and sexual respectability through creative authorship. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida.