The objectification and hypersexualization of black women in many of Miley’s music videos is painfully obvious and distasteful. In her music video for We Can’t Stop, a song about living and partying freely without the concern of others, black women are portrayed as objects, usually seen twerking, embodying a to-be-looked-at-ness that Mulvey describes as the woman as image, man as bearer of the look. The women seen twerking with Miley are not shown throughout the rest of the video in the scenes of the party, and not only are they seen twerking in the video, but Miley is shown grabbing their ass and focusing primarily on the sexual objectification of these women. The only men in the video are seen partying and dancing with women, holding the power of the gaze. Images of black women twerking litter the video, while white women are shown partying and swimming. Not only black women are objectified in this video, as all of the women portrayed in the music video are reduced to sexual objects to be looked at by men.
Mulvey writes, “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” (Mulvey, 33)
The emphasis on the black female body and the tokenization of hip-hop culture in this video and many of Miley’s other music videos depicts an unfortunate reality of racist tropes in popular media. Perpetuation of the Jezebel trope of black women further reduces people into stereotypes, and honestly there are so many other directions Miley Cyrus could have gone with a music video about partying without sexualizing and displaying the black female body as the object of male gaze.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, 1990, pp. 33.
Feminist Film Studies Fall 2018 