Racialized objectification of Black women's bodies

Racialized objectification of Black women's bodies is presented not as a single insult but as a pattern: Black women are appraised, sexualized, and touched as though their bodies were available to others. Through Queenie’s experience and her observations of Kyazike, the novel traces how attention that may be described as admiration can still deny a person control over how she is seen and approached.

Appearance, Attention, and the Gaze

Queenie’s account of Kyazike combines affection with a sharply detailed inventory of features: her dark skin, eyes, eyelashes, hair, and figure. Kyazike is frequently asked out, receives messages from men, and is described by herself and those men as “thicc.” The description makes visible the intense attention focused on her appearance, while Queenie’s comparison of Kyazike’s toned body with her own heavier limbs and softer stomach shows how such ideals also shape the way women assess themselves. Kyazike pushes back against that comparison by telling Queenie that she can tone up and that her body is not everything; their friendship offers a countervoice to the assumption that a woman’s value can be read from her shape.

At a party after her separation from Tom, Queenie is reluctant to create an OkCupid profile, but Fran takes her phone and urges her to emphasize her voluptuous figure and lips. The scene turns the profile-making into a group activity, with Queenie’s hesitation overtaken by her friends’ confidence that the process will be fun. Its comedy does not erase the pressure at its center: Queenie’s body becomes the material to be marketed while her own reluctance recedes. Elsewhere, she describes the contrast between the romantic dinner invitations her friends receive and the men who approach her by touching her body and proposing sex. That contrast makes clear that attention is not automatically recognition or desire on equal terms; it can instead position a Black woman as sexually accessible while withholding ordinary courtship and care.

Queenie later names the categories through which she feels other people interpret her: loud, brash, sassy, angry, exotic, and sexy. The list moves between hostile stereotypes and apparently complimentary labels, showing how even praise can keep her body and identity under an external gaze. Her account connects that scrutiny to a deeper fear that she cannot be loved without the possibility of rejection for being Black. Objectification therefore operates both in public encounters and in the intimate expectations Queenie brings to relationships: it narrows the space in which she can feel recognized as a whole person.

Touch, Consent, and Bodily Boundaries

The novel makes the loss of bodily control literal in scenes where strangers treat Queenie’s hair and skin as public property. At a club, a drunk woman reaches out and runs her hands through Queenie’s twists, praising them while touching her without permission. Kyazike immediately grabs the woman’s wrist, pushes her hand away, and rebukes her for treating people as property. The woman’s distressed reaction shifts attention from the unwanted contact to the discomfort of the person challenged; a bouncer then orders both Queenie and Kyazike out. Kyazike leaves for Old Kent Road, while Queenie rides home stunned but not wholly surprised, reflecting that even in Brixton, where Black people are supposed to be the majority, they are not treated as though their needs matter. On the bus, she makes a deliberately spare inventory of who may touch her hair: herself, a hairdresser, and nobody else. That list converts a violated boundary into a rule she names for herself.

The boundary matters even in an intimate moment that Queenie experiences as gentle. After she tells Ted about her unresolved separation from Tom and her fear of becoming involved, Ted takes her hand and holds on when she tries to pull away. His touch feels gentle after a long absence of tenderness, but when he reaches for her hair, Queenie whispers that he must not touch it. He kisses her softly, yet the intimacy soon brings on guilt and she pulls back, saying that it is too intimate. The scene holds comfort and apprehension together: the fact that touch feels welcome in one form does not make every form of access welcome, and tenderness does not cancel Queenie’s right to set a limit.

Later, Ted’s description of Queenie’s brown skin as beautiful accompanies a sexual encounter in which she tries to explain that she is not warmed up and asks him to wait. His racialized praise makes her skin part of the sexual attention directed at her, while her hesitation marks a distinct bodily need that the scene places beside that attention. In a separate confrontation, Adi’s wife identifies Queenie through her size and a racist insult, then grabs a handful of her twists and yanks them. Queenie pulls her hair back and rubs her sore scalp, checking whether any twists have come out. The episode makes the objectifying gaze physical: Queenie is reduced to a body described and accused by others, then subjected to force, while her immediate action is to reclaim and protect the part of herself they have seized.

Naming the Costs

Queenie’s conversation with Janet gives the pattern a wider frame: it is not confined to the moments when someone stares at or touches her. She insists that she cannot set aside being a Black woman on the bus, on the Tube, at work, or in the cafeteria. The labels she ticks off on her fingers—ranging from angry and confrontational to exotic and sexy—show how hostile judgment and apparent praise can both reduce her to an identity others claim the right to define. As she speaks, her voice grows hoarse and her nails dig into the chair. The physical strain makes the argument inseparable from the body through which she has to live it; Janet does not claim to know the experience Queenie describes.

Queenie also connects that pressure to her expectations of intimacy. She says she fears that she cannot have love without anticipating rejection for being who she is, and describes a disparity between the way her friends are approached and the sexual access men demand from her. The novel thus distinguishes being desired from being recognized: sexual attention can leave Queenie feeling less, not more, secure in the possibility of reciprocal affection. Her distress is not presented as a simple misunderstanding that reassurance can undo, but as an accumulated response to the meanings imposed on her body and the vulnerability those meanings create in relationships.

That accumulated harm surfaces when Queenie tells Kyazike that she is afraid of Black men and believes she will always think they hate her. Kyazike reassures her, while Queenie links her sense of being damaged to her experiences with Tom, Ted, and others, and ultimately to Roy’s destruction of her self-esteem. The exchange does not treat Queenie’s fear as proof of an essential truth about Black men; it shows how past injury shapes what feels possible to her now. Her account makes the concept more than a description of other people’s gaze: objectification also leaves consequences in self-understanding, trust, and the capacity to imagine being loved without fear.

The Power to Name an Encounter

The conflict with Ted also shows how intimate attention can be recast as a question of authority over the story. After Ted files a confidential HR complaint, Gina tells Queenie that she is being suspended while the allegation is investigated. Ted’s account presents Queenie as the pursuer, claiming that she paid him excessive attention, made suggestive remarks, and followed him; Queenie is bewildered and insists that the claims are untrue. The episode does not establish that the complaint itself is racially motivated, but it places Queenie’s account of intimacy inside a workplace process in which Ted’s description has immediate force: she is removed from the office before the investigation is resolved.

Gina’s explanation also complicates the dispute rather than making it a simple contest between a truthful employee and a hostile manager. She cites Queenie’s lateness, distraction, failure to contribute the article she had wanted to write, and inability to look after an intern, while contrasting her with Darcy, who manages to work alongside their conversations. The suspension therefore grows from both Ted’s allegation and Queenie’s documented work difficulties. In the wider pattern of the novel, this distinction matters: objectification concerns not only how a body is looked at or touched, but also how a person’s conduct is interpreted by others with power. Queenie’s experiences make the struggle to be treated as a whole person inseparable from the struggle to have her own account taken seriously.