Over the first 60 seconds of visual artist and writer Hannah Black’s 2014 short video My Bodies, a chorus of Black female vocalists — including Beyoncé, Rihanna, Ciara, and Mariah Carey — croon the phrase “My body,” as a montage of images of smiling white men in suits dominate the visual frame. We don’t see the women themselves; their bodies never appear to take custody of their voices. Black would later tell Artforum that the project was “partly a critique of the white-feminist conception of the body, the heritage from the ’60s and ’70s which involves the affirmation of white nudity, displaying the agency of white naked bodies.”
In Emily Ratajkowski’s debut memoir, My Body, she writes about Black’s video in an essay about a vacation she took to the Maldives, one sponsored by a hotel group owned by a “super-rich guy from Qatar.” Struck by a wave of self-consciousness, she frets about her position as a pawn in a system of capitalist patriarchs. The actress and model turns to Black’s work for solace and self-reflection. “‘My body!’ I sang out loud in my best Rihanna voice, thinking of Hannah Black’s piece as I stepped in the water, adjusting my wet bikini to wedge it further up my ass,” she recalls. Her body had paid her way to the island with the promise that her photographed presence might generate a man’s profit — she knows she’s “an advertisement, not a vacationing guest.” So as she stages her sponsored photos for social media, she seizes the opportunity to promote her own business, cleverly opting to don her own bikini line for the post. After all, she writes, if any one was going to make money off her body, shouldn’t that person be her?