The Right to Visibility in Michelle Obama’s Becoming

Abstract

Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming, published in 2018, consists of about 400 pages of text and 63 photos. The book tells the story of how its author overcomes her social invisibility and fights for her right to visibility. The paper investigates the aspects of Obama’s fight against invisibility both in the text and in the photos, with a focus on their relation. The ‘Becoming’of the title refers to the meaning-making potential of the narrator’s voice, who tells the lessons of her life, which self-fashioning is a central theme of the African American autobiographical tradition. In the book the narrator’s voice highlights the importance of narrative as well as visual self-construction. In the photos the visual self-construction is profoundly feminine because it focuses on how the female body and activities associated with a traditional domestic sphere acquire social functions in the public sphere. This study argues that the photos illustrate the ways elements of a traditional notion of the domestic sphere in the US public space become social and political initiatives to fight simplified and biased visual representations of African American femininity. The paper claims that in Michelle Obama’s autobiography the photos resist racialized stereotypes of US public discourse more pointedly than the text by foregrounding and reconfiguring socially relevant dimensions of the central character’s life in the private sphere.