'Sinners' Tries, We Deny: On Desiring Fat Black Women

Annie in 'Sinners' shatters the illusion of the undesirable fat Black woman, compelling audiences to confront their own deeply ingrained biases.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

By: Juahl Ganaway

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Imagine this: it’s a few days after opening night and you’re glued to your seat, eyes wide, taking in the lush excellence of Sinners in IMAX (thank you, AMC Lincoln Center). You’ve watched Stack (Michael B. Jordan) expertly gather the crew for the juke joint, shifted in your seat as Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) were introduced in quite…memorable ways, and felt unexpected sorrow listening to the wordless hymn of Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and Sammie (Miles Caton). As you’re processing it all, the mood shifts again. We leave the fiery red, fast-paced Stack for a cool blue tone as Smoke (also Michael B. Jordan) re-enters the scene. His car rumbles down a dirt path, and he steps out, places flowers on a grave, and quietly murmurs, “Papa’s here”. At that moment, Annie (played by the incomparable Wunmi Mosaku) steps into frame. The tension is palpable. The two size each other up as they exchange a few words; there’s clearly history between them, something like animosity, but maybe more? Moments later, you get your answer: they’re lovers. Annie grips Smoke in a way that leaves little to the imagination, pulling him close, sultrily whispering the infamous, “Your body didn’t forget me.” It's a line that cements the history between the two and though the scene is brief, their entire ten-minute run is charged with electric longing from both parties.

It was to my complete and utter surprise upon leaving the theater and hopping on X (formerly Twitter) that I encountered a stream of comments expressing confusion over Annie’s role, with some people even initially assuming she was the twins’ mother. I was puzzled to say the least - before meeting Annie, the audience learns via Mary that her own, now dead, mother was the primary maternal figure in the twins’ lives. I initially brushed it off and attributed the misunderstandings to overeager viewers who’d missed details in the film’s early moments. But as the days rolled by and the conversation continued, I began to wonder: why had Annie, who was so clearly presented as the third central love interest of the film, evoked such confusion in the minds of viewers?

From her first appearance on screen, Annie steps into the spotlight as a commanding yet soft presence. The camera lingers on her almost affectionately, making it clear she occupies a central position in the film. Mosaku has spoken of the intentionality placed in Annie’s character, describing her to Vogue as a woman “whose love for Smoke is inseparable from her spirituality and the depth of their connection”. Mosaku explains that during her reading of Annie’s first scene, she assumed the film was a love story, discovering a bit later that it was a thriller. She notes that Coogler loves women, a fact that is evident in the care and attention given to the depiction of all the women on screen, including Annie, who is treated no differently than her counterparts.

Despite Sinners intentionally positioning Annie as a woman to be desired, her character's reception has become entangled in a sticky web of longstanding racial and cultural bias surrounding fat black women. Instead of being seen as a romantic lead, Annie is stripped of her sexual autonomy and reduced to a maternal figure. This misreading isn’t just a simple case of audience confusion, but a reflection of persistently held cultural biases, particularly around the perception of plus-sized Black women in media. What does this say about representation? And more importantly, what does it tell us about the audience’s willingness, or reluctance, to accept fat Black women in roles of desirability?

To understand the audience’s misreading of Annie, we need to take a step back and examine the historical baggage that shaped our perceptions of fatness and Black womanhood in American culture. Enter the mammy, a longstanding archetype that has been used to relegate full-bodied Black women to secondary roles, usually that of the sexless maternal figure ready to nurture but never to receive, being that romantic or sexual affection or attention herself.

Further complicating Black female representation and the mammy archetype is the racialization of fatness. In “Fearing the Black Body”, sociologist Sabrina Strings explores how fatphobia and anti-blackness intersect, painting fat Black women as the embodiment of excess in every sense of the word: size, emotion, and morality. The fat body, in this context, would be linked to ideas of moral inferiority, further subjugating Black women and solidifying their role only as caregivers, never as an object of desire. As Strings asserts, “fatness became stigmatized as both black and sinful,” a view that has embedded itself in American racial and religious ideologies, framing fatness as moral failure and a marker of racial inferiority.

Fatness, historically, surpassed mere cultural stereotypes to become a tool of social distinction. Drawing from the work of Bourdieu and Foucault, Strings discusses how elites used the regulation of diet and body image to separate themselves from the “other.” In this way, fatness became a visual marker of both class and racialized identity. Black women, marked as excessive and grotesque due to their size, were positioned in contrast to the slender ideal, which was promoted as the embodiment of moral and social superiority and intertwined with white identity.

As Strings notes, “the discourse of fatness as coarse, immoral, and black worked to denigrate black women,” while simultaneously promoting slenderness as the proper form of embodiment for elite white women. This dynamic reinforced fat Black women’s marginalization, propagating racial and gendered stereotypes that continue to make it difficult for audiences to accept them as desirable, as it challenges these deeply ingrained cultural norms.

This is Sinners’ cultural inheritance: Even as the film attempts to subvert stereotypes by centering Annie, a plus-size Black woman as a romantic lead, the audience response reveals how tightly held our biases still are. Annie is not written nor shot in any negative or “mammified” way, but viewers reimagine her as that anyway. Folding her back into roles they are accustomed to seeing fat Black women play. This misreading doesn’t stem from any narrative ambiguity but is a projection from a gaze trained to associate fatness as degenerate and Blackness as servile. The collective confusion over Annie’s role is not a fluke, it’s a mirror reflecting the general discomfort with seeing fat Black women occupy space in genres where they have historically been excluded. When this discomfort bubbles over into negative online reactions, it reveals how far we still are from being able to receive stories like Annie’s. Sinners cracks the door open and offers a future that imagines fat Black women as visible and worthy of love and desire. Now, whether viewers are ready to step through and embrace that future is another question entirely.