Controlling images are powerful, repetitive stereotypes that help justify and naturalize systems of oppression, especially around race, gender, class, and sexuality in Patricia Hill Collins’s Black feminist theory. They are not just “wrong ideas” but ideological tools that shape how people are seen, treated, and governed.

Core idea

Collins uses “controlling images” to describe stereotypical representations (for example, of Black women as “mammy,” “matriarch,” “welfare queen,” “Jezebel,” or “strong Black woman”) that make racism, sexism, and class inequality appear normal, deserved, or inevitable. These images work by presenting certain groups as naturally suited to service, blame, hypersexuality, or endless strength, so that harmful social arrangements seem like common sense rather than injustice.

How they differ from “regular” stereotypes

Controlling images are:

• Systematic: They are produced and circulated through major institutions (media, policy discourse, schooling, science, religion), not just individual prejudice.

• Functional: They actively support specific power relations—for example, “welfare queen” helps legitimize punitive welfare policy, or “criminal” Black men helps legitimize over-policing and mass incarceration.

• Relational and intersectional: They only make sense in relation to other images (e.g., “good mother” vs. “bad mother,” “respectable woman” vs. “ho”) and are shaped by overlapping hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

• Dynamic: They change form over time to fit new social conditions, even when the underlying structure of domination persists (for instance, an old racist caricature reappearing in apparently “empowering” or “sexy” contemporary guises).

What they do in practice

Controlling images:

• Organize perception: They pre-structure what people “see” when they encounter members of stigmatized groups, so that behavior and events are interpreted through a ready-made frame.

• Guide policy and institutional responses: Because they carry built-in explanations (“she’s irresponsible,” “he’s dangerous”), they direct blame toward marginalized groups and away from structural causes like labor markets, housing policy, or policing.

• Shape subjectivity: People internalize or resist these images; either way, they must contend with them in making sense of their own identities, possibilities, and constraints.

Examples in Collins’s work

In Black feminist thought, Collins analyzes how:

• “Mammy” normalizes Black women’s unpaid and underpaid domestic labor, casting them as naturally self-sacrificing caretakers for white families.

• “Matriarch” and “welfare queen” blame Black mothers for poverty and social dislocation, obscuring structural racism, joblessness, and state violence.

• “Jezebel” constructs Black women as naturally hypersexual, legitimizing sexual exploitation and victim-blaming.
  Each of these images functions to rationalize existing inequalities while appearing as obvious, cultural “truths” rather than ideological constructs.

Using the concept analytically

To do a “controlling images” analysis you would:

1. Identify repeated, idealized or stigmatizing portrayals of a group (in news, film, policy talk, memes, etc.).

2. Map how they cluster and contrast with other images (good/bad, male/female, respectable/deviant).

3. Ask: What forms of inequality do these images help explain away or justify? Whose interests do they serve?

4. Trace their historical lineage and how they have shifted while preserving similar logics of domination.

perplexity