Nijera Jones is apologizing to no one.
Instead, she flaunts.
“I love to be different every day,” she said. “I love to try out different styles and wear different things. Either I’m very dressed down, or I’m going to be full glam.”
Her sense of style and flair came from the women in her family, who always dressed elegantly, she said.
“My favorite things to wear are metallic suits like satin white with little gold spots on it, or dresses, and I have all kinds of dresses – and I’m building my gown wardrobe.”
Her wardrobe also includes a beautiful hand-embroidered sash and a heavy quality crown embellished with crystals.
Jones is the Miss Voluptuous USA South titleholder with the platform “Unapologetically Desirable.” Her message has three tiers: “plus-sized women, Black women and … plus-sized black women.”
She uses her title and platform to bring her experiences to the forefront, she said, with a key one being to challenge “fat-phobia.”
Fat-phobia is rooted in “a lot of racism,” she said. “A lot of what happened to my ancestors we are still seeing today,” such as the enduring stereotypes: “Mammy, a nurturing figure who is sexless, with no desire, there to take care of people” and also the opposite image: “plus-sized women being oversexualized – the jezebel stereotype; they expect us to have sex anywhere, with no standards.”
Many of her patients have had to deal with those issues, she said, and “Of course, I’ve grown up around Black women. I’ve seen them go through it, my mom and grandma sure to present themselves in a certain way so they are not stereotyped: extremely polite and soft-spoken” so that people would not treat them badly.
People continue to make the mistake of acting as if sex is taboo and “something we need to keep completely private and not talk about it at all,” she said. That attitude causes teen pregnancies, assault and women putting up with not being sexually satisfied with their long-term partners.
“What I wish people would know about Black women and weight is that beauty is definitely more than skin deep,” she said.
And a preference for thin may just be from conditioning rather from the heart, she said.
“A lot of preferences we have for certain people – certain body types – are rooted in a lot of the judgement that different groups received back in history. A lot is also rooted in the medicalization of Black women,” she said.
Though society has a long way to go in with acceptance, things are a lot better than they were. Part of that came from ground-breaking television shows of the 1980s and 1990s which showed chubby and fat characters in a respectable manner for practically the first time, with shows such as “Roseanne” and “Living Single.”
She anticipates views on body positivity and stereotypes to “go back and forth” in the foreseeable future. There continue to be both positive and negative and harmful attitudes.
Negative stereotypes have reigned for so long “that it takes time for people to be body positive. We have to get to body-neutrality first before they can be celebrated.”
Even though her focus is on Black women, “it’s important for women in general to be loving themselves and feeling beautiful without someone telling them they’re beautiful You are who you are, period,” she said.
Jones grew up in the Meadow Gardens area off Chatham Road. It was a great childhood, playing with all of her cousins and seven siblings and a “multitude of great aunts and uncles,” she said. Her parents are Cathy Martin and Alfred Jones.
She went to Mt. Olivet Elementary School, Laurel Park Middle School, Magna Vista High School and Carlisle School, always busy with tennis, volleyball, Spanish Club, drama class and other afterschool activities. She was the senior class secretary and graduated in 2012.
She started college at Old Dominion University and graduated from Radford with bachelor’s degrees in psychology and sociology and a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling, then went through the internships and residencies to get a counseling license, as well as another master’s degree, this one from Arizona State University online, specializing in gender, religion and race.
She worked in a few capacities as a counselor in other cities, then returned to Martinsville 3 years ago. Now, she supervises clinical students who are trying to get their licenses. She also is working toward her PhD through the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation is how plus-sized Black women in the South view themselves.
Her practices is called SEXhale Service, a somatic sex therapy which is regular sex therapy with body movement with it, such as yoga meditation, “to really help people get in tune with their body,” she said. “It is really good for sexual trauma victims or religious hang-ups.”
Meanwhile, she has participated in a variety of pageants through the years, starting with winning a baby pageant, and on up.
The thought of pageants came back to her recently, she said, so she started looking up possibilities and found the Miss Voluptuous pageant online. She followed it for a year or so before applying and interviewing to participate. It is “an extremely long application process,” with only eight titles in the United States available, she said.
She won for this region.
She will compete in the pageant Oct. 26-31 in England, at Rosington Hall in South Yorkshire. Her website is www.unapologeticallydesirable.com, and her email address is mvpusasouth25@gmail.com.
The other participants are more like friends than competition, though. They talk once a month over Zoom, where the past queen and director teach them “tips and tricks.” They follow each other on social media. It is a competition, but we actually really do love each other.”
They also prepare for their own pageant by being in the audience at any pageant around them locally, and making public appearances in their capacity as Miss Voluptuous.
Her trip to the Miss Voluptuous pageant will be her first time abroad, and she is looking forward to meeting her new friends who come from all over the world, she said.
