TO take second place at Wimbledon is an incredible feat for any athlete. To do that as a new mother, as someone who nearly died following childbirth, seems impossible. Yet 10 months after birth, near-fatal complications and surgery, Serena Williams did just that. It’s her second major competition since giving birth and cheating death in 2017.

Williams, a first-time mother, had an emergency Cesarean section that later ruptured due to coughing caused by a postpartum pulmonary embolism – a blocked blood vessel in her lung. A haematoma was found in her abdomen and she faced further surgery. In the past year alone, two women I know have died from the same condition: one friend, one neighbour. In the US, the condition causes 20% of maternal deaths.

It starts with a deep vein thrombosis, a large clot that looks like a tree branch. It sits in the veins like unexploded piece of artillery, threatening to go off at any moment.

As pressure builds, pieces break off, and wherever they travel they can cause severe complications that are often fatal. They can move to the brain, heart or lungs. The clots leave the body starved of oxygen.

This is what happened to Williams last year and also in 2011 when, on the way to an Oscars party, she found it hard to breathe. She turned out to have several clots in her lungs and required life-saving surgery to put a filter into a major vein.

Fast forward to July 2018 and Williams is not just playing tennis – she’s competing at major tournaments. At Wimbledon, she was beaten by Angelique Kerber in the women’s singles final but she leaves the tournament with far more than silver. Defying all expectations, she has challenged ideas about what bodies can do: maternal, recovering, woman, black.

Each of these characteristics constitutes an academic discipline. I acknowledge up front the flattening of those diverse, intersecting experiences in service of a more general point: that in each, Williams embodies defiance of harmful, stereotypical expectations.

She is a mother, yet she is an athlete. She is recovering from a serious illness, yet she is capable. She is a woman, yet she is strong and in control. She is black, and she is celebrated.

Throughout her career, Williams’s black female body has been a constant subject of negative discussion. It has been bombarded with slurs, stereotypes, and speculation; the price of not meeting the expectations of the dominant discourse.

Black bodies are fetishised, sexualised and racially essentialised. Black bodies are defined in opposition to white body norms and beauty standards. Serena Williams’s body is strong, but muscularity in black women is seen by some as threatening, so she’s denigrated, referred to as an animal or man.

Her gender at birth has been questioned. A man threatened to skin her alive. Each victory is followed by a torrent of abuse and bigotry. Even well-meaning commentary on her performance is rooted in stereotypes about black female bodies.

Similarly rooted in a stereotype is our treatment of illness, how we think of the bodies of people who have suffered ill-health. People who have been sick are often tied to that illness through others’ view of them.

Williams’s recovery is a reminder that illness is an interference in life, it does not have to be what defines the life going forward; it was a moment of vulnerability and medicalisation in a lifetime of performance and physical accomplishment.

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us of the danger of a single story. She reminds us of what’s lost when we consider things in a single dimension, and how this shallow thinking breeds stereotypes, and how those stereotypes don’t just become a story, but the story. Our bodies are no exception.

How often do we tell a single story about women’s bodies? How often do we reduce women to the single story we believe about their bodies? The woman in a hijab – oppressed. The fat woman – lazy. The woman in the short skirt – slut. We draw grand conclusions from superficial information.

When we make judgments like this, we create and perpetuate bodily shorthand that places constraints and limitations on how those bodies should behave, where they should go, and what they’re allowed to do. These are messages we often internalise, and when that happens our bodies become a prison rather than a tool.

Williams once called her body a weapon and a machine. Even if you don’t plan on winning 39 major titles, recognising your own strength can be the thing that pulls you through.