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Black Female Body and Sexuality Part 2

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In the second half of the article Thompson explores the intersectionality of Black womanhood as it relates to the Black female body. Thompson challenges us to think about the compacted effect race, gender, and sexuality has on the Black female body in the section of her article entitled “”.Nandipha Mntambo and Berni Searle, both artists from South Africa, challenge pre-conceived notions of the Black female body by reclaiming the body and using it as a site of protest. In Berni Searle’s art she forces the viewer to be conscious of both her identity as a woman and as Black. I feel this intersect of identity is complex but is often over-simplified through the eyes of Western Viewers.
 

For this reason, I appreciated Stearle’s fight against the Western propensity to associate nude Black women with sexuality. She instead uses her nude body to counteract and criticize the Western perspective and to evoke the history of abuse and violence directed toward the Black female body, specifically violence against the Black female body in the various forms of sexual abuse (299). Zanele Muholi, also an artist from South Africa, takes it a step further through exploring the added layer of sexuality in relation to the Black female body. LGBTQI issues are not often discussed with in Black communities and I think Muholi’s intention to use this photograph to make a political statement is both awesome and admirable. Muholi’s piece Sex ID Crisis is one of my favorite pieces in this article because the image is able to capture the complexities of what it means to be a Black lesbian woman in a simplistic manner. Muholi’s image also evokes a history of violence against the LGBTQI community. For me the piece incites critical thinking about what it means to be a lesbian in an black society and the unique challenges accompanied by that multi-layered.
 

The final part of the article encompasses the component of transnationalism into the conversation on the intersectionality of Black female identities. This section of the article reminds me of W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “double consciousness”. Dubois explains “double consciousness” as the dilemma of having to embody two distinctly different and contradicting identities into one identity. Thompson explores art from producers rooted in histories of forced migration and art from artists who were raised in the land of the colonizers. As an African-American woman I have struggled with defining my identity especially in relation to Africa. Consequently, I really enjoyed learning how artists from similar backgrounds,who struggle with identity crises too, express their sentiments on this issue through art. The fusion of both identities is really beautiful to me especially when conceptualized in art forms like Magdalena Campos-Pon’s piece When I am not Here.

Black Female Sexuality

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African bodies have traditionally been depicted as both oversexualized and desirable. The tale of their sexuality chronicles a racist history of exploitation and exaggerated imagery. Their bodies are not their own, they belong to the viewer(power structure), the white heterosexual male. Fear and desire simultensously play in the psyches of Western viewers.  The sexuality of black women has experienced a narrative of exploitation that aligns with the colonization and exoticizing. Colonization remains the largest force behind the racists notions of black sexuality, and these notions prevail in the current perception of beauty. The legacy of colonization is aligned with the ideological values it brought; the ideas of beauty and how black women fall in and outside these standards.  Art has become the most important counteract to these ideologies

Pariah: The film explores the internal and external perceptions of black female beauty; Western culture’s perceptions of beauty clash with Alikes’ and create a confusing atmosphere that combats her growth.

Taylor: Document 11 examines the increasing globalization of art and the influence on cultural identity.

Thompson: This piece discusses how black womanhood has entered cycles of discovery and repression, particularly in regard to historical events like colonization.

Appropriation or Spiritual Exploration?

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In our presentation today, my focus was on artists within our own collection at the Davis that illustrate intervention into the history of black female bodily representation. I have chosen to focus on the methods used by Renée Stout. Stout is an African American artist from Pittsburg that uses art to both bring to light and explore religious practices of the African diaspora. Her art is very much a reflection of her own spiritual journey. At first I was quite confused by Stout because she often bounces from faith tradition to faith tradition in her art. One minute she’ll be exploring ideas of black femininity through a Congolese Nsiki, the next numerology, and the next creating an alter ego of a Haitian root worker named Fatima Mayfield.

There is a tension in the Black American community often times between exploring your “African” roots and being appropriative. I was concerned that Stout’s work crossed this line since researching Stout I know that she grew up in the Christian tradition and did not have access to exploring these belief systems until later in life. I was concerned that her representations of different African belief systems had the potential to either misrepresent these faith traditions, or appropriate something deeply personal for many people, like religion, for her own artistic expression.

However, the more I thought about this idea of exploration vs. appropriation I realized that it was not such a clear cut question. The Thompson reading discusses how artists based in African countries like South Africa utilized other more general ideas of African femininity, expressing them through objects that were not necessarily a direct part of their personal, or their countries’, experience. And yet, their use of these different objects effectively expressed the ideas of beauty, femininity, masculinity, and diaspora that they were trying to communicate. Furthermore, stereotypes of Black bodies in the U.S. have derived from a history of African colonialism and the relationship of the “West” to the African continent. With the transatlantic slave trade those ideas and relationships have literally been transplanted into the Americas.

This leads me  to conclude that the entirety of the African diaspora has had such a transnational experience, to the point where you can’t simplify a discussion about authenticity, and thus appropriation as it relates to members of the African diaspora relating and communicating with each other. The conversation involves acknowledging that people were literally colonized and this caused people to convert or remix their faith traditions accordingly because of where they were being located, their safety, or simply how the politics of the region influenced their faith.

Furthermore, the article also often used the term “African women” in a way that implied it was talking about women of the entirety of the African diaspora because of overarching themes that impacted most African peoples given shared histories of colonialism and white supremacy. Situating the work of Renée Stout in this larger historical context of remixing as a way of responding to history and creating locations for self-empowerment, the way that she as an female of the African diaspora utilizes faith traditions and objects in her art makes more sense.

The Gaze

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Summaries:

Pariah: In Pariah, Alike confronts her sexuality as she struggles with the identity of her black womanhood in the context of her family.

Black Womanhood, Barbara Thompson: Diverse artists from the diaspora disrupt and reply to the Western standard of Black females via stereotypical appropriation.

Contemporary Art, Taylor: The artists featured in Documenta 11 addresses the context of identity on an international level.

In Black Womanhood, Thompson provides examples of various artists who not only disrupt and reply to the Western European standard but also the gaze of the art world, another sphere of influence for the Western white male. This gaze acts as a form of judgment or standard from the art world which asserts the perspective of the western white male. The “other” identities depicted in traditional work are considered in relation to this “ideal” identity, demeaning the value of the “other”. The works of artists who disrupt and reply to the gaze is important because they also provide a space and canvas for reaffirmation of the other identity. In Black Womanhood, Thompson presents diverse artists from the African diaspora who redefine and reaffirm the identity of the black female as well as counter the gaze of the art world. Such artists are necessary as the traditional Western white male perspective has dominated the art world and defined the black female identity as overtly sexual, subordinate, and savage-like. I think Thompson describes the new perspective best when she states that through the work of such artists, viewers can “imagine themselves in her skin taking up negative space of her absent body with all of its cultural baggage and expectations.” This contradiction of existence and identity cannot be understood through the gaze of the art world or the western European standard, asserting the necessity for the perspective of diverse artist from the diaspora.

Berni Searle and the Reclamation of the Black Female Body

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Pariah: Chronicles the coming-of-age of a 17 year African American girl as she experiences societal, communal, and familial pressure for her to conform to pre-established norms of Black womanhood.

Barbara Thompson: This article discusses the works of contemporary artists in their efforts to challenge our historical canon which has projected an image/perceived reality of Black women as savage, inferior, and immoral beings.

Barbara Thompson’s mention of Berni Searle’s (South African artist) campaign to “reconstruct a micro-history of the personal” resonates with my own desire to abandon and re-script the visual narrative and identity that has been “made for me,”as a Black woman. Her recognition of the black female body as a site of oppressive politics in the historical narrative is noteworthy; but it is her subsequent decision to re-appropriate her body in an effort challenge racialized stereotypes- despite the debilitating weight it carries- that I view as a brilliant act of courage. In our own class discussions, we have pondered this very question of how an individual who has been defined as a material object for centuries can then transform their identity into that of an intelligent human being. Searle uses her nude body, which is anything but a neutral palette, to interrogate our traditional understandings of non-White beings. With the ever-present risk of outsiders “recognizing” her pieces as ‘more of the same’ images of un-clothed black bodies, Searle embraces the opportunity to promote images of black females practicing self-love, acceptance and ownership of their politicized bodies.

Thompson digresses into instances in which the nude black female body has been used explicitly as a “tactic of resistance.” Though I support Searle’s campaign to re-appropriate  the identities already given to black women, I don’t know that I endorse the metaphor of “self-exploitation” that is mentioned later in the article. I look forward to discussing the implications behind and the utility of a concept  like “self-exploitation” in our efforts to abandon stereotypical narratives that continue to oppress women of color worldwide.

 

 

 

 

De-colonizing the Queer Self

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“You should wear your hair down.”

“Your father likes it up.”

Pariah, a film lauded for its representation of the black lesbian community, follows protagonist Alike as she struggles to find an authentic queer identity in a conservative, black, middle-class family. Alike is alienated by her ultra-normative parents and feminine younger sister, yet even the family itself chafes at its own normativity – the desperate attempts of the mother to seduce her own husband, his only constant the beers he swills as he becomes forever more and more absent. They all recognize their individual and collective failures at (hetero)normativity. Frantically, they attempt to retain that normativity, that perfectly organized (colonized?) family unit – the mother buys Alike pink blouses, the father asserts his patriarchal authority and supposed “untouchability”. “Why you asking so many goddamn questions, girl?” He demands of Alike. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t question me.”

 “Tell him! Tell him that you’re a nasty-ass dyke!”

To escape the crushing (hetero)normativity of her home life, Alike depends on Laura, her older, butcher, working-class friend. Laura attempts to help Alike navigate queer life, taking her to the lesbian club nearby, lending her clothing and even buying her a strap-on dildo at one point. The club represents a queer “safe space” for queer black women, an opportunity to defy heteropatriarchal impositions. Yet even within this safe queer haven, they are unable to escape the colonizing forces of normativity. The lesbian club Laura and Alike frequent is strictly butch-femme, allowing only for the coupling of an AG (aggressive) like Laura and the submissive femmes she picks up. Alike feels this pressure to adhere to this binary within the queer community, overhearing one feminine-presenting straight girl at school say that she might be attracted to her if “… maybe if she was a little bit harder…” Despite Alike’s valiant attempts at an AG presentation, it seems that she is still not quite masculine enough to be acceptable in this dichotomous world. She hates the strap-on Laura buys her, claiming it chafes, and throws it away. She feels uncomfortable at the club, seemingly uninterested in or unwilling to play the butch-femme game to pick up women. Even Laura, the model AG, appears to recognize the limits of this so-called “freedom”. When talking Alike about her (Alike’s) new love interest, she says in a melancholy tone, “I really am happy for you… Because I love you.” After uttering those words, Laura turns away, taking the acceptably femme partner she had picked up at the club with her, leaving Alike open-mouthed with her femme counterpart. Did Laura desire Alike all along, unwilling to take action because of the forbidden nature of a butch-butch coupling? Regardless of the nature of her desire, one cannot argue that Laura is not one of the most (if not the most, in my mind!) faithful, most loving characters in Alike’s life. She cares for Alike when she leaves home after her mother beats her when she is forced to come out despite the fact that she and her sister are struggling to make ends meet, stroking her arm softly to comfort her in one touching scene. Laura undoubtedly loves Alike – could it be that in another context she would express that love differently?

“I am not broken, I am free.”

After a violent and emotional confrontation with her parents, Alike leaves home, claiming that she is “not running, I’m choosing”. She knows that she can no longer bear the yoke of “acceptable” black womanhood, and that she must, as Thompson suggests, de-colonize her own queer self in order to find true freedom – outside of her oppressive household, outside of the false freedoms of the club. It must be brought to attention that Alike’s wardrobe changes towards the end of the film – something that is not at all insignificant. She is perhaps still more masculine-of-center, but no longer attempts the hyper-masculinity of Laura or other AGs. She wears hoodies and jeans, but she occasionally wears pink, she keeps her earrings in – she is no longer forced to choose between the hyper-femininity of her mother or the extreme AG masculinity of Laura. Alike introduces herself to the outskirts, a truly queer world, where she does not have to fit norms of any origin. Through extreme pain, she is able to graduate early with her perseverance, talent, and intelligence and go into an early college writing program. She forgives her mother, telling her that she loves her, though her mother is not able to repeat those words back to her. Ultimately, on the bus ride to college, despite the incredible loss she has experienced, Alike appears happy. She knows that she is not broken, she is free.

Colonial Narratives, Artistic Confrontations

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For this response, I will focus on the first half of Barbara Thompson’s “Decolonizing Black Bodies: Personal Journeys in the Contemporary Voice”. Thompson carefully explores the historical representations of black women as the venus, the odalisque, and as mothers while focusing on the ways in which black artists have confronted the colonial imaginations of black women through their own works.
Both colonial and post-colonial narratives have fixated on the body and purported sexuality of African and black women as a counter-narrative to white womanhood. Where the black woman was lustful, voluptuous, and unclad, the white woman was modest, demure, and pure. African and black artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Sokari Douglas Camp, and Emile Guebehi physically exaggerate the black female form in a variety of mediua. In doing so, they expose the colonial exaggerations of black women as “ethnographic specimen(s) and anthropological curiosities” (283) and disrupt the historical stereotypes.
In the nineteenth century, colonialism created fictionalized narratives of Africa “which reinforced racist visual and ideological landscapes” (284) through photography. This often focused on the idea of harems and the black female nude as a subject. Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi uses photography to illustrate the construction rather than reality of photography by focusing on the sexuality alluded to veiled African bodies. Photographers Carla Williams, Malick Sidibe, and Alison Saar disrupt the colonial notions of black women by reclaiming the black nude female figure.
For me, the most interesting section of this reading focused on the colonial narratives (and contemporary artistic challenges) of African and black motherhood. The African mother was the cornerstone of colonialism and imperialism, while in the post colonial context, African and black mothers continue to be defined by the colonial interpretations and representations. The figure of a black woman holding a white child was a popular method of highlighting black women’s ‘natural’ caretaker instinct that ignored the experiences of these women. Artists Joyce J. Scott and Senzeni Marasela challenge the “Mammy” figure, dismantling the notion of the nurturing caretaker and highlighting the harmful effects on black women and their children. Recalling the typical pose of a black woman posing with a child in her lap, photographer Fazal Sheikh creates powerful portraits of Somali refugee mothers with their children. By collaborating with the subjects of his portraits, Sheikh empowers them to convey the reality of their experiences.

Chic of Queer

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The broad reach and fast circulation of images and ideas in cyberspace accelerate and enable mobilizations of identity and politics in a larger scale; as such, during the  war of terror following the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, images of queer Iranians became more visible, but also were limited in their exposure of the queer experience.

In the case of Ayaz Marhouni and Mohamad Asgari, their arrest for the rape of a young boy was turned into a story of martyrdom of two gay individuals, despite a lack of evidence about their sexuality.

The visible gayness becomes a symbol for the oppression and backwardness of Iran. However, as discussed with Professor Sakhsari today, this oppression then becomes the excuse for sanctions and violent attacks without consideration of the effect that has on the very populations we try to “protect”.

New Media

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The Iranian socia movements towards LGBTQ people reflect Western ideals of a more integrated and democratic society. New tools like the internet provide a platform for discussion on intolerance in societies, however they can also be manipulated to advance the political aims on individuals & organizations. As the debate over inclusion heats up across Iran, there is a question over how change should occur. Should it be through social movements or public policy? Although the social movements have seemingly had more success, has it really changed attitudes within the society? The movements direction towards Western influence reflect sentiments of more developed nations as being more accepting. However is this true? Although the internet has been a useful tools, western ideals about the direction of the movement can conflict with the sentiment of local, Iranian organizations.

Hypervisibility vs. Invisibility

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What is interesting about Professor Shakhsari’s piece Cyberspace, the War on Terror and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer is that in the discussion of the politics of visibility, there are examples where the Iranian queer subject is not just made hypervisible, but can also be made invisible. It is necessary when constructing a hegemonic narrative to quell those stories and views that challenge and diversify that narrative. Thus we see how the tensions between representing the various situations, opinions, and desires of the queer members of the Iranian diaspora and representing a narrative stripped of complexity are acted out. This seems to end up a diversity of voices being subjugated in favor of a narrative like Parsi’s who “repeats the usual narrative of escape from a home of oppression in Iran to freedom in the ‘West'”; many voices are made invisible.

Parsi’s effective use of the tools of Weblogistan to disseminate his message has immense power to shape the larger narrative. At first I was surprised at the ease with which this hegemonic narrative of the queer Iranian experience was able to be created because you would think that the web would actually be the perfect platform to highlight a variety of opinions and experiences on the matter. However Shakhsari also discusses the barriers of access to the world of Weblogistan for some people to disseminate their opposing views. Furthermore, we can’t forget that those stories, video clips, and articles which were picked up and circulated most widely after 9/11 were those that operated to serve the geopolitical project of otherizing and demonizing Iran. Anything that served that larger project was made highly visible. This happened often, Shakhsari writes, to the detriment of safety for many queer Iranian subjects. Shakhsari piece aims to warn us against the tendency to separate the politics of Weblogistan from the politics of real bodies moving through the world and to keep in mind the consequences for the narratives that Weblogistan helps construct and perpetuate. Who are we making invisible? Who are we making hypervisible and why?

As a side note I would be really interested to put this article in conversation with something like Hillary Clinton’s most recent video about marriage equality. What is the political project of the Secretary of State in this video. Who is she making hypervisible? Who is she making invisible in this plea? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6HBExa6LAY