Otherness: Marked Sex and Gender

"Get Your Freak On" Sex, Babies and Images of Black Femininity

(Patricia Hill Collins)

Sarah Baartman, The Hottentot Venus of Sideshows

a Khoikhoi woman born in the late eighteenth century in what is now South Africa. Baartman was brought to Europe as a human exhibit after supposedly signing a contract she probably did not sign well-informed and out of her own free will.

Placed in front of vast crowds across Europe, Baartman’s large buttocks were presented to millions of European eyes within human “freak show” exhibits. She became infamous and ridiculed. White people would travel long distances and pay fees just to gawk at Baartman’s Black body.

“Her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974. Her remains weren’t repatriated [to South Africa] and buried until 2002

• Symbolic association of  African Women in the West as "wild" sexual practices in an uncivilized, inherently violent wilderness
• wrapped up in the notion of freakdom in popular entertainment- human oddities and the history of freak shows
• originally denoted a sexual promiscuity associated with blackness
• hypersexualization of Black bodies is rooted in the tremendously problematic ideology that whiteness is the norm and that Blackness is of the “other.” It is propelled by a shameful desire to partake in the fallaciously depicted “deviancy” of Black sexuality.
• Many damaging stereotypes are derived from this hypersexualization: Black women have bigger behinds and breasts than white women, Black men are brutes in the bedroom… Although some may conceptualize these as “positive” stereotypes, they actually lead Black individuals down an unhealthy path where unrealistic expectations and underlying worries become ingrained into romantic relationships and self-images.
• Black women are more commonly presented in visual media as animals and are objectified to a greater extent than White women.
• First, they can be denied uniquely human attributes, such as civility and rationality, and thus subtly likened to animals (i.e., animalistic dehumanization). 
• Second, they can be denied human nature attributes, such as warmth, emotionality, and vitality, and thus subtly likened to machines or objects. 
• One common stereotypical representation of Black women is that of the Jezebel, which is an alluring and seductive African American woman who is highly sexualized and valued purely for her sexuality. 
• only useful for the pleasure of others. 

• Europeans were fascinated by African sexuality. William Bosman described the black women on the coast of Guinea as "fiery" and "warm" and "so much hotter than the men."
• William Smith described African women as "hot constitution'd Ladies" who "are continually contriving stratagems how to gain a lover"(White, 1999, p. 29). The genesis of anti-black sexual archetypes emerged from the writings of these and other Europeans: the black male as brute and potential rapist; the black woman, as Jezebel whore.
• The Jezebel stereotype was used during slavery as a rationalization for sexual relations between white men and black women, especially sexual unions involving slavers and slaves. The Jezebel was depicted as a black woman with an insatiable appetite for sex. 
• Slavery: Young black girls were encouraged to have sex as "anticipatory socialization" for their later status as "breeders." When they did reproduce, their fecundity was seen as proof of their insatiable sexual appetites. 
• Emancipation and Reconstruction did not stop their sexual victimization. From the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s, no Southern white male was convicted of raping or attempting to rape a black woman; yet, the crime was common
• 20th Century Jezebels
• the depiction of black women as Jezebels was common in American material culture. Everyday items - such as ashtrays, postcards, sheet music, fishing lures, drinking glasses, and so forth - depicted naked or scantily dressed black women, lacking modesty and sexual restraint

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• For example, a metal nutcracker (circa 1930s) depicts a topless Black woman. The nut is placed under her skirt, in her crotch, and crushed.6Items like this one reflected and shaped white attitudes toward black female sexuality. 
• Many of the Jezebel objects caricature and mock African women. 
• Black Jezebel in Film
• In the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation (Griffith), Lydia Brown is a mulatto character. She is the mistress of the white character Senator Stoneman. Lydia is savage, corrupt, and lascivious. She is portrayed as overtly sexual, and she uses her "feminine wiles" to deceive the formerly good white man. Lydia's characterization was rare in early American cinema. There was a scattering of black "loose women" and "fallen women" on the big screen, but it would be another half century before the depiction of cinematic black women as sexually promiscuous would become commonplace.
• By the 1970s black moviegoers had tired of cinematic portrayals of blacks as Mammies, Toms, Tragic Mulattoes, and Picaninnies. In the 1970s blacks willingly, though unwittingly, exchanged the old negative caricatures for new ones: Brutes, Bucks, and Jezebels. These new caricatures were popularized by the two hundred mostly B-grade films now labeled blaxploitation movies.
• The world depicted in blaxploitation movies included corrupt police and politicians, pimps, drug dealers, violent criminals, prostitutes, and whores. 
• Many black women in these blaxploitation movies functioned as "sexual fodder," legitimizing the street credentials of the black male superhero. Even when black women were the central characters of the movies, they were still portrayed as sexually aggressive, often deviants. 

• The portrayal of black women as sexually lascivious became commonplace in American movies. Grier, for example, in Coffy (Papazian & Hill, 1973) and Foxy Brown (Feitshans & Hill, 1974) goes undercover as a "whore" to get revenge on whites who have victimized her loved ones. In The Big Bird Cage (Santiago, Shaffer & Hill, 1972), Carol Speed plays a spunky black hooker inmate. The 1973 movie Black Hooker (Holsen & Roberson) is a movie about a "white" boy whose mother is an uncaring black whore. In the made-for-television movie, Dummy (Tidyman & Perry, 1979), Irma Riley plays a Black prostitute. Lisa Bonet, one of the daughters on the Cosby show, plays a voodoo priestess in Angel Heart (Kastner, Marshall & Parker, 1987). Her character, Epiphany Proudfoot, has a sexual episode with Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) that was so graphic that the movie almost received an X rating. In Harlem Nights (Lipsky, Wachs & Murphy, 1989), Sunshine (played by Lela Rochon) is a prostitute so skilled that a white lover calls his wife on the telephone to tell her that he is never returning home.

• Images of Working Class Black Women: Bitches and Bad Mothers

•  welfare queens
• drug addicted single mothers
• images in rap music (male)
• popular culture/music (Minaj)
• body parts
• baby got back
• doing da butt
• WAP
• "Bitch" controversy...what is in a word?

BRAIN BROW and BOOTY: Latina Iconicity in Popular Culture

•  Tropicalism
• male: latin lover, macho, dark, mustached, 
• female, spitfire, loud, red lips, bright seductive clothing, curvaceous hips and breasts, long brunette hair, extravagant jewelry. 
• sexual availability, proficiency and desirability
• whiteness is disembodied and cerebral/POC breasts hips and butts
• SUPERBOWL race and gender
• Jennifer Lopez and Shakira
• Madonna
• Prince
• Adam Levine

SO FULL OF MYSELF AS A CHICK: Goth Women

• Young women walk a narrow line between sexual agency and promiscuity
• this contributes to young women's powerlessness (management)
• Consequences:
• desire to appear good impedes the use of sexual protection
• can't make sexual decisions when their sexuality (as opposed to young men's) is not acknowledged or discussed
• emphasis on finding "love"
• GOTH SPACE: women struggle for agency and reject stereotypes
• in the end as subject to the same pressures as non goth young women even with the "space" rules and other beliefs about the sexual agency of women.

POVERTY AND CLASS in THE UNITED STATES

• Foucault and "inscriptions on the Body"
• through socialization which now leads to self-discipline (rather than a public spectacle which makes an example of violators)
• Poor children's bodies are marked with poverty and disciplined inpublic by other children
• poor single mothers are vilified