Liz Barnett

Through the Eyes of the White Man: Representations of the Black Female Body and Construction of Racial Difference.

A Review Essay: Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History.

The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, not-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the Wests metaphoric constructions of woman. White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gather in) is what she had better not be.1

On August 18, 2007, the Association of Black Women Historians published a scathing review of the Kathryn Stocketts best-selling novel and movie The Help.2 They denounced the novel and movie disturbed by The Helps representation of black women as a disappointing resurrection of Mammya mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. The review continued to lament how the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. However, reviews like those from Entertainment Weeklys Karen Valby suggest that many Americans were either not conscious of the overt racism that disseminated through the stereotypical depictions of black women, or such representations did not bother them. She writes that, Kathryn Stockett's
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Lorraine OGrady, Olympias Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, in New Feminist Criticism, ed. Joanna Freuh et al. (New York: Harper Collins, 1994) 152. 2 "An Open Statement to the Fans of the Help:" Association of Black Women Historians Website. 16 Aug. 2011. Web. 06 Nov. 2011. <http://www.abwh.org/index.php?option=com_content>.

debut novel, The Help, could have turned out goofily earnest or shamefully offensive. Instead, it's graceful and real, a compulsively readable story.3 For reviewers like Valby, the novel and movie represented a happy veneration for the beloved mammy character. The relative popularity of The Help raises important questions about the origins and reliability of popular representations of black femininity. Common representations of the black female are deeply embedded into both United States and European society. Discourse of race and femininity continue to be unconsciously reproduced without much criticism. Although these representations appear to exist and reproduce themselves naturally, they are human creations that are neither static nor unchangeable. Foucaults idea that the body and sexuality are cultural constructs, rather than natural phenomena, proves important to the analysis of the representations of black female bodies and sexuality. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault states how, deployments of power are directly connected to the body.4 Foucaults definition of the body as a constant site of struggle is crucial in understanding the formation of the dominant representations of black womens womanhood. Foucault sees bodies as instruments of institutions of power that only want to propagate their ideological viewpoints - an observation that is very important in understanding the representations of black female bodies. Black female bodies are, in essence, a canvas in which figurative scripts of racial representations are inscribed by the dominant group. In tracing the origins and evolutions of the dominant groups representation of the black female body, it is apparent that over time, the representations of the black female body remained an ideological tool for those in power.5 Understanding the motives and history around hegemonic representations of the black female body is the first step in deconstructing such images
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Karen Valby, The Help Review | Book Reviews and News | EW.com." 11 Feb. 2009. Web. 02 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20258471,00.html>. 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1978) 151-2. 5 For an in-depth discussion of how Foucaults History of Sexuality should intersect with racial thinking see: Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke UP) 1995.

and liberating the black female body from these oppressive representations. The scripting of black female bodies has been a common practice since the early European expeditions to Africa in the second half of the 16th century. The early European representations of the black female body were created by European travelers who looked for ways to differentiate newly encountered African women from white European women. These representations consisted of drawings and written descriptions that emphasized specific parts and aspects of the black female body. Such representations were the direct constructs and imaginations of their European creators. These representations served a distinct ideological purpose - to construct African inferiority - and were created with that goal in mind. Jennifer L. Morgans work, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, shows how these European artistic and literary representations of African women focused on their savagery and their resilience to pain, as a means to underscore their fundamental difference from European women. In Morgans analysis, it was the female body that allowed European men to justify and create the racial differences that the institution of slavery was structured upon. European mens obsession with the myths and perceptions of African womens sexual and reproductive identities allowed them to justify the use of African womens labor in the most difficult arenas of plantations society. The differences that European travelers saw between the African woman and the European woman helped forge the initial ideologies about racial dissimilarity. Unlike the male body which proved harder to subscribe symbols and meanings of racial difference, the female body was conducive to inscribing such difference. Morgans use of travel accounts of European men in Africa and then of popular representations of black females in the British colonies in the Americas, demonstrates that these ideas were not specific to time and place but traveled across the Atlantic with the trade of African slaves. In travel accounts, the socially constructed idea of beauty as white
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was transcribed onto the black female body as a means to perpetuate the idea of African inferiority. According to Morgan, the conflict between perceptions of beauty and assertions of monstrosity exemplified a much larger process through which the familiar became unfamiliar as beauty became beastliness and mothers became monstrous, all of which ultimately buttressed racial distinctions.6 European men emphasized this monstrous characteristic of African women as a means to elevate the superiority of European women and the European race. The depiction of the African women with long sagging breasts became the representation of monstrosity and savagery used to justify forced labor. During his 1555 voyage to Guinea, William Towrson depicted African women using this sort of animalistic and savage imagery. In her text, Morgan cites Towrson when he writes that Africans goe so alike, that one cannot know a man from a woman but by their breastes, which in the most part be very foule and long, hanging downe low like the udder of a goatdiverse of the women have such exceeding long breasts that some of them will lay upon the group and lie down by them.7 European travelers, such as Towrson, were able to separate themselves from the African women they encountered by creating such outlandish descriptions of African women. This clear demarcation between African and European is seen in many drawings of the time. An example of one of these drawings is titled A Description of the Habits of Most Countries in the World, found in Ansham and John Churchills Collection of Voyages (which is reprinted in Morgans book). The drawing juxtaposes African, Indian and European females. While well dressed, proper, European women held their children in their arms, Africans were depicted as savages through their lack of clothing, long sagging breasts, and babies tied to their backs. The theme of African womens beastliness and savagery repeatedly appeared over and over again in travel accounts and works of art, allowing Europeans to subscribe meaning
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Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004) 15. 7 Morgan 27.

of racial savagery to black female bodies. Difference is also emphasized is in the descriptions of the process and experience of African childbirth. Europeans used myths and false perceptions to describe the African womens childbearing process as that of something profoundly different from European women. As Morgan argues, these descriptions of childbirth work to establish further distance between Africans and Europeans. Morgan quotes a passage from Pieter de Marees narrative, A Description and historicall declaration of the golden Kingdome of Guinea. In this passage, Marees writes that, when the child is born [the mother] goes to the water to wash and make lene her self, not once dreaming of a moneths lying-inas women here with us use to doe; they use no Nurses to help them when they lie in child-bed, neither seeke to lie dainty and softThe next day after they goe abroad in the street, to do their businessit shows that the women here are of a cruder nature and stronger posture than the Females in our Lands in Europe.8 De Marees emphasizes the strength and savagery of African mothers by describing the ability of African mothers to work right after child birth by carrying their children in a sash on their backs. He writes that African babies, whilst the mother is walking or at workif they cry out for the teat, they throw their breasts over their shoulder and let them suck.9 These artistic and literature depictions of African womens difference gave European men the reasoning and ideology to exploit African womens labor. As Morgan argues, African womens Africaness became contingent on the linkage between sexuality and savagery that fitted them for both productive and reproductive labor.10 This allowed Europeans to remove any connections that could be made between African mothers and European mothers so that they could morally justify the enslavement and forced labor of African women. The publications and artwork tactfully depicted African womens savagery as a means to legitimate the
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Morgan 31. Morgan 35. 10 Morgan 36.

exploitation of these black women. According to Morgan, Sixteenth-century ambivalence about Englands role in overseas expansion required a forceful antidote. In responsethrough and oftenconflicted depiction of African peoples, ultimately differentiated between Africa and England and erected a boundary that made English expansion in the face of confused and uncivilized people reasonable, profitable, and moral.11 Across the Atlantic, these discourses allowed colonists to see African women as biologically fit to perform the harsh tasks of plantation life. The discourse surrounding the representation of their bodies scripted black women as feeling no pain, as savage, and as significantly stronger then the European women. As Morgan demonstrates, those who would capture African women to exploit their labors in the Americas would have to grapple with, and harness those womens dual identity as workers and parents; once having done so they would inaugurate a language of race and racial hierarchy in which that dualism was reduced to denigration and mobilized as evidence of European distinction.12 Europeans turned to African women in their search for evidence of cultural inferiority that would ultimately become encoded as racial difference.13 Representations of the black female body were paramount to the development of the ideology of black savagery and white superiority that Europeans needed to justify the exploitation and enslavement of African women. Many of the early representations and descriptions of African women with long, sagging breasts, as indistinguishable from their male counterparts, as shameless, as carnivorous, and as impermeable to the pain of labor, continue to form the basis of more contemporary European and American representations of black womens bodies. In their book, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams trace the photographic portrayals of the black female body from the invent of photography in the mid-19th century to present day. Willis
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Morgan 26. Morgan 54. 13 For another example of the intimate relationship between race and gender see: Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge) 1995.

and Williams highlight significant continuities between the colonial period and modern period by tracing the varying Eurocentric narratives that have shaped the representations of the black female body. As the authors demonstrate, the representations of the black female body continue to be scripted in accordance to the ideological and political needs of those in power. Even though the invention of photography redefined the visual world and everyones access to it, photography did not alter the visual conventions that were used to depict racial differences. According to the authors, when the means of visual communication became an impartial machine, visual conventions gained force, as viewers assumed that they were seeing black people as they really were.14 There exists a strong correlation between the 16th and 17th century European artistic and literary imaginations of the black female body and the photographic representations found in Willis and Williams book. The earliest photographic representations of the black female body in the late 19th century engage similar themes as the earlier representations. Like the European travelers who purposely shaped their drawings and writings to represent the black female body in a specific light, the photographers also shaped their shots to represent their black subjects in a distinct light. Using specific props, lighting, and positioning, 19th and early 20th century photographers successfully mimicked many aspects of earlier 16th and 17th representations. In similar spirit to the European travelers that Morgan uses in her analysis, Willis and Williams examine the late 19th century scientific communitys obsession with classifying the black female body as beastly and savage. The two authors define this photographic style as the National Geographic Aesthetic- the photographic emphasis on the skin color, facial structure, and most specifically black female genitalia. Such photographic representations defined the black female body as a foreign specimen to be studied. These scientific studies allowed for the classification of
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Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: a Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002) 3.

black bodies as less developed than whitesas associated with moral deficiency, sexual deviance, and intellectual inferiority. Phrenology and physiognomy compared the shape and size of African and European skulls; these comparisons exaggerated differences and linked blacks to animals (particularly monkeys), and were touted as proving African inferiority.15 This scientifically certified knowledge about blacks inferiority was symbolized through the photographic representations of black female bodies that appeared in many scientific institutions during the late 19th century. In the 1850s Louis Agassiz, a Swiss born natural scientist and zoologist from Harvard University, spent a month on a United States plantation to observe the enslaved Africans.16 He believed that photographic evidence could validate his theories on the plural origins of man and the racial inferiority of blacks. The female participants were forced to pose for the photographs half naked from the wait up in frontal and profile views that exaggerated their breasts and buttocks (in the same fashion that Morgans sources did). In orchestrating such representations of the black female body, the photographers were specifically controlling the knowledge, ideas and discourses surrounding the body. Photographs that were not taken for scientific purposes often juxtaposed a black woman and a white woman within the same photograph. In the early 20th century, photographer Jacques Moulin actively engaged his black and white subjects in gender and racial roles to heighten the sexualized content of his photographs. In these photos, the sexualized subject is constantly the white woman and never the black women. Moulin makes the distinction in his photos between the nude white women and her naked black maid. According to Willis and Williams, the nude body is aesthetically pleasing, idealized rendering, while the naked is a more realistic, less flattering
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Willis and Williams 2. Willis and Williams 22.

depictionthis image explicitly denies the black female body a rendering as an aesthetically pleasing equal of the white.17 Moulin also manipulates the composition of his photos to subtly reinforce African womens animal-like nature. Willis and Williams demonstrate how photographers like Moulin used props, such a leopard skin blankets and different manners of posing the bodies, as a means juxtapose the two women. For centuries, representations of the black female body in Western fine arts and popular culture has centered on manmade racial and sexual mythologies including the promiscuity, deviance, and exoticism of their bodies. The hegemonic notions that controlled the representations of the black female body were intrinsically connected to the need to justify and exploit the labor of black women (both literally and sexually). Historians and scholars like Morgan, Willis and Williams can gauge these hegemonic notions by the degree to which the representations account for the subjects voice and include their participation in the process of representation. In this sense, agency is defined as the act of confronting hegemonic identities and taking control of the image being produced. Willis and Williams see the emergence of black female agency and resistance in the mid20th century. Since the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration, black artists, especially photographers, took control of their own self-representations. They did so by creating images that reflected their own aspirations, desires, beauty and pride in their identity. According to Willis and Williams, the term black was itself transgressive, and it became a positive self-definition for many African Americans. Black photographers framed their photographs, especially the image of the black female nude, with a sense of pride in their ancestry informed by sexual desire and racial identity.18 For the first time in centuries black women exerted power and control over their self17 18

Willis and Williams 39-40. Willis and Williams 5.

representations. Many black female artists working today choose to directly confront many of the historical images of their body. Thus they are, in essence, subverting and rewriting their history through their photographic work. According to Willis and Williams, the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-presentation and imposed presentation is fundamental to black female photographers.19 Today black female artists demonstrate the agency and power to directly challenge and rewrite the popular historical representations of the black female. They incorporate photographic legacies with contemporary realities in order to present images of real black women who are no longer acted upon but who possess, in one body, both active voice and visual selfpresentation.20 Although responding to these historic narratives of the black female is an important first step in deconstructing these representations, Willis and Williams must be careful in their definition of agency and resistance. By responding to and engaging with historical representations, black female artists are not, in effect, liberating themselves from these historical discourses. They are instead working from within them; never fully deconstructing them. A complete reformation is needed in which black females create their own narrative and their own representations free from the confines of historical representations. For centuries, the image of the black female body has always served an ideological purpose. The strength of these hegemonic representations came from the alienation of the black female from the representation of her own body. The extent and power of such hegemonic descriptions of the black female body is seen in the salience of such imagery in todays society. The representations of black women are so deeply rooted in American and European society that it will take more than just black womens voices to deconstruct the many stereotypes surrounding the black female body. It
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Willis and Williams 5. Ibid.

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will take a new level of consciousness throughout all of society to critically scrutinize the origins of societys representations of the black female body. For true liberation to exist, the representation of the black female body needs to be created and defined through the eyes of the black woman. This process will only be complete when movies like The Help no longer rely on stereotypical, racist, and unreal representations of African American women.

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