Reading Representations of Race with Masochism: The 1990s and Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

Abstract

So sing Hester, an abortionist, and Canary, a prostitute, in Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2000 play Fucking A. I begin my essay on masochism and Venus with this quote because it seems to encapsulate a reoccurring theme in Parks’s oeuvre: economic depravity encouraging people to act against their own best interest. Hence, Hester and Canary’s claim that they are “digging [their] ditches without complaining” seems an apt line to describe Parks’s larger view of the economic system, with its roots firmly in the slave trade, both requiring and inspiring people to participate in it. This is so, even as taking part means that they are digging themselves deeper into trouble, or harming themselves in some way. While in the context of Fucking A’s fable it is easy to understand that the abortionist and the prostitute are doing “all [they] can,” the similarities to the main character in Parks’s 1996 Venus have escaped most critics. Yet, The Venus, as Parks names the character loosely based on the historical Saartije Baartman, a.k.a. The Hottentot Venus, is also in many ways “doing all she can.” Venus has educed much commentary, most often concern for the political ramifications of Saartjie Baartman’s implied complicity, as imagined by Parks. Baartman was a young South African woman brought to London in 1810 to be exhibited in a freak show. Her value as a freak show attraction had to do with her (by European standards) unusually big buttocks. Only a few years later, after having