The Other Southern Belles: Civil War Reenactment, African American Women, and the Performance of Idealized Femininity

Abstract

This essay examines African American women's participation in Civil War reenactment as performances of idealized femininity. African American Civil War reenactments enable black men and women to construct narratives of historical subjectivity through performances of masculine and feminine agency. In enacting the role of the “demure southern belle” supporting black Union soldiers, black women reenactors occupy an image associated with idealized femininity. This appropriation of southern belle iconicity destabilizes past and contemporary representations, rooted in southern mythology, relegating black women to the categories of the mammy and Jezebel, the black whore. In this endeavor, they use these performances as resistance, thereby suggesting the presence of power and subversion within traditionalism. Moreover, as the black male reenactor's occupation of the conservative image of the idealized citizen-soldier is perceived as anathema to contemporary black masculinist discourse, the ironies inherent in black women's performance of traditional femininity as feminist discourse underscore the problematics embedded within mainstream feminism, revealing the situated nature of its core assumptions.