The Will to Adorn: Beyond Self-Surveillance, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Redemptive Self-Love

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn “Characteristics of Negro Expression” folklorist Zora Neale Hurston posits “the second most notable characteristic” of Black expression is the will to adorn. Historical accounts of the Great Migration in the United States reveal Black communities sought to navigate the problem of visibility through respectability politics that appealed to the moral agency and goodness of Black people through self-censure and dress. By critically engaging French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism, this article argues today’s visible Black Church perpetuates not a free will to adorn as a result of moral agency but rather a self-surveilling culture that polices the Black female body through the establishment and enforcement of rigid codes of holy dress, as evidenced in Juanita Bynum’s “No More Sheets II.” Au contraire, contemporary Black churchwomen indulging stylistic pleasures of the self through adornment, reclaim not only will but somebodiness, thus realizing a womanist ethic of redemptive self-love.