Black Sex Research Articles

Introduction: Special Issue on Black and Latina Sexuality and Identities

Black feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) have challenged researchers to expand their thinking when examining issues of sexism, racism, and classism. Their main focus of untying the interlocking systems of oppression has been groundbreaking, liberating, and not without controversy. In short, defining, documenting, and destroying human suffering is much easier said than done. Subsequent contributors to Crenshaw’s and Collins’s work have added sexuality (among other variables) to this timely and all-too-important investigatory agenda (for examples, see Brewer 1993 and McCall 2005). Further, some have drawn on various bodies of scholarship—historical, social scientific, and literary—to reveal the multiple and intersecting social forces that have shaped the “place” for sexual minorities (for a review, see Battle and Bennett 2005). In addition to exploring the pioneering work of Crenshaw and Collins, other scholars have actually expanded it. Consider, for example, the intersectional imagination (Pastrana 2006), a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individualand group-level oppressions based on identity. Starting with an understanding that individuals and groups are more than the sum of their parts, that each individual characteristic or constituent has the capacity to affect different outcomes, the intersectional imagination attempts to describe the ways that identities come together and are pulled apart. The articles in this collection address not only individual-level issues but also macro-level ones. Across the articles, researchers wrestle with how race, class, gender, sexuality, and a myriad of other variables work to oppress as

Introduction: Special Issue on Black and Latina Sexuality and Identities

Introduction: Special Issue on Black and Latina Sexuality and Identities

The Other Harlem Renaissance: Father Divine, Celibate Economics, and the Making of Black Sexuality

The Other Harlem Renaissance:Father Divine, Celibate Economics, and the Making of Black Sexuality Benjamin Kahan (bio) Divine Alternatives In his foreword to Bobby Seale's A Lonely Rage (1978), James Baldwin describes feeling "inept" and "almost presumptuous" in writing an introduction to the autobiography of the co-founder of the Black Panthers. These feelings stem from the differences in generational outlook between the older Baldwin and the younger Seale: The time of my youth was entirely different and the savage irony of hindsight allows me to suggest that the time of my youth was far less hopeful . . . . Our most visible heroes were Father Divine and Joe Louis—we, in the ghetto then, knew very little about Paul Robeson. We knew very little about anything black, in fact, and this was not our fault. ("Stagolee" ix–x) Here, the spiritual leader "Father Divine" and the heavy-weight champion "Joe Louis" seem to signify knowledge about blackness, constituting some of the "little" known "about anything black."1 Langston Hughes similarly flags the importance of Divine and Louis in his distinctly inclusive "The Heart of Harlem" (1945): The buildings in Harlem are brick and stoneAnd the streets are long and wide,But Harlem's much more than these alone,Harlem is what's inside— It's Joe Louis and Dr. W. E. B.A Stevedore, a porter, Marian Anderson, and me.It's Father Divine and the music of Earl Hines,Adam Powell in Congress, our drivers on bus lines. (Collected 311–12) Joe Louis' 1938 defeat of the German Max Schmeling was understood allegorically as an American victory over Nazism. Louis was a national hero and a model for (black) manhood during the fearful time of the Depression and coming war. While much has been written about the importance of Joe Louis in relation to national and international politics,2 it is far less clear what the much-misunderstood and much-maligned Father Divine signifies for black identity in the 1930s and 1940s. Father Divine was an intellectual and religious leader who believed he was God. In the 1930s, when his religion, the Peace Mission Movement, was at its apex, he had a large following both nationally and abroad. In Harlem, he is estimated to have had between three and four thousand core followers, though his appearances drew crowds of ten to fifteen thousand and his newspaper, the Spoken Word, had a national circulation of about thirty thousand (Watts 141–42). The size of his global following in the 1930s is disputed, but was estimated to be in the millions (Griffith 119–20).3 The central ritual of the religion was the banquet table at which Divine lavished abundant and delicious food on thousands of unemployed and hungry people. At the table, Divine impresses the hungry visitors with his overwhelming bounty, quieting their stomachs' grumblings long enough to hear his message. Divine's strong emphasis on celibacy seems at odds with this practice of gluttonous eating, but both practices have the effect of focusing followers' attention on the materiality of his body.4 He organized his followers into communal interracial celibate living situations called kingdoms. Members of these celibate kingdoms broke ties with their families, friends, and spouses, creating an environment in which to meditate on Divine and his teachings, minimizing influences outside the Peace Mission Movement. Divine's own abstinent marriage underwrites rather than undermines this emphasis on celibacy as he considered his marriage sacrificial, marrying so that his followers would not have to suffer the burdens of conjugality. [End Page 38] Despite Father Divine's following and mass appeal, many believed he was a charlatan and a swindler. Hughes' own "Projection of a Day" (1946) imagines Father Divine speaking the truth "when the Savoy / leaps clean over to Seventh Avenue / and starts jitterbugging" (Collected 403–04). Owen Dodson's Divine Comedy (1938) presents a similarly unfavorable portrait of Divine, as does Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem (1957), where the protagonist analogizes getting conned and believing in Father Divine: "It [the con] hadn't been too hard for him to believe. Other people in Harlem believed that Father Divine was God" (31). Period journalism bolsters these literary depictions...

Why Do Good Girls Have to Be Bad? The Cultural Industry's Production of the Other and the Complexities of Agency

The political economy of popular culture often overlooks the ideologies that determine how identities are commodified. The commodification of what is reductively known as black music is unique because the commodification routinely intersects with historical constructions of blackness and black gender identities. Therefore, any analysis of the relationships between black musical artists and the cultural industries and the subsequent production of performative identities must take into account America's exploitation of black music genres and black sexuality. This article examines the tension between record labels' construction of young black female performing artists, focusing on Atlantic Records' unwillingness to market teenage singer Keke Palmer over her refusal to be “urban.” Drawing from Ryan and Hesmondhalgh's definition of the cultural industries, Negus's idea that culture produces industry, and Toynbee's explanation of artistic agency within cultural production, the article shows the conflicts that emerge in the commodification process while arguing that the cultural production of black womanhood in popular music continues to be predicated upon historical constructions of Otherness.

HIV/AIDS Prevention and Sexed Bodies: Rethinking Abstinence in Light of the African AIDS Pandemic

As churches, non-profits, and governments look for solutions to end the African AIDS pandemic, abstinence has provided a seemingly quick and easy answer that is thought to carry moral weight. Yet abstinence, as it is preached and practised, is often an immoral option because it does not first consider the full agency of women. In asking why abstinence has been so readily embraced as a response to the African pandemic, assumptions of black sexuality must be brought into question. The tendency to focus on sexual morality rather than on the economic, gender, and social inequalities that cause the spread of AIDS must also be questioned. Through employing a postcolonial critique of abstinence, I argue that when abstinence as morality and abstinence as prevention collapse into one another, there is no space for women to find agency in abstinence. Instead, abstinence must be defined as "space" rather than "prohibition" in order for it to contribute to human flourishing.

What Is a Disaster?

What Is a Disaster? Curtis Marez One of my favorite moments in this volume occurs when Johari Jabir turns to Mahalia Jackson’s performance in the film Imitation of Life (1959). Near the end of Douglas Sirk’s famous Technicolor melodrama, Jackson, a New Orleans native, performs the old spiritual “Trouble of the World” in a way that refuses subordination within the film’s central narrative. In Jabir’s account, Jackson succeeded in evoking Black New Orleans funeral rites in the face of a film industry that was aggressively indifferent to African American life and death. “When Mahalia enters the film with her New Orleans dirge interpretation of ‘Troubles of the World,’” he argues, “we are reminded that at any moment, centuries of historically repressed crying, ‘weeping and wailing’ buried deep in the souls of black folk, could erupt and consume all the elements . . . [of ] whiteness, wealth, and status” otherwise celebrated in the film. In the wake of Katrina, when a virtual “commemoration industry” has arisen to remember New Orleans and reconstruct its cultural heritage, Jabir invites us to “take another listen” to the way “Mahalia Jackson made it part of her art to tell the truth about the ‘troubles of the world.’” For a number of reasons this moment is an apt overture for “In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions,” a special issue of American Quarterly. To engage in American studies after Katrina means to think about how the hurricane’s aftermath and the complicated problems it has come to name may have transformed what we thought we knew about a wide range of pressing issues and topics. While many of the essays in the volume analyze Katrina in terms of the relatively recent past, others raise questions about what Katrina helps make visible in earlier periods in the twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries. One way to read the title of this issue, in other words, is as a call to think critically about historical and cultural memories in the wake of Katrina, which means not only historicizing the immediate aftermath of the hurricane but also analyzing the longer historical preconditions for the contemporary disasterscape as well as alternatives to it. At the most basic level, the contributors to this special issue ask: what is a disaster? To what extent is disaster “exceptional” and to what extent is it [End Page ix] the norm? Does the term refer only to the moment when the levees broke, or does it also signify the political-economic context that preceded the hurricane and the government response afterward, as local activist Shana Griffin argues? Drawing upon the ideas of Orlando Patterson (“social death”), Giorgio Agamben (“bare life”), and Achilles Mbembe (“necro-politics”) among others, scholars in and around American studies have recently focused on economies of death and the ways in which particular bodies and populations are made disposable. How might scholars of American studies and related disciplines approach the problem of disposable people in Katrina’s wake? The special issue contributes to such a discussion by isolating and analyzing various forms of disposability as modes of structural violence. Vital statistics, historical genealogies, community organizations, legal proceedings, schools, churches, housing, literary texts, musical performances, storytelling, and tourism become critical means for representing deeply sedimented forms of systemic disposability. As these essays indicate, diverse peoples in the Gulf region, including Black diasporans, as well as Asian- and Latin-American immigrants, have been drawn into matrixes of disposability that are organized not only in terms of race and class, but also gender and sexuality. While such issues have been ignored in mainstream accounts of Katrina, this volume reveals how disaster is gendered and sexed and how representations of supposedly deviant forms of Black sexuality and intimacy helped to naturalize disposability. At the same time, this special issue suggests that such forms of structural violence both shape and are shaped by cultural and political struggles over the production of disposable people. Whereas the dominant political culture of what Clyde Woods calls the ruling “Bourbon bloc” in Louisiana strives to hide or naturalize Black disposability, and while the mainstream news media and tourist industries often capitalize on it, many of the writers...

Trapped in the Epistemological Closet: Black Sexuality and the “Ghettocentric Imagination”

In the summer of 2005, Robert Sylvester Kelly released the first five chapters of his twenty-two-episode magnum opus Trapped in the Closet, garnering a great deal of attention both from media critics and popular audiences. Elaborating on S. Craig Watkins's notion of the “ghettocentric imagination” and Eve Sedgwick's argument on the processes of epistemological production structured by the metaphor of the closet, this essay examines the relationships between and among black popular culture, the “closet,” and the maintenance of certain definitions of “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality”; it argues for a deeper understanding of the “glass closet,” a space of confinement and hypervisibility, as a structuring metaphor and trope in representations of black sexuality. Speculating on the relationship between black popular culture and theories of sexuality more generally, the essay suggests that the glass closet must also figure into scholarly assessments of the emergence of the “down low,” a term that typically describes black men who have sex with men but do not identify as gay, bisexual, or queer.

“Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no”: Grace Jones and the performance of Strangé in the Post-Soul Moment

In Grace Jones' work and that of the other black artists influenced by her, we see the wedding of disco and punk; art and fashion; male and female, animal and human, and human and machine to create new notions of black sexuality. Jones' use of drag puts her into the larger history of the ways that performers of the African Diaspora use performance in complex ways to lobby a critique of the dehumanization of black people. Yet Jones' use of drag and other techniques of performing identity pose challenges of readability. She is, in many ways a trickster figure, sliding out of grasp of both her fans and critics. Like other trickster performers of color who rose to prominence during the same period of the 1980's and early 1990's, Jones uses an outsized, “strange” public persona-one that often risks caricature–to lobby critique and to express anger and ultimately, agency. In this essay, I explore Jones's strategies of drag, theatricality, and disidentificaiton, focusing in on her One Man Show (1981), her performance collaboration with partner Jean-Paul Goude, and in her appearance as the “Corporate Cannibal” Strangé in Reggie Hudlin's 1992 film, Boomerang.

Ageism through Omission: The Obsolescence of Black Women’s Sexuality

This article, utilizing an exploratory methodological approach, examines to what extent historical materialist theory can explain the omission of Black senior women from discourse on sexuality in the United States. Employing a historical materialist methodological framework, this study analyzes the relationship between the obsolescence of Black senior women's sexuality and the historical superexploitation of Black women’s sexuality in the United States. This research examines: (1) The ways in which the analysis of Black senior sexuality differs from that of the current hegemonic discourse on White sexuality. (2) The ways in which the use of negative propaganda have affected the image of Black female sexuality, and in turn Black senior women’s sexuality. (3) The ways in which Black senior women’s sexuality is affected by the unique relationship Black women have historically maintained with the state, as both producers in the wage-labor force and reproducers of the wage-labor pool. (4) The current state of Black senior women’s sexuality, including: practices; taboos; health; freedom of sexual expression; and the sex ratio imbalance. This exploratory analysis reveals that, as scholars often analyze a generic sexuality in the United States without regard for the unique social, political, and economic contexts of Black American life or the senior experience, little attention has been paid to Black senior sexuality. This leaves an astounding gap in the literature. Adequate analysis of the state of and oppression of Black senior sexuality must take into consideration the larger structural and institutional framework, notably, the economic, political, and social framework, i.e., historical materialist theory. Such a perspective would help reveal the structural factors associated with Black sexuality, Black senior sexuality, and more specifically Black senior women's sexuality.

Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis — A Reading of Simon Njami’s

The construction of African male blackness is read against the backdrop of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a text that informed the writings of Simon Njami as well as of authors such as Dambudzo Merechara, Dillibe Onyeama, and Daniel Biyaoula. Njami’s African Gigolo exposes the ‘pathological patterns’ of male behaviour and the mythical image of black male sexuality to be structurally rooted in (historically established) reciprocal assumptions about Euro-African gendered encounters.

Pulling the coat: postcolonial performativity in Black British women's drama

This paper analyzes black British women's drama produced during the 1980s and 1990s to understand the transformations in black lesbian politics through these decades. It explores the intersections between queer cultures and postcolonialism as a political theory and ideology that thinks of colonialism as an encounter with specific material, linguistic and cultural effects on the colonizing and colonized populations. Using Audre Lorde's idea of the ‘progress’ and ‘future’ of black women's politics, I outline a critical model described in this paper as ‘postcolonial performativity’. This model, I argue, allows us to look at representations of black sexualities in literature, culture and society in relation to concerns of class, vocabularies of sexualities, place of origin and belonging. A close reading of works by black British women playwrights, Jackie Kay, Jacqueline Rudet and Valerie-Mason John, indicates that the plays serve as instances of public pedagogy, thereby transforming the cultural project into an activist one of ensuring racial and sexual justice. The paper concludes by suggesting black British women's drama draws upon the intersection of sexuality, race, and class based justice and it can serve as a model not only for the assertion of black sexualities in Britain as a postcolonial metropolis but also non-metropolitan postcolonial locations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, the metaphorical ‘homes’ of black diasporic populations.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles (1971): An Analysis of a Militant Movie

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song represented a turning point in filmmaking when it was released in 1971. This article focuses on the interplay of the political and the aesthetic in a film that was conceived as a means of furthering change in the representation of African Americans. Not only did it support the emergence of black cinema by opening up filmmaking to black crews, but it also broached taboo subjects while depicting black sexuality (miscegenation) and police brutality. Melvin Van Peebles proposed a new heroic figure through the character of Sweetback, whose hypersexuality was to become a mercantile asset in Hollywood blaxploitation films. Nevertheless, the narrative’s reliance on a stereotypical Sweetback undermined its political message.

Black Sexuality in the U.S.: Presentations as Non-normative

Does current sex research in which people of African descent in the United States are the subjects present black sexuality as non-normative? If so, what is the impact of these presentations? The methodology used in this study included a qualitative review of research on sex and sexuality in which black people in the U.S. were research subjects. The study concludes that contemporary research on sexuality is dominated by research related to sexually transmitted infections, particularly AIDS and HIV. In the efforts to address this health crisis that has affected people of African descent in the U.S. disproportionately, some articles, perhaps inadvertently, present black sexuality in the U.S. as non-normative. This pathologizing of black sexuality occurs because some researchers studying aspects of sexuality in which the focus is on subjects of African descent in the United States, fail to either consider or describe possible systemic influences (poverty, racial discrimination, etc.) that affect the sexual behaviors of black people.

Sex in the sun: racial stereotypes and tabloid news

Sexuality and ethnicity are potent categories, especially in combination. In news reporting, the ways in which such categories are symbolically mobilised may seem very much of the present, but such uses are often deeply rooted in the past and reproduce stock notions that were developed in previous historical formations. The present article takes a front-page tabloid news story as an example of how this can operate. It shows how the story draws on various stereotypical representations of female and black sexuality on the one hand, white European and black African social arrangements on the other. Its narrative structure privileges and silences certain “voices” in the narrative, and uses what these “voices” say to support its key thematic template. The discourse of the story is schematically organised around this template, which deals in long-established binary conceptions of civilisation and primitiveness, and strategically opposed values of social responsibility and personal fulfilment. These are reinforced not only by the various textual features of the narrative, but also by its intertextual relation to the other, subsidiary, front-page story in the same edition of the newspaper. The lead story plays fear and fascination off against each other as its key point of interest, and in doing so ensures that various gender and racial myths and stereotypes are maintained in ideological circulation.

Making monsters: heterosexuality, crime and race in recent Western media coverage of HIV

In the early HIV epidemic, Western media coverage encouraged the idea that infection was linked to 'other' identities located outside the 'mainstream'; outside 'proper' heterosexuality. Today, however, HIV has become repositioned as a global heterosexual epidemic. Analyses show that since the 1990s Western media have shifted away from blame and hysteria to an increasingly routinised reporting of HIV as a health story and social justice issue. But recent years have seen the emergence of a new media story in many Western countries; the criminal prosecution for HIV-related offences, and with it a reframing of old discourses of 'innocence' and 'guilt', but now with heterosexuals in focus. We examine this story in recent domestic media coverage in Australia, a country where heterosexual HIV transmission is rare by global comparison. Echoing similar stories in other Western media, in Australian coverage the idea of criminal intent converges with the symbolic weight of black sexuality and African origins to produce a 'monstrous' masculinity, which at the local level taps into contemporary racial tensions and, in so doing, conjures an imagined Anglo-heterosexuality at once vulnerable to and safe from HIV in a globalised epidemic and world.

Hip-Hop Honeys and Da Hustlaz

AbstractHip-hop pornography propels the conventions of the nearly soft-core hip-hop video to the extreme, the explicit, the hard-core. The convergence of the outlaw cultures of hip-hop and pornography offers a compelling narrative about how black sexual subjects define authority, legitimacy, legibility, and power. Hip-hop porn provides black women and men an arena for labor and accumulation as well as self-presentation, mediation, and mobility. As a space for work, survival, consumption, and identity-formation, the genre proffers an opportunity to explore the gendering of black (post)modern desires, as well as the potential to think through historical echoes of the current controversies and debates around exactly what constitutes “appropriate” black sexuality. Even as it offers a venue for acts of self-representation, pleasure, and exchange, hip-hop porn's brand of eroticism raises important questions about contemporary black gender and sexual politics. Within the space of hip-hop porn, these gender and sexual politics are produced within a sexual economy of illicit eroticism. The “illicit erotic” challenges ideas that fix the hypersexuality of the black body as always already repugnant, by using fetishized hypersexuality to strategically work with and through modern capitalism. This essay is primarily concerned with exploring how black sexual subjects engage illicit erotic economies as sites to self-fashion themselves according to the values and practices of “radical consumerism,” “play-labor,” and self- or counter-fetishization.

The Color of Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality

In the discourse of the civil rights movement, "full citizenship" was constructed upon heterosexuality and in opposition to non-heteronormative behaviors. Prior to the ascendancy of the movement in the 1950s, African-American working-class culture was far more open to homosexuality and non-heteronormative behavior than was the black middle class, which led the movement, or than white culture generally. This black working-class openness was one indication of a broader evasion of the repression required of "good Americans," as black homosexuals came to represent all the elements of African-American working-class culture that civil rights leaders identified as obstacles to the attainment of citizenship. At the height of the movement for integration, black queerness was replaced in public discourse and popular culture by black heteronormativity.

Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning

Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning Jennifer D. Williams (bio) In a 1924 review essay titled "The Younger Literary Movement," W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke praise Jean Toomer for his daring portrayal of black sexuality in Cane. They proclaim him the first black writer to challenge the conventions of black genteel literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its endorsement of Victorian notions of purity, chastity, and domesticity.1 While these writers of genteel literature sought to restore dignity to black bodies discursively assaulted in mainstream news and literary organs, the ideology of respectability upheld by these texts, as well as the surveillance and policing that reinforced this ideology socially, imposed new forms of sexual repression.2 By deviating from these conventions, Toomer's work, according to the review, advances a necessary shift in black arts and letters. That Toomer's depiction of sexually transgressive women marks a literary achievement is certain. However, Du Bois and Locke's serial gloss of these women resembles a seraglio: Here is Karintha, an innocent prostitute; Becky, a fallen white woman; Carma, a tender Amazon of unbridled desire; Fern, an unconscious wanton; Esther, a woman who looks age and bastardy in the face and flees in despair; Louise with a white and black lover; [End Page 87] Avey, unfeeling and immoral; and Doris, the cheap chorus girl. These are [Toomer's] women, painted with a frankness that is going to make his black readers shrink and criticize; and yet they are done with a certain splendid careless truth. (289) Locke and Du Bois imply that liberating "the colored world" from repressed sexual mores can be achieved through liberating black women's bodies. By ascribing an element of realism and "truth" to Toomer's depictions, these authors bestow a certain degree of authenticity to an unbridled black female sexuality.3 Moreover, the review fails to account for the overlap of desire and loss that occurs on the bodies of black women in Cane.4 Toomer's representations of black women's sexuality neither replicate the exotic primitivism of the Jazz Age nor the nostalgic return of the romantic imagination. Rather, acts of sexual union and conception in Cane are marked again and again by traumatic history. I want to intervene at that critical crossroads in Cane, where sexuality and loss intersect at the black female body. I call this coupling of desire and loss an "erotics of mourning" and regard Cane as an embodied narrative of a passing era associated with the trauma of slavery. Materializing this passing era in song and/as female embodiment, Cane accentuates the role of black female sexuality in modern constructions of blackness. Moreover, Toomer connects anxieties around racial and cultural continuity generated by modernity to the regulation of black female desire. In "Love and Loss: An Elegy," George E. Haggerty attributes an erotics of mourning to the pastoral elegy, and specifically to the male homo-eroticism that is common to the elegy form. I also find the elegiac connotation of the erotics of mourning suggestive for considering Toomer's use of the landscape of black female sexuality to uncover a history of racial trauma. Yet, Toomer reworks the elegy —as well as its thematic preoccupations with sex and death —and makes it relevant to an African American historical context of slavery, lynching, and migration. In the tradition of the pastoral elegy, Toomer laments modernity's corruption of nature and of folk aesthetics. At the same time, his critique of modernity retains critical ambivalence. He mourns a vanishing "folk spirit" without romanticizing it and attends to the potentially destructive elements of modernity without insisting upon a return to a simpler past. Since the South for African Americans functions as a site of trauma as well as a symbolic homeland, black pastoralists tend to be less nostalgic than their Anglo American counterparts.5 Evoking Billie Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit," for instance, Farah Jasmine Griffin [End Page 88] recounts, "[Holiday's] portrayal of the naturally beautiful 'pastoral South,' marred by the realities of burning black bodies, gives meaning and emotion to the descriptions written by [black] novelists" (15). Like Holiday, Toomer...

Sexuality in South Africa and South African academic writing

‘Sexuality in South Africa and South African Academic Writing’ has two goals. Its first is to examine and account for the existence of a particular discourse around black sexuality in contemporary academic writing, where that discourse is productive of a view that black sex is almost always problematic. Here I look at the emergence of writing about sexuality in South Africa, beginning with some of the work penned by European travel writers, and others, moving on to looking at the emergence of government discourses around black sexuality as well as the emergence of sexuality as a subject of academic practice, which was a characteristic of the twentieth century. Although sexuality as written about has had a diverse disciplinary history, more lately writing about it has been over-determined by the existence of HIV/Aids. Clearly, there are exceptions to this trend, but much recent writing concerned with sexuality tends to examine it only in relation to HIV/Aids. My second goal relates to an attempt to counter the tone of this discourse by writing about the permeation of sex in everyday life. In order to do this I look at the everyday treatment of sexuolity in black Christian society in the early 20th century. Here my intent is both to write about positive understandings of sexuality, and to write about these in a positive fashion. I examine both some of the factors — such as class and location — which impacted upon perceptions of sexuality, as well as the perceptions that people had of sexuality. Notwithstanding popular discourses around immoral women, it is possible to see that for some black South Africans and under certain circumstances, sexuality was regarded as a positive force.

Misplaced Bodies: <span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s</span> The Body Beautiful

Misplaced BodiesProbing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful Diana Adesola Mafe (bio) Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity1 In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled—the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”2 I wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned. Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautiful operates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.”3 And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains [End Page 37] subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences. Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost . . . but not quite”4 the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity. Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model.5 But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”6 Admittedly, existing scholarship on The Body Beautiful is quick to examine the feminist content and the significance of Madge’s mastectomy, but the pressing subject of Ngozi’s mixedness is either disregarded or conveniently (re)read as black culture. This reading is restrictive not only because “black culture” is inevitably difficult to define, but also because blackness is not pervasive in Onwurah’s film. When the camera shoots a profile of the adolescent Ngozi standing in her bedroom, the visible poster in the background features Jimmy Dean, not Shaft. Since Onwurah clearly...