Representation Of Black Women Research Articles

The Essence of Res(ex)pectability

Abstract In the late fall of 2004, following the media spectacle created by Spelman College's protest of the misogyny and sexism in the music and videos of rapper Nelly, Essence, a popular black women's magazine, began a campaign to raise awareness. Arguing that a more public discussion by black women of the issue of misogyny in rap's portrayal of black women is long overdue, the magazine published a year-long series of articles as part of its “Take Back the Music” campaign. More interesting than the series of articles produced by the magazine is the overwhelming response generated on its internet-based scribble boards, which offered their readers the opportunity to participate in a communal dialogue. Arguing that the scribble boards became a black women's temporary “safe space,” this essay interrogates the manner in which black women construct subject positions around the performance of race, class, and gender as a means to resist dominant representations of black women, while simultaneously engaging in disciplinary practices that constrain black femininity.

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...

The Subjectivity of the Colonial Subject from Olympe de Gouges to Mme de Duras

Olympe de Gouge's L'Esclavage des noirs and Madame de Duras's Ourika address the question of subjectivity and the representation of black women under colonialization. De Gouge's protagonists express subjectivity by questioning slavery, while Ourika does so by seeking an impossible place for herself within French aristocratic society. In both cases, the problem of subjectivity revolves around the fate of a black woman's body.

Gender, Race, and Descriptive Representation in the United States: Findings from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project

SUMMARY This research draws on the nation's first comprehensive database of elected leadership of color to provide a multi-cultural, multi-office, and multi-state look at the contours and context of descriptive representation by race and gender and with women of color at the center of analysis. We find that key to the persistent trend of growth in elective office holding of the nation's Black, Latino, and Asian American communities in recent decades is the expanding size of women of color elected officials. Compared to whites, gender gaps in descriptive representation are smaller among nonwhite groups. Although the proportion of nonwhite population may impact the degree of electoral success, we find parity ratios to vary by race, gender, level of office, and state. For example, states that have the highest share of the black population did not produce the highest level of representation of Black women. Finally, we find that gender differences within each race are generally significant, but far greater racial differences are found among men and women of color elected officials–especially at the municipal and school board levels of offices. We conclude that women of color have played a significant role in advancing descriptive political representation of people of color and of women in the United States as a whole.

Race, Class, and the Pressure to Pass in American Maternal Melodrama: The Case of Stella Dallas

THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP concerning King Victor's Stella (1937) attests to the richness of the film and to its capacity to illuminate the complex representations of motherhood in American culture. Stella tells the story of a working-class woman who aspires that her daughter Laurel might gain acceptance in her father's upper-class milieu, only to discover that her own lack of pedigree threatens her child's social future. Stella chooses, therefore, to sever her relationship with her child so that Laurel might live as a member of the upper class-a decision that raises questions about the nature of class hierarchies and the possibilities of class mobility in American society. Scholarly analyses of Stella struggle with these questions, particularly when it comes to Stella's capacity to make choices and follow her own desire, for while Stella demonstrates that she can behave in an upper-class manner when she must, she apparently chooses not to and thereby estranges herself from her beloved daughter, an act that seems incompatible with Stella's maternal devotion. My contribution to the discourse on Stella's ostensibly paradoxical acts of selfactualization and self-sacrifice is to contend that much of the film's narrative logic emerges from the tradition of racial passing narratives, specifically scenarios where a person with black parentage is able to pass for white. Stella employs the logical structure of passing scenarios and associates Stella's character with stereotypes of black womanhood in order to present Stella's class status as a physical and inherited trait-a conceit that allows audiences to accept Stella's self-exclusion from the promise of the American dream. drama of self-sacrifice and maternal disappearance in Stella corresponds to larger patterns in American maternal melodrama. Christian Viviani outlines this trend in Who Is Without Sin?: Maternal Melodrama in American RIm, 1930-39, where he explains that in the 19305 the pressures of the Depression made Americans less interested in melodramas set in a romanticized European milieu and more determined to address domestic issues, either by representing Americans' economic and social problems or by offering escapism to a beleaguered population (85). Thus began the Americanization of the maternal melodrama, where maternal sacrifice became a high priority: The maternal melo in its American vein is an apologia for total renunciation, total sacrifice, total self-abnegation (96). Stella's sacrifice of her maternal bonds corresponds to this American model; unlike the mothers in European melodrama, who have their children confiscated, American mothers give up their children in order to protect them from their damaging social influence. I argue that American melodrama's substantial variations from the European model are founded on the unique racial dynamics of American society, where one's racial identity, both actual and perceived, has a central role in kinship structures and social relations. My analysis of Stella will Illustrate how the emphasis on maternal sacrifice in the Americanized maternal melodrama emerges from America's racial history and its corresponding narrative tradition of the child whose social capital rests on the mother's disappearance and anonymity. Typically, the melodrama scholarship on race focuses on films featuring multiple nonwhite characters and directly addressing racial conflicts. Stella may seem like an unusual choice to extend the discourse on race, for although are black characters in the film, their appearances are brief and scattered, to the extent that some viewers might not even notice their presence. Indeed, E. Ann Kaplan, In her seminal article Mothering, Feminism and Representation: Maternal Melodrama and the Women's RIm 1910-40, asserts that there is no race issue in Stella Dallas (133). However, if we closely examine the narrative functions of the black characters, each playing a mammy or Aunt Jemima role, while reevaluating the complexities of Stella's motherhood within the parameters of race drama, It becomes clear that American traditions of racial passing narratives, representations of black women's motherhood and sexuality, and the peculiar relationship between race and class In American society together account for the unique characteristics of American maternal melodrama, and not only in instances where race Is clearly at issue. …

Book ReviewsSaints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. By Trudier Harris. New York: Palgrave, 2001.Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. By Maurice O. Wallace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

I t is a testament to the diversity and complexity of African American cultural studies that two texts grappling with the intricacies of black gender identity should find themselves located within such distinct critical universes. Though both Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature and Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 mine the ways that racist stereotypes have affected black gender identity and its articulation in literary and cultural texts, they do so from radically different perspectives. Trudier Harris closely reads the work of several African American writers, identifying and exploring the figure of the strong black woman, while Maurice O. Wallace marshals an impressive array of literary and cultural theory to show how black male identity has been historically produced within a dialectical process of production and destruction in what he terms discursive and representational enframement. In Saints, Sinners, Saviors, Harris explores late twentieth-century fictional representations of black women. It is no secret that we as black women have endured a barrage of violent misrepresentations on the page, stage, and screen—the Academy Award–winning Monster’s Ball (2001) included. We have been presented as either oversexed mulattas or sexless Mammies, screeching harpies or resigned victims, but we have rarely been depicted in anything like our full complexity. Black authors have had to develop literary devices to meet this representational assault and have, in

Against the grain: black women and sexuality

abstract The work of Zanele Muholi and Ingrid Masondo, two black South African women photographers, draws attention to the deeply entrenched social codes that inform representations of black women and sexuality. By unsettling the images and conventions that underpin nationalist representations, racist and colonial mythmaking, and pornographic images, their photographs uncover ways of viewing black women's bodies and sexuality in relation to their agency, choice and independence. These photographers' works unsettle two forms of silencing. On one level, they obviously interrogate the suppression of black women's independence and voice through master narratives embedded in scientific categorisation, the mass media, a growing sex industry and heteronormative and patriarchal nationalist myths. On another level, they address the tendency among radical black women to dissimulate or repress discussions of black women's bodies and sexuality: racist legacies that fixate on the sexuality of black women have meant that black women's responses have often involved suppressing or dissembling discussion about bodies and sexuality, this leading to the continued dominance of racist, heteronormative and patriarchal public discourses. The photography of Muholi and Masondo demonstrates the enormous extent to which radical black women artists can open up liberating public discourses about body politics, sexuality and personal and social freedoms.

The “Batty” Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

The sultana and her sisters: black women in the British Isles before 1530

This interdisciplinary study examines cultural representation of black women in the British Isles before 1530. It addresses a lacuna in the historiography of black women which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of their existence in the British Isles before British involvement in the slave trade. Representations of black women in stained glass and in poetry of the Middle Ages are examined and their meaning and function interrogated through an analysis of the medieval discourses which framed them and through which they were refracted: biblical exegesis, natural histories and travel literature, bestiaries, constructions of female beauty and medical treatises. These images suggest that the bodies and behaviours of black women were the site for a definition of gender and racial otherness long before the development of the slave trade of Elizabethan and Jacobean England

The sultana and her sisters: black women in the british isles before 1530

Abstract This interdisciplinary study examines cultural representation of black women in the British Isles before 1530. It addresses a lacuna in the historiography of black women which has, hitherto, paid little attention to the fact of their existence in the British Isles before British involvement in the slave trade. Representations of black women in stained glass and in poetry of the Middle Ages are examined and their meaning and function interrogated through an analysis of the medieval discourses which framed them and through which they were refracted: biblical exegesis, natural histories and travel literature, bestiaries, constructions of female beauty and medical treatises. These images suggest that the bodies and behaviours of black women were the site for a definition of gender and racial otherness long before the development of the slave trade of Elizabethan and Jacobean England

More than meets the eye … representations of black women in mid-19th-century french photography

Abstract This article looks at issues raised by some French photographs of black women taken in the mid-19th century. While standard readings of Orientalist painting describe representations of North Africa as constructing an imaginary Orient for the male white viewer, I argue that this oversimplifies a complex historical, cultural, and ideological configuration of factors relating to the transition between colonialism and imperialism in the mid-19th century and the embodiment of this configuration consciously and unconsciously in the representations of black women. Using photographs taken in France and in North Africa, I look at issues of gender, “race,” and class in relation to these images, locating some serious problems in attempts to read them as discourses of racialised femininity, which construct signs more real than the material circumstances and lived experiences through which they were produced and viewed. I offer a Marxist reading of these images as profoundly contradictory and unstable—embedded in modern historical and cultural processes rather than successfully fixing a clear and unchanging stereotypical view of North Africa and the racialised sexuality of black women’s bodies. This should in no way be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate these images.

Election Systems and the Representation of Black Women in American State Legislatures

Both blacks and women are under-represented in American elected offices. At the local and state legislative levels, however, the under-representation of blacks is almost entirely due to the under-representation of black women. Black men have achieved or exceed parity between their population proportions and their proportions among elected officials; therefore, the under-representation of blacks and women are one and the same. Women are more likely to be elected in multi-member districts than in single-member district systems. Black women, in particular, are more likely to come from multi-member district systems whether in overwhelmingly white or black majority constituencies. Redistricting to multi-member districts with black majority and overwhelmingly white constitencies, then, could aid in the election of more black women without hurting black representation overall.

Election systems and the representation of black women in American state legislatures

Election systems and the representation of black women in American state legislatures

African American Women in the U.S. Military

This article is a comparison of black women with women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and black men in the U.S. military. Developmental analysis is used to examine historical trends and to hypothesize about the future of black women on active duty. Although there is considerable scholarly literature on minorities (particularly African-American men) and women in the armed forces, no systematic study of the participation of African-American women exists. This omission is significant in view of the fact that the representation of black women has increased more than sixfold over the last 15 years (which marks a greater percentage increase than any other segment of the military population). Results of statistical analysis confirm previous findings that African-American women are accessing the military at a faster pace than other racial and ethnic female groups in the United States; they are more concentrated in the Army than other branches of the military; they are mostly assigned to administrative and support occupations; and they are more likely to be single parents than are military women and men in the comparison groups. The article ponders the consequences of these findings for the future stability of the participation of black women in the U.S. military.

The black woman in South African English literature

Summary The article examines representations of black women in South African writing from the seventeenth century to the present. It is suggested that both race and gender are important factors in the formulation of several stereotypical depictions which recur in the work of white authors. These types are variously classified as “untouchables”, “unattainables” and “destroyers”. The article concludes with a brief consideration of the “Mother Africa” figure created by black male authors.

Comparable Worth and Its Impact on Black Women

Comparable worth is a subset of affirmative action strategies that deal with all of the terms and conditions of employment including hiring, recruitment, promotion, transfer, and wages. This article describes the comparable worth strategy and its potential impact on black women, black men, and the black community. By viewing the representation of black women in municipal clerical jobs, the author concludes that black women will gain from comparable worth. Because black men are overrepresented in “typically female” jobs, it is further concluded that black males will gain from implementation of comparable worth. Finally, because comparable worth will examine the basis for pay scales, the author concludes that both gender and racial bias may be revealed when job evaluations are examined. This article also views limitations to the comparable worth strategy and distributional concerns of comparable worth.