Gender and Sexuality
In the very beginning of this course, I mentioned that a partial reason for taking this course was because I was taking a Gender and Society course and was interested in how it would couple and/ or digress with this course. There were instances of “ah-ha’s” and some nods of familiarity throughout this course in reference to other courses I am taking. However, this week’s readings felt particularly salient in concepts from my Gender and Society course; perhaps it is because it is deep into the semester or perhaps this week’s readings deviate from an-almost-taken-for-granted theme of dealing with the sexuality of white, Euro-descendent, and if applicable, middle-class Americans so far in this course. When faced with less-taken-for-granted groups of Americans, social structures and social constructionism become more salient?
Either way, I found Brenda E. Stevenson’s piece fascinating and resonating with concepts I learned from Gender and Society (specifically Patricia Hill Collins’s piece, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images”), and characters in Sula. Collins’s piece introduces “controlling images” or stereotypes and/ or caricatures of African-American women since slavery till contemporary times. Many of these constructed images conflict each other in regards to femininity and sexuality. In her piece, Collins profiles and provides historical context of the “mammy,” “black matriarch,” “welfare queen/ mother,” “black lady,” and the “jezebel/ hoochie / whore.” A common theme between these images is the constant recycling of (conflicting) concepts to justify first, slavery; second, domination and exploitation over blacks and blatant racism; and lastly the social inequalities and oppression of blacks. It was interesting to receive even more historical background from Stevenson’s piece and trying to identify some origins of persisting controlling images Collins introduced and connecting some of these aspects to the women in Sula.
From Collins, the “black matriarch” is the working head of the household who is characterized as the aggressive and unfeminine “bad mother.” The local historical context Collins provides is post WWII to the 1960’s when this image places poverty and social ills on black women’s fault as opposed to racial oppression. This can be connected to what Stevenson calls “matrifocal” slave families due to the disproportionate sex ratio and resulting in great power and influence for slave women (161). Strong black female heads of the family like Eva Peace or families with mothers only like Nel Greene’s family is a common theme in Sula. However, Morrison’s depictions of these women are not carbon copies of the controlling image of the black matriarch (remembering controlling images do not represent reality), but give more insight in the experiences of these black women the image is based on.
Another of Collins’ controlling image is the “jezebel / hoochie / whore,” has pretty much existed since the sexual exploitation of female slaves by white masters and as Stevenson points out, by black men and the double standard for men to have as much sexual conquests needed justification (167, 169). The “whore” image is characterized as a hypersexual and fertile (a nod to the “breeder” image) black woman, whose sexual appetite cannot be satiated. Related to this image is the Madonna-whore dichotomy, where the “good woman” (usually white) is sexually passive, pure, and confined to marital sex and the “bad woman” (usually a woman of color) is an exotic sexual aggressor. In Sula, Hannah Peace and Sula Peace were considered whores in their communities. Once again, controlling images have limits and it would be naïve to only read Morrison’s complex portraits of African-American women through them. While I still can not quite put my finger on thoughts on how I feel about or interpret Sula (hooray for class discussion), it was interesting to see the connections.
Tags: Black Community, Complexity, Slave Relations, Social Constructionist, Sula
April 16th, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Hi Vita,
Your thoughtful comments and connections are really helpful for pointing to the long legacy of oppression and exploitation of black women in particular through prominent stereotypes, which, as you point out via Collins, are used to justify inequalities and degradations. In this course, with the Foucauldian emphasis, and with Stevenson and Hansen’s essays in mind, we can also see how the power relations involved with both the slave communities and free African-American communities add complexity to this kind of ideological analysis (and its differences from Foucauldian analysis).
Remember our initial discussions on Foucault about the shifts from sovereign power to the deployment of sexuality? Slavery is a function of sovereign power in so far as it involves seizure of bodies and corporal punishment. In contrast, the forms of (bio)power relations in the deployment of sexuality are, at various points, disciplinary and inducing of certain behaviors (like Nel’s mother telling her to pulling her nose so that it looks longer and thinner). As Foucault points out, the deployment of sexuality involved middle class–and usually white–members of populations first and only later filtered into working class and minority groups. That is one reason that the works we investigate follow this history. Whereas Stevenson shows the prominence of sovereign power in the time of slavery, we can see beginnings of the deployment of sexuality in the free African American community that Hansen discusses. And in Sula we see both forms of power relations circulating. So for our discussion, I’d like you to point out some of the differences between these forms of power relations as depicted in the novel.