Analysis Of The Sexual Politics Of Black Womanhood

In Deborah E. McDowell’s essay Black Female Sexuality in Passing she writes about the sexual repression of women seen in Nella Larsen‘s writings during the Harlem Renaissance, where black women had difficulty expressing their sexuality. In her essay, she writes about topics affecting the sexuality of women such as, religion, marriage, and male dominated societies. In Toni Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif” there are examples of women who struggle to express their sexuality. The people in society judge women based off their appearance, and society holds back women from expressing themselves due to society wanting them to dress/act a certain way.

Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, grandparents, pimps, prostitutes, straight people, gay people, lesbian people, Europeans, Asians, Indians, and Africans all have once thing in common: they are products of sexuality. Sexuality is the most common activity in the world, yet is considered taboo and “out of the norm” in modern society. Throughout history, people have been harassed, discriminated against, and shunned for their “sexuality”. One person who knows this all too well is activist and author, Angela Davis. From her experiences, Davis has analyzed the weakness of global society in order to propose intellectual theories on how to change the perspective of sexuality. This research paper will explore the discussions of

replacement of stereotyped images of black womanhood with those that are self defined, 4) black women’s activism, and 5) sensitivity to black sexual politics. The first three themes correlate to black motherhood and living in a binary environment, one in which black people are the oppressed and white

Patriarchy’s Scapegoat: Black womanhood and femininity – A critique of racism, gender inequality, anti-blackness, and historical exploitation of black women.

This week’s reading of Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique offers a queer of color analysis that poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, liberal pluralism and historical materialism, and opts instead for an “understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress and confirmation (3). By challenging some of the main complacent thinking that characterized canonical sociology, Ferguson pushes for an engagement with racial knowledge about African American culture as it was produced by American sociology if one is to fully understand the gender and sexual variations within the African American culture. One of the principle assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of cultural, racial and sexual differences in the process of pathologizing African American culture. By juxtaposing canonical sociological texts from the Chicago School of Sociology with that of African American literature, Ferguson provides a genealogy of this foundational issue of imagining African American culture as sites of polymorphous gender and sexual perversions and how these perversions are in turn associated with societal and moral failings.

Throughout America’s history there have been many struggles with equality amongst the many racial identities that live in this “melting pot.” Acceptance of the many races is a continuous goal in the war on racism in America. Once accepted, many racial identities go under huge scrutiny by the media, society, and their other racial counterparts, etc. Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins is a critical analysis of blacks in America and blacks as a race. The book analyzes this race on various levels, and these levels include, but are not limited to the following: the concept of “new” racism, gender ideology within the race, and the potential for progression of

The texts that are going to be discussed and compared in this short essay are ‘Ethnicity, Sexuality and Globalization’ by Joanne Nagel and ‘Not So Strange bedfellows: Sexuality and International Development’ by Susie Jolly. These texts have been chosen because of their thought-provoking and informative content and the ways in which they both discuss the restrictive and controversial nature of sexuality in the heteronormative world, sexuality in regards to sex work, and the ways in which they focus on sexuality itself as well as women’s sexuality globally.

“No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have Black women… when Black people are talked about the focus tends to be on Black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.” - Bell Hooks

As the author points out, “African American women were wanton, licentious, promiscuous. White men (who had obviously engaged in sexual acts with African American women over the decades, given the range of skin colors among African Americans) could not be accused of raping ‘bad’ women. ‘Bad,’ amoral women did not need or deserve protection” (30). The history became the past that kept hunting the black women. As the victims, instead of receiving a fair treatment from the community, they were blamed just because of the history that they did not have the intention for that to

The United States prides itself on being a land of opportunities, and in many ways it is. We look at countries like South Africa, which not long ago was segregated through the laws of Apartheid, and we are glad that we are so much further along than the land of Mandela. However, every now and then we need to stop and ask ourselves just how far along we really are, and we have to wonder if many of the once oppressed countries we helped free are not passing us up in the area of civil rights and opportunity.

Examining the links between sexuality and power in a system of interlocking race, gender, and class oppression should reveal how important controlling Black women's sexuality has been to the effective operation of domination overall. The words of Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Alice Walker provide a promising foundation for a comprehensive Black feminist analysis.

The article titled, Black Women Thought; Matrix of Domination, by Patricia Hill Collins explores the oppression of African-American women. While there is also a theme of individual empowerment, Collins’ ends the article by stating, “only collective action can effectively generate lasting social transformation of political and economic institutions” (cite). I believe Collins’ motivation for this article was to bring awareness and to inspire change.

To do so, Levy turns to the experiences of several young women whom she interviews. From her interpretations of these experiences, Levy reaches the conclusion that these women’s sexual nature revolves around their need

Throughout history, black female bodies have been marginalized by white society and viewed as only being valued for their bodies, specifically their genitals. bell hooks’ essay titled, “naked without shame: a counter-hegemonic body politic”, discusses the domination of the black female body and how there is little discussion on how the body has been “foregrounded as a site of conquest in all efforts of colonization”. According to hooks, black bodies are rarely highlighted in a way that counters the hegemonic representation of being

The fear of expressing sexuality forms a prominent driving factor in Helene’s failure to find a common ground in her femininity and matronly roles, resulting in her oppressing the future generations of black women. As established previously, being the “daughter of a Creole whore who worked” at a brothel not only created Helene in poverty but also in tabooed sexual expression (17). As such, Helene struggled for the rest of her life with the ‘Madonna or Whore Complex’, where she perceives that to counteract the lowly promiscuity of her mother she must remain chaste (in the sense of stifling sexual and feminine expression) and matronly. Her grandmother exacerbates this complex through “counseling [Helene] to be constantly on guard for any sign