Introduction

In this paper I look at how Black feminist scholarship has contributed to theories and histories of the body.  I use some of the theories of the body from Kathleen Canning’s “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of Body in Gender History” as a guide to look at how the Black woman’s body has functioned as a site of knowledge production, theory, and praxis. Canning’s analysis is helpful with providing some of the trends among the history and theory of the body scholarship.  The many ways Black women’s bodies exist and move through social and popular spaces is a crucial lens that reveals the complexities of Black womanhood beyond the binaries of resistance and assimilation.  Coupling Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls with Patricia Hill-Collins’ Black Sexual Politics and Black Feminist Thought, I discuss how some Black feminist scholars have approached the theory of the body (as the social body, embodiment, inscription, reified bodies, etc.).  I review some of the Black feminist scholarship that centers Black women’s bodies. Through analyzing Black female artists EnVogue, Black female hip hop dancers and models like Melissa Ford in Black popular culture, and some of the discourse on twerking, I explore Daphne Brooks’ argument in Bodies in Dissent; that “racially marked women used their bodies in dissent of the social, political, and juridical categories assigned to them” (Brooks 162). As an extension of Jayna Brown’s analysis in Babylon Girls, I explore how Black women performers use their bodies continue to define the modern.  How do Black women performers use their bodies and the staging of music videos as tools of dissent?  How are Black women performers resisting the intersectional oppressions of controlling images of Black womanhood?  How are Black women performers presenting a Black feminist praxis that; according to Joan Morgan, is “brave enough to fuck with the grays” (280)?

Black Feminism & Black Women’s Bodies

Black feminist epistemology comes out of the many ways that Black women have produced knowledge in ways not traditionally acknowledged by Western structures from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthologyto the many speeches, diaries, and letters in Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America.  Black feminist scholarship has theorized the Black woman’s body as the physical representation of racial, sexual, economic, and social concepts.  Hence, Black women’s bodies have been seen as places where intersectional politics are placed, interpreted and embodied.  Hence, many social ideologies become physical, tangible, ‘reified’ in the Black female body (Canning).

Black women’s bodies are not discussed in Black feminist scholarship without the classical American raced and gendered tropes of the mammy and jezebel being at the center of how the Black woman is understood whether it be in social or physical ways.  Patricia Hill-Collins’ Black Feminist Thoughtprovides a historical overview of many of what she calls “controlling images” of Black womanhood in the United States.  From the mammy to the jezebel, much of the stereotypes of Black women come with popular tropes about how each of these ‘types’ of Black women use their bodies.  According to Hill-Collins, the mammy is seen as an asexual laborer using her body in service of the white employers, while the Jezebel/Hot Momma uses her body to feed her own insatiable sexual desires and tempt the morally weak with the wiles of her flesh (Black Feminist Thought72).  Controlling images dominate how Black women’s bodies and the movement of those said bodies are understood, so that they are constant sites of theoretical and theatrical struggle.  Black feminist scholarship theorizes Black women’s bodies through a body politic; which Ronald Jackson defines as, “…bodies are inscriptive surfaces that are discursive texts, which can be rewritten after acts of struggle toward emancipation, though still not fully divested of prior inscriptions; body politics is the lifeline for race and racism; and corporeal inscriptions stimulate the negotiation of racial identities” (Jackson 5). The body politic is in line with Canning’s discussion of social and reified bodies.  As a concsequence, Black women’s bodies end up being objects that are inscribed upon, representations of the state, and also embodiments of hegemonies. Black feminists like Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill-Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Kumea Shorter-Gooden have theorized Black women’s bodies as sites of social and political dissent.  These Black feminist scholars, among others, attempt to provide Black women with voices, agency, resistance, multitude of existence outside of white supremacist racist patriarchal capitalisms.

Patricia Hill-Collin’s discussion of controlling images and how Black women are seen in popular culture in Black Sexual Politicsis an intersectional analysis that reveals the classed, raced, and gendered popular conceptions of Black womanhood.  There are polarized images of Black women as the working class “bitches and bad (Black) mothers” and the middle class“modern mammies, Black ladies, and “educated bitches”” (Hill-Collins Black Sexual Politics138). Hill-Collins understands the images of Black women’s bodies in hip hop as sexual objectification, a departure from Black popular culture’s appreciation of Black women during the Black Power era:

“In a sense, the celebration of Black women’s bodies and how they handled them that had long appeared in earlier Black cultural production (for example, a song such as “Brick House” within a rhythm and blues tradition) became increasingly replaced by the objectification of Black women’s bodies as part of a commodified Black culture.  Contemporary music videos of Black male artists in particular became increasingly populated with legions of young Black women who dance, strut, and serve as visually appealing props for the rapper in question.  The women in these videos typically share two attributes – they are rarely acknowledge as individuals and they are scantily clad. One Black female body can easily replace another and all are reduced to their bodies” (Black Sexual Politics128).

Hill-Collins’ analysis understands Black women’s bodies as social bodies, but also mainly as a way that Black women and their bodies are seen, imaged, used.  Black women working class bodies and Black women middle class bodies are not represented in the same way in popular culture.  Black women working class bodies are reflective of the Jezebel or the Sapphire while Black middle class women’s bodies are synonymous to the mammy (Hill-Collins Black Sexual Politics). Much of the Black feminist scholarship that understands Black women’s bodies as social bodies that utilizes sexual objectification and political economic perspectives of the body do not disrupt this common power binary to see the possibilities of resistance, enjoyment, power, self-definition, and empowerment of Black women performers.

Black feminist scholarship theorizes the bodies of Black women through their critiques of social tropes about the meaning of Black women’s bodies.  Much of the Black feminist approaches to the body have been discursive, reflections of the hegemonic epistemologies of dominant ideologies, where a society’s regimes of truth become concrete.  Black feminists have theorized the body as the signifier, social body, through embodiment, while also seeing the body as the materialization of social and economic inequality.  But here lies the difficulty.  Black women’s bodies are signifiers of the intersections of hegemony, sites of the disruption to oppression, embodiment of the ‘other’, and much more.  Black feminist works understandings of Black women’s bodies contributes a historical multiverse to theories of the body. Black feminist scholarship engages in historical analysis that disrupts the linear nature of temporality.  When understanding Black womanhood and the bodies of Black women, whether it be something that transpired 700 years ago or three minutes ago, it has contributed to determining what happens five minutes from now and the many meanings that event might have.  Black feminist epistemology understands the Black woman’s body as a place where all history becomes current event.  Black women’s bodies are where the boundaries of nations are drawn, where the often forgotten Blackness lies, and are sites of violence, terror, pain, pleasure, resistance, assimilation, agency, freedom, slavery, across time and space.  For example, Brown mentions how Black women’s bodies and performances were used to define nations and colonies via the orientalism of Black variety shows like The Creole Showduring the summer of 1893 (Brown 101). Orientalism enables Blackness to become the signifier for all other non-White races, making their bodies a useful form of performing propaganda that reinforced racial ideals and colonial empires.

Black Popular Culture & Black Women Performers

Traditionally, Black feminist scholars have approached Black popular culture, especially hip hop, with a stance of self-defense. Black feminists like hooks, Hill-Collins, Morgan, Tricia Rose, and Rosa Clemente have discussed the patriarchal objectifications of Black women in music videos, rap verses, and the popular discussion of hip hop artists.  As stated by Hill-Collins, “Objectifying Black women’s bodies turns them into canvases that can be interchanged for a variety of purposes. … Rap and hip-hop serve as sites to contest these same gender meanings.  The language in rap has attracted considerable controversy, especially the misogyny associated with calling women “bitches” and “hos””(Hill-Collins Black Sexual Politics130). Much of these analyses are compared to Black women performers like Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, or Lauryn Hill.  But some Black feminist scholars are looking more carefully and closely at Black women performances, looking at the more nuanced meanings that are present outside of the common analyses extending from common understandings of patriarchal sexual objectification.  Returning the objectifying gaze or resisting the oppressive gaze through bodily performance is what a number of Black feminist scholars have attempted to explore.

Jayna Brown’s analysis of Black women performers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reveals the importance of contextual theories of the body, situated in historical and racially relevant analysis to reveal the many meanings behind Black physical expressive form.  These controlling images of Black women that Hill-Collins discusses are situated in the racial and gendered subordination of Black women throughout colonial history. “African American women’s status as outsiders becomes the point from which other groups define their normality” (Black Feminist Thought70).  Black women are boundaries, the margin that defines the center.  George Yancy discusses this binary/boundary making in Black Bodies, White Gazes;  “The Black body provide[s] whites with psychological mechanism with which to bury their own feelings of hatred, guilt, lust, insecurity and fear… Whites created/create fantasies regarding the Black body as sullen and immoral so as to stabilize dialectically their own fantasized identity as clean and moral.”(Yancy 44). It is through the other that normalization is realized in the ‘common sense’ of the hegemonic binary (Gramsci). As revealed by Brown’s analysis of the history of female minstrelsy (burlesque) in the United States, “For white women, performing fantasies of African American, as well as various types of native, femaleness provided moments of immunity from restrictive social protocol, a license for physical expression and self-possessed sexuality” (100). The performance of raced fantasy, this racial mimicry reveals an alternative exchange system.  In Babylon GirlsBrown refers to racial mimicry as cultural exchange but she does note that cultural exchange is not necessarily on equitable terms.  She sees dance and movement as something that is not necessarily created/owned by a particular group since its site of creation is not that clear.  The alternative exchange system that occurs extracts meaning from Black women’s bodies. This sense of cultural exchange is only part of a larger system of the construction of meaning and value that is raced, classed, and gendered.

From Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost to Tricia Roses’ Black Noise& Hip Hop Wars,Black feminists challenge the racially and sexually oppressive elements of hip hop.  But, it is more than a top down model of power interactions.  Black women performers are speaking back with their bodies, their gazes, and body positioning.  While sexual objectification and commodification theory was the overwhelming trend for since the 1990s, it is not the only conversation that Black feminist scholars are having.  Joan Morgan and Tricia Rose, for example, mention the importance of understanding Black women’s expressive rights.  What happens when a Black woman wantsto ‘shake her ass’?  Jayna Brown discusses this within her articulations of dance as a form of expression that can never be fully owned.  Dance and performance is where “…the body affirms an individual’s entitlement of to the body’s grounds, it affirms a right of habituation” (Brown 85). In “Where My Girls At?”: Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos, Rana Emerson provides an analysis of EnVogue’s Giving Him Somethingvideo that demonstrates a number of gazes are central.  While the Black women of EnVogue who perform on stage “moving seductively, gyrating their hips, and sing provocatively” are being objectified and sexualized, they are also gaining pleasure in a reciprocal fashion as these men appear to be losing control of themselves because of their performance (Emerson 132). EnVogue express their sexuality and perform in a manner that returns the gaze as well as the objectification.  Their entitlement to their own bodies, sexuality, and Black womanhood is entangled in their performance.

As with Babylon Girlsreveals throughout the history of Black women performers, not all Black feminist theorists see explicit bodily display as a means of liberation.  As in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies, the Black middle class and the ‘politically conscious’ ‘Ashy Ankhs’ do not take too kindly to what Carol Henderson articulates as a dethroning of the queens who once heralded ‘ladies first’ to being replaced by the ‘skeezas, gold diggers, sac chasers, and chicken heads at the front of the line’ (Henderson 48). The respectability politics that was very present within the rhetoric that framed Black chorus line and variety show performers still chastises today’s ‘babylon girls’ but they are chastised to a slightly different tune.  Respectability politics refers to sets of ideals that states that women must be positive and good role models and exemplify perfect womanhood.  The rules of being good quality women, deserving of respect still dominates some of the discussions about Black women performers in popular culture.  Black feminist scholars are attempting to articulate the body in ways that disrupt the binary of popular male dominated Black radical traditions.  Both Murali Balaji and Carol Henderson discuss how Black women performers find ways to resist, self-define, and express their sexuality through performance.  In “Its All in the Name: Hip Hop, Sexuality, and Black Women’s Identity in Breakin’ In: The Meaning of a Hip Hop Dancer” Henderson discusses why some of the Black women performers and hip hop dancers pursue careers in such an exploitative and objectifying industry: Though numerous schlars have written about the idea of taking the power of definition away from the focuses of that have oppressed Black women, few have allowed the women who are thrust into the limelight as sexual objects for mainstream consumption to speak for themselves” (Balaji 11). Filmmaker Elizabeth St. Philip states that one of the motivations for making the documentary Breakin’ Inwas to give hip hop dancers a chance to contribute to the discourse commonly dominated by outraged feminists and academics. The hip hop dancers in the documentary are diverse, some being college educated and making distinctions between themselves and other dancers, embracing a sense of morality that differentiates them from working class bitches and hos.  Other dancers embrace the industry and idolize other Black women performers who are seen as sexual icons in the hip hop industry.  Henderson’s analysis of the women in the documentary reveals how these women struggle with the various aspects of the entertainment industry.  It is important for us to understand that Black women’s identity is a constant shifting identity, it is fluid, slipping between hyper-visibility and invisibility: “Black women’s lives are a series of negotiations that aim to reconcile the contradictions separating our own internally defined images of self as African-American women with our objectification as the Other” (Hill-Collins Black Feminist Thought94). Contradictory elements can and very well do exist within these women’s articulations of their performance and their understanding of self within them, a plurality of meaning must be acknowledged. Even while racist capitalist patriarchal exploitation is occurring there can be empowering self-definition, liberating expression of sexuality, and resistance can simultaneously occur as well. In her discussion of the video model Melissa Ford’s articulation and understanding of herself, her image, and the hip hop industry, Balaji states that, “Ford believes that education and discourse on sex roles will help to de-stigmatize women who appear in music videos.”  Ford, a middle class college educated Black women performer hailing from Toronto, has been featured in a wide variety of music videos from Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin’” to Myistikal’s “Shake It Fast”.  In “Vixen Resistin’: Redefining Black Womanhood in Hip-Hop Music Videos” Balaji look’s at Melissa Ford’s performance in music videos as well as interviews with Ford that display her own understanding of herself within the music videos and Hip Hop industry.  Melissa Ford’s body positions away from the male rapper, gazes, and even her dancing with male artists and pinning them up against the wall in Myistikal’s “Shake It Fast” displays an agency of her own.  Ford says that she chooses to shape her own characters and images in her performances and speaks up when she doesn’t agree with a specific concept in a video. Ford, like some of the hip hop dancers in Breakin’ Indistinguishes herself from other Black women performers in hip hop while also stating that she believes that they all have the right to shape their own images.  Ford’s understanding of self-definition and empowerment from performance stems from the idea that, “Black women can use their sexuality as a tool of resistance against attempts at objectification and commodification – in other words, gaining independence by inverting the oppressive images used to control them” (Balaji 7). Ford embraces Audre Lorde’s claim that identity and sexuality have emancipatory potential.  Black feminist scholarship’s theories of Black women’s bodies as social bodies and reified bodies is currently struggling with meaning and how effective their resistance is in deconstructing racist capitalist patriarchy.  Brown’s analysis in Babylon Girlschallenges us to move beyond hegemonic binaries.  There is still meaning in performance, resistance is still something that many Black women are striving for yes; but should oppression be the only thing that defines Black women’s bodies?  Should oppression be the only thing defining Black feminists’ theories of Black women’s bodies?  While hegemony is something that we cannot ignore, Brown cautions us all and reminds us that hegemony is not the only thing we should be paying attention to. Meaning and definition is found throughout Black bodily performance beyond bodies simply being inscribed upon by hegemonic institutions.

“Now You Stand Helpless To This Ass”: Twerking for Liberation & Self-Definition

Black feminists on social media, in popular culture, bloggers, and in academe theorize Black women’s bodies via performative praxis. A recent spoken word performance by three young Black women titled “The History of Twerking” hails “We twerk to remember, we twerk to resist” as they physically perform and speak to the historical and cultural significance of twerking.  A wide variety of Black feminists on Twitter, Tumblr, and blog sites have spoken up seeing the recent discovery of the dance “twerking” that people of African descent have been doing for some time.  These young women’s performance disrupts the binary of the good and bad Black women as they communicate the importance of their bodies to themselves and challenge the misogynoir of society’s respectability politics.  When discussing the popular notions of what twerking is after giving the audience a private ‘how to twerk session’, the young women review the Urban dictionary’s definition of twerking, “as the act of moving, shaking one’s ass, buns, buttocks, bum bum in a circular, up and down, side to side motion/ Basically, a slave dance derived from strip clubs” (Curtis). This performance is informed by Black feminist theories of the body that sees power in the erotic but also challenges the objectification and commodification of Black women’s bodies via racist capitalist patriarchy.  An important portion of this performance also stems from their celebration of bodily performance as self-definition, not simply seeing Black women’s bodies as social bodies that are responsible for carrying the entire race to a respectable liberation.

“Pleasure is our power/ this dance, this movement, mutilates these rusted locks around our vulvas/no more suppression and spying behind walls/our sexuality is not to be restrained/our cock is more than cave for your orgasm/our pussy is pious/it’s only natural that the spirits of my sex roams free/like the birds soaring over Yoruba ceremony/like tribal calls and swaying with the force of the hips/ like limbs racing mother nature’s breadth” (Curtis).

Throughout their performance these young women engage in a diasporic conversation about the cultural dance, movements, and bodies of women of African descent around the world, instructing listeners that the twerking is part of a larger bodily, physical performance history, challenging respectability politics and its use to regulate the behavior of Black women. The performers continue to call out the contradictions of racist capitalist patriarchy as they together sway and perform the different diasporic forms of twerking from Afro-Arab dances, to Cuban, Bolivian, Columbian, Somolian dances, and the dutty wine in Jamaica.

Many Black feminists perform and theorize Black feminisms that are brave enough to “fuck with the grays”, theories of the Black woman’s bodies that move into self-definition and empowerment, Black feminisms that don’t make you pick Lauryn Hill over Trina, Queen Latifah over Lil’ Kim.  Balaji, Henderson, Emerson, and Brown dare us to move our conversations away from the binaries, away from the center and to the margins, where Black women are living their lives, where there is a multitude of meaning present.  They finalize their performance with a statement that is in line with a theory of the body as a place/space for liberation. Based on the understanding of Black women’s bodies being exploited from male and White means, the performers communicate that the problem is when they use their bodies to their own purposes.

“There is no shame in the desires that I express through twerk/the natural rhythms of life begin inside me/though you cherish our thickness when you can have us how you want us/on the pole being thrown your money/in the music videos clapping ass for your fame/on the corner selling pussy for your profit/but when we do it for ourselves is when you fear us most/the way we grind and tease men as they grab hungrily at our burdening hips/now you stand helpless to this ass/in defense, you call us rachet/you call us vulgar, loose, whore, ho, wretch/why must sex be a scarlet letter upon my chest?/we know what we are/we are god in the flesh/a body stretched across oceans and continents/we are brown, we are thick/middle passage in our waist/history in our hips/we twerk to remember/we twerk to resist” (Curtis).

The shame commonly associated with women’s embrace of their sexuality and the display of self through dance is vehemently rejected by the performers as they speak and dance seductively around the microphone stands.  This performance employs theories of the Black woman’s body as social, reified, and representative of diasporic histories all the while capable of self-definition.  Black women’s bodies and sexuality have been used as tools to be exploited throughout colonial history.  The Black women who perform this poem state that the real threat is them owning their bodies through the performance of twerking.  Much of the Black feminist and womanist discourse, performances, and scholarship (inside and outside of academe) are moving across theories and negotiating contradictions.  It is through performances like these where Black women begin to move beyond the being defined solely by racist capitalist patriarchy.  This is one shade of many of the greys through which Black feminists are understanding Black women’s bodies.

“Every white body doing that cakewalk is just a minstrel under the skin.”

In Babylon Girls Brown showcases how Black women performers shaped the modern with their dance, style, and performances.  A core component to shaping what we understand as the modern woman was burlesque and how female minstrelsy was used as a tool where Black womanhood could be channeled and liberate the bodies of White women. Brown continues by discussing how this went out without the Black face cork as the cakewalk and many other dances popularized by Black performers were embraced by Whites consumers and performers. This racial mimicry has not ended. Twerking is today’s cakewalk.  While much of American popular culture and media has hailed and celebrated White women performers who twerk, Black women who twerk are stigmatized in intersectional ways that their White counterparts are not.  Much of the discussion led to this being another incidence of cultural appropriation,

“The notion that Black women twerking is “lewd” and “degrading” but White women doing (or trying to do) the exact same dance is “cute” and “classy” and that they should cash in, in attention, praise or actual money (i.e. teaching classes) on twerking while pretending that they do not know the racial double standard here. White privilege is why they can both appropriate and feign ignorance over the magnitude of what this appropriation is. White privilege is why they can continue to dehumanize Black women (while some simultaneously demand loyalty to a White supremacist feminist agenda, versus the intersectional feminism/womanism that we know) by pretending that we are solely objects to emulate—costumes to put on out of interest and then take off if situations get too sticky or portraying a certain form of Whiteness becomes more important or profitable” (Trudy).

Black women’s bodies are still being used to define the modern, dissent, self-definition, and the dissent and definition of the new women through 3rdwave white feminism.  A recent example of this is the twerking of White women, including Miley Cyrus.  Miley Cyrus performed at the 2013 Video Music Awards twerking surrounded by Black women dancers who twerked around her in bear head costume, serving as her props. Black feminist blogger Tressie McMillan described the backup dancers as “Fat non-normative black female bodies are kith and kin with historical caricatures of black women as work sites, production units, subjects of victimless sexual crimes, and embodied deviance” (McMillan). Cyrus even fake rims the ass of one of the Black women performers as she performs on stage also rubbing a foam finger on her crotch.  Not much has changed, once again a White woman has liberated herself not just using actual Black bodies but also through her actual twerking, and on multiple occasions using Black women to legitimate her performed Blackness.  As stated by Jacqui Germain in her blog post “Miley Cyrus, Feminism and The Struggle for Black Recognition”,

“Here’s where the racial fissures in feminism come out: by all means, defend a woman’s right to govern her own body; it’s great that white feminists have that goal at the top of their lists.  But in Cyrus’ search for and exploration of her sexual identity, she limits my autonomy as a woman of color. She appropriates it. She cheapens it. She effectively uses the identity and lived experiences of so many women of color as a crutch for her career”(Germain).

Cyrus not only twerked in videos with Black women, but she also performed common stereotypical “Black” Hip hop tropes, wearing grills and a beanie, throwing up the peace sign.  This type of performance and the communication of these particular cultural signifiers allow Cyrus to perform Blackness, use Black women to legitimate the racial mimicry, all the while freeing herself from her previous quaint White middle-class Disneyfied reputation.  Hence, every white body doing that twerk is just a minstrel under the skin.

Much of hip hop culture and Black women performers’ dance still provides White women with means of escaping hegemonic femininity in ways that the Black female body will forever be entrapped by and juxtaposed against.  While I do appreciate Brown’s argument in Babylon Girls that critiques the concept of cultural appropriation, I do not wholly agree with it.  Yes, cultural exchange is occurring, and cultural exchange does not mean it is in anyway equitable.  But it is important for us to understand that an alternative exchange system which includes cultural dances and elements as currency that transfer among respective groups in exploitative fashions is by definition cultural appropriation.  Cultural exchange that is on equitable and respectful terms is referred to as cultural appreciation.  Brown highlights that there is ambiguity in the origin of movement and dance.  But what do we say when we know that a particular dance and movement is originated from a particular group?  What do we say about the Harlem shake?  Twerking?  And if the said cultural exchange is not appropriation then how can it be mimicry? Brown opens up a number of questions for Black feminist and performance scholars to study.  My read of Brown could very well be a misread, her analysis in Babylon Girlscould also be understood as a call to us to all theorize from elements of lived experience that is in the moment.  Dance and performance is a praxis where many forces intersect, and many epistemologies are present.  What theories of the Black woman’s body can we learn from Black women performers? This cultural exchange then is more than simply cultural appropriation, it is an exchange where performers extract elements from a wide variety of influencing styles that inform the characters and meanings they portray when they step on stage.  But can we eliminate the discussion of cultural appropriation from racialized dance and racial mimicry?

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