Investigating racial patterns in pornography offers one route for such an analysis. Black women have often claimed that images of white women’s sexuality were intertwined with the controlling image of the sexually denigrated Black woman: “In the United States, the fear and fascination of female sexuality was projected onto black women; the passionless lady arose in symbiosis with the primitively sexual slave” (Hall 1983, 333). Comparable linkages exist in pornography (Gardner 1980). Alice Walker provides a fictional account of a Black man’s growing awareness of the different ways that African-American and white women are objectified in pornography: “What he has refused to see-because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protector defend black women-is that where white women are depicted in pornography as ‘objects,’ black women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted as human bodies if not beings, black women are depicted as *censored*” (Walker 1981, 52).
Walker’s distinction between “objects” and “animals” is crucial in untangling gender, race, and class dynamics in pornography. Within the mind/body, culture/nature, male/female oppositional dichotomies in Western social thought, objects occupy an uncertain interim position. As objects white women become creations of culture-in this case, the mind of white men-using the materials of nature-in this case, uncontrolled female sexuality. In contrast, as animals Black women receive no such redeeming dose of culture and remain open to the type of exploitation visited on nature overall. Race becomes the distinguishing feature in determining the type of objectification women will encounter. Whiteness as symbolic of both civilization and culture is used to separate objects from animals.
The alleged superiority of men to women is not the only hierarchical relationship that has been linked to the putative superiority of the mind to the body. Certain “races” of people have been defined as being more bodylike, more animallike, and less godlike than others (Spelman 1982,52). Race and gender oppression may both revolve around the same axis of distain for the body; both portray the sexuality of subordinate groups as animalistic and therefore deviant. Biological notions of race and gender prevalent in the early nineteenth century which fostered the animalistic icon of Black female sexuality were joined by the appearance of a racist biology incorporating the concept of degeneracy (Foucault 1980). Africans and women were both perceived as embodied entities, and Blacks were seen as degenerate. Fear of and distain for the body thus formed a key element in both sexist and racist thinking (Spelman 1982).
While the sexual and racial dimensions of being treated like an animal are important, the economic foundation underlying this treatment is critical. Animals can be economically exploited, worked, sold, killed, and consumed. As “mules,” African-American women become susceptible to such treatment. The political economy of pornography also merits careful attention. Pornography is pivotal in mediating contradictions in changing societies (McNall 1983). It is no accident that racist biology, religious justifications for slavery and women’s subordination, and other explanations for nineteenth-century racism and sexism arose during a period of profound political and economic change. Symbolic means of domination become particularly important in mediating contradictions in changing political economies. The exhibition of Sarah Bartmann and Black women on the auction block were not benign intellectual exercises-these practices defended real material and political interests. Current transformations in international capitalism require similar ideological justifications. Where does pornography fit in these current transformations? This question awaits a comprehensive Afrocentric feminist analysis.
Publicly exhibiting Black women may have been central to objectifying Black women as animals and to creating the icon of Black women as animals. Yi-Fu Tuan (1984) offers an innovative argument about similarities in efforts to control nature-especially plant life-the domestication of animals, and the domination of certain groups of humans. Tuan suggests that displaying humans alongside animals implies that such humans are more like monkeys and bears than they are like “normal” people. This same juxtaposition leads spectators to view the captive animals in a special way. Animals acquire definitions of being like humans, only more openly carnal and sexual, an aspect of animals that forms a major source of attraction for visitors to modern zoos. In discussing the popularity of monkeys in zoos, Tuan notes: “some visitors are especially attracted by the easy sexual behavior of the monkeys. Voyeurism is forbidden except when applied to subhumans” (1984, 82). Tuan’s analysis suggests that the public display of Sarah Bartmann and of the countless enslaved African women on the auction blocks of the antebellum American South—especially in proximity to animals-fostered their image as animalistic.
This linking of Black women and animals is evident in nineteenth-century scientific literature. The equation of women, Blacks, and animals is revealed in the following description of an African woman published in an 1878 anthropology text:
She had a way of pouting her lips exactly like what we have observed in the orangutan. Her movements had something abrupt and fantastical about them, reminding one of those of the ape. Her ear was like that of many apes…. These are animal characters. I have never seen a human head more like an ape than that of this woman. (Halpin 1989, 287)
In a climate such as this, it is not surprising that one prominent European physician even stated that Black women’s “animallike sexual appetite went so far as to lead black women to copulate with apes” (Gilman 1985, 212).
The treatment of all women in contemporary pornography has strong ties to the portrayal of Black women as animals. In pornography women become nonpeople and are often represented as the sum of their fragmented body parts. Scott McNall observes:
This fragmentation of women relates to the predominance of rear-entry position photographs…. All of these kinds of photographs reduce the woman to her reproductive system, and, furthermore, make her open, willing, and available–not in control…. The other thing rear-entry position photographs tell us about women is that they are animals. They are animals because they are the same as dogs-bitches in heat who can’t control themselves. (McNall 1983, 197-98)
This linking of animals and white women within pornography becomes feasible when grounded in the earlier denigration of Black women as animals.
Developing a comprehensive analysis of the race, gender, and class dynamics of pornography offers possibilities for change. Those Black feminist intellectuals investigating sexual politics imply that the situation is much more complicated than that advanced by some prominent white feminists (see, e.g., Dworkin 1981) in which “men oppress women” because they are men. Such approaches implicitly assume biologically deterministic views of sex, gender, and sexuality and offer few possibilities for change. In contrast, Afrocentric feminist analyses routinely provide for human agency and its corresponding empowerment and for the responsiveness of social structures to human action. In the short story “Coming Apart,” Alice Walker describes one Black man’s growing realization that his enjoyment of pornography, whether of white women as “objects” or Black women as “animals,” degraded him:
He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. In pornography the black man is portrayed as being capable of *censored*ing anything … even a piece of *censored*. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectivity of his cock. (Walker 1981, 52)
Walker conceptualizes pornography as a race/gender system that entraps everyone. But by exploring an African-American man’s struggle for a self-defined standpoint on pornography, Walker suggests that a changed consciousness is essential to social change. If a Black man can understand how pornography -affects him, then other groups emeshed in the same system are equally capable of similar shifts in consciousness and action.
Prostitution and the Commodification of Sexuality
In To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Lorraine Hansberry creates three characters: a young domestic worker, a chic professional, middle-aged woman, and a mother in her thirties. Each speaks a variant of the following:
In these streets out there, any little white boy from Long Island or Westchester sees me and leans out of his car and yells–”Hey there, hot chocolate! Say there, Jezebel! Hey you-’Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding”! YOU! Bet you know where there’s a good time tonight . . . ” Follow me sometimes and see if I lie. I can be coming from eight hours on an assembly line or fourteen hours in Mrs. Halsey’s kitchen. I can be all filled up that day with three hundred years of rage so that my eyes are flashing and my flesh is trembling-and the white boys in the streets, they look at me and think of sex. They look at me and that’s all they think…. Baby, you could be Jesus in drag-but if you’re brown they’re sure you’re selling! (Hansberry 1969, 98)
Like the characters in Hansberry’s fiction, all Black women are affected by the widespread controlling image that African-American women are sexually promiscuous, potential prostitutes. The pervasiveness of this image is vividly recounted in Black activist lawyer Pauli Murray’s description of an incident she experienced while defending two women from Spanish Harlem who had been arrested as prostitutes: “The first witness, a white man from New Jersey, testified on the details of the sexual transaction and his payment of money. When asked to identify the woman with whom he had engaged in sexual intercourse, he unhesitatingly pointed directly at me, seated beside my two clients at the defense table!”(Murray 1987, 274). Murray’s clients were still convicted.
The creation of Jezebel, the image of the sexually denigrated Black woman, has been vital in sustaining a system of interlocking race, gender, and class oppression. Exploring how the image of the African-American woman as prostitute has been used by each system of oppression illustrates how sexuality links the three systems. But Black women’s treatment also demonstrates how manipulating sexuality has been essential to the political economy of domination within each system and across all three.
Yi-Fu Tuan (1984) suggests that power as domination involves reducing humans to animate nature in order to exploit them economically or to treat them condescendingly as pets. Domination may be either cruel and exploitative with no affection or may be exploitative yet coexist with affection. The former produces the victim-in this case, the Black woman as “mule” whose labor has been exploited. In contrast, the combination of dominance and affection produces the pet, the individual who is subordinate but whose survival depends on the whims of the more powerful. The “beautiful young quadroons and octoroons” described by Alice Walker were bred to be pets–enslaved Black mistresses whose existence required that they retain the affection of their owners. The treatment afforded these women illustrates a process that affects all African-American women: their portrayal as actual or potential victims and pets of elite white males.3
African-American women simultaneously embody the coexistence of the victim and the pet, with survival often linked to the ability to be appropriately subordinate as victims or pets. Black women’s experiences as unpaid and paid workers demonstrate the harsh lives victims are forced to lead. While the life of the victim is difficult, pets experience a distinctive form of exploitation. Zora Neale Hurston’s 1943 essay, “The ‘Pet’ Negro System,” speaks contemptuously of this ostensibly benign situation that combines domination with affection. Written in a Black oratorical style, Hurston notes, “Brother and Sisters, I take my text this morning from the Book of Dixie…. Now it says here ‘And every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself to pet and cherish, and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight’” (Walker 1979a, 156). Pets are treated as exceptions and live with the constant threat that they will no longer be “perfect in his sight,” that their owners will tire of them and relegate them to the unenviable role of victim.
Prostitution represents the fusion of exploitation for an economic purpose-namely, the commodification of Black women’s sexuality-with the demeaning treatment afforded pets. Sex becomes commodified not merely in the sense that it can be purchased-the dimension of economic exploitation-but also in the sense that one is dealing with a totally alienated being who is separated from and who does not control her body: the dimension of power as domination (McNall 1983). Commodified sex can then be appropriated by the powerful. When the “white boys from Long Island” look at Black women and all they think about is sex, they believe that they can appropriate Black women’s bodies. When they yell “Bet you know where there’s a good time tonight,” they expect commodified sex with Black women as “animals” to be better than sex with white women as “objects.” Both pornography and prostitution commodity sexuality and imply to the “white boys” that all African-American women can be bought.
Prostitution under European and American capitalism thus exists within a complex web of political and economic relationships whereby sexuality is conceptualized along intersecting axes of race and gender. Gilman’s (1985)analysis of the exhibition of Sarah Bartmann as the “Hottentot Venus” suggests another intriguing connection between race, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe-the linking of the icon of the Black woman with the icon of the white prostitute. While the Hottentot woman stood for the essence of Africans as a race, the white prostitute symbolized the sexualized woman. The prostitute represented the embodiment of sexuality and all that European society associated with it: disease as well as passion. As Gilman points out, “it is this uncleanliness, this disease, which forms the final link between two images of women, the black and the prostitute. Just as the genitalia of the Hottentot were perceived as parallel to the diseased genitalia of the prostitute, so to the power of the idea of corruption links both images” (1985, 237). These connections between the icons of Black women and white prostitutes demonstrate how race, gender, and the social class structure of the European political economy interlock.
In the American antebellum South both of these images were fused in the forced
prostitution of enslaved African women. The prostitution of Black women allowed white women to be the opposite; Black “whores” make white “virgins” possible. This race/gender nexus fostered a situation whereby white men could then differentiate between the sexualized woman-as-body who is dominated and “screwed” and the asexual woman-as-pure-spirit who is idealized and brought home to mother (Hoch 1979, 70). The sexually denigrated woman, whether she was made a victim through her rape or a pet through her seduction, could be used as the yardstick against which the cult of true womanhood was measured. Moreover, this entire situation was profitable.
Rape and Sexual Violence
Force was important in creating African-American women’s centrality to American images of the sexualized woman and in shaping their experiences with both pornography and prostitution. Black women did not willingly submit to their exhibition on southern auction blocks-they were forced to do so. Enslaved African women could not choose whether to work-they were beaten and often killed if they refused. Black domestics who resisted the sexual advances of their employers often found themselves looking for work where none was to be found. Both the reality and the threat of violence have acted as a form of social control for African-American women.
Rape has been one fundamental tool of sexual violence directed against African-American women. Challenging the pervasiveness of Black women’s rape and sexual extortion by white men has long formed a prominent theme in Black women’s writings. Autobiographies such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and Harriet Jacobs’s “The Perils of a Slave Woman’s Life” (1860/1987)from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl record examples of actual and threatened sexual assault. The effects of rape on African-American women is a prominent theme in Black women’s fiction. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) and Rosa Guy’s A Measure of Time (1983) both explore interracial rape of Black women. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1980) all examine rape within African-American families and communities. Elizabeth Clark-Lewis’s(1985) study of domestic workers found that mothers, aunts, and community othermothers warned young Black women about the threat of rape. One respondent in Clark-Lewis’s study, an 87-year-old North Carolina Black domestic worker, remembers, “nobody was sent out before you was told to be careful of the white man or his sons” (Clark-Lewis 1985, 15).