In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” [1]. Intersectionality is a metaphor: the intersection at which two roads, or two distinct identities, come together. The experiences of those whose identities intersect will often be unique and reflective of the systemic inequality and disadvantage sustained by oppressive structures. Crenshaw’s paper “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Colour,” highlights the specific violence faced by Black women and women of colour as a result of the intersection between womanhood and Blackness. The unique experience of Black women, Crenshaw found, was being dismissed due to the limiting parameters of both anti-racist and feminist movements [2]. The tenets of second-wave feminism were orchestrated specifically by white women; the failure to integrate race within their feminist framework contributed to the ongoing subordination of Black women and women of colour [3].
As a white ciswoman, I believe it is vital to know and understand the complexities and histories of intersectionality. The intersectional framework outlines the distinct experiences of Black women and women of colour and the ways in which white women have benefited from the systems that have historically and contemporarily oppressed Black, Indigenous, and other women of colour.
In the weeks following George Floyd’s death, the white world finally acknowledged the centuries-old power structures formed and sustained by white people which systematically oppress Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour. Why did it take the death of George Floyd for white people to begin to recognise the grave racial disparities within our systems? More specifically, why has it taken this long for white women to question their racial biases and acknowledge the distinct experiences of Black women? In a preliminary analysis of these topics, I will examine the historical and radicalised conventions that have shaped visual culture and subsequently informed the trajectory of Black and white female relations.
In her essay “Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Audre Lorde explains that, as a means of social control, women have been encouraged to acknowledge only one area of human difference as legitimate: those differences between women and men [4]. For centuries, white women have exploited the superior/subordinate dichotomy to uplift themselves and ignore the differences in experience of Black, Indigenous, and other women of colour. The need to recognize our differences is long overdue. Utilizing difference as a tool to join forces rather than as a tool for implicit exploitation is tremendously important [5].It is time for white people to begin to acknowledge and repair our injustices against Black women. In doing this, it will be imperative to examine and understand our respective and overlapping histories. As Crenshaw points out, we cannot change outcomes without understanding how they came about [6].
According Lorraine O’Grady’s article, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” the female body in the West was never a unitary figure [7]. O’Grady describes that “like a coin, [the female body] has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white, or, prototypically, black” [8]. As it has been implicitly understood, white is what a woman is—the symbol of so-called femininity; not-white is what a woman better not be [9]. In visual culture, the Black female body historically acted as the white female’s “chiaroscuro”—bolstering white women’s subjectivity and their perceived femininity by juxtaposing them with Black women’s bodies in an attempt to render the status of the white female sitter [10].
Until the nineteenth-century, it was a convention in portraiture to depict a high-status white woman in the same frame as her enslaved counterpart [11]. In these portraits, the Black women were not represented as subjects, but as commodities. The fallacy that enslaved persons were “desired assets,” and “expensive rarities” maintained widespread between the mid-fifteenth-century and the mid-nineteenth-century [12]. Therefore, the servility of the enslaved figure within white women’s portraits determined the power held by the white woman, displaying her status even within the constraints of a patriarchal society.
O’Grady cites Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) as a pertinent example. In Olympia a white, naked, female prostitute (Olympia) is juxtaposed by her Black female “servant” named Laura. Laura is fully clothed; she stands in the background of the painting and is placed off to the side, at the painting’s edge. Laura’s function goes beyond any perceived “tonal contrast” [13]. According to O’Grady, Laura is clearly present within the frame in order to embody the stereotypes of the Jezebel and Mammy, the prostitute and the female eunuch [14]. O’Grady’s point is critical in that it emphasizes Laura’s role as “castrata and whore, not Madonna and whore,” elucidating that Laura’s place is outside of what can be conceived of as a woman [15].
Nineteenth-century pseudo-science posited that there were innate differences between races [16]. The stereotype of the “Hottentot Venus” heightened this perceived reality: this image of the Black female emerged as an icon for Black female sexuality and racial identity [17]. From 1810 to her death in 1815, Sarah/Saartje Baartman, or the original “Hottentot Venus” was exhibited as a spectacle in London, and until recently was preserved in a jar in the Musee de l’Homme [18]. The protruding buttocks of the figure was central in distinguishing the Black woman from her white counterparts, reducing her to sexual characteristics [19]. This stereotype also cemented the notion that Black biology was “pathological” and “primitive” in relation to the “normal” white medical model [20]. According to natural scientist Georges Cuvier, the black female “look[ed] different,” he goes on to write, “her physiognomy, her skin colour, and the form of her genitalia label her as inherently different” [21]. The belief that black women had “primitive” genitalia also implied their “primitive” sexual appetite. Laura was frequently classified by critics as a “Hottentot Venus” [22].
Baartman was not the last “Hottentot Venus:” the stereotype became ingrained within the nineteenth-century European psyche; implicit racial, biological, and sexual differences were classified in scientific texts, perpetuated in popular songs, and solidified in the theatre [23]. Moreover, the Hottentot’s perceived biological differences ensured that the male voyeuristic gaze favoured the white female body. The Hottentot’s effect was hypersexualizing to the degree that the image represented white women’s latent sexuality, acting as a vehicle for the comparison of the white and Black female body [24]. The attributes that mark or distinguish the female have been defined by Eurocentric and patriarchal definitions of the civil [25]. The feminine has and continues to be the threshold or limit of “civility” itself [26]. Historically and contemporarily, the stereotype of the “Hottentot Venus” and the tropes that sustain it, have been used to frame white women’s sexuality as the more “civilized” option for white men.
White women’s historic reluctance to acknowledge Black female sexuality is evident in the work of contemporary female artists. For example, in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1973-78), a feminist installation displaying thirty-nine elaborate place settings for thirty-nine mythical and historically famous women, Sojourner Truth occupied the singular place setting for a Black woman [27]. Moreover, instead of rendering her place setting with Chicago’s famous vagina depiction, displayed on thirty-six of the thirty-nine plates, Truth’s was inscribed with a face [28]. Thus, it is evident that Chicago had trouble acknowledging and embracing the sexuality of not-white individuals [29]. Dinner Party can also be read as an attempt to maintain a specific sexual desire for white women, one that Chicago could not conceptualize for a Black woman.
In order to move forward, we must examine how we, as people who live in this society, are programmed and conditioned to subordinate others in order to affirm and enforce our own superiority and power. In looking at these histories, we are exposed to the patriarchy’s omnipresence and the levels to which oppressive frameworks have affected different people. As stated previously, white women often utilized portraiture conventions that included enslaved individuals in order to display their status, while still respecting patriarchal constraints. It can be said that white women struggled within a male dominated society, but enslaved and Black individuals bore the brunt of a different level of oppression, one that can only be understood when analyzing people’s distinct struggles through an intersectional lens.
Anthony Van Dyck’s Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, (1625), further exposes this reality. Van Dyck’s painting depicts an Italian noblewoman; behind her stands an enslaved African male, who shades her with an outstretched arm. As an enslaved male, this individual communicated to the viewer that women are not always the least powerful agents within society [30]. Examining paintings such as Van Dyck and Manet’s allows us to understand the indispensability of promoting and understanding intersectionality, as we consider both the historical and contemporary experiences of those continuously marginalized and impacted by racially driven injustices.
When analyzed through an intersectional lens, visual culture has the ability to underscore the power and privilege certain individuals hold and the inequality and oppression faced by others. Understanding intersectionality, although imperative for white people, is not a viable solution for the systemic inequality and misrepresentation faced by Black individuals. In the realm of visual culture, the solution lies within bolstering Black artists and empowering their own forms of emic representation.
Citations: [1] Crenshaw, Kimberle, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," in Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991). [2] Crenshaw. 1252. [3] Crenshaw. 1252. [4] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press Feminist Series, (Berkeley, Calif.: Crossing Press, 2007), 122. [5] Lorde. 123. [6] “Kimberle Crenshaw: What is Intersectionality?” National Association of Independent Schools, (2018). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViDtnfQ9FHc [7] Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, 1992. 15. [8] O’Grady. 15. [9] O’Grady. 1. [10] O’Grady. 1. [11] Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Oritz eds., “Introduction: Envisioning Slave Portraiture,” Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2. [12] Rosenthal and Lugo-Oritz. 2. [13] Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, 1992. 3. [14] O’Grady. 3. [15] O’Grady. 3. [16] Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature." Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985), 212. [17] Charmaine A. Nelson, “The Nude and the Naked: Black Women, White Ideals and the Racialization of Sexuality,” in Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 125. [18] Yolande J. Daniels, "Exhibit A: Private Life without a Narrative," in Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot", edited by Willis Deborah, by Williams Carla, (Temple University Press, 2010), 63. [19] Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985), 213. [20] Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature." Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985), 212. [21]Gilman. 213. [22] Gilman. 213. [23] Yolande J. Daniels, "Exhibit A: Private Life without a Narrative," in Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot", edited by Willis Deborah, by Williams Carla, (Temple University Press, 2010), 63. [24] Daniels. 64. [25] Daniels. 62. [26] Daniels. 62. [27] Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, 1992. 3. [28] O’Grady. 3. [29] O’Grady. 3. [30] Tanya J. Tiffany, “Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velazquez’s Supper at Emmaus,” Art History 31, no. 1 (February 2008), 37.
Bella Silverman is a double major in history and art history at McGill University. Bella’s academic goal is to uncover histories that are normally concealed due to patriarchal structures and the systematic canonization of history.
