Читать книгу Misogynoir Transformed - Moya Bailey - Страница 14

Black feminists’ activist and scholarly interest in representation was born of these real concerns for the ways that misogynoir shapes Black women’s daily treatment in the world. Like feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality,” “misogynoir” names a concept that Black feminists have discussed since our earliest preserved writings, speeches, and poetry.55 In 1851, abolitionist Sojourner Truth revealed the ways womanhood is raced such that Black women are excluded from the category and therefore subject to abuses that white women are not.56 Black studies scholar Hortense Spillers’s classic text “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” explores the degendering of Black women in US slavery and their subsequent treatment as commodities of labor and breeding for white slaveholders.57 Black women were not women, but their fertility was essential for the maintenance of slavery. Both Truth and Spillers describe the way that Black women are subjected to differential treatment in society based on their simultaneous marginalization along the lines of race and gender.

While initial challenges to misogynoirist representations of Black women in the early twentieth century involved some classist and moralizing sentiments about proving oneself in the public sphere, the digital age has made way for strategies that reject respectability in favor of more multifaceted representations of Black women in all of our complexities. Respectability is the idea that if marginalized groups comport themselves well, they may be able to be accepted into society. Whether through the activism of Black club women during the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, or the Black women’s media renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s, Black women were creating the visions of themselves that they wished to see.58 Black feminist thought has expanded to be more inclusive of Black women who are not interested in respectability because not only does it not produce different affective treatment of Black women in society, it delimits comportment and leads to intra-group policing that is more harmful than helpful. In every era, Black women have been at the forefront of creating media for themselves that challenge misogynoir, whether explicitly or implicitly.

These new digital dissensions follow a long history in the twentieth century of Black women transforming the way they were portrayed in popular culture. TV shows like Living Single (1993) and films like Daughters of the Dust (1991) gave Black women artists more opportunities to tell more stories about who they were from their own perspective. Current media projects attempt to bring forward alternative representations of Black women, but these efforts can be marginalized by the conglomeration of media companies, which makes it difficult for these dissident voices and images to find space. The digital skills built through social media use are being leveraged for more sustainable and generative media now and in the future.

Black Hollywood is producing images to counter the globe-circling archetypes that negatively portray our communities. Independent films like Pariah (2011) and the even earlier Eve’s Bayou (1997) have received critical acclaim but have had limited circulation in mainstream venues. More popular and available Black films attempt to challenge some stereotypes while reinforcing others. In the process of creating these alternative/“positive” representations, cis male producers and writers may challenge depictions of Black men as weak, unemployed, or unintelligent while stereotypes about Black women are reified and reinscribed. Additionally, positive Black masculinity in these films is equated with the Black male character’s ability to achieve the heteronormative, patriarchal, capitalistic American Dream. It is the acquisition of the assimilationist fantasy that provides the Hollywood ending. This goal is reached through the often-violent reassertion of hierarchal gender roles. Films popularized and written by Tyler Perry are consummate examples of this practice. Perry is in a category all his own, given his ability to finance his own productions and his popularity in Black markets, particularly among Black women. Yet his female protagonists are punished for their career ambition and assertive personalities through the contraction of HIV or humiliating chastising by a male paramour.59 In his narratives, Black women are physically dragged back into their place or pushed out of the way by Black men.60

For example, in Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? (2007), the character Marcus strangles his wife, Angela, when she reveals that his STI is courtesy of the man she was sleeping with, who passed it to her. Marcus’s masculinity is presumably undermined by Angela’s wine-induced, Sapphire-inspired vitriol, in which she accuses him of cheating, which he (also) was. Her duplicitous intent for withholding her affair with Walter is presented as more egregious than his own deceit. His rage is justified by the reactions of his friends and the audiences viewing the film, while Angela’s deception is not. As Marcus chokes her, we hear another man in the scene shout, “I hope you break her throat!” Marcus and his friend’s support of physical violence against Angela does not elicit any reprimand from the other friends still seated around the dinner table. Though eventually pulled away from Angela, Marcus never faces consequences for his treatment of her, nor is Angela portrayed as someone who has just been assaulted.61 The fact that the local sheriff is present but sees no need to do more than help pull the two apart further enforces the justifiable nature of Marcus’s actions. The violence of the scene—Angela literally being choked—is set up as comic relief, with audiences prompted to laugh uproariously when Marcus finally loses his cool.

These acts of filmic violence are not coded as such. Violence against Black women is made normal, comic, and necessary for the attainment of a positive Black masculinity, making intraracial violence against Black women off-screen tolerable and unremarkable.62 The poem “Brother” by Pat Parker addresses the violence Black women face in their own communities while trying to address systemic oppression:

Brother

I don’t want to hear

about

how my real enemy

is the system.

i’m no genius,

but i do know

that system

you hit me with

is called

a fist.63

Like Olayiwola, Parker identifies the ways Black women are supposed to ignore their own pain in service to a perceived greater threat outside the Black community. Black women are expected to sublimate their concerns for the good of their communities. Perry’s scene also demonstrates an interdependency between gender role expressions, where proper “positive” Black masculinity can be obtained only through the subordination of Black femininity.64 Perry’s portrayals mirror Moynihan’s damning report on the Black family, as Black men are often physically fighting to put Black women back into the imagined “correct” place in the gender hierarchy, with men at the top. Black women are publicly derided by other Black people—from ambivalent Black leaders to apathetic media moguls, Black comedians to hip hop stars—with little consequence.

While Black people were perhaps initially invested in a strategy of proving their humanity through self-policing behavior and comportment (like that of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century club women), the overwhelming evidence—in the form of continued disparate treatment—shows that these efforts did not mitigate misogynoir. The practice of displaying respectable representations of themselves in media as a strategy for uplift gave way to recognition that any secondary positive feelings white audiences had for Black people as a result of self-generated representation had little material purchase in their lives. Racial uplift in a white supremacist world remains a central theme in many media projects over the years; however, queer and trans Black women create cultural works that challenge intraracial misogynoir because of their liminal space within a community that is already marginalized. By crafting reflections of the racialized and gendered violence that happens in our own spaces because of colorism, homophobia, and trans antagonism, queer and trans Black women push for accountability within their own networks as opposed to without. It seems that Black women must continue to look to themselves for representations that affirm and expand who they are as human beings. Misogynoir Transformed endeavors to bring some of these practices to the fore.