Beauty, difference, and the Hottentot Venus: Black feminist revisions in performance and aesthetics, 1810 to the present

Is black beautiful? This question is asked in light of a rather long history of racist representations depicting black bodies as "ugly," grotesque, and deviant. Because of this, the issue of aesthetics becomes a possible site for liberation.;This project thus examines the relationship between blackness and beauty, specifically prevalent notions of racial difference that posit whiteness as beautiful and blackness as not beautiful. Beginning with the historical case of the Hottentot Venus, embodied by Saartjie Baartman, this study further analyzes how racism and sexism intersect to promote differences between races, between men and women, and between "civilization and primitivism.";Such dichotomies, however, are challenged by black women in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose bodies become sites for contestation and resistance to existing concepts of beauty and difference. Sojourner Truth is one such person studied in this project who presented her body publicly in her confrontation with whites who questioned her womanhood and authority as a religious speaker; while Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, in comparison to Truth, presented her body in the world of fine arts, directly challenging her nineteenth-century audience to accept the possibility that black women can engage in such "civilized" disciplines as classical music. Neither of these women is recognized as "sexual" and is often stripped of sexuality-both similarly and in contrast to Baartman. However, anxieties existed among their audience members, which suggest that these women struggled to be seen as "women" and even to transcend their sexuality.;Perhaps the most recognized icon of black female sexuality is Josephine Baker, who challenged her audiences to define her body in terms of beauty. Her particular performance of savagery and nudity, however, perpetuates a widespread iconography of black female sexuality in a context of heightened sexuality, a literary and visual trope deconstructed in the writings of Toni Morrison and Andrea Lee and in the art of Renee Green and Renee Cox.;This project continues with an exploration of discourses on black female beauty in late twentieth-century popular culture and concludes by calling for a black feminist aesthetic in the realm of media and image-production.