Black Women's Sexual Agency in ‘Neo’ Cultural Productions

Looking Forward to the Past: Black Women's Sexual Agency in ‘Neo’ Cultural Productions Sydney Fonteyn Lewis A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Katherine Cummings, Chair Chandan Reddy Habiba Ibrahim Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of English University of Washington Abstract Looking Forward to the Past: Black Women's Sexual Agency in ‘Neo’ Cultural Productions Sydney Fonteyn Lewis Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor, Katherine Cummings Department of English This dissertation combines critical black feminisms, cultural studies, performance studies, and queer theory with readings of African-American cultural productions in order to consider how black women can and have reconfigured their non-heteronormative sexualities outside of the language given to us by white-dominated GLBT scholarship. The emphasis on “neo” cultural productions, that is projects that look toward the past to re-imagine a new future, speaks to Laura Alexandra Harris’s assertion that a queer black feminist methodology necessitates reclamation of one’s history and an affirmation of desire as a form of resistance to shame. This dissertation reads black female bodies as subversive. In embracing their bodies as pleasurable, these unruly women resist racist and heterosexist hegemonic discourses which silence or pathologize black female sexuality and negate black women’s agency. Chapter One looks toward Barbara Smith’s 1977 publication, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” as an inaugural point for thinking about black female sexuality outside of normative and pathologizing paradigms. It argues for a reading of Sula as a queer black femme novel, and from there develops a (neo) theory of black femme-inism which is indebted to and departs from Smith. Chapter Two reads Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledging as neo-slave narratives which also narrate a queer politic. The black female vampires in these novels constitute a necessary departure from realism, which does not adequately narrate the complexity of black women's sexuality. The third chapter reads Cheryl Dunye’s film, The Watermelon Woman, arguing that the film proposes a new methodology for reading lesbian sexuality in its historical and contemporary contexts. Chapter Four analyzes Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus and neo-burlesque performances by black women in order to suggest how black female performances, through the remaking of the black female body from spectacle to spectacular, can interrupt the historical and contemporary pathologization of black women. In all of these chapters I look toward neo-narratives as sites which connect the historical realities of black female subjugation with the contemporary moment in ways which usher in alternative possibilities for black female agency. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction or “Something to do with Beyoncé”…………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter One: “Everything I know about being Femme I learned from Sula” or Toward a Black Feminist Criticism……………………………………………………………………………………………………….............. 25 Chapter Two: Written in Blood: Slavery, Miscegenation and Realist Limits in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling ……………………………………………………………………. 78 Chapter Three: Re-presenting Myths and Tellin’ Tales: Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and the Re-visioning of the Black Lesbian…………………………………………………………………………….. 116 Chapter Four: Revealing Venus: The Spectacle of the Black Female Body (Re)made Spectacular In Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus and the Black Female Burlesque Performer………………………………. 151 Conclusion or “A Diva is a Female Version of a Hustla”………………………………………………………….204 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Deepest gratitude to: Kate Cummings, Chandan Reddy, and Habiba Ibrahim for guiding me intellectually and emotionally; Kathy Mork for pushing me through this process; GO-MAP and the Bank of American Dissertation fellowship for their financial assistance; my father, William A.L. Lewis, Jr. and my grandparents, Rosa N. Lewis and William A.L. Lewis, Sr., for their unconditional love; my partner, Nicky Estrella, for her support and undying faith in me; my femme partner in crime, Erin Kilpatrick. And to all the Femmes who inspire my work – peace, love, and glitter. ii DEDICATION For the bad.girls iii 1 Introduction or "Something to do with Beyoncé" "For Black women, ceding control over self-definitions of Black women's sexualities upholds multiple oppressions. This is because all systems of oppression rely on harnessing the power of the erotic. In contrast, when self-defined by Black women ourselves, Black women's sexualities can become an important place of resistance. Just as harnessing the power of the erotic is important for domination, reclaiming, and self- defining that same eroticism may constitute one path toward Black women's empowerment" - Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought "Bad girls, Talking about the sad girls (Sad girls), Talking about bad, bad girls, yeah" - Donna Summer, "Bad Girls" (1979) I remember in elementary school painting bright colors on a piece of white paper. I then colored over the painted mural in black crayon seemingly obscuring the artwork I just created. But, if I took a toothpick and scraped off the crayon, the bright colors peered through once more, and the new piece of art combined the dazzling colors of the first, the waxy black crayon, and the lines and shapes created by the two. So many textures and colors and shapes. The crumbs of crayon left dark stains on my fingertips, but that was part of the process and necessary to the final image. The texts that I look at in this dissertation are similar to my layered piece of art -- white paper, covered in colors, covered in black, scraped and created anew. Riffing on the language of neo-slave narratives I call these texts "neo" cultural productions, multilayered pieces of art which look toward the past in order to create new images. These new images require the previous ones for their brilliance and even the muted crayon, the dark histories, are needed to reveal new artistic possibilities. New images must be created because the old ones are very much alive. To be clear, these new images do not erase or reverse the old ones, but like a palimpsest, write over them to create something else out of the previous script. If the "new racism [...] has not replaced prior forms of racial rule, but instead incorporates elements of past racial formations," it 2 follows that radically intervening strategies are needed to deal with these ever-present formations (Collins, Black Sexual Politics 32-33). The ever-present racial formation, or, as Patricia Hill Collins calls them, "controlling images," "are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life" (Collins, Black Feminist 77). The Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Hoochie Mama, Welfare Queen, and other black female stereotypes are intended to discretely undermine black women and inhibit challenges we might pose to the oppressive status quo. However, as much as I rely on and appreciate the work of Collins, we differ in that she implies that undermining controlling images can be done through the reversal of those images. She points to literature as one site where "emergent women" have survived the assault of controlling images by "turn[ing] it out" - or by inverting them (Collins, Black Feminist 106). But reversing one stereotype, let's say the Jezebel, may just be another form of oppression. As L.H. Stallings notes "one person's indefinable sexuality could be another's promiscuous sexuality" (2). She cautions, "as black cultural studies continue to address gender and sexuality, we must reconsider who gets to say what is and is not a valid form of resistance to stereotypes, and why" (2). Likewise, Homi Bhabha argues that stereotypes cannot just be reversed in order to create radical change to oppressive regimes but must be explored as potential sites of agency. He argues: To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not the displace it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity, with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs colonial identified subjects (both the colonizer and the colonized)" (95) [italics mine]. 3 In other words, if objectifying stereotypes provide one site of agency that is because of the multi-varied strategies of oppression. Oppression is not just a matter of top-down power, but a polyvalent site of power production. The combination of desire and derision that Bhabha explicates points to the exigency of studying black women's sexuality and sexual agency. Thus this project addresses how black women have responded to those controlling images through cultural productions which radically take control over those images, not to destroy them, but to enable black women to act as agents in their own self-definitions. The neo-cultural productions - that is cultural productions which utilize a recursive structure for remembering the past while re-imaging the future - examined in this dissertation point to self-defining strategies used by black women. In it, I argue that black female sexuality has been defined primarily as a lack of agency, that is black women have been scripted as hypersexual or asexual, animalistic and masculinized; hence the stereotypical Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Bitch, and Ho. None of these positions are self-defined or self-created; rather they are products of various white heteropatriarchal regimes. I index these stereotypes and more importantly examine how black women have crafted themselves as sexual agents through a variety of cultural productions -- namely literature, film, theater, and performance. Additionally, I question the limitations of realist narrative in understanding the black female body. As a body that has historically been scripted as not being able to speak for itself, as belonging to various oppressive regimes, the black female body has a fraught relationship to realist constructions.

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