Voice of The Black Venus @voiceoftheblackvenus - Tumblr Blog

What else is there to know? Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all.2 Hers is an untimely story told by a failed witness. It would be centuries before she would be allowed to “try her tongue."

Saidiya Hartman - Venus in Two Acts

Listen to The Voice

This project was curated to track the reclamation of self through the sensual as done by modern Black women and femmes. Throughout history, Black women and femmes have had their femininity judged by how well it equates to that of white patriarchal standards. In many ways, this has reinforced the issue of misogynoir by having Black feminine beings seen as disposable hyper-sexualized objects instead of people. Respectability politics do not help negate this perception, rather they reinforce the idea that if the Black woman/femme does not reflect that of the ideal white woman, they are not true women and in some cases, barely considered to be human. With this project, the goal is to answer the following question: in a world built off the degradation of Black women and femmes, how do we reclaim the divine feminine energy aka the idea of the Black Venus?

By having modern artistic elements done by Black women in conversation with the history of the fight to express Black femininity, this project intends to shed light on the oppressive narratives that have prevented the Black Venus from being able to speak for herself, while also exposing what her voice and form can be when its not being policed by an oppressive society.

All black girls and women suffered under what black feminist scholar Moya Bailey has defined as misogynoir, or the victimization of black girls and women through racism and sexism. Misogynoir is further complicated by historical stereotypes that served to define “virtuous” whiteness by “degraded” blackness from infant girls’ first breaths.

Portrait of (an Invented) Lady: Daisy Gatson Bates and the Politics of Respectability by Misti Nicole Harper

“ “Worthwhile” black women strove for impeccable surfaces that mirrored chastity, temperance, and refinement. Cleanliness created armor against and defied the white gaze that attempted to dismiss ladylike qualities manifested by black women.” - Portrait of (an Invented) Lady

Male privilege, however limited for a black man, afforded Smith a laxity when it came to the tenets of respectability. He could play cards, shoot marbles, even occasionally enjoy a drink without permanent damage to his identity as a man. Bates remembered him as a gentle, fun, and loving father. Her affection for him shined, whereas her respect for Susie Smith had its sources in her foster mother’s more severe personality. Susie’s natural seriousness was almost certainly intensified by the intersecting barriers that meant she had to be irreproachably respectable at all times as a “lady” and doubly so as a black lady. In contrast to their husbands, respectable black women did not have the luxury of enjoying blithe indulgences without fear of permanent damage to their reputations within their own communities, as well as white ones.

Portrait of (an Invented) Lady: Daisy Gatson Bates and the Politics of Respectability by Misti Nicole Harper

Portrait of (an Invented) Lady: Daisy Gatson Bates and the Politics of Respectability

“If she ever could have been entirely candid with anyone in her adulthood, perhaps she would have admitted that the corset of respectability politics in Huttig and in her foster home threatened to suffocate her.”

“Natural,” I would suggest, often connoted a specific ontology of white being, aligned with middle-class values and developed within New Left and feminist politics as authentic and antimarket; the term was quickly adopted by Madison Avenue as a selling point for a range of consumer products. Depending on its context, the term “natural” could sometimes work as a race-evasive code for white femininity.

Elspeth H. Brown from Work! “You’ve Got to Be Real” CONSTRUCTING FEMININITY IN THE LONG 1970S

“The fantasy of white feminine innocence, perpetuated through popular culture, has led white women to believe that they are absolved from being beneficiaries of white supremacy.... Forged through in its imperial history, white femininity was accustomed to seeing itself as the vessel of morality that ought to be revered and protected, not distrusted or challenged. “

from Purity by Helen Liu

“ In photographic shoots such as this one, the model produced her sexuality and femininity in relationship to a heterosexual narrative being scripted by both the photographer and the culture at large. As one reporter summarized, models “perform, act, and display their femininity in arresting pictures that re- quire a look and a second look.”13 The model produces what Marcia Ochoa has called “spectacular femininity”: femininities produced in relationship to the idea of them being seen and consumed by others. Like Shrimpton’s turning on of her sexuality for the camera, the production of this spectacular femininity was also a job, one that models turned on and off as part of their work. There’s nothing “natural” about this production of femininity, which seems obvious to everyone in the business; instead, the goal is the production of a persuasive discourse of the natural and the real in relationship to that gender and its representation.” - Elspeth H. Brown from Work! “You’ve Got to Be Real” CONSTRUCTING FEMININITY IN THE LONG 1970S

Pictured: Penny Ashton

“ While Solange is known for her daring style and for pushing against the mainstream in contrast to her more popular big sister, Black Twitter and others on social media commended her for projecting black bougie cool, which appropriates white fashion elegance to heighten black women’s beauty and style. Nonetheless, the specter of elegance and thinness through which Vogue assimilates the black subject into sophisticated whiteness is represented by the slenderized white-wedding aesthetic of Knowles and even in the celebration of svelte, dark-skinned Kenyan ac- tress Lupita Nyong’o, who landed her first Vogue cover that same year with subsequent appearances in 2015, 2016, and 2018. Such aesthetic preferences illuminate how the real beauty challenge for women of African descent is not their skin color but their curves.” - Janell Hobson Remnants of Venus

Remnants of Venus by Janell Hobson

“Slavery and the women absorbed and distorted by that legacy remain as incomprehensible as a sphinx.”

soph-okonedo

It’s not very often that an artist talk sells out with the swiftness of a high-profile pop concert. But that was the case for a highly anticipated talk between artist Kara Walker, who is known for her phantasmagoric cut-paper installations , and filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who is at work on a biopic about Martin Luther King Jr . The pair was teamed up by the Broad as part of the museum’s “Un-Private Collection” artist talk series. Within eight hours of putting the tickets on sale this summer, every last one was gone.

Given these aesthetic treatments, how can black women in the United States and elsewhere see themselves more holistically? What are other ways of representing black women’s bodies? Moreover, can they ever exist beyond what Hortense Spillers argues is our “New World, diasporic plight [that] marked the theft of the body—a willful and violent . . . severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (1987, 67; emphasis in original)? This historical theft, dating back to slavery, renders difficult any claims to a liberated black female sexuality since, as Spillers also argues, black women remain “unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb” (1984, 74), mobilized for others to define their own sexualities. The few black women artists analyzed here are attempting to reclaim their bodies.

Janell Hobson - Remnants of Venus

voiceoftheblackvenus

Both white and black women take up space in Jefferson’s notes as expressions of male passion. To him, they are the embodiment and extension of white male needs and the performance and breath of his inclinations. They are responsive, not active. However, one denotes “elegant symmetry of form,” judgment and natural preference for white men, while the other does not do any choosing or judging. Rather, she, with the “immovable veil of black,” is chosen, purchased, and used—by “Oran-ootan” black slaves and white men. Let Jefferson tell it, she does not even respond. She willingly takes life as it comes to her

Tamura Lomax - BLACK VENUS AND JEZEBEL SLUTS: Writing Race, Sex, and Gender in Religion and Culture (via damnsheelegant)

With that said, black enslaved women and girls were capital and labor. They were moveable property, bought and sold, seen in terms of nature and as workers, though not equal to men. This made black women’s and girls’ labor as breeders and field and domestic workers seem natural and thus innocent. It also further bound them up with mythologies on superwomanhood, inhumanity, and hypersexuality

Tamura Lomax - BLACK VENUS AND JEZEBEL SLUTS: Writing Race, Sex, and Gender in Religion and Culture

Ayana Evans functions as a living art piece in the museum of the white gaze. Her personhood is the last thing to be acknowledged as she maneuvers around a traditionally white space in her authentic Black body as it appears in the cat suit.

voiceoftheblackvenus

“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!” I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (via damnsheelegant)

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Voice of The Black Venus