Maestro:
A Response to the Documentary on the
Underground Dance Music Scene in New York City
By Carmen Mitchell / Princess TamTam
Four years in the making by director, Josell Ramos, Maestro
documents the history of the underground dance music scene by placing
emphasis on the legendary DJ Larry Levan and his place of residency at
the Paradise Garage. Maestro boldly proclaims throughout
promotional materials of its own inventiveness and originality as 'the
most realistic motion picture ever made on dance music culture.' Josell
Ramos documentary is indeed the first know film to chronicle the
underground dance music scene in
New York City.
The
term underground signifies this music and culture as unseen and
unheard from the mainstream and popular mass media and society. It is
unwanted, off-limits or made inaccessible for popular viewing, listening
and cultural consumption. This paper will explore the role of music as
a cultural form and artifact as mediated in the visual documentary. By
utilizing the film Maestro, this endeavor poses as interesting
challenge as the music culture of underground dance, commonly known as
house music, is primarily experiences within the audible contact of the
nightclub as opposed to music videos or even airplay on the radio.
Maestro
accomplishes the feat of documenting a hidden and invisible music scene
in New York City. Like its progenitor of the more popularized disco
music of the seventies, underground dance music is characterized by a
constant 4/4 beat with the second and forth beats being emphasized. The
beats per minute usually range from 120-140 in dance music and is
characterized by a continuous 4/4 beat, the DJ’s use of technology, and
the lyrical discourse on sexuality, happiness, and dance through the
voice of the house diva.
This paper deploys a close reading of Maestro through two main
areas of inquiry and investigation. First, it will explore the
dichotomy of participation within and outside of Maestro as the
participatory mode utilized within this documentary film as well as the
incorporation of my own participation in and outside the film as a
participant in underground dance music scenes. And secondly, to uncover
the role of the documentary in the chronicler of underground cultures
and marginalized groups as represented in Maestro.
The Dichotomies of
Participation
When we view participatory documentaries we expect to witness
the historical world as represented by someone who actively engages
with, rather than unobtrusively observes, poetically reconfigures, or
argumentatively assembles that world (Nichols, pp. 116).
Multifariously, Maestro illustrates participatory action centers
the words, voices and actions of the participants in the underground
dance music scene throughout the entire filmic process of creation,
content, distribution and reception. Maestro was produced by New
York native and longtime participant in the underground dance music,
Josell Ramos. The documentary features rare footage or dancers at the
Paradise Garage, photos, a musical cannon of underground dance classics
as the superb soundtrack, and group dialogue with club goers and
interviews from an impressive roster of djs, producers, and promoters
that reads like a veritable Who’s Who List in dance music for the past
thirty years.
On
a personal and participatory note, I too had been an active participant
in the New York underground dance music scene. But I had alienated the
dance floor milieu for my full time job in a high-stress media
workplace, graduate school at night, a death in the family, and simply
put, boredom and disheartened by the continuous shrinking dance club
scene in the city the supposedly never sleeps. I realized that others
in the movie theater participated in this scene too as from time to time
there was an occasional outburst from the small audience stating that
they knew so and so on the screen from Brooklyn that was on the screen.
I saw Maestro in the village by myself. I was nervous as I sat down and
I wanted to sit in the back and remain unseen by my former club
buddies.
All
the anxiety melted away as I heard the opening bars of the booming bass
line of a classic house song in the darkness of the theater. I realized
how much I absolutely loved this music and missed it as a remarkably
mesmerizing scene in Maestro casts over me. The camera slowly
panned inward to a steady blue neon lighted haze. Multiple voices are
heard as they recount their initial entry towards the light with almost
a heavenly after life or out of body experience full of awe and wonder.
Hushed voices in excitable tones note being simply overwhelmed by the
omnipresent sound of the bass that took hold of them as captives drawing
them closer, pulling them towards the light and the sweaty grinding on
the crowded dance floor of the inner sanctuary, the legendary club known
as the Paradise Garage.
Documenting a Voice,
a Sound and a Place
of the Marginal Underground
‘No scripts, No Actors –
Real Life, A Real World’
‘The World of the Creators of Dance Music’
- Trailer from Maestro
There was just one tape and a lot of it was improvised.
Sometimes the places that we were shooting was dark or light but the
camera was rolling. That’s what I mean by cinema verite - it was
unfolding as we were shooting. We wanted the film to be as raw as
possible. The film has an authentic look and that’s what we were
striving for. We did not want to follow a chronology from 1969 to 1986
that would be predictable for people who know the history. For example,
in 1969 talking about Francis Grosso, in 1971, the “Loft”; you already
know the “Gallery” is coming next then the “Garage” after that. So we
wanted to make it as unpredictable as possible. It was non-linear. We
started with the “Garage”, then the “Gallery”, then Francis Grosso, then
the “Loft” then back to the “Garage” (Ramos, 2004).
But
is it really cinéma vérité, or meaning what Nichols states in his
reference to Dziga Vertov’s as ‘film truth,’ the idea emphasizes that
this is the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or unhampered
truth. (page 117-118 Nichols)? Many reviewers with the creators of the
underground dance scene in
New York
were actually filmed under extreme technical limitation almost so much
to the point of a painful viewing experience. A number of interviews
were simply badly lit, grainy and too dark. One cannot help but to
remain skeptical at entertaining the possibility that it was an
aesthetic and stylistic technique to correlate with the deep dark
rawness of the underground dance music in NYC.
Many postulations can come out of this. Primarily issues of funding
experienced crew and editors. Taken as a whole, it almost does the
documentary injustice because of this serious technical deficiency and
more so if it took four years to create. A particularly painful
interview was with dance music pioneer Francis Grosso. Not only was the
lighting dark on one side of the screen, the movement of Grosso at any
moment put him in and out of a blinding bright light. Grosso was ill and
spoke with a very raspy voice and had trouble breathing.
Although Maestro is a visual documentation of the underground
dance music scene, this particular culture has been archived through the
oral and aural narratives of fans, creators, and disseminators in
recording studios, pirate and official radio stations, house music
events, and most significantly on the dancefloor. Making a documentary
of a subject such as underground and unknown as house and dance music is
a feat until itself. The name even aptly foresees its own mysterious
nature. However, Maestro and the opening sounds are somewhat
familiar to many ears even though some may not know it as such. With its
musical roots starting with disco, underground dance music is the
soundtrack to much of urban nightlife for the past thirty years in
American and abroad.
The
exchange of knowledge and telling ones own story in one’s voice or
viewpoint is crucial in the creation of Maestro. The filmmaker himself
is steeped in the culture and world of underground dance music in
New York City. Rarely does one encounter presumptuous ‘voice of
god’ narrator techniques. Although some may claim that the DJ is almost
a godlike and omnipotent presence on the dancefloor the receptive
experience of underground dance music and culture provides a form of
authority of the dancing audience.
Numerous voices were heard in the scenes that involved group interviews
with club goers outside that reminisced about the Paradise Garage and
the Loft. However, the main emphasis of the voice of the films comes
from the maestro’s themselves. Almost all the words and stories come
from the proclaimed maestros of the underground dance scene themselves.
The term Maestro lends itself that the filmmaker concedes time
and power to the voice of those that lived, created and was involved
participants of the scene.
As
a documentary, Maestro makes great use in rationing one of the few
videotaped scenes of the Paradise Garage. It was rare to bring in
cameras and video recording materials but one can surmise from this rare
footage that gay black and Latino men were the main supporters and
audience for underground dance music at the Paradise Garage. In this
rough footage of amateur video recording in black and white captures the
and the digitized beats the Larry Levan presented to them as a DJ also
concedes his own power to the audience as the success of the DJ is
predicated on the audience’s seal of dancing and emotive approval.
Hence, the organization of underground dance music into a cohesive
musical expression and meaning rests upon the shared performances of the
dancing audience, DJ musical maneuvers within the spatial context of the
dance club. Likewise, it is important to note that the voice in the
film also comes from the use and timing of the music. Because the
documentary centers around underground dance music, the tone, sound
quality and placement of particular music’s throughout the film is
crucial. In one particular scene to signal the entrance of the club
rivalry between the Paradise Garage and David Mancuso’s Loft parties.
The
legendary icon DJ Larry Levan loomed large throughout the film. It was
almost as tribute to this dj himself and his club of DJ residency the
Paradise Garage and equated the whole underground dance music scene in
NYC with him and the Paradise Garage. Incidentally, the cultural and
social reality of current historical moments and events present a
challenge to Maestro's centralization and privileging of a
particular history and its characters and spaces within the many
histories of the underground dance music movement within and outside of
New York City. Yet, some may quip that at the end of a documentary
moment, it comes down to who gets to tell the story and who is willing
to lend an ear as audience. Who takes the initiative and inherent
sacrifice is the definitive voice that defines a part of various
histories and stories of the dance music cultures. Yes, as “current
documentary self-inscription enacts identities – fluid, multiple, even
contradictory – while remaining fully embroiled with public discourses”
(Renov, 4).
Maestro’s
emphasis on the importance of an ordinary garage as a
Paradise transformed the image of this supposedly dark and unused space into
heavenly beacon of dancing pleasure for its primarily black gay
audience. This Paradise Garage was located at
99 King Street on the
lower east side of Manhattan in New York City. According to the film,
this revered dance club for the children, a term of affection for the
community of black and Latino gay men, was indeed transformed from a
literal garage. In fact, underground dance music’s initial acceptance
occurred in spaces that catered to African American and Latino gay men.
These dance clubs were seen as places of refuge from homophobia and
racism. These marginalized communities were able to perform creative
displays of gay sexualities through house music. The automation of the
beat simulates sexual activity with all of its rhythmic pulses, thrusts
and never ending climaxes for the audience. The spatiality of gay and
gay-friendly dance clubs affirmed and approved this sexual and bodily
urgency of house music that was not available in other publicly
sanctioned spaces.
Outside of the well-known and critiqued visual of the music video as
seen on MTV and VH1 and BET, It is my hope that in exploring the
fluidity within, against and between various forms of documentary modes
can signify the emergence of new urgencies in expressing and documenting
these marginal communities and underground music cultures the address
the complexity of multiple histories within and beyond Maestro.
Sistas Gone Wild: Cleo as the Black Lesbian in Set it Off
by Princess TamTam/Carmen
Mitchell. Copyright © 2003
An
examination of Larry Gross’ writings on the representations of lesbians
and gay men in mass media through his article "Out in the Mainstream:
Sexual Minorities in Mass Media" employs the cultural artifact of the rock
and roll film musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2000) as a premier
example of how and what a film could look like through the lens of a
transgender perspective. The examples Gross utilize in his article
centralizes the role of gay men in mass media at the noted absence of very
little representation of lesbians in mainstream media, namely television
and film. Gross recognizes this absence through his attempt to gage
audience reaction of lesbians to the cult classic, Desert Hearts
(1985), one of the first mainstream films about and by lesbians in the
United States accessible to a mass audience.
This paper will extend a reading of Gross’ work by placing lesbians and
the representation of lesbians in mainstream films in the United States at
the center. More specifically, this paper will examine the representation
of black lesbianism in the film Set it Off which stars Queen
Latifah as Cleo, the black lesbian character in this 1996 film. With the
backdrop of urban Los Angeles, Set it Off is the story of four
black women who were friends from childhood from the ghetto. Tired of the
harsh realities of poverty, racism, sexism and violence, the four women
decide to go on a spree of robbing banks through out Los Angeles to remedy
their financial woes.
Given the datedness of Gross’ work and the social realities of the
women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement, there has been a
significant realignment of attitudes and public opinion on the acceptance
of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people, or sexual
minorities as Gross terms, within the social fabric of America as
illustrated in mainstream network television, pay cable television,
independent and mainstream Hollywood movies and film. The enormous success
of NBC’s hit television sitcom Will and Grace to Bravo’s reality
show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Showtime’s drama Queer
as Folk speaks volumes of how far mainstream audiences have come in
accepting images of gay men into their living room during prime time.
However, previous programs like Ellen and Rosie, presented a
dilemma by having their main characters come out of the closet as lesbians
in real life after their television programs were on the air with success
for some time which was met with lowered ratings, confused character
development and plot, and cancellations. Subsequently, the Hollywood
spotlight was now on the actors’ personal lives as lesbians (Ehrenstein,
p. 316) .
Gross would aptly term these entries of sexual minorities in mass media
as the integration of lesbians and gay men into the televised landscape to
provide a glimpse of individuals marginalized primarily because of their
sexuality. However, as Gross asserts that by "1983 nearly all mass media
attention to gay men was in the context of AIDS-related stories, and
because the coverage seems to have exhausted the media’s limited interest
in gay people, lesbians became even less visible than before (if
possible). (p. 413), the current absence of any main lesbians’ character
in network television is still true today. Yet despite this absence on the
small screen, there is more room to visualize and represent lesbians on
the silver screen through independent and Hollywood films.
While Gross places an emphasis on the representation of gay male sexual
minorities in television, one can uncover visual history of lesbians in
film before the celebrated cult classic, Desert Hearts (1985) Gross
utilizes in his article. From the early silent films to the golden age of
Hollywood to low budget horror movies and international film, lesbian
characters have been afforded similar spectacularized character portrayals
that ghettoize gay men and other minority characters. Currently in the
late nineties a number of films have cast a new lesbian character, one who
is a lesbians but eventually goes to the other side of heterosexuality
like Chasing Amy and uproariously panned Gigli. In horror
films, the lesbian vampire are continuously pervasive in Hollywood, in low
budget b movies, and international film with this supernatural and
fantastical character wrapped up in the patriarchical fear of women and
blood through the natural female process of menstruation but conversely
can be seen as the connection between lesbians and vampirism as a stand in
for the unspoken love between two women.
Strikingly, decades before these any of these films, Pandora’s Box
(1928) featured the Countess Geschwitz, as one the first lesbian predatory
characters on the silver screen played by Louise Brooks. Likewise, rumored
real life lesbian lifestyles of films stars during the Golden Age of
Hollywood in the thirties like Greta Garbo, in the film Queen Christina
(1933), and Marlene Dietrich, in Morocco (1930), of which both
movies that featured the Hollywood starlets as cross-dressing women, was
the hot gossip of the time (Weiss, p. 30-32).
The notion of lesbian portrayals on screen by these actors and their
actual love lives and questions of their sexuality in their real lives
continues to be an issue as in the case of Queen Latifah’s celebrated
performance of the black lesbian character of Cleo in ‘Set It Off.’
Black Lesbianism on the Silver Screen: Cleo in Set it Off
Often wrapped up in the complexity of multiple identities that address
the social realities of race, class, gender and sexuality, images of black
lesbians have been far and few on the silver screen. Ann Ciasuallo refers
to Alexis Jarvis that the emergence of the lesbian chic phenomenon
primarily entertained the notions of a racialized whiteness, a delicate,
fashionable femininity acceptable to mainstream society and one that does
not overtly threaten heterosexual masculinity by centering the sexual
desires of femme and lipstick lesbians for straight men who take two women
loving one another as sexual pleasure for themselves.
Alexis Jetter astutely observes that lesbians represented in the
mainstream media "have a few key things in common: They're white.
They're middle class. And they seem more interested in makeup and
clothes than in feminism. In short, they're femmes, or what the
straight world prefers to call lipstick lesbians." (34) Indeed, one
cannot help but notice that the images populating the cultural
landscape are images of a white femme body (Ciasuallo, 2001).
One of the earliest mainstream portrayals of black lesbians on screen
was Alice Walker’s adaptation of her award winning novel The Color
Purple (1985). However, the movie watered down their close
relationship in the novel to a simple bisexual love affair between Celie
and Shug within the backdrop of a staunchly black masculinity and
heterosexuality in question. Subsequently, the supposedly negative
portrayal of black men in the film created a cultural chasm and outcry
from numerous black men in America. With this in mind, the lesbian
relationship between the two black women that took the center place in the
book was now fleeting bisexual moments in the film watered down for
mainstream audiences.
As a fast forward to the next decade in the mid-nineties, though
obviously heterosexual, another ‘you go, girl!-esque’ group movie was the
hit Waiting to Exhale (1995). With this film’s success, Hollywood
thought mainstream audiences were ready for black women at the center of
major Hollywood films. Featuring another batch of black women starlets,
Set it Off (1996) was riding high off the coat tails of a combination
of Waiting to Exhale and the growing success of hip hop culture in
mainstream audiences. Set it Off tells the story of four childhood friends
for the ghetto grown up. Each woman takes a different path in life towards
her own sense of womanhood. Similarly, each one is stalled by the stark
reality of being a black woman trying to survive the landscape of urban
poverty in South Central Los Angeles. After one pitfall after another,
from Stony’s (Jada Pinkett) brother’s wrongful death from the police, to
Tisean’s (Kimberly Elise) only child taken away from her, along with the
loss of Frankie’s (Vivica Fox) job, Cleo (Queen Latifah) and her childhood
friends decide out of desperation on the ambitious and dangerous deed of
robbing Los Angeles banks. In her review of Set it Off in Outlaw
Chicks and Lesbian Desperadoes, Greta Christina aptly describes her
reaction to Cleo:
Interestingly, one of the main characters in Set It Off,
Cleo, is also a dyke. Not just a nice pretty bluppie either
(that's "black lesbian yuppie" for the acronym-impaired), but a big,
butch, working-class dyke in jeans and T-shirt and no makeup who fixes
cars and sometimes steals them. (She's played with grit and flair and
humor Queen Latifah, to my panting and drooling delight.) And unlike a
lot of movie dykes, she has a way cute girlfriend and serious sex
life, both of which you get to see a whole lot of before the movie's
over. I'm not sure what to make of this. Maybe it's easier to show
dykes and dyke sexuality when your characters are outlaws and outcasts
already. Or maybe it's part of the whole women-bonding thing; when
you're showing women rebelling against the social order, it kinda
makes sense that their loyalties and affections would be with one
another (1995).
Also, interestingly enough, Cleo is spared a particular instance of
tragedy and upheaval compared to her counterparts as noted above. She
appears to co-exist and even thrive in the ghetto-fabulous lifestyle that
conversely plagues her sister friends. Cleo’s entrance on the silver
screen as a butch black lesbian in Set it Off begins with a
competitive display of automobiles, one of the prime symbols of
contemporary masculinity, as another brother from the ghetto disrespects
Cleo in her raggedy and dilapidated car. After cussing the brother out
with obscenities, Decked out in overall, tee shirt and cornrows, Cleo’s
butch lesbianism is complete with a pretty feminine girlfriend on
one buff arm and a forty-ounce of liquor in the other, mimics the antics
and daily life of just another unemployed and idle black man in the hood.
In fact, Cleo’s is the first of the four women to even suggest the idea of
robbing a bank as a viable alternative to making money legally. Her eyes
glazing over with daydreams of cash in her hand, Cleo’s main motives for
wanting more money are voiced as being able to outfit her car to rival
those of the other men in the ghetto.
All four women are forced into menial jobs as cleaning women for their
shady boss Luther, of Luther’s Janitorial. Because of the low-wages earned
as a cleaning woman and lack of money for childcare, Thesia must bring her
child into the workplace. Subsequently, the child accidentally drinks some
hazardous cleaning supplies and is rushed to the hospital. Thesia’s only
child is temporarily placed into foster care with the threat of being
taken away permanently because of child endangerment. This is the final
straw for the four women as they all agree that robbing a bank will be the
only answer to their problems.
After the first successful heist that garners each woman a couple of
thousand dollars, the feel that in order to not be suspect, they continue
with their regular day jobs. All except Cleo who, in another telling scene
that, portrays this specific representation of Cleo as butch black lesbian
caught up within the motifs of black ghetto thug masculinity and limited
expressions of black lesbians in mainstream media. Cleo spends her money
from the first bank heist on decking out her car with gold rims and new
paint job in addition to outfitting her femme girlfriend with expensive
risqué lingerie.
Following Anne Ciaosuollo examination of femme lesbianism in mainstream
media as inevitably white women while portrayals of black lesbians are
reserved for butchness, it is interesting to note that Cleo’s black
girlfriend in Set it Off is visibly the femme in the relationship.
She even has short hair died blond with feminine sexy short shorts, halter
tops and high heels. However, no where in the film does she have spoken
dialogue or even one word uttered out of her mouth. In fact, Frankie (Vivica
Fox) quips under her breath to Stony and Thesia at the beginning of the
movie when she enters with "Does she even talk?’ Cleo’s girlfriend, though
a femme black lesbian, does not have a voice and appears as eye candy as
she struts and panders to the sexual whim of Cleo and the audience.
Despite the bold scene of Cleo and her girlfriend seductively feeling up
and kissing on her girlfriend, When a portrayal of black femme lesbian
occurs, she is without a voice, literally and simple eye candy.
Despite the boldness of Cleo and her girlfriend’s lesbian relationship
in Set it Off, the primary romantic interest of the movie focuses
on the heterosexual relationship between Stony (Jada Pinkett) and Blair
Underwood. Despite Stony’s less privileged background from the ‘hood and
Blair’s Harvard educated and upscale lifestyle, these two opposites slowly
fall in love. However, the last and most difficult bank all four women are
set to rob is Blair’s bank where his is employed as an investment banker.
Predictably the last crime being the most difficult one fails as Thesia is
shot and seriously wounded by a gunshot wound from a security guard. All
of the women make an escape with the money and a wounded Thesia in the
getaway car with the police hot of their trail. Thesia dies and is left in
the getaway car while the Cleo, Stony and Frankie shift to Cleo’s own
decked out hoopty ride. Trapped in tunnel in the car with helicopters,
nightly news camera televising the car chase, and police hot on their
trail, Cleo knows they must split up and urges Stony and Frankie to escape
on foot with the money promising to catch up with them.
One of the last scenes with Cleo is a spectacular and pivotal display
of black butch lesbians to the hilt. Blinding the boundaries of plight of
black men and police brutality, crime and escape and guns, Wrought up in
the lived experiences of black men, Like a real man, Cleo enacts a
martryesque persona of rooting for the bad guys, this time black girls in
the film. Cleo knows this is the end and realizes that if she must die at
the hands of the police, she must go out swinging. With a sorrowful ballad
as mood music and Evoking a James Dean-esque imagey, whom himself is a
iconic figure for butch lesbians, the camera slow motions on a the
cigarette Cleo slowly puts to her mouth and lights while holding back the
tears knowing her fate is near. She takes a puff and revs up her car
eyeing the situation of police cars, armed guards and hovering
helicopters.
As a final act of thumbing her proverbial black butch nose in the face
of the cops and death, Cleo amps her car up like a challenging bully ready
to fight to the last breath as it hops up and down on the jumpers to and
fro as in a car show taking first place in a car show. Charging on through
sirens and cop cars in full force, Cleo rages her car forward crashing and
careering thought the gun blasts and richochet bullets. Eventually, Cleo’s
car smokes toward the end of the street exhausted with bullet holes and
broken glass. The eerie silence of a few seconds is disrupted as suddenly
a weary and wounded Cleo triumphantly emerges from her car with a machine
gun blasting straight at the cops who in turn shoot her down with
continuous aimed shots eventually killing her. She dies with her fists
raised up against her chest and slowly slumps over her car and then falls
to the ground. The camera then cuts to Cleo’s girlfirned who is glued to
the television watching the death of her lover unfold right before her
eyes. Still no word or utterance of sorry. Only tears and a trembling
mouth inform the emotions felt by Cleo’s femme girlfriend who is now alone
in silence and still with no voice. As for the other remaining sistagirl
bank robbers, After watches Frankie get shot and killed before her eyes,
Stony is the only one to escape death is as she hides in a tour bus bound
for Mexico.
Cleo’s character is not on the margins and does not wholly exist to
explain her sexuality to mainstream heterosexual characters in the film.
After all, the main romantic interest of the film is between Stony and
Keith, despite Queen Latifah’s stellar spotlight stealing performance as
Cleo. All of the women, Stony, Cleo, Tisean and Frankie, were already
positioned as outcasts to mainstream white, middle class society as poor
black women from the ghetto. Because of this, their collective outsider
status embraces, without question or confrontation, Cleo’s lesbianism and
assists the audience in doing so too.
Gossip and Rumors
"That scene in Set It Off where I kissed that girl? I've
never watched it. I mean Dana [Latifah's real name] is not comfortable
watching Dana doing stuff like that. What I do from my point of view
is one thing, but seeing it is another thing. So I've never actually
watched that scene, every time it comes I know it and I turn my
head.... I tried to get out of it. . . . I didn't think it was that
necessary, my mother didn't think it was that necessary, but this
guy's directing the movie and he's got the last call." The Source
Magazine
"I don't have any problems with my sexuality, whatever you wanna
think I am. I'll never answer the question. I'd rather have you die
wanting to know."
Before her foray into films such as the butch lesbian character in set
it off, Queen Latifah was always marked with the gossip and rumors
surrounding her sexuality. Black women in hip hop music and culture were
associated with the roughness and harsh words and gestures that seemingly
reserved for men, many black women in hip hop adopted these same stances
in order to be taken seriously in this intensely male dominated arena of
hip hop music and culture. Hence, because of their masculinized femininity
in hip hop, a number of female emcees, such as Da Brat, MC Lyte, Missy
Misdemeanor and Queen Latifah have been rumored to be lesbians or at least
bisexual.
The contemporary image of a certain black excessive masculinity
furthered the success and demonization of hip hop music and
culture. The raw realities expressed by many black hip hop artists spoke
to the violence of urban life and their masculinities in the context of
the other, black femininity. Hence, the infamous ‘bitch and ho’’ are
common worded motifs throughout rap lyrics. In this musical discourse
dominated by 'authenticated' black men, female emcees in hip hop music are
constantly envisioned as "second rate imitations of men and butchy
lesbians, and indeed many of them have taken pains to assert their
heterosexual status" (Potter, 97). However, some black female hip hop
emcees like Queen Latifah "draw[s] from the hyper-masculine moves of black
male rappers…" (Halberstam, 29) that invokes Halberstam’s elaboration on a
female masculinity or butched lesbianism.
Larry Gross’ article elaborates on the subversive use of irony and
satirical communication between gay men as camp (p. 417). A viable
counterpart to this gay male subversion of media texts by the use of camp
is its feminization through the re-appropriation of gossip as a recognized
form of communication between women, and between lesbians in particular.
Edith Becker notes in her article on Lesbians and Film that,
‘The most important viewing strategy had been to concentrate on the
subtext, the ‘hidden’ meaning, of commercial films. The notion of the
lesbian subtext depends on the knowledge, suspicion, or hope that some
participans in the film (director, actress, screenwriter) were
themselves lesbians, and that their perspective can be discerned in
the film even though disguised. Subtexting, then, depends for its cues
on gossip. Gossip provides the official unrecorded history of lesbian
participation in film. Actresses and directors have had to hide their
identity in order to preserve their careers in a homophobic society"
(Becker, et al, p. 30).
Although the real life sexual orientation of Queen Latifah is not
really known or flaunted in the public eye unlike other celebrities, the
fact of the matter is that lesbian audiences, especially black lesbians
are so starved for images of themselves to reflect their lives and
experiences, the communicatory utilization of gossip and rumors exist to
fuel this hunger and hope. Very much like the entrance of Desert Hearts,
lesbian audiences were happy to finally see themselves in a positive light
of the silver screen. The growing access and knowledge of new technologies
in current grassroots and creative film making have rendered first time
amateur filmmakers with the ability to tell their own stories. Numerous
grassroots and alternative media outlets and archives such as Women Make
Movies, DYKE TV, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives and hundred of
independently owned and woman centered film production companies continue
to challenge the Hollywood monopoly on images and representations of
lesbians of all colors in film.
Although it set a precedent in the representation of black lesbianism
in mainstream film through the character of Cleo, Set it Off is not
the only reflection. As with the history of lesbians in film discussed
earlier in this paper, one must uncover the rich and growing visual
narratives in films about lesbians by and for lesbians. Cheryl Dunye’s
Watermelon Woman, Michelle Parkerson’s Storme, Lady of the Jewelbox Revue,
Storme- and the Lady Jewel Box Review, are just a few films that tell the
narratives and lived histories and experiences of black lesbians often
times for and by black lesbians is a proactive proclamation by Larry Gross
all marginalized groups, black, poor, lesbian, gay, leftist and otherwise
must heed.
‘The ultimate expression of independence for a minority audience
struggles to free itself from the dominant cultures hegemony is to
become creators and not merely the consumers of media images. In
recent years lesbian women and gay men have begun – although with
difficulty – to gather the necessary resources with which to tell our
own stories (Gross, p. 419)
References Cited
Gross, L. (2001). Out in the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass
Media. In M.G. Durham & D.M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural
studies: Keyworks (pp. 405-423). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
(Reprinted from Remote control: Television, audiences and cultural
power, pp. 130-49, by E. Seiter et al, Eds., 1989, New York: Routledge)
Linden, A. (1998, August). From here to royalty. The Source: The
magazine of hip-hop music, culture, and politics, 157, 158.
Becker E., et al. (1995). Lesbians and film. In C.K. Creekmur & A. Doty
(Eds.), Out in culture: Gay, lesbian and queer essays on popular
culture (pp. 25-43). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weiss, A. (1993). Vampires and violets: Lesbians in film. New
York, NY: Penguin Books.
White, P. (1999). Uninvited: Classical Hollywood cinema and lesbian
representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
Ehrenstein, D. (2000). Open secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000 (Rev.
ed.). New York, NY: Perennial.
Ciasullo, A. M. (2001, Fall). Making her (in)visible: cultural
representations of lesbianism and the lesbian body in the 1990s.
Feminist Studies. Retrieved December 1, 2003, from http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0300/3_27/81889004/p1/article.jhtml
Christina, G. (1995). Outlaw chicks and lesbian desparadoes. [Review of
the motion picture Set it Off]. Retrieved December 1, 2003 from
http://www.fishnetmag.com/reviews/1996/11-29/outlaw_chicks.html
Potter, R. (1995). Spectacular vernaculars: Hip-hop and the politics
of postmodernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Halbersham, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Gray, F.G. (Producer/Director), & Bufford, T. & Lanier, K. (Writers),
(1996). Set it off [Motion picture]. United States: New Line Cinema.
Speilberg, S. (Director), & Walker, A. (Writer), (1985) The color
purple [Motion picture]. United States: Amblin Entertainment.
Dunye, C. (Director), (1996). Watermelon woman [Motion picture].
United States: First Run Features.
Parkerson, M. (Director) (1987). Storme: Lady of the jewel box
[Motion picture]. United States: Eye of the Storm Productions.
Pabst, G.W. (Director) (1928). Pandora’s box (Die buchse der
Pandora) [Motion picture]. Germany: Nero Film.
Mamoulian, R. (Director) (1933). Queen Christina [Motion
picture]. United States: MGM.
Von Sternberg, J. (Director) (1930). Morocco [Motion picture].
United States: Paramount.
Cultural
Crossroads: Miami 2003
Association for
Technology in Music Instruction
Society for Ethnomusicology
The College Music Society
Joint Conference Meeting
October 1-5,
2003
Panel Chair: Kai Fikentscher, Ramapo College of Music
Panel Title: Issues in Electronic Dance Music,
Saturday, October 4, 2003, 1:45 pm
Panel Abstract:
Over the past quarter of a century, electronics have helped redefine
the production and consumption of dance music on a global scale. Known
more often by a plethora of stylistic terms such as house, techno, or rave
music, and less often by the overarching label electronica, contemporary
dance music and its sites of production and consumption have only recently
attracted the attention of ethnomusicologists. This panel is comprised of
four presentations whose authors focus on various aspects that help define
many of the often interrelated strands of contemporary dance music, such
as race, class, gender and the construction and maintenance of
(sub)-cultural identities and affinities. These examinations are part of a
larger and growing discourse within ethnomusicology on the relationships
between musical style, social and cultural identities, and technologies of
dance and music (including electronics, the internet, and the human body).
Farzaneh Hemmasi, Columbia University
Title: "Feeling the Music: Movement, Embodiment, and House Music at
Bang the Party"
Abstract:
Bang the Party (BTP), a "party" or club night in Brooklyn, New York, is
a weekly house music event that features an extremely diverse group of
attendees, who perform a variety of popular dances and movement styles. I
combine a discussion of origins of, and connections between, music and
dance styles encountered at BTP, investigating links between rhythm and
dance as observed at the party as the expressive, externalized embodiment
of sound. While other authors on "club cultures" (e.g. Gilbert and Pearson
2000 and Malbon 2001) and related topics (such as capoeira, c.f. Downey
2002) have commented on issues relating to music and movement, this paper
contributes to the study of contemporary urban social dance by focusing on
specific practices and voices from the dance floor and the participants’
connections to related genres and aesthetics of disco and hip-hop, as
contextualized within the local histories of New York City. Through dance
and discourse on the subject, party participants raise a complicated set
of issues connecting rhythmaticity, (sub-)cultural affinity, and
racialized notions of dancing ability. Based on several years of
participation in, and observation of BTP, this essay also explores the
ways dancers differently transmute musical sound and texts into
performances of culturally informed identity and memory.
Beverly May, New York University, NY
Title: The Chocolate City Legacy: Race & Class in Detroit Techno
Abstract:
Racial and class issues have heavily influenced the creation and
evolution of Techno music, a sub-genre of electronic dance music that
evolved out of Chicago House and emerged in Detroit during the 1980's as a
form of "Black" music: it was created by African-Americans, for an
African-American audience, within an African-American socio-cultural
heritage and mileu, and it contained distinct African-American musical
elements. However, Techno's was also heavily influenced by prior white
and/or European artists and musical movements, including Germany's
Kraftwerk and many "industrial" and
"electro-pop" groups of the 1980's.
Techno became enormously popular with European audiences from its
earliest releases, and soon morphed into a global genre associated with
European producers and the predominantly white Rave scene. These changes,
in turn, influenced the genre's form and subsequent evolution, diminishing
the subsequent public awareness and influence of the genre's
African-American roots.
Some Techno scholars, such as Simon Reynolds and Bill Brewster, have
tended to cover Techno's racial and class evolution from a Eurocentric
standpoint, while others have implied but not explicitly analyzed the
music's complex African-American racial and cultural heritage, such as Dan
Sicko. My research attempts to clarify the impact and role of the music's
socio-cultural heritage on its form, impact and evolution.
Carmen Mitchell aka Princess TamTam, Brooklyn College, UCLA
Title: Diva Delight: Theorizing House Music and House Divas
Abstract:
My research explores the mediation of racialized sexualities and gender
within house music. Whereas many sources on house music note that this
music formed in Chicago, Illinois, as a contemporary dance music text with
primarily gay African American and Latino men at the helm, I explore the
historical formations, articulations, and dissemination of house music
with a focus on the African American female performer, commonly known as
the house diva (a descendant of the disco diva to the extent that house is
the musical offspring of disco).
In this presentation, I aim to address the following questions: In what
ways can the African American woman as house diva be centered within and
beyond gay club cultures? How can one place the performance and
articulation of the diva as a racialized and gendered icon in house music
within the continuum of African American music? What is the relationship
between technology and gender within that continuum? Through an
examination of the use of digital technologies in house music, the
construction of race, gender, and sexuality as "other" will be explored.
John von Seggern, University of California, Riverside
Title: Network Effects: the Internet and the Chinese Rave Scene
Abstract:
Since the first raves were held in Beijing in 1995, a sizable
electronic dance music scene has grown up in the People’s Republic of
China. Clubbing has become a popular activity among a significant segment
of the country’s growing urban middle class, and an indigenous culture of
Chinese DJs, MCs, producers and promoters has emerged.
In this presentation, I will point to some specific ways in which
increasing Internet usage among participants in this scene has contributed
to its rapid growth nationwide. In a country where public access to
traditional mass media is strictly controlled by the government, the
Internet has played a crucial role by providing members of the dance
community with a viable alternative communications channel as well as a
site for constructing new group identities. More generally, as Chinese
clubbers are using the Net to organize and promote their activities, as
they are exposed to new ideas and lifestyles through the widespread use of
email and chat rooms. As new opportunities for independent
entrepreneurship and wealth creation emerge, there is increasing evidence
of specific ways in which the Internet can act to reduce government
control over the Chinese population.
Bearing in mind Attali’s idea of music as prophecy, what kind of
messages about the future of modern China might we see emerge in places
such as the main dancefloor at Club Rojamin in Shanghai, where on any
given weekend more than a thousand clubbers might typically be found
dancing to a mix of electronic beats from all over the world?
The Melting Pot
Saturday, February 1, 2003
New York City
I was interested in what the lady bartender had said. Something
about how she was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the Melting Pot
crowd. Upscale, diverse, professional, and how much she liked to mingle
amongst them herself. Yeah, the Melting Pot's crowd was just that: a
multicultural mix of earth kids with headwraps and dashikis to casually
dressed folks fresh from a nice dinner in midtown to a few rag tag b-boys
and girls in sweat and sneakers squirming and itching to move on the
dancefloor and to others folks who just happen to be in the stew of
things.
|
I
casually mingled in the close coziness of the Melting Pot family. Having
attended the first Melting Pot in September, I was impressed with the
collage of performers, spontaneous spoken word, to visual art spread
throughout the venue. This time around I took in the visual art by
featured artists like the limitless multi-media expressions of Shweta
Bhardwaj, Head Fashion Consultant of mondomedeusah and photographers Jesse
Curtis, whose pictures worked to add dimension and scope through the eyes
of her subjects while Hassan Kinley’s images of candidly presented day
life and love in the Dominican Republic. |
 |
| |
DJ
Ian Friday takes in some art |
A sista planted incense around the room that enabled the dancers to see
themselves amongst the smoke that waffled upwards to the yellow and red
hazy lights. Just in time, as the crowd was ready for the poet,
Postmidnight, from the creative duo, BodyPoets. The other half of duo was
dancer/choreographer Kazum Motomura. We sat and stood at attention for
Postmidnight's stoic black earth child demeanor guided our assumptions of
what he might speak about. War and President Bush? The Man and
Reparations? My Queen, the Black Woman? No. None of that. Instead, he
humorously chuckled out a poem proclaiming his love for....bacon.
Dude, bacon! His pro-pork diatribe was a wacky
worded assault to the more righteous-than-thou Maxwell/Badu Mafioso kids
that bombard the spoken work circuit with cowry shells, incense, backpacks
and garden burgers. We were cracking up as he
ended his carnivorous guilt trip with beads of sweat on his brow and
clinched teeth to quell his appetite and love for 'the other white meat.'
*giggles*
Later, my fellow audience members and I became antsy as we waited for
the next artistic treat. We were thoroughly satisfied, as RhythMutation, a
trio of eclectic performers took to the stage. Immediately, the crowd was
struck by Chikako Iwahori, the fierce Asian girl, who possessed an in-yo-face
slap happy toe tap steps while her ivory sista, Stephanie Larriere,
parleyed a fanciful but adventurous footwork that
complemented her companion. The two tap divas worked together with the
fast procession of beats that their spectacled brother, Greg Burrows, on
African drums brought to the stage. They twirled and pranced with feet
tickling the floor as they smacked their thighs with heated palms. The
audience answered by our hoops and hollers that fueled the playful
competition between them. They finally closed with a bold barrage of
footsteps, toe taps and drum beats that kept every member of the crowd on
the edge and wanting more!
Next,
our beloved pro-pork poet, Postmidnight of the duo the BodyPoets returned
to the stage with his dancing compatriot Kazum, who donned a face mask.
This time around both artists unveiled a more somber, though equally
explosive, performance of dance, movement and words. Masked with a silver
place across his face, the dancer fought with bodily exhaustion against,
with and between the poetic bards of his lyrical brother. It was unique
display of collaborative expressivities of dance and poetry.
The BodyPoets express themselves
Interspersed between these performances were the DJ’s blessed
selections of soul, rock, hip hop, jazz, salsa, house and good music from
music extraordinarres Ian Friday of the celebrated Tea Party events and
Melting Pot’s own Kervyn Mark. The baby power and soaked bodies of the
dancers attested to this even more. ‘Yes, yes, yes y’all we gotta make it
hot in the melting pot! We gotta make it hot in the melting pot! We gotta
make it hot in the melting pot!,’ the crowd exclaimed with smiling faces
on the dancefloor…
Love, princess tamtam
Hottentot Venus Revisited:
Multiple Expressivities of the Black Female Body in
Visual Art and Music Performance by Princess TamTam/Carmen
Mitchell. Copyright © 2003
The ‘Hottentot Venus’ or Saarjite Baartman and the
Colonial Gaze
I begin this work on diva delight from recent
thoughts in cyberspace in addition to revealing my
own growing interest in art
criticism. The ‘I’ness and personal narrative of
this writing helps me to invoke a sense
of agency by identifying this as a personal quest of interrogating the
representations of particular Black female bodies in cultural creativity
and social reality. To me, art has a story and a history to
tell, especially some forms of African
and African American art. Hence, I feel this will
be crucial to my overall understanding of African
American (1) double-consciousness, a term and idea popularized by
scholar W.E.B. Dubois, which,
'...is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one’s self through they eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks in on amused
contempt and pit. One ever feels his twoness, -an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"
(Dubois, 215).
This double-consciousness of Africans in the Americas is
the mindset or way of living for many Black communities of the so-called new
world. These dual lived experiences, both African and European, are a
result of forced migration and labor otherwise known as chattel
slavery spanning over the course of three centuries (Lewis, 8).
Nevertheless, I assert that Africans throughout the Diaspora and African
Americans have provided some of the most prominent forms of
cultural expressions in the West despite the violent, forced encounter
between African and European worlds, standards, and value systems. This is
illustrated through the creation of a distinct, complex expressive culture
in music, dance, and art.
I would like to pose an
interesting correlation between these cultural mediums
for they all seem to demploy multiple
modes of articulations. For example, the musical performance of Black divas
with spectacularized movement, antics, and interaction with the crowd upon
the stage, or the visual attire and bodily adornments of Black dancers, or
the contrast motifs of music that occur through the historiography of
African American visual art.
Throughout discovering African American Art, I have come
to unlearn the ways of dominant westernized notions of passive, objective,
and distanced consumption of visual art within the hegemonic spatiality of
certain museums. However, as Samella Lewis indicates, the role of African
American art, like so many other artistic and expressive cultural creations
of this community, calls for an active engagement and responsibility to its
potential public (Lewis, 4). As an African American woman, I boldly contend
that the main project of this writing speaks to my own interest in the image
of the African American female body and sexuality in art and its
relationship to African American musical traditions.
The Deployment of Heterogeneous Methodologies
In order to carry out this dialogical
proposal more specifically, I plan to incorporate the postmodernist
(2) technique of invoking a sense of timelessness and borderlessness
by deploying a number of specific visual images of African and African
American female bodies that fluctuate through space and time. Likewise, in
the methodology of cultural studies, I wish to compare and correlate these
images of raced and gendered bodies to the trope of the African American
female performer commonly known as the ‘house diva.’ in the contemporary
dance genre of house music
I will invoke the methods of feminist and critical race
theory by centering gender and sexuality along with race and Blackness.
Thus, my proclivities for interrogating the iconography of house divas along
with visual creations of the Black women’s bodies stems from the
predominance of large, fuller figure African American women such as Martha
Wash, Jocelyn Brown, and Kim Mazelle as house divas. I will emphasize a
number of artistic representations of African and African American women’s
bodies which assemble alternative views of womanhood contrary to the
dominant, bourgeois, White-skinned idea of fragility and litheness that
remains prevalent, despite the contrary, in public
displays of popular art in magazines, television, and movies.
In keeping with the feminist and critical race
(3) approach to cultural expressions, I plan to weave my own
personal, yet relevant, anecdotes within the context of this project. The
oft-cited feminist statement that "the personal is political" along with an
affirmation of personal convictions in one’s understanding of African
American art, or all art for the matter, assists my methodological maneuver
of distinct narratives that can be readily applied to larger communities in
struggle against various oppressions.
Together, these heterogeneous methods will assist me in
proving that concepts of excessiveness and overabundance of a particular
heavy Black female body conjures up paradoxical notions of Black womanhood,
sexuality, and emotionality. I provide three main trajectories to support my
general argument. First, I use an historicizing lens to explore images of
Black female bodies within popular Western European colonial portrayals
specifically through the so-called phenomenon of the Hottentot Venus.
Secondly, I move through geographic locals and time to explore the creations
of Black artists in the African Diaspora that reconstruct and subvert
negative imagery of raced and sexed bodies through photography, painting,
and mixed media. Lastly, I make similar associations of visual art with
audible music by focusing on the corporeality of the
heavy-set African American singing diva as an
iconic figure in pop and house music. To conclude,
I believe this writing will grant me a crucial lens to look at the racial,
gendered, and classed phenomenon and social realities of Black women in our
current historical moment through unique cultural expressions that recall
African cultural and philosophical retentions in American and the African
Diaspora.
Historical Trajectories of Black Women’s Raced and Sexed
Bodies in Art
The ‘Hottentot Venus’ or Saarjite Baartman and the
Colonial Gaze
"Several prints dating from the early nineteenth century
illustrate the sensation generated by the spectacle of "The Hottentot
Venus." A French print entitled "La Belle Hottentot," for example,
depicts the Khosian women standing with her buttocks exposed on a
box-like pedestal. Several figures bend straining for a better look,
while a male figure at the far right of the image even holds his
seeing-eye glass up to better behold the women's body. The European
observers remark on the women's body: "Oh! God Damn what roast beef!"
and "Ah! how comical is nature" (Thompson, 1998).
The visual images of The Hottentot Venus (figure
one) exemplifies the historical discourse surrounding a particularized Black
womanhood. The Hottentot Venus whose real name was Saarjite Baartman was
brought from Africa not as a slave but in the hope of finding work. A
traveling English doctor named William Dunlop convinced Baartman she would
make a fortune if she displayed herself throughout Europe because of her
so-called uniqueness in bodily attributes, namely her large and protruding
buttocks. In figure one, the pedestal that Baartman is propped upon
resembles a slave auction block. However, the onlookers are not purchasing a
body for labor but consuming her with their curiosity and own thoughts of
racial hierarchy and amazement. She is poised as if attempting to cover her
breast but to no avail. Baartman seems to place her own gaze not towards the
immediate onlookers but to the audience that is viewing the picture itself.
She does not seem to challenge authority directly but displaces it on
distance, anonymous, and unseen audiences.
Although I viewed various representations of the
Hottentot Venus throughout my liberal arts education and
non-classroom based learning, the image in figure one is the
first time I had seen the Hottentot Venus in the presence of others. The
other prints displayed Saarjite Baartman as a
lone, solitary figure with a front and a side profile shot much like an
anthropological specimen to be studied and observed for abnormality. Surely
enough, in an incredulous act of objectification, the so-called elongated
genitalia and brains of the deceased Saarjite Baartman were removed from her
body and stored for public display at the Musee de l’Homme for over 150
years (Weekly Mail & Guardian, 1995).
However, I draw attention to my initial reaction to the
particularized imagery of the Hottentot Venus above because of the very
audience she attracts. My own gaze is not posited directly upon this
colonized Black woman’s body but upon the White colonizers that look at
amazement upon this raced and gendered body in awe. All of the onlookers are
White and male except for one woman. None of the onlookers peer directly at
the colonized model upon display. However, their eyes are directed towards
objectified and segmented body parts of Saarjite Baartman In fact, I noticed
that the ramification of class can be interpreted
via the placement of these spectators. All of them appear to represent
different class and occupational strata of English society. The seemingly
bourgeois middle-class gentleman in frock coat and top hat keeps a safe
distance from the supposed oversexed and erotically dangerous Black, female
body while obtaining a closer view with the help of his glass lens. However,
the others are within close proximity of the Hottentot Venus. The White
woman in the picture is the only one who possesses the gendered sameness
that allows her look directly up towards Saarjite Baartman elongated labia
of her vagina. Two White men have on traditional Scottish kilt skirts and
are positioned in the front and back of the Hottentot Venus. One kilted man
placed in the back of Baartman buttocks is not passively standing by
looking. Like the other spectators, he is active in this work as he appears
to reach out in childlike wonder at the protruding bare buttocks of this
Black woman’s bodily segment.
This leads me towards and interesting observation that
the deranged popularity of Saarjite Baartman expressed dominant mainstream
and White racist societies contradictory White male desire and denial
of Black women’s bodies. The appellation, Hottentot Venus given to
her imagines Baartman as a sepia, degenerate animalism of the milky-skinned
Venus, or goddess of love in Greek mythology.
The name ‘Hottentot’ was also a derogatory term for the African ethnic
group called the Quena people who were aboriginal to the southern area of
the African continent. (Weekly Mail and Guardian, June 1995).
Likewise, many White women tried to limit White male desire for particular
Black women’s bodies. They answered this taboo desire with the subsequent
entrance of the bustle in European women’s fashion around this time as an
answer to quell White male desire of the competitive and contemptuous Black
female body. The bustle was a type of dress that contained large padding
around the back of the hips to simulate the Hottentot Venus’ buttocks. In
fact,
"Her anatomy even inspired a comic opera in France.
Called The Hottentot Venus or Hatred to French Women, the drama
encapsulated the complexities of racial prejudice and sexual fascination that
occupied European perception of aboriginal people at that time" (Weekly
Mail & Guardian, 1995).
Those that gazed upon the naked body of Saarjite were
audience members of freak shows or bizarre oddity fairs popularized
throughout the working class in supposedly civilized western countries like
France and England. When placed in an historical context, it is my
estimation that the cartoonish, Black and White visual representations of
the Hottentot Venus was disseminated to a larger, popular audience for mass
consumption through newspapers, tabloids and magazines. Indeed, it was
possible that this image was used as a publicity advertisement to attract
audience members to the so-called freak shows and circuses Saartije Baartman
performed in to make a living.
I suggest these shows attracted a mainly working class
clientele to take their minds and worries off their daily lives in the toil
and hardship of the beginnings of working class industrial economies and
further class stratification of Europe with the emergence of capitalism as a
global economic phenomenon. In addition to this, the peculiar institution of
slavery in the New World had informed White curiosity and
the mass explanation of racial hierarchy based primarily on skin
color. The body of Saarjite Baartman confirmed the warped notions of
difference and the missing link between man and animal. However, Baartman’s
body was not only limited to the gaze of the working class but also the
‘upper crust’ of society where she:
"…excited the attention of the Parisian intelligentsia
at the time. Cuvier, who was at the center of an eminent school of
social anthropologists met me - on display as a naked and exotic savage
dressed only in feathers – at a high society ball organized by the
Countess Du Barrie. This was the time of pre-Darwinist social
anthropology and [Dr.] Cuvier believed she was the missing link, the
highest form of animal life and the lowest form of human life" (Weekly
Mail & Guardian, 1995).
Tragically, Baartman had to supplement her meager income as a prostitute
and died at the age of 26 most likely of syphilis (Weekly Mail
& Guardian, June 1995).
Part Two: "Venus Hottentot 2000" through Space and
Time for the New Millennium
The exaggeration of the Black female body as the representations of the
Hottentot Venus on display throughout Europe seems very reminiscent of naked
Black women placed on the auction block during slavery in the so-called New
World. The justification for this public, naked display of Black female
bodies rested upon the supposed uninhibited sexual nature and savage lust of
Black male and female sexuality.
I turn to the perspectives of critical race theory to
probe these inquiries. The Dred Scott V Sanford case was a seminal
court decision that arose concerning the actual humanity of Black slaves in
the United States. The Court ruled that Dred Scott, a Black slave, could not
sue any party for his freedom or utilize any services of the court. Being a
slave, he was deemed to be property, Black chattel. He was not human and
certainly not an American citizen, therefore, no rights, privileges or
freedoms could be afforded to him. This ‘legal’ proclamation signaled the
inhuman fate of all enslaved Blacks in the United States wishing to use any
type of legislative methods to challenge and contest oppressive and violent
operations of slavery. If Black slaves were not human, a deep and secretive
contradiction arose when the discourse of sexuality and gender enters this
framework. However, because enslaved Africans in America were not human,
what can be said of the White master’s sexual desire and longing for Black
female bodies?
"-the master’s rape of the female slave-was an ‘open
secret.’ The need to deny the ‘open secret’ (through miscegenation laws
and ‘one drop of Black blood’ racial categorization) leads, moreover, to
the formation of an internally contradictory juridical discourse around
racialized sexuality…the necessity for this "open secret" can be traced
to the White master’s sexual desire for a slave. Since this desire
implicitly admits the slave’s humanity, it undermines the foundation of
the border-the supposed inhumanity of the Black other.." (JanMohammad,
104)
Thus, the construction of a racialized sexuality for
African Americans (mainly women) was predicated by the uncontrolled desires
of White slave masters. The results were children of mixed race along with
the denial and silence of White desire for Black bodies through the legal
discourse of miscegenation laws and the "one drop of Black blood" criteria
for Blackness. Out of this construct involving multiple identities, I would
like to draw inferences to the alteration of this construct for African
Americans after emancipation. Angela Davis asserts that the role of
sexuality in the aftermath of slavery was critical. It was the first time
freed Black people could love and live with whomever they chose as opposed
to either forced or secretive sexual and romantic relationships with and
between Black slaves (Davis, 249).
At the same time it also signaled the elaboration on
contrived tropes of Black womanhood during and after slavery which included
comforting Mammys, kitchen-loving Aunt Jemimas, Black male emasculating
and boisterous Sapphires, sexually raunchy Black Jezebels, and tragic
mulattos among others. The image and real lived experience of Saarjite
Baartman can be seen as a precursor to some of these representations of
Black womanhood but in a diasporic context beyond the borders of America.
Likewise, in diasporic fashion, I look to the subsequent responses to these
tropes of oversexualized and excessive Black femininity represented in the
Hottentot Venus through the Jamaican American Black female artist Renee Cox
Along with Lyle Ashton Harris, Renee Cox created a
photographic image entitled Venus Hottentot 2000 (figure two). The
demarcation of time in the title of the work acknowledges the continuous
cultural, socio-economic and political ramification of the infamous visuals
of the Hottentot Venus or Saarjite Baartman on display in Europe.
Likewise, because this work is photographic art as
opposed to a painting or sculpture, the image of the Black female possesses
a heightened sense of immediacy and realness of an actual Black female body.
In fact, it is the actual artist, Renee Cox, herself that is placed at the
center of this visual text.
But the assumed authenticity of the photo is somewhat
negated with the artificiality of the metallic and exaggerated breasts and
buttocks which are noticeably held in place with string and Cox’s own hands.
These phony body part on this Black woman’s body is a response to the
generalized stereotype of plethoric and excessive Black female bodies and
sexual natures as seen by the onlookers responses in figure one of
the Hottentot Venus. Cox challenges these racist and sexed assumptions of
Black womanhood and this photo conjures up new ways to discover the
diversity of Black women’s bodies and sexualities that do not cater to White
hegemonic ideals and expectations.
As opposed to the distanced and indirect gaze of Saarje
Baartman above, Renee Cox takes the rein of the gaze to inform her own sense
of empowerment. She looks directly and fiercely into all eyes of her
potential audience. One cannot look at her fake breasts and buttocks without
coming to terms with her whole self because her penetrating gaze disallows
you to do so. This active stare asserts that the objectification and
exotification of Black women’s bodies must cease.
Part Three: Reconfiguring Aunt Jemima and Hottentot Venus
in the House Diva
M. M. Manring’s "Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of
Aunt Jemima" discusses the visual packaging and consumption of the
mammy/Aunt Jemima stereotype. "This particular image, which evolved from the
mammy image, is very similar in terms of appearance. The primary distinction
between mammy and Aunt Jemima is that Aunt Jemima’s tasks of domesticity are
usually limited to those of a cook. She is portrayed as extremely jolly, but
also quarrelsome" (Manring, 44). Like Renee Cox and Lyle Ashton Harris’
response to the representation of the Hottentot Venus, more responses to the
stereotypical images of the Aunt Jemima remove her from the kitchen and onto
the battlefield of cultural wars. Some of these artistic works include
militant and revolutionary Aunt Jemimas by Black artists Joe Overstreet and
Betye Saar.
Raised in Watts, Los Angeles in Southern California,
Samella Lewis notes that Saar collects cultural artifacts representing
African Americans in an insanely derogatory way. However in Saar’s
mixed-media work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (figure three), this
household character ‘is transformed into a gun-carrying warrior" (Lewis,
202). Professor Von Blum relates that instead of negating and ignoring the
reality of past racist images, African American artists like Saar have
utilized and reclaimed them to educate audiences about the harmful effects
and possible liberation from dangerous and negative stereotypes.
Previously, I considered the persistence of certain
tropes of African American womanhood such as mammies, tragic mulattos, and
Sapphires, during and after slavery. With this in mind, there has been the
mainstream pathologicalization and cultural
commodification of African American communities by associations with drugs,
crime, and welfare, sports and entertainment. In a society that is permeated
by other forms of visual culture such as television and newspaper photos
these mainstream notions of African Americans are imagining new and modified
stereotypical taxonomies of Black womanhood. I believe these include the
cocaine/crack mother, the bourgeois Black middle-class ‘buppie’, the welfare
queen, the singing diva, and the big mama.
I place my emphasis on the latter two stereotypes in an
attempt to examine African American house diva Martha Wash and the
correlation I wish to make between visual art and music and representations
of particular Black female bodies. Hence, Wash is both the singing diva
and the big mama. The big mama trope can be seen as a sexually
provocative mammy figure. But the mammy represented a non-desirous, maternal
sexuality of large African American women. Sue K. Jewel describes her as
such:
"Two of mammy’s most endowed features are her breasts
and buttocks. Both breast and buttocks are enlarged in all images that
symbolize woman hoot. However, in mammy these features are extremely
exaggerated. The unusually large buttocks and embellished breast place
mammy outside the sphere of sexual desirability and into the realm of
maternal nurturance. In doing so, it allows make who constructed this
image, and those who accept it, to disavow their sexual interested in
African American women" (Jewel, 40).
Although the mammy’s sexuality is maternally neutral, I
propose that the big mama, with the same physical disposition, can invoke an
aggressive and provocative sexuality. The ample, fleshy voluptuousness of
the big mama speaks to the historical underpinnings of large Black women who
were actually envied and exoticized like the Hottentot Venus described
above. In film, television, music videos and other forms of visual culture,
the big mama’s sensuousness is conflated with her being comically oversexed
and desperate or erotically dangerous to men by her sheer weight.
Nevertheless, I contend that Martha Wash, like Aunt Jemima, has been
situated in the racialized and gendered boxes the reoccurring tropes of
excessive Black womanhood. This time, she is a cross-cultural creation of
the visual big mama and the musical singing diva (figures four and five).
Initially used in Italian opera to designate soprano
singers, the term diva also meant goddess. The popularized
definition of diva was furthered by the presence of female performers
and entertainers in movies, popular music, and television. For the most
part, female artists were given the term diva because of their of cult
status with fans and devotees, exceptional and/or unusual talents and/or
appearance, along with dramatic events in divas ‘real’ lives or
performances. Because African American musical expressions are pervasive
throughout American culture, African American women are constantly bracketed
in this trope of the singing diva.
Originally from San Francisco, Martha Wash grew up
singing in the church and was musically trained in classical voice. In 1978,
she secured a gig by answering an ad requesting back-up singers for
Sylvester, an African American gay male Disco artist. After a successful
audition, Sylvester asked Wash if she knew of another large African American
woman who could be the other back-up singer. She immediately referred Izora
Armstead, her friend from the church choir. These two women later became the
Weather Girls and would go on to success in the early eighties with the hit
"It’s Raining Men" (1983). The Weather Girls were noted for their singing
ability and their weight. People Magazine quotes,
"No, they are not svelte young things who prattle on
about the wind-chill factor and extended forecast on the six o’clock
news. But Izora Armstead and Martha Wash call themselves the Weather
Girls nonetheless. Between them, these lusty ladies weigh more that 500
pounds and sing up a storm, as proved by their single, It’s Raining Men,
which made a splash on the pop charts this past winter" (Sheff, 139).
Martha Wash and the groups she performed with are closely associated the
popular dance music texts of disco and house. Disco, often cited as the
progenitor of house music, was essentially up-tempo Black soul and R&B
recordings popularized in Black and Latino gay urban clubs during the 1970s
(Joe, 21). Likewise, the lineage of House music is traced through
underground Black and Latino gay clubs in New York and Chicago as places of
refuge from homophobia in minority and mainstream communities and racism in
White gay communities. As resident DJ of the WareHouse club of Chicago in
1977, Frankie Knuckles proved to be both a sensation and inspiration to his
mainly African American gay male club clientele. In fact, House music
derives its name from Chicago’s African American gay male club called the
WareHouse or ‘the House’ for short. Both Disco and House music are
characterized by a continuous 4/4 beat, the disc jockey’s use of new media
and computer technologies, the free flowing lyrical discourse on
sexualities, love, and tolerance, and the iconography of the fuller figure
African American female performer commonly known as the House diva.
Combining the singing diva and the big mama in house
music results in a foray of abundance, excess and passion in the figure
known as the house diva. This house diva is often presented with a large
body, animated gestures, elaborate and sequined attire, and a booming voice.
In her solo videos, Martha Wash adorns her large, beautiful voice and body
with wigs, feathers, over-the-top vocal faculties, sequins, glitter, and
wind blown hair or weaves. She revels in her fearless sexuality for she is
surrounded by water drenched masculine bodies on a sweaty and pulsating
dance floor. This visual imagery illustrates the house diva’s body pride and
self-acceptance even if she may well be dejected, invisible or lampooned by
mainstream media and other visual representations. If house divas like
Martha Wash see themselves as sensuous and powerful fleshy icons, then I
assert that she could possibly inform an alternative reading to exalt the
familiar body composition and assumed sexuality of the Hottentot Venus
described in part one on my paper. However, this time the Hottentot Venus or
Saarjite Baartman is reclaimed and serves as an agent of liberating Black
female desire, pleasure, and body acceptance for and by Black women on their
own terms.
Conclusion: Ambivalence & Articulation of Black Female
Bodies as African Retention
Art created by African Americans and those in the African
Diaspora speaks to the realities of larger Black communities. Thus, the
questions and inquires surrounding the meaning of the Black female body
articulated by Black women are diverse and heterogeneous because the
concerns Black women encounter move within and between the matrixes of race,
sex, class, sexuality, and region. Lyle Ashton Harris states this about the
Venus Hottentot 2000:
"This reclaiming of the image of the Hottentot Venus
is a way of exploring my own psychic identification with the image at
the level of spectacle. I am playing with what it means to be an African
diasporic artist producing and selling working a culture that is by and
large narcissistically mire in the debasement and objectification of
Blackness. And yet, I see my work less as a didactic critique and more
as an interrogation of the ambivalence around the body.
Hence, the contradictory readings I have given the
Hottentot Venus in Lyle Ashton Harris and Renee Cox’s critically sarcastic
work appears to be diametric to my interpretation of elevating the Hottentot
Venus through large African American house divas. My own paradoxical
‘ambivalence’ surrounding representations of Black female bodies provides me
with a useful conclusion to discuss inherent connections with the abstract
and complicated representation of Black bodies in traditional African
figurative art. In a previous class session, we viewed the film Africa’s
Gift that expounded upon the African aesthetic of asymmetrical body
segments and the exaggeration and contortion of body features as constant
motifs in African sculpture. Almost, antithetical to Western European
traditional art, traditional African art and the distortion of the body
privileges the idea of what is abstractly felt over what is literally seen
with the naked eye. This involves more than one of the sensorial tools of
hearing, seeing, and touching that most humans experience. As we have seen
in the visual art of Renee Cox and the music performance of Martha Wash, the
role of the Black female body is centered and even privileged in
traditional, matri-focal art throughout certain ethnic groups in Africa.
More precisely, the bodily distortion of African aesthetics and female
centeredness confirms,
"…the female figure is often larger than the male" [and]
"[t]he dominating status of the female figure is a succinct declaration , in
plastic terms, of core Senufo [an African ethnic group] social and religious
concepts; the procreative nourishing, sustaining role of both mothers and
Deity; the priority of the uterine line in tracing relationships and
determining succession rights to title and property; and the special role of
women as intermediaries with the supernatural world" (Laude, 51 in Sieber
and Walker, 29).
At left, Maternity Group Figure
Afo Peoples, Nigeria, 19th Century
Wood, Horniman Museum, London
Figure 6
Consequently and in conclusion, this African aesthetic of
multiple-emotive reactions used in understanding art manifests itself by the
film’s emphasis on the cross expressiveness between art, music, and dance to
Africans and African Americans. My project in revisiting the Hottentot Venus
reflects the multiplicity of African creativity through my exploration of
Black women’s corporeality and sexuality in visual art and musical
performance. Collapsing the boundaries between different expressions in
African American culture is crucial to my discovery of the historical and
social contexts of identities and articulations that flow within, against
and between visual art and music. It is my hope that this can ultimately
signify the potential for even more multiple expressivities in creative
works to begin.
Notes
1. In my
writing, I have made an effort to distinguish
between the ethnic and racial identifications of Africans as those on the
African continent, African Americans or Black people in the United States,
and Africans in the Diaspora as those who are of African descent throughout
the world. Likewise, I will sometimes interchangeably use the term Black to
describe one or more of these racialized ethnicities of commonality and
shared histories.
2.
That is if one exists in the
nothingness of postmodernism!
3.
Critical race theory deploys the law
and the legal system as a way to theorize about notions of race, color, and
power.
4. Interestingly enough, some fuller
figure White women such as the legal drama the Practice’s Catherine Manhyme
are advocating for a more inclusive acceptance of all sizes of women in the
media and everyday experiences.
5.
Tragically, Baartman had to supplement
her meager income as a prostitute and died at the age of 26 most likely of
syphilis (Weekly Mail and Guardian, June 1995).
6.
The name ‘Hottentot’ was also a
derogatory term for the African ethnic group called the Quena people who
were aboriginal to the southern area of the African continent. (Weekly Mail
and Guardian, June 1995)
7.
This is not to say
that men or transgender people cannot be divas but I use the above
characteristics of a diva to emphasize the role African American women as
divas.
8.
Within the continuum
of African American female vocal repertoire some of these African American
singing divas include Bessie Smith, Nancy Wilson, Aretha Franklin, Patti
LaBelle, Diana Ross, and Jesse Norman.
9.
These collaborations
include Sylvester, the Weather Girls, C & C Music Factory, Seduction, and
Black Box.
10.
Indeed, fuller figure Martha Wash was
visually replaced by slimmer women in Black Box and C & C Music Factory
music videos. She later sued and won before a court of law.
Works Cited
Bell Jr., Derrick A.. Dred Scott V. Sandford in
Civil Rights: Leading Cases. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and
Company, 1980: 1-25.
Davis, Angela. I Used To Be Your Sweet Mama: Ideology,
Sexuality, and Domesticity in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York:
Pantheon, 1998: 248-261.
Dubois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk in
Three Negro Classics. Avon Books: New York, 1965: 207-390.
JanMohommed, Abdul R. 1992. Sexuality on/of the Racial
Border: Foucault, Wright and the Articulation of "Racialized Sexuality"
in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS. Ed. D.C. Stanton.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992. 94-116.
Jewel Sue K.. From Mammy to Miss American and Beyond:
Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy. Routledge: London
and New York, 1993.
Joe, Radcliffe A. This Business of Disco. New
York: Billboard Books/Watson-Gill Publications, 1980.
Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists.
University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1990.
Manring, M.M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt
Jemima. University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville and London, 1998.
Read, Alan. The Fact of Blackness. Bay Press and
inIVA: Seattle and London, 1996.
Sheff, David. "San Francisco’s Weather Girls Weigh in
with a Winning Forecast: It’s Raining Men." in People Magazine,
May 2, 1983: 139.
Sieber, Roy and Roslyn Adele Walker. National Museum of
African Art: African Art in the Cycle of Life. Smithsonian Institution
Press. Washington D.C. and London, 1987.
Staff Writer. "Bring Back the Hottentot Venus" in Weekly
Mail and Guardian, June 15, 1995 from
http://www.sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/950615/wm950615-12.html.
Story, Rosalyn M. And So I Sing: African American Divas
of Opera and Concert. New York: Warner Books, 1990.
Thomas, Anthony. 1989. The House the Kids Built: The Gay
Black Imprint on American Dance Music in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian
and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. Eds. C. Creekmur and A.
Doty. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1995: 437-446.
Thompson, Khrista A., Exhibiting "Others" in the West, 1998
at http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Exhibition.html
