Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture - Review

For any woman growing up in, and living in, the Western world, issues of body image, body shape and sexuality can be problematic. For black women, there's an additional layer of complexity, of danger, of risk of being dangerously misunderstood. In Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Janell Hobson explores the centuries of racist exploitation that have produced this state of affairs—most recently brought into focus by the infamous Janet Jackson Superbowl incident—and ways in which black women creative artists have tried to confront it.

At the centre of Hobson's account is the life, and posthumous treatment of Sara Baartman, a woman who was brought from what is now South Africa to England and France and between 1810 and 1815 exhibited as the "Hottentot Venus." Particularly exciting (in several senses of that term) to those who paid to see her sometimes unclad body were her supposedly abnormally-large buttocks and genitals. After she died, her body was dissected and her brain and genitals preserved, with casts of her body and her skeleton.

Well, you might say, that was a past, barbaric age. Then you learn that it was only in 2002 that these remains were finally returned to South Africa, after a long campaign, and given a proper burial.

And, Hobson, points out, the history of exploitative, demeaning use of black bodies, particularly female bodies, is a continuous one. Even anti-slavery campaigners used sexualised images of flogged and otherwise abused women for their cause, then images of naked black bodies, both male and female, were used by the National Geographic Society (among others) in "anatomical education", "primitive-style" nudity being acceptable where "civilised" was not, which of course provoked a suppressed erotic reading of these supposedly pedagogic materials.

Hobson says:

When this colonial historic imagery combines with the more familiar American popular iconography of desexualised, fully clothed mammy images and celebratory imagery of white female beauty, we may be able to more fully comprehend interstices between race and gender that shape our uneasy responses to sexualised visual representations of black women.

Can a black woman hold up a mirror that reveals an alternative image of herself, free from the iconographic history in dominant culture that cast black female bodies as illicit, hypersexed, primitive and obscene?

As these extracts suggest, Hobson's writing is intelligent without being buried in that bane of so many otherwise fascinating texts, academic jargon, despite her position in women's studies. This is a book accessible to virtually any reader, and one that many black women, and their white compatriots, would surely find illuminating in their encounters with cultural conundrums of competing demands for sexual display and "modesty."

Article Author: Natalie Bennett

Natalie is the editor of My London Your London, an independent cultural guide featuring theatre, gallery and museum reviews, and also blogs at Philobiblon, on history, culture, Green politics and all things feminist. …

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