7 - Sexploitation?

Summary

On Saturday 10 August 2002, the BBC World TV news programme reported the final laying to rest of Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, whose ‘private parts’ had been de-privatized through their display in Paris and elsewhere during her life-time and after her death in 1815 when Georges Cuvier ‘presented to “the Academy the genital organs of a woman prepared in a way so as to allow one to see the nature of the labia”’ (Gilman 1992: 180). On 11 August 2002 the Observer featured an article on a ‘pygmy show’ in Belgium: ‘Although the exhibition in the grounds of a private zoo is ostensibly raising money for the pygmies, anti-racism activists say it is degrading and voyeuristic’ (Osborn: 19). Though the two exhibitions are separated by nearly two hundred years, their shared characteristics of the display of the supposedly physically exotic – in the Academy and the zoo, both sites where ‘strange bodies’, human and animal, are subjected to specularization – bespeak the history of the European exploitation of ‘other’ bodies to satisfy scopophilic desires through the former's exhibition, initiated through forced migration and displacement. That exhibition, in the case of Sarah Bartmann quite literally, is one of the backgrounds against which the sexploitation of Black female bodies has to be read and understood.