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AC: You’ve been consistently concerned to explore the relationship between black women and white women’s sexuality. But how does your use of historical representations of Baartman impact on the kinds of links you want to make in relation to the way in which white women’s sexuality has also been historically inscribed within a particular kind of pathologizing discourse? PS: White women are often absent from Baartman’s story. I’ve tried to address this. In Dora and the Other Woman I’ve looked at Saartjie Baartman in relation to Freud’s Dora and I have been quite explicit about the relationship here. Dora’s sexuality was fragmented, taken away from her, in a sense by Freud. She was made an object. While her genitals weren’t literally put into a bottle and preserved like Saartjie Baartman, she too was actually objectified and turned into a spectacle. In that work I copied quite literally and painstakingly nineteenth-century French and British caricatures of people looking at Saartjie Baartman. The idea of looking and the idea of objectification was the connecting theme in both those women’s stories. But clearly even within that scenario power relations are played out ‘differently’. That is why I used caricatures. They were obviously representations, I was simply re-representing them. So on this occasion I actually made a direct connection between the way white women’s sexuality was pathologized in psychoanalysis, most of all through Freud, and the image of Saartjie Baartman. But more recently I started using the cast of Saartjie’s face because it is in fact the nearest to a trace of her we have. It’s like an indexical sign. It’s as close as one could get, I suppose, but it’s still a mediation, it’s a cast. When I’ve used Baartman’s image, I’ve always marked it as a mediation even in the subtlest of senses. This has involved including the odd contingent effects of the contexts which framed her—the packing crates, the protective cushions, etc. AC: So, for instance, in some of the other works, for example Exhibit Ex Africa, you don’t include a representation of the cast of Baartman’s genitals but a ‘real’ piece of cloth, a Victorian ‘apron’, as a way of suggesting the cloth which was wrapped around the cast of her body parts in the storeroom of the Musée de L’Homme in Paris where you saw them (Figure 4)? PS: Yes. But the apron also obviously refers to the ‘tablier’—a term used to refer to the shape of her genitals. AC: I’ve seen the photographs which you took of the plaster casts of Saartjie Baartman at the Musée de L’Homme and the way in which she’s literally packaged and crated in the storeroom of the museum. And I’ve also seen those horrific casts of different African women’s genitals, totally disembodied with anus and vagina wrapped in cloth, in a kind of fetishistic
DOI link for AC: You’ve been consistently concerned to explore the relationship between black women and white women’s sexuality. But how does your use of historical representations of Baartman impact on the kinds of links you want to make in relation to the way in which white women’s sexuality has also been historically inscribed within a particular kind of pathologizing discourse? PS: White women are often absent from Baartman’s story. I’ve tried to address this. In Dora and the Other Woman I’ve looked at Saartjie Baartman in relation to Freud’s Dora and I have been quite explicit about the relationship here. Dora’s sexuality was fragmented, taken away from her, in a sense by Freud. She was made an object. While her genitals weren’t literally put into a bottle and preserved like Saartjie Baartman, she too was actually objectified and turned into a spectacle. In that work I copied quite literally and painstakingly nineteenth-century French and British caricatures of people looking at Saartjie Baartman. The idea of looking and the idea of objectification was the connecting theme in both those women’s stories. But clearly even within that scenario power relations are played out ‘differently’. That is why I used caricatures. They were obviously representations, I was simply re-representing them. So on this occasion I actually made a direct connection between the way white women’s sexuality was pathologized in psychoanalysis, most of all through Freud, and the image of Saartjie Baartman. But more recently I started using the cast of Saartjie’s face because it is in fact the nearest to a trace of her we have. It’s like an indexical sign. It’s as close as one could get, I suppose, but it’s still a mediation, it’s a cast. When I’ve used Baartman’s image, I’ve always marked it as a mediation even in the subtlest of senses. This has involved including the odd contingent effects of the contexts which framed her—the packing crates, the protective cushions, etc. AC: So, for instance, in some of the other works, for example Exhibit Ex Africa, you don’t include a representation of the cast of Baartman’s genitals but a ‘real’ piece of cloth, a Victorian ‘apron’, as a way of suggesting the cloth which was wrapped around the cast of her body parts in the storeroom of the Musée de L’Homme in Paris where you saw them (Figure 4)? PS: Yes. But the apron also obviously refers to the ‘tablier’—a term used to refer to the shape of her genitals. AC: I’ve seen the photographs which you took of the plaster casts of Saartjie Baartman at the Musée de L’Homme and the way in which she’s literally packaged and crated in the storeroom of the museum. And I’ve also seen those horrific casts of different African women’s genitals, totally disembodied with anus and vagina wrapped in cloth, in a kind of fetishistic
AC: You’ve been consistently concerned to explore the relationship between black women and white women’s sexuality. But how does your use of historical representations of Baartman impact on the kinds of links you want to make in relation to the way in which white women’s sexuality has also been historically inscribed within a particular kind of pathologizing discourse? PS: White women are often absent from Baartman’s story. I’ve tried to address this. In Dora and the Other Woman I’ve looked at Saartjie Baartman in relation to Freud’s Dora and I have been quite explicit about the relationship here. Dora’s sexuality was fragmented, taken away from her, in a sense by Freud. She was made an object. While her genitals weren’t literally put into a bottle and preserved like Saartjie Baartman, she too was actually objectified and turned into a spectacle. In that work I copied quite literally and painstakingly nineteenth-century French and British caricatures of people looking at Saartjie Baartman. The idea of looking and the idea of objectification was the connecting theme in both those women’s stories. But clearly even within that scenario power relations are played out ‘differently’. That is why I used caricatures. They were obviously representations, I was simply re-representing them. So on this occasion I actually made a direct connection between the way white women’s sexuality was pathologized in psychoanalysis, most of all through Freud, and the image of Saartjie Baartman. But more recently I started using the cast of Saartjie’s face because it is in fact the nearest to a trace of her we have. It’s like an indexical sign. It’s as close as one could get, I suppose, but it’s still a mediation, it’s a cast. When I’ve used Baartman’s image, I’ve always marked it as a mediation even in the subtlest of senses. This has involved including the odd contingent effects of the contexts which framed her—the packing crates, the protective cushions, etc. AC: So, for instance, in some of the other works, for example Exhibit Ex Africa, you don’t include a representation of the cast of Baartman’s genitals but a ‘real’ piece of cloth, a Victorian ‘apron’, as a way of suggesting the cloth which was wrapped around the cast of her body parts in the storeroom of the Musée de L’Homme in Paris where you saw them (Figure 4)? PS: Yes. But the apron also obviously refers to the ‘tablier’—a term used to refer to the shape of her genitals. AC: I’ve seen the photographs which you took of the plaster casts of Saartjie Baartman at the Musée de L’Homme and the way in which she’s literally packaged and crated in the storeroom of the museum. And I’ve also seen those horrific casts of different African women’s genitals, totally disembodied with anus and vagina wrapped in cloth, in a kind of fetishistic
ABSTRACT
AC: You’ve been consistently concerned to explore the relationship between black women and white women’s sexuality. But how does your use of historical representations of Baartman impact on the kinds of links you want to make in relation to the way in which white women’s sexuality has also been historically inscribed within a particular kind of pathologizing discourse?
