ABSTRACT
The location of the black female body as a transgressive site has long, complex and persistent roots within western culture. The colonial stereotyping of black peoples was a necessary extension of European imperialism that sought to provide a discursive framework and moral foundation for the horrifi c trade in African peoples and the colonialization of “other” lands. As the mothers of future slave labour, black women suffered a particularly incessant form of “scientifi c” scrutiny that, within its various manifestations, sought to locate the black female body as the site of pathological sexual deviance linked to a racial degeneracy.1 It was largely through the evaluation of the black woman’s body that these colonial western “scientists” tried to produce race as an empirical biological marker of identity. The hierarchization of race and colour within a dominantly patriarchal society positioned black woman at the bottom of the “tree of man.”2
