Racing Sex—Sexing Race

Abstract

Within Western borders, the human body has always been viewed and analyzed as a social body that physically and ideologically locates itself within society. The value of the individual human body has been so important to the Western social, cultural, and political agendas that its perceived corporeal value (based on race, national origins, and gender) inevitably translated into its perceived ideological value. “The ways people knew their places in the world had to do with their bodies and the histories of those bodies, and when they violated the prescriptions for those places, their bodies were punished, often spectacularly. One’s place in the body politic was as natural as the places of the organs in one’s body, and political disorder [was] as unnatural as the shifting and displacement of those organs” (Scheman 186).

When invoking the term “body” we tend to think first of its materiality— its composition as flesh and bone, its outline and contours, its outgrowth of nail and hair. But the body as we well know is never simply matter, for it is never divorced from perception and interpretation. As matter, the body is there to be seen and felt, and in the process it is subject to examination and speculation.

—Carla Peterson, Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women