| A 1923 French poster depicts a black woman, standing in a shipping crate, wearing only a maid's apron with her breasts visible on either side. The crate is stamped, "Sent from Martinique," and the poster caption reads: "Are you looking for a maid? Bamboulinette comes to the rescue." This is a visual example of the manufacture and widespread distribution of an image of black women as lascivious. In light of historical myths of black female hyper-sexuality, this dissertation focuses on the recent proliferation of literary and critical sexual discourses to understand how black women publicly constitute themselves as agents relative to imposed moral codes. Sexuality has become an increasingly important site, across disciplines and within popular culture, to explore changes in relations of power.;Shameless Discourse explores the connection between sexuality in literature and sexuality in public that arguably constitutes a canon of post-1970 writing by black women. I contend that sexual agency is under-analyzed due to excessive critical emphasis on its repression and absence. Black female sexuality has been critically sublimated, both denied outlet yet incessantly discussed. The texts under consideration are, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Alice Walker's The Color Purple , Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass Cypress & Indigo, and Gayl Jones' Eva's Man. Traditionally, black women's writing has been mined for its latent sexuality while those texts that express an overt sexuality are elided. Rather than argue the presence of sexuality in particular novels, I am interested in the kind of sub-text that is elicited when sexual situations are shockingly and repeatedly represented.;This project bridges two substantial gaps: first, between texts that offer a critique of historical narratives of black female sexuality and texts that analyze black women's contemporary literary expressions but omit sexuality and second, between scholarship in the academy and black female sexual discourse within the community. Though my focus is post-1970 writing, I introduce the dissertation with an analysis of Wilson's Our Nig in order to document the relationship between sexuality and citizenship in the earliest novel by a black woman, which continues to condition literary representation well into the late 20th century. |
