a few updates: I

Susannah Bartlow
“Ebb and Flow: the Future of Feminist Intervention”
Presented at Gender Across Borders III: Research Transformations
Saturday, April 5, 2008


In this paper, I explore womanist and black feminist theory, as proposed in the works of Alice Walker and expanded by a number of critics, to articulate some of how I would like to see discussions of women flow forward in the 21st century. I want to think about how movements come to ground, bubble, overlap and resurface on the long shoreline of our understanding. I take it as a given that feminism is, in the most pragmatic sense, a practice of community, not a series of waves, a particular field, or even limited to an interest in one gender. I take as my starting point the premise that the body matters—not the body as a concept, but the body as an experience, as a creative construction. Through this paper, very much a work in progress, I want to evoke the contribution this can make to feminist ethics.

I want to begin by addressing race discourse as a central component of ethical discussions. Womanism, literary analysis, and critical race studies concern themselves in slightly different ways with how the trauma of white male supremacy manifests itself through daily wounds on individual bodies and spirits. “White supremacy”, “oppression” and “domination” refer to the cumulative result of daily acts that consolidate assets, social power, and psychological safety. For black women, that “material and psychological price” is often linked with what Candice Jenkins has termed “the salvific wish,” or the “lift as we climb” responsibility to serve as a caretaker both within African American communities and in the larger context of legal and de facto enslavement. As Saidiya Hartmann has said with reference to the work of photographer Lorna Simpson, “the ‘corporealization’ of relations of domination have created a black body riddled by pathologies and in need of a cure” (55).

I argue that the burden of what Kimberly Springer terms “interstitial politics” in black feminist organizing and Kimberle Crenshaw calls “intersectionality” in legal discourse is gestured to being healed in the black women’s literary renaissance through a creative reimagining of emotional, spiritual, physical, and intellectual growth. Self-possession, for the characters I will discuss, becomes both an empowering and terrifying pursuit: what is the cost of owning the body if that also means owning the scar? An emphasis on sensation, spirituality, and difficulty, along with the theorizing of identity politics, have led this work to a regrettably silenced position in most literary, academic, and feminist conversations. But it is precisely this field’s creative reimagining of the female body that is uniquely relevant to discussions of feminist ethics.

One of the conceptual contributions of this work is the interconnection of body, world, mind and spirit. Gay Wilentz and Ann Folwell Stanford, in separate studies on women writers of color in the late 20th century, link these fictionalized healing processes with holistic medical practices that incorporate storytelling and social reform, recognizing the extent to which “health is inextricably bound to social conditions” (Stanford 2). This approach is predicated upon the convergence of material/physical health and psychological/spiritual wellness. In fact, illness and dysfunction emerge when the physical body and the array of mental connections that go along with it are treated as separate. This is a flat refusal to engage with the counterproductive discussion of the mind and body as separate elements of a divided carcass. We are part of the same organism, these texts urge the reader; the wholeness of the mind is dependent upon the wholeness of the body.

As Hartmann states, “highly visible yet unrepresented,” the black body has become the site of resistance, embodiment the idealized state of black self-realization. Into this contested arena, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker has thrown her work on women’s empowerment and, more recently, her interest in transcending the body in order to build a stronger community that “invokes the sameness produced by social identification and solidarity” (Hartmann 66). In a parallel paper, I explore Walker’s interest in transcendence and what that suggests about the history and future of a spiritual feminism. For the purpose of this panel, I want to bring the body back into our ethical conversation and illustrate that black embodiment is a choice, in Walker’s work, to consciously adopt one’s racialized body as a source of human power—as the site of physical strength and sensual pleasure and as the frame of consciousness. The choice to embrace the solidity of an embodied identity constructs a community of people who love their human bodies and self-consciously work to heal the ways in which those bodies are denied, degraded, abused or unrepresented. Walker’s humanist discourse skirts the questions of black identity politics—who is black? What does it mean to identify with blackness? What is the right way forward for “blacks”?—and enters the arena of “identification and solidarity”, a constructed community based on consciously claimed reformulations that are always, but not exclusively, political. Walker's theory of embodiment has become reified as one of the defining theories of womanism, even as Walker herself has gradually moved on. Understanding Walker’s work as a process theory opens up the potential to see which avenue of growth works best at the matrix of womanism, literature, race studies, and feminism (which is where I sit).

Her best-known work, The Color Purple, follows this process in form and content, accumulating layers of interactions within the community as Walker’s narrator Celie becomes more aware of them. Because the wounds of interlocking oppression appear in the body and spirit of the person with less power, they become extremely difficult to express in a way that conveys the depth of the pain. The Color Purple opens this question of articulation with a commandment invoking the original patriarch: “Tell nobody but God about this. It’d kill your mammy” (1). The pubescent Celie is warned by her stepfather (whom she believes to be her father) to keep his rape of her a holy secret. Celie obeys him, but the act of confessing to God is also a form of transgression, since she is speaking out about her pain. This illustrates one of Walker’s central themes: Celie’s oppression within patriarchy, her lack of authority as a black woman, constrains her, forcing her into a vulnerable and isolated state that, paradoxically, forces her to express its emergency. By coming to terms with her physical body and pushing the limits of acceptable behavior, Celie manages to heal at the site of the paradox, existing in an outsider position that is both isolating and liberating. I want to emphasize here that I am not seeking to romanticize or fetishize Celie’s outsider position or black women’s embodiment, but to explore the creative response to it: a process of intellectual, conscious, self-aware engagement with the world.

Celie enters her body first by being singled out and loved, first in small doses, with her sister and her neighbor; then in a flood of closeness with the outrageous and loving blues singer Shug, who is also her husband’s lover. Even before the two women begin a sexual affair that, Walker depicts how a small act of creative production follows upon an intimate moment of caretaking. As Celie scratches Shug’s hair at home, Shug begins to sing a new song. When she performs it publicly, calling out "Miss Celie" and describing the song’s loving origin, Celie emerges from a sulk about not being noticed to hum along and note the novelty: “First time somebody made something and name it after me” (73). As a cumulative and process-oriented theory, Walker’s embodiment suggests that segments of gradual awareness build upon one another to illustrate how a slow and reliable experience of love and affection can gradually release the protective boundary Celie has established around her emotional life.

Walker's model also emphasizes the centrality, and mutual reinforcement, of safety and commitment. Before they are physical lovers, Shug decides to stay in the household and protect Celie from being battered by her husband. In other words, Shug commits her love to Celie’s safety and security and at the same time contravenes patriarchy. It is important to note that this is a loving, but not self-sacrificing, act. Staying allows her to sing at the juke joint, receive the benefits of the family and her connection with Celie, and maintain her companionable and sexually satisfying relationship with Celie’s husband. Walker argues that love, support, and intimacy need not go along with self-sacrifice, contravening the demands of the salvific wish.
Celie also develops a sort of sisterly friendship with Squeak, a meek young woman whom Celie’s son-in-law has taken as a lover. She mentors Squeak to try to stand up to her husband, suggesting that the feeble signs of intimacy she carried with her into her abusive marriage can blossom into a true friendship through parallel experiences of healing embodiment. Chronologically, Walker links this ability to connect with the entire extended family with Shug's direct encouragement of Celie's sexuality.

In turn, this is dependent upon Celie’s self-awareness. Walker argues in The Color Purple that healthy black female embodiment is a dialogic and cumulative process that builds upon the intersections of external awareness and internal consciousness, of getting to know yourself as an other and as yourself:

“I lie back on my bed and haul up my dress. Yank down my bloomers. Stick the
looking glass tween my legs. Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be
black. Then inside look like a wet rose.

It a lot prettier than you thought, ain’t it? she say from the door.

It mine, I say. Where the button?

Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little.

I look at her and touch it with my finger. (78)

As Celie recognizes herself in the mirror, she can move on to see herself in an other; her first contact with her clitoris is when she looks at Shug, as though this central experience of pleasure is linked with her ability to connect with another woman. Shug literally guards the door and provides the mirror for Celie to become comfortable with her most intimate self. The obvious homoeroticism of this passage is equalled by its auto-eroticism: Celie is looking in a mirror at her most intimate physical being and, in the process, discovers what is most important: she falls in love with herself by possessing her body, saying “it mine.” What began in an experience of recognizing herself through halting sentences, brief moments, and mirrored reflections, concludes with Celie's complete self-reliance and immersion in her community. She is even, at novel's end, living in the rehabilitated house of her trauma and reunited with her sister, suggesting that the original wounds of her embodiment have at last been healed.

Similarly, Elizabeth Alexander argues that the unconscious, private, sacred space of African American identity is “the black interior”. Alexander’s phrase invokes both the fetishized “colonial fantasy”—the “heart” of African “darkness”—and the interiority of a black subject as a safe and sacred space of privacy and self-renewal. Alexander argues that “’the black interior’ is not an inscrutable zone … [r]ather, I see it as inner space in which black artists have found selves that go far, far beyond the limited expectations and definitions of what black is, isn’t, or should be” (5). Alexander’s reading of the black interior, a material, geographic, and metaphoric space, illustrates a similar process as Farah Jasmine Griffin’s conceptualization of embodiment: each is a cumulative product of a creative responsibility, renewed through daily attentions.

In a study of late 20th century black women writers, Griffin argues against the implied subjectivity debates that a return to emotionality and the body is somehow an essentializing of blackness and femininity or a demand that one deny or repress the constructedness of identity. Instead, as she points out, the return to the body is a creative project that empowers the embodied subject to “construct” the body in a different way, to begin to use her own body for ends that she designates as important. This claiming project does not require returning to a “truer self”, but instead “suggests that [bodies] can be constructed differently, for different ends” than their positioning as abject or traumatized (524). In Griffin’s theory of textual healing, the body is not essentialized, it is transformed from its one-dimensionality. This process of embodiment empowers the subject to operate with pragmatic control in a field not of her own making: “necessary acts for those of us who are constantly bombarded with very strong fictions” (525). In the creative production of the self, the subject finds alternative figurations that feed in a circular/dialogic/spiraling expansion of a body that, as Alexander argues, is both conscious and unconscious, that has its full humanity. This step of consciousness/unconsciousness working together is the power that embodiment claims, but the process depicted in these works illustrates the dynamic nature of this often binarized relationship: that is, the unconscious is not being controlled, it is being artfully responded to by a conscious self. The relation between conscious and unconscious also suggests Walker’s interest in transcendence, as the desire to link these two brings the character into a more possible way of relating to the social world, and, in connecting, transcending the limits of a single person’s body and mind.

With a special relevance to our discussion of feminist ethics, this embodiment is an interesting echo or prediction of Audre Lorde’s discussion of the creative uses of difference. Celie comes to understand her differences from the norm as evidence of the divine rather than as a limitation to her acceptance by a powerful male. Similarly, Lorde suggests in 1980 that women address conflict or difference as a site of potential, rather than difficulty. Especially in our dealings with people we traditionally think of as “other” and therefore a threat, Lorde advocates that we instead find out more about the nature of the differences, discovering how we can work together or at least not in conflict because of them. Celie comes around to the idea that her troubles with God and real live men are, similarly, the places where she can begin to test her limits and discover a new approach to life. Walker conveys a matrix of relations and interactions, illustrating how even the smallest tender gestures, when followed by some level of commitment or at least mutual involvement, yield a stronger community. In the eyes of a hopeful observer like Celie, these strengthened ties can lead to greater self-consciousness: knowing the limits, Celie can connect.

The radial and aggregate policy of womanist theorizing unifies analytical and logical process with metaphoric and cumulative bodies of knowledge. Similarly, the work of Lorna Simpson, Hartmann argues, compiles selected experiences and reflects oppression back onto the viewer, indicating complicity or relief and requiring engagement. Simpson invokes the viewer as part of an individual identity but also of a kind of “intersubjective union” (67). Union—not unity, not making as of one, but a temporal joining of separated subjects.

Alexis DeVeaux has argued that one purpose of activism is “to merge the ‘solitary self’ to a shared politic. To imagine the “solitary self’ as necessary to a democracy of equals” (DeVeaux 14). One of the persistent myths of feminism is that there is a unifying traumatic experience that all women share. While I am here to encourage community, I think that, as Lorde suggests, the community must be established on the foundation that our “solitary selves,” people’s differences in embodiment are as significant, and as much to be treasured as the ways in which we undoubtedly do connect. In this sense, the first responsibility is to understand and heal one’s “solitary self” through a continuing process of creative self-production that holds me, or you, or each person accountable to the ways in which that self is both externally and internally defined, scarred, praised and transformed. Thank you.

Works Cited

Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004.
DeVeaux, Alexis. “Geographies of Difference: ‘Race’, Language, and Imagination”.
Distinguished Faculty Lecture, Institute for Research and Education on Women
and Gender. University at Buffalo. March 23, 2006.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Textual Healing.”
Stanford, Ann Folwell. Bodies in a Broken World: Women Novelists of Color and the
Politics of Medicine. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1993).
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982.