Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

Author:Patricia Hill Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135960131
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Hurston’s work can be read as a Black feminist analysis of the sexualized violence that many Black women encounter in their deepest love relationships. Tea Cake and Sop-de-Bottom see women as commodities, property that they can whip to “reassure their possession.” Janie is not a person; she is objectified as something owned by Tea Cake. Even if a man loves a woman, as is clearly the case of Tea Cake and Janie, the threat of competition from another male is enough to develop an “awful fear” that Janie will choose another man and thus deem him less manly than his competitors. Whipping Janie reassured Tea Cake that she was his. The conversation between the two men is also revealing. Images of color and beauty pervade their conversation. Sop-de-Bottom is envious because he can “see every place” that Tea Cake hit her and that she was passive and did not resist like the rest of the “rusty black women.” Tea Cake and Sop-de-Bottom have accepted Eurocentric gender ideology concerning masculinity and femininity and have used force to maintain it. Furthermore, Janie’s transgression was the potential to become unfaithful, the possibility to be sexually promiscuous, to become a whore. Finally, the violence occurs in an intimate relationship where love is present. This incident shows the process by which power as domination—in this case gender oppression structured through Eurocentric gender ideology and class oppression reflected in the objectification and commodification of Janie—has managed to annex the basic power of the erotic in Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship. Tea Cake does not want to beat Janie, but he does because he feels, not thinks, he must.3 Their relationship represents the linking of sexuality and power, the potential for domination within sexualized love relationships, and the potential for using the erotic, their love for each other, as a catalyst for change.

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