Godless Americana: Race & Religious Rebels by Sikivu Hutchinson

Author:Sikivu Hutchinson [Hutchinson, Sikivu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Infidel Books
Published: 2013-05-04T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

Jezebel continues to have a powerful influence on the self-image and self-policing of women of color. In her article “Guadalupe: The Sex Goddess,” Sandra Cisneros reflects on the ease with which white women own and occupy their bodies in the locker room:

In high school I marveled at how white women strutted around the locker room, nude as pearls, as unashamed of their brilliant bodies as the Nike of Samothrace. Maybe they were hiding terrible secrets like bulimia or anorexia, but, to my naïve eye then, I thought of them as women comfortable in their skin. You could always tell us Latinas. We hid when we undressed, modestly facing a wall, or, in my case, dressing in a bathroom stall. We were the ones who still used bulky sanitary pads instead of tampons, thinking ourselves morally superior to our white classmates.15

White women strut, reveling in their liberty. Latinas retreat, private, and prudish, the antithesis of cultural stereotypes about spicy hot-blooded vixens jiggling around spewing broken English to horny white men. Cisneros’ passage highlights why religious mores and racial politics continue to be key in shaping gender norms amongst women of color. White women are the cultural, moral, and aesthetic standard against which all women of color are judged. White femininity is the global beauty ideal that all girls of color grow up aspiring to emulate. At the Disney store, mecca for young capitalists in training, girls like my ten-year-old niece flock like honey bees to Disney princesses with long, lustrous, Rapunzel-esque blond hair. Tiaras with platinum blond tresses beckon from the shelves. Snow White dresses wait to transform some lucky girl with thirty dollars. Only a doll modeled on the “spunky” uber blond character from Tangled can satiate the raging goldilocks lust of tween girls. Despite the market savvy multiculturalism of the 21st century Disney princesses (e.g. black Princess Tiana and Middle Eastern Jasmine), the brand still epitomizes a Europeanized beauty ideal of pinched thin noses, wasp waists and butt-sweeping straight hair. Coming from the ministry of Disney, the modern woman/princess is both sexually desirable and unattainable, independent yet traditional, dependably hetero yet the shimmering object of every girl’s fantasies. For women of color watching behind the scenes, the white woman and the blonde symbolize all of these contradictions. White women are “comfortable” in their skin and in their bodies because the dark Jezebel has freed them from the yoke of depravity. They are free to be sexual adventurers because they aren’t marked as universal “hos.”

Within Catholic traditions, the ubiquitous image of the pure as the driven snow self-sacrificing Virgin Mary is the model for femininity. But the Virgin’s white purity is only validated by the fallen dark whore: The black, Asian, Latina or Native American woman whose body is “the sign of sexual experience.” 16 As writer Yasmin Davidds Garrido notes, “It often seemed to me that unless I behaved just like the Virgin Mary I wouldn’t be good enough to win God’s approval. In order to be considered

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.