Laughing to Keep from Dying by Danielle Fuentes Morgan

Author:Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Misrepresenting the Past

Certainly Black women are in a vulnerable position both within and without the frame of respectability politics. E. Francis White writes, “To be positioned outside the ‘protection’ of womanhood was to be labeled unrespectable. Black feminists of the first wave understood the costs of this label to all black women. They did not miss the irony in the contrast between the fiction of black men’s molestation of white women and the very real rape suffered by black women” (33). Indeed, the stakes of “respectability” are particularly high in this regard for Black women as they are at particular risk of a lack of respectability thought to signal their own abjection. This line is especially difficult to negotiate for African American women because the expected prerequisites for “respectability” are often those that are also not considered conventionally funny. Women are then damned if they do, and damned if they don’t—they are either the boring prude or the grotesque clown. Of course, even this so-called protection emerges as a falsehood—there is no amount of respectability a Black woman can perform that would ultimately protect her from violent assumptions about her sex and sexuality. Black women have been denied the protection of membership in the cult of true womanhood, where (white, land-connected) women were seen as pious, pure, submissive, and domestic, and thereby worthy of a level of esteem and protection. Indeed, the overwhelming emphasis on enunciated sexual availability or sexual silence of Black women disallows such attributes—white women in the cult of true womanhood were sexualized insofar as they were seen as women in the traditional sense but never thought to be deriving any subversive sexual pleasure from their own femaleness. In this sense, Black female sexuality is often imagined on a binary—entirely present for the pleasure of others, or entirely absent in the caretaking of others.

Oftentimes, Black female comedians shirk an essentialized view of Black female sexuality by attempting to articulate ownership of their own sex lives, to varying degrees of success and clarity. In doing so, they simultaneously refuse both easily imagined tropes of the mammy and the Jezebel. The continued reliance on the imagined existence of mammy in contemporary society speaks once again to the power of mainstream cultural production to shape our understanding of both ourselves and of others. The Jezebel emerges in the national consciousness as the diametric opposition to the mammy—not only is she sexually available and sexually provoking, but she is sexually insatiable. Her sexuality is her defining characteristic—if she has children, their welfare is secondary to her desire to feed her own sexual appetite. As a result, both of these tropes gain significance only to the extent that they offer a disavowal of the other. If both of these tropes remain in steadfast existence, there is a dismissal of Black female dynamism at best, and the reification of white and male domination over that which is marked as racially and sexually different at worst. Ultimately, these tropes prescribe parameters in which these female comedians struggle to exist.

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