User:Blackfeministarteditor/Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity

Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity

"Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" is an essay written by artist and writer Lorraine O'Grady, originally published in 1992 in the book, New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. The first part of the essay was published in Afterimage 20 (Summer 1992). Widely referenced in scholarly works, it is a cultural critique of the representation of Black female bodies, and the reclamation of the body as a site of black female subjectivity.

O’Grady opens the essay stating that the female body in the West is not a unitary sign. She uses the metaphor of the coin- that which has two sides but cannot be separated- to distinguish the separate bodies of the West’s metaphorical construction of the woman: white and non-white. This separation designates woman as white and omits the non-white figure from the discourse dealing with sexual difference. This construction of the West’s ‘woman’ places whiteness as fundamental and Blackness as the other, the entity that is parallel in the defining of the self. O’Grady uses the Victorian painting Olympia by Édouard Manet as an example of the Eurocentric depiction of Black womanhood. The painting features a nude prostitute, modeled by Victorine Meurent with her black maidservant, modeled by Laure, in the background. “The image of the black female constructed in this period reflected everything the white female was not.” The West has constructed the not-white woman as unseen.

To further this point, O’Grady cites Sylvia Ardyn Boone’s description of the bare-breasted culture of the Mende people and compares this to an anecdotal account of Black and white women in public pool showers- the Black women remaining covered while white women shower nude, suggesting these women remain covered in order to protect themselves and their bodies from the historically rooted racial abuses in America.

O’Grady uses the metaphors of both the prostitute and feminist psychoanalysis’ the female eunuch as a way of describing Olympia’s maid’s positionality as a Black woman. The white body of Olympia is the only object of male gaze, and Laure’s inclusion is subconsciously critiqued thru the reading of the white figure. In a damaging critique of the painting from when it was originally shown, Amedee Cantaloube describes as “a kind of female gorilla, a grotesque rubber figure surrounded by black, a monkey on a bed, completely nude.”

“O'Grady specifically refers to a tradition of iconography of black female sexuality that casts black women as simplistic stereotypes, such as the "Hottentot Venus," "Jezebel," "mammy," "Sapphire," "welfare queen," and more recently "quota queen" and "baby mama.' " Quoting Patricia Hill Collins, Janelle Hobson states that these stereotypes are products of the systems of power, meant to control those without white skin privilege and “distort the way black women see themselves and each other” They also create the process of unmirroring. Where mirroring in terms of psychology refers to the imitating of one by another, unmirroring refers to the process in which a subjected figure imitates the distorted image of themselves, projected by the authority of the status quo.

O’Grady takes up these issues of representation using modern and contemporary artworks as an example. She cites Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1973–78) as an example of white feminist art that does a poor job of representing Black women. In Dinner Party, of the thirty-nine place settings, Sojourner Truth is the only Black woman present. Truth is not represented by one of the thirty-six ceramic depictions of a vagina, but rather a face. Argued by both O’Grady and Hortense Spillers, this decision to omit the vagina at Truth’s place setting is a symbolic castration and a refusal of Black female sexuality.

O’Grady cites the pursuit of Judith Wilson to confront “the paucity of Black nudes in U.S. Black artist production prior to [1960].” In her attempt to uncover nineteenth-century nudes by black artists, Wilson found only three: Edmonia Lewis’s Poor Cupid (1876), her Asleep (1871) and her sculpture Awake (1872). Each nude figure in the sculptures listed above are white and is a child. This, to O’Grady, is proof that Black artists creating work in accordance with the painting conventions of the time between the nineteenth century and the 1960s were not making works dealing with nudity or works about sexuality. As of 1992, when “Olympia’s Maid” was published, there had been no known artworks that depict a Black nude by a Black artist, especially not one concerning sexuality.

O’Grady references African-American artist, Adrian Piper’s art practice, specifically her performance, Food for the Spirit (1971), as an example of the proper representation of the subjective Black nude, though this is problematic because as of September 2012, Piper has “retired from being black.”

Conceptual artist Renée Greene’s work Seen (1990) is also mentioned as representation based on Black female subjectivity, except according to O’Grady, the work falls short “because it is addressed more to the other than to the self” (156)

In order to avoid such aggressions as Chicago’s and to avoid the disparaging number of artists working with sexuality and identity, O’Grady calls for the theoretical discourse surrounding Black women to be produced by Black women, to establish their subjectivity before theorizing their view of the world and to ignore scholarly pursuits that keep marginal figures out of the center. It is noted that rather than making artwork or literary work tailored to explain the positionality of Black females, where explaining and theory is designated as the masculine manner of thinking, progress is made with work that is showing how it feels, the feminist method of thinking/expressing. Critiquing the imperialism that has oppressed Black people does not teach imperialism the subjecthood of Blackness.

O’Grady discusses the struggle in depicting race, identity and proper representation as a Black female artist, drawing examples from her own artwork: the politics of skin color, hair texture and facial features. In privileging a facial feature that looks a particular way over another or in pairing light and dark skin tones, hierarchies of difference are created. These hierarchies of difference exist because of historical ideologies and they have difficulty breaking down because they are supported by the preconceived importance of the whiteness in the West. O’Grady states:"“to win back that position for the African-American female will require balancing in mental solution a subversion of two objects which may appear specifically distinct: on one hand, phallocentric theory; and on the other, the lived realities of Western imperialist history”"It comes from the understanding of the structures put in place by these two theories and an overall restructuring of these theories for progress to be made. Social change cannot happen without the reorientation of the systems that exist to subjugate Black people.

O’Grady picks out psychoanalysis as the “linchpin of Western (male) [sic] cultural theory.” She quotes Jacqueline Rose’s description of psychoanalysis and race: “To say that psychoanalysis does not, or cannot, refer to non-European cultures, is to constitute those cultures in total ‘otherness’ or ‘difference’; to say, or to try to demonstrate, that it can, is to constitute them as the ‘same.’ ”

“The creation of a black feminist aesthetic must challenge dominant culture's discourse of the black body [as] grotesque and articulate a black liberation discourse on the black body [as] beautiful.” European and European-American society has historically viewed Blackness as ugly. It is up to those working within Black feminist theory and critique to reinvent a new positionality. This, O’Grady argues, comes at a time when subjectivity itself has been problematized by ideology. Ideology is a patriarchal practice and theory is what substantiates it; theories of the political and social as well as the ideological/intellectual aided in the creation of the devalued Black figure. Out of ideology came the notion of binary logic: either/or-ism.

As a standard, the Western mode of thinking, as proposed by many feminists, is ‘either:or-ism.’ It describes two modes of thought or plans of action that can be reached, but never can the two be reached together. “The binary logic of the west takes on an added dimension when confronted with the presence of a black woman.” Behind the binary logic of science in the nineteenth century, literature and art situates the representations of Black woman at both the site and sight of violation. Either/or logic fragments that which it is applied to. Riffing off of this logical ideology, O’Grady makes mention of a contrasting Eastern mode of thinking: ‘both/and’ logic. It describes dialogical thinking and living, implying the functioning of both options within a scenario and suggests the abandonment of the either/or hierarchy.

(This article was written employing the politics of capitalization, capitalizing the “b” in “Black” in ways of underlining importance; importance that has been undermined by whiteness and therefore, not been acknowledged historically.)