Friday, February 10, 2012

Sara Baartman's Double Identity

 In Boetsch and Blanchard's article, The Hottentot Venus: Birth of a 'Freak' (1815), they say that Sara had a "double identity founded both on femininity and savagery." I would say that this is true, but at the same time that they aren't separate traits. Her big butt and elongated labia would be the obvious feminine traits but they would also be savage traits according to the people of her time. Those differences she had from white European women made her savage or deviant. The men who were in charge of her played those traits up. They said that her butt had magical powers and that her elongated labia made her have a higher sex drive. They oversexualized all her differences from European women and made her an exotic figure.

In doing all that they obviously were degrading Sara to nothing more than a prop that needed to be studied. She was a way for people to define their own race and selves as "normal." A way for them to justify the treatment of other races and colonialism. She was used to define what a deviant is, what traits one had that classified them as such.

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