The Duke on Gender Colloquium hosted a virtual panel on “Black Feminism Beyond the Human” on January 29, 2021. Hundreds of guests heard presentations by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (University of Southern California, English) and Patrice D. Douglass (Duke, GSF) on the ways the hegemonic concept of the human depends on and perpetuates interrelated forms of gendered-racial violence. For both Jackson and Douglass, Black feminism is a critical lens for making this violence visible and, ultimately, for interrupting the aesthetics, taxonomies, narrative structures, and entire ontologies that reproduce the liberal, Eurocentric concept of the human.
Expanding on a chapter from her book, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Jackson drew upon Sylvia Wynter’s articulation of the sociogenic principle—a Fanonian concept in which humans are materially, and thus biologically, produced through language and culture—to raise the stakes of representation. Rather than a mode of mimesis, representation unfurls in Jackson’s talk as “a doing, a making, and a worlding that, in turn, makes us.” Black female flesh, according to Jackson, both troubles and undergirds the representative taxonomies that materially constitute race and gender into recognizable types. Through her reading of Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild (1995), Jackson made evident how the nonhuman—its complexities, its morphological excesses, its “more-ness”—renders strange, or denatures, the referential categories of gender, race, and sex.
Douglass’s reading of Belle (2013), a film directed by Amma Asante, also turns to questions of representation—and its limits—specifically what cannot be said or imagined outside the hegemonic framework of the human. By extending the conceptual architecture of the slave ship Zong to the narrative structure of Belle, Douglass exposed how “the forced imposition of human care” organized the logic of slavery even as it also obscured forms of enslavement that were less visibly violent. Care, Douglass argued, threatens to represent slavery as a “question of morality” rather than as an institution that “marks black and human difference at the level of violence,” and, more specifically, sexual violence. To erase or refuse to grapple with sexual violence—or to approach it as something that must be overcome on a path towards Black female empowerment—is to miss the inherent violence of cis-gendering and to overlook the political, narrative, and imaginative constraints placed upon Black gendering within the hegemonic conceit of the human.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies