Shadow Bodies

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813593418
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman’s body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do discursive practices, both speech and silences, support and maintain hegemonic understandings of Black womanhood thereby rendering some Black women as shadow bodies, unseen and unremarked upon?   Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically. 
 

1 • Different Streams of Knowledge

Theoretically Situating This Study

Anna Julia Cooper, in 1892, counseled Black women to critically articulate the complex and various ways that racism and sexism affected their lived realities. She argued:

The colored woman of today occupies, one might say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which makes for our civilization. She is confronted by a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both. (Cooper, 1995, p. 45)

Cooper’s concerns remain a core theme of Black feminist thought. Central to Black feminist thought, through the ages (I am not suggesting that Black feminist thought is static) is the concern of the representation of Black women. From Cooper to Crenshaw to Alexander-Floyd and others, Black feminists have sought to render the invisible visible in an attempt to encourage a more democratic politics. These social activists and researchers examine how mutually interlocking systems of oppression—race, gender, class, and sexuality—construct and perpetuate marginal identities and experiences, and also foster opportunities for resistance within the Black community in general and Black women specifically.

This research joins a growing body of work that centers on Black women’s political behavior—generally defined—that seeks to render what is invisible visible. Additionally, it represents my attempt to continue the political work of my mother—moving Black women who live at the intersection of mental illness, domestic abuse, and/or HIV/AIDS from the shadows. My mother’s work was and is political. Consider Joy James’s description of Black women’s political behavior. According to her, “Black women have tended incredible, secluded gardens within the expansive wasteland of this dysfunctional democracy” (1999, p. 2). James, like other critical race and gender scholars, recognizes that Black women’s political behavior must be contextualized and theorized in a nontraditional manner in order to capture their experiences. Literature that directly or indirectly focuses on the political behavior of the majority group tends to center traditional forms of political behavior, such as registering, voting, and monetary contributions. Traditional approaches to measure this behavior can privilege attitudinal factors such as socialization and socioeconomic factors including but not limited to education. This type of research is apt to leave Black women in the gap—where the wide spectrum of their political behaviors is not always analyzed and/or explained.

Additionally, James suggests that the American democratic process is not always accessible to, inclusive of, and representative of Black women. Even after winning the formal right to engage in the political process, Black women still find themselves marginalized. Given this, Black women have created alternative spaces within which to engage in politics (see Berger, 2004; Isoke, 2013). Traditional research can also fail to appreciate and theorize such spaces because these actions are not easily conceptualized and operationalized to fit into “standard” ways of knowing (see Christian, 1988). Consequently, traditional research can miss the political agency of Black women. So how do we begin to understand Black women’s political behavior?

Extant research that centers Black women’s relationship with formal politics informs us that Black women’s political acts and attitudes are influenced by their social location. Gay and Tate (1998), Mansbridge and Tate (1992), Simien (2005), and Simien and Clawson (2004) speak to the influence of the intersection of gender and race on the political attitudes of Black women. Orey and Smooth (2006) show how intersectionality influences the political strategizing of elected Black women. Studies of this nature argue that interlocking identities of race, class, and gender influence Black women’s political activities and behaviors.

Research that centers nontraditional political participation of Black women addresses, in part, how Black women use their voices and words to critique, challenge, and offer alternatives to their inequitable social position. Much of this scholarship focuses on African American women’s literacy practices and is primarily historical in nature (focusing on women of the 19th and early 20th centuries). Most notably are Logan’s We Are Coming (1999), McHenry’s Forgotten Readers (2002), Peterson’s “Doers of the Word” (1995), and Royster’s Traces of a Stream (2000). Similar to studies on Black women’s involvement with formal politics, these studies argue that although constrained by multiple oppressive structures, these women engaged literacy practices that critiqued the raced-gendered status quo. Black women rhetors such as Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Maria Stewart, Mary Church Terrell, Victoria Earle Matthews, and several others used their words as political acts.

African American females’ language and literacy practices reflect their socialization in a racialized, genderized, sexualized, and classed world in which they employ their language and literacy practices to protect and advance themselves. Working from this rhetorical situation, the Black female develops creative strategies to overcome her situation, to “make a way outa no way.” (Richardson, 2003, p. 77)

Richardson (2003) further informs us that Black women employed multiple means such as storytelling and a number of verbal and nonverbal communication methods—including the manipulation of silence in their challenge to race and gender hierarchies.

The development of this knowledge of Black women’s speech and silence as political is not evenly distributed across all disciplines. One discipline where growth of this type of scholarship continues to lag behind is political science. Michele Berger’s (2004) Workable Sisterhood disrupts the more traditional studies of Black women and politics. Berger, using the concept of intersectional stigma, provides us with a different way of reading power, oppression, and speech. The women analyzed by Berger are stigmatized as a result of their experiences with HIV/AIDS and their histories as sex workers. Berger shows how they (re)construct themselves into activists and truth bearers. These modern-day women are very similar to the historical Black women who inform our analyses on Black women’s discourses. They use their talk—written and oral—as radical political acts designed to challenge and replace existing inequitable positions.

Research on Black women’s discourses frequently considers the social role and positioning of the physical Black female body in conjunction with the spoken/written word. We see this more often with analyses of women such as Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (see Peterson, 1995). A norm in such analyses is to first consider how the majority (that is, Euro-Americans) reads and responds socially, culturally, politically, and economically to the Black female body, and second the response of Black women to such actions (Bennett & Dickerson, 2001; hooks, 2000; Orleck, 2005; Roberts 1997; R. Y. Williams, 2004). It has been argued that in response to such scrutiny, Black women engage in a politics of “silence” or a politics of “respectability” as a means of protecting Black female personhood (Higginbotham, 1992, 1993). In essence Black women have adopted a politics of strategic, discreet silences.

While the Black female body has been the topic of discussion of many scholarly treatises and cultural analyses, many have not explored how the Black female body functions in political representation, in the sense that it serves as a text in which power hierarchies are embedded and read and acted upon by Black women. Researchers tend to look at the female body as a recipient of actions—cultural, political, and social. To build on this body of research on the politics of Black women’s talk, I focus on the intragroup reading of the Black woman’s body and its relationship to their articulations/speech/discourses and silences. I explore the points of intersection between discourses of HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and mental health and the socio-politicization of the Black female body. I focus on how social power—articulated via the body—enables subject positions that marginalize or exclude some members of the community and determines which experiences are worth talking about, how they should be talked about, and how resources should be distributed among community members.

I this chapter I offer the theoretical approach that I employ to understand the intragroup use of silence. I start by offering a brief review of what I mean by silence. This is followed by the presentation of the concept of intersectionality, muted group theory, and body studies—which combined, offer the theoretical framework for the study. While often treated as separate concepts and theories, I bring them together in an attempt to offer a more comprehensive understanding of silences and the resulting shadow bodies for understanding the intragroup performance of intersectionality among Black women.

Understanding Silence

This analysis explores the “meaning making practices” (Halliday, 1994) of the talk on HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and mental illness and the ways this talk is used to represent reality as well as the positioning and social roles of various Black women in the Black body politic. Existing research on meaning making among Black women tends to focus on verbal or visual language, often ignoring the silences (see Henderson, 2010; Hobson, 2012). To understand how some bodies become shadow bodies requires that I analyze the deployment of silence within the context of (a) who is speaking, (b) what is being said/talked about, and (c) what is also not being said in the discourses. Silence, like talk, is a way of managing meaning and subjectivities. As I argue, shadow bodies emerge in that space between talk and silence.

Huckin (2002) argues that the public does not always notice silence. However, the failure to notice silence does not render it powerless. Indeed rhetorical silence does ideological work by either reinforcing bias and/or prejudice in those who are reading, writing, or even listening. There exists a substantial amount of research on the general topic of silence where silence tends to be treated as metaphorical, ambiguous, or as a negative (see Bruneau, 1973; Jensen, 1973; R. L. Scott, 1972). While silence has been the subject of study in communication literature, for example, there remains an area that, while growing, is undertheorized and understudied. There is very little written on how silence can serve to communicate messages. Furthermore, research in this area tends to focus more on conversational silences, often leaving uncovered the ideological work done by textual silences. As such the methods/methodological approaches for “showing” silences, textually, is underdeveloped—after all how does one show something that does not exist particularly when there appears to be lots of words (talk) present?

As defined by Huckin (2002, p. 348) textual silence is “the omission of some piece of information that is pertinent to the topic at hand.” To date, research on textual silence tends to focus on how the media omits information (see Chomsky, 1987; Jackson, 1999; van Dijk, 1986). I extend this by looking at political and cultural text to show how silence is manifest. Within communicative structures there exists (and it is much needed) that which is made explicit and what is not. Consequently, silence should not be viewed as a pause or absence of communication. Silence, instead, should be understood as serving a functional role and thus as embodying its own meaning and interpretive value (see Jaworski, 1993; Tannen & Saville-Troike, 1985). Silences become evident when the reader, as in the case of this study, (re)constructs what is said by focusing on who is speaking and the context within which the speech is occurring. Thus, silences have to be culturally and situationally read in the sense that the person (re)constructing the silence has the templates (the scripts, discussed in chapter 3, are the templates) for understanding not only what is spoken but that which goes unspoken.

In my attempt to bring to light what might not be easily seen, I rely on Huckin’s (2002) typology of “textual silences.” This typology offers the following understandings of silence: (1) speech act silences are used as a form of communicative import, but only if the reader or listener, because there is a shared set of expectations, is able to arrive at the intended understanding; (2) presuppositional silences involve the speaker or writer not stating what is assumed to be common knowledge, but is instead easily recoverable from context; (3) discreet silences are used as a means for avoiding the mention of sensitive subject, resulting from issues of tactfulness, confidentiality, or taboo topics; (4) genre-based silences result from the norms and conventions of a particular genre; and (5) manipulative silences involve the deliberate actions to conceal relevant information from the reader/listener. I focus primarily on discreet silences in this research and argue that this form of silence is the result of the taboo nature of HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and mental illness and their perceived negative reflection on Black womanhood.

Theoretical Orientation

Silence in relation to the scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies and their articulations of policy issues is not extensively studied in political science. Literature on agenda setting, the process by which social issues are brought to the public and the policy agenda, suggest that there are a number of factors that influence this process (Bachrach and Baratz, 1963; Baumgartner and Jones, 2002; Gaventa, 1980; Fischer, 2003; Kingdon, 1984; Lukes, 1974; Schneider and Ingram, 1993, 1997; Stone, 1988; Strolovitch, 2007). These researchers, among others, suggest that the movement of an issue to the public and policy agenda is influenced by factors such as resource differentials and power imbalances for example. Crenson (1971, pp. 177–178) posits that “‘victims’ of political power may remain politically invisible—indeed, invisibility may constitute their response to the power of non-decisionmaking.” Crenson, like E. E. Schattschneider (1960, 1975), argues that there is a “mobilization bias” that results in the policy concerns of the weak being left out or ignored in politics and policy deliberations. While this well-respected body of literature helps us to understand the non-decision making and the faces of power, it does not allow us to fully understand how multiple-identity marginalized groups, as opposed to “singly marginalized” groups (Baird, 2010) are treated in politics and policy decision making. Given this limit, Karen Baird (2010, p. 10) asks, “what about black women?” She then claims that “complex population constructions for intersectionally marginalized groups and the influence of such construction on the policymaking process need further research and specification.” She suggests using intersectionality, as a means of enhancing the above theorizing, to better understand how issues affecting multiple-identity marginalized groups make it onto public and policy agendas.

Theories tend to be general and do not consider multiple identities and roles, thereby making their applicability to Black women a challenge (Howard-Hamilton, 2003). Additionally, the empirical literature on Black women’s intragroup talk and silence is scant. The difficulty of “measuring” silence and its relationship to demobilization and representation may, in part, account for this dearth of analysis. Given this, I offer a framework that amalgamates a number of theories to understand the silences around HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, and mental health (all cross-cutting issues). My theoretical orientation, while drawing, in general, on the above-referenced literatures on agenda setting and the exercise of power, is grounded in Black feminist studies (particularly intersectionality), muted group theory, and body studies. While these theories have been developed across various disciplines and might not have a single unified theoretical understanding, they are particularly well suited for this analysis. While developed in fields such as Black women’s studies, anthropology, philosophy, and feminist studies, these theories have achieved interdisciplinary appeal. These various theories are complimentary as at the core of each is a concern with the exercise of power. Individually and collectively the theories are concerned with how power is used to subjugate, silence, marginalize, and control some groups while privileging others. This interdisciplinary approach to the study of the intragroup performance of intersectionality allows for the identification of how talk and silences are employed “to negotiate [raced and] gendered cultural identities, affirm sisterhood, build community, and confront, demystify and overcome oppression” (Houston & Davis, 2002, p. 12). As such they are well positioned to explain how some Black women become shadow bodies.

I start with a singular exploration and review of the theories and highlight their interrelatedness. However, I recognize that none of these theories are “settled.” For example, there is much debate on how to approach an intersectional study (see Dahmoon, 2008; McCall, 2005). Theorizing on the body and its role in politics, social policy, and the body politic is not free of contention. I do not, for example, address the mind/body duality proposed by Cartesian thought or Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) challenge to this duality. My goal is not to settle these debates but to use the various theoretical developments to explore how Black women’s bodies influence their talk and silence on specific social issues. Instead, I recognize the fluidity and interrelationship between the mind and body (see Sklar, 1994). Furthermore, the social and cultural environments influence what is done to the body and how the body responds to these actions.

The Black feminist contribution to my theoretical orientation stems from two interlocking components that characterize Black feminist thought: Black feminist standpoint theory and the recognition of the diversity of Black women’s experiences. First, there is the notion that Black women share a common experience of being Black and female that affords them a peculiar view, or standpoint, of the world and a similar experience of oppression. Since the early 1800s (if not earlier), Black women have recognized and eventually named their experiences with race, class, and gender as an intersectional identity. The Combahee River Collective again articulated this identity and its impact on the bodies of Black women in 1977. In 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw named Black women’s experiences with multiple systems of oppression as “intersectionality” (Crenshaw, 1989).

Crenshaw’s theoretical understanding, in part, speaks to political and structural intersectionality. Political intersectionality reflects the different (and sometimes conflicting) political agendas of the various groups to which an individual may belong, or within which they “define” their identity. Scholars most often note the challenges Black women face, having been left out of the women’s movement and ignored in the modern Black freedom struggle. I think of political intersectionality in terms of how Black women craft their political responses to being rendered invisible and silenced. Such political strategizing is in response to the Euro-American oppression of Black women and is also a function of the Black community’s internal structuring. I recognize that these two processes are distinct, but intimately connected.

Structural intersectionality centers the operation of systems and structures in society that result in the marginalization of individuals—in terms of their social needs and legal status. Crenshaw (1991, p. 358) offers the following claim to demonstrate the functioning of structural inequality: “Intervention strategies based solely on the experiences...