I'm not going to lie. This text was difficult for me to parse the second time through, too. But here are my basic questions to think about:
1. At the beginning of the fourth section, Spillers writes, "But just as we duly regard similarities between life conditions of American women-- captive and free-- we must observe those undeniable contrasts and differences so decisive that the African-American female's historic claim to the territory of womanhood and "femininity" still tends to rest too solidly on the subtle and shifting calibrations of a liberal ideology." Then, Spillers writes that "gender and the arrangements of gender are both crucial and evasive." What, specifically, is meant by this? Does the author mean liberal thinkers are all too often duped into understanding black women through a lens that doesn't actually exist at this time? That we don't actually understand that there was an "altered reading of gender"?
2. Being a former journalist, I relate better with the more simple, concrete sections of the text. For example, at the top of p. 78, Spillers writes, "Because African-American women experienced uncertainty regarding their infants' lives in the historic situation, gendering, in its coeval reference to African-American women, insinuates an implicit and unresolved puzzle both within current feminist discourse and within those discursive communities that investigate the entire problematics of culture." This, to me, is an admission that the article's content and understanding the role black women played are inherently difficult to understand, and will forever be, particularly within certain circles. Do you agree?
3. What did you glean differently from the text during your second take? Was it more readable? Could you relate the thoughts to anything else we've read? I am curious to know if anyone saw a distinct correlation between the authors and their writing, despite the difference in form.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Without a doubt, Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is a challenging article to read, but her theories are becoming more understandable as I examine other class-assigned texts related to race, ethnicity and gender. For example, Spillers writes “These undecipherable markings of the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color.” (67) When I first read this a few weeks ago, the passage explained how the scars of slavery are the heirlooms of future generations. The torturous pain of slavery and its effect of future generations are not seen by those who only see beyond skin color. But now “Corregidora” brings a whole in understanding of Spillers’ theory that “this body whose flesh carries and female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned inside out.” (67) Ursa’s hieroglyphics and identity are shaped by stories of physical tortures that her great-grandmother and grandmother endured by the “slave breeder and whoremonger” Corregidora. Ursa is told that “The important thing is making generations. They can burn the papers, but they can’t burn conscious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence. And that’s what makes the verdict.” (22) Ursa is burdened with the sadness and brutality of her ancestors. And now that her womb is gone, what is her purpose in life? The loss of the womb should free her from the pain. But she doesn’t seem to see it that way. She feels inadequate to her family of women and undesirable to men.
ReplyDeleteThe flesh bears witness to a painful past. Maybe that’s why the battles in “Corregidora” must be resolved through the flesh, through sexually contact. What happened to these women defies logic. Gayl Jones writes “It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great Gram did to Corregiodora.” (184) There isn’t much conversational exchange between men and women in this text. Male-female exchanges are physical – through sex or violence.