Women, Negroes, and Other Monsters: An Essay on Non-Civilized Bodies

Abstract

The Western dynamics of civilization implies a tense relationship between body and mind, culture and nature, civilization and barbarism. In the following essay we explore the construction of the last one of such dualism by investigating the spaces where certain bodies are defined as monstrous. We are particularly concerned with the constitution of a scientific vision of racial differences, its specificity in relation to the medieval perception of the place of alterity, its role in legitimizing the circulation of ‘monstrous’ bodies as commodities and its claim to disclose an objective hierarchy of races and gender. From Lavater to Curvier, the classification of species offers a hierarchical model that will be appropriated by race and gender discourses in biology. Within this context, there is one case of paradigmatic quality, ‘The Hottentot Venus’. We argue that the political negotiation of Sara Baartman’s ontological status, during the 19th and 20th centuries, represents just such effort to establish the borders of civility through the circulation and exclusion of uncivilized bodies.