Loving Body, Skin and Hair

‘Ain’t I a woman…?’ Not so much a question as an exclamation; this famous phrase, the axis around which Sojourner Truth constructed the speech she presented at a women’s rights convention in Ohio in 1851 is the starting point for this chapter. For over 150 years, Truth’s words continue to provide valued currency for feminist discourses that at one and the same time seek to unify women and, crucially for Black women, to authorise the significance of difference. Donna Haraway (1992) suggests this is because in deconstructing the ‘terrible edifice of “woman” in Western patriarchal language and systems of representation’ (p. 92), Sojourner Truth challenges the idea of the Black woman as one who can never be a subject, who is only ‘plot space, matrix, ground, screen for the act of man’. Historically, this ‘act of man’ has been concerned with the racialised and sexualised objectification of the Black woman to service the interests of male desire and white privilege while her exoticisation has ensured the marginalisation of her own versions of selfhood. This chapter is concerned with dominant representations of beauty and the ways in which Abasindi women redefined the concept of beauty in their own likeness. Taking the position that ethnocentric ideals that pervade constructions of beauty within a context of race and gender inequality are harmful to self-esteem and provide pervasive subliminal means of limiting women’s power, reclaiming the Black self is not only vital for self-love, but also is in and of itself, a political act.