Her posterior was thought to possess mysterious properties (Hobson 2005). Earlier, on a journey to South Africa, François Levaillant had offered a few gifts in exchange for a glimpse of a naked female Hottentot. He had thus been able to explain that the famous apron was “not an extension of the nymphae, but of the labia majora” (Levaillant, cited by Moreau, 1803). Based on their findings in their studies of Saartjie Baartman, researchers classified the Khoikhoi within a racial hierarchy: the fact that science, in the era of “human zoos,” sought to define a race according to one individual is telling (Blanchard et al. 2011[EL3] ).

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? Truth’s words vividly contrast the character of oppression faced by white and[5] Black women. While white middle class women have traditionally been treated as delicate and overly emotional—destined to subordinate themselves to white men—Black women have been denigrated and subject to the racist abuse that is a foundational element of US society.

At the same time, the practice of a systematic mathematization of her body concentrates the anxieties of the period to understand the evolution of humanity, to depict it in scientific terms and to produce narratives of what is known as ‘scientific analogy’ and ‘scientific orientalism’. Africans were historically placed next to primates in the great chain of being. Race and gender are also depicted by Nancy Leys Stepan (2000) as a powerful ‘scientific analogy’ that occupied a strategic place in scientific theorizing about human variation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remnants of this argument are found in examples from anthropometric, medical and embryological studies focused on measuring human and animal skeletons (see Gould, 1981). Such studies have provided evidence of women’s low brain weights and deficient brain structures as compared to men from varied cultures o[4] r even to animals. Thus, it was observed that Woman shared with Negroes the primitive traits of a narrow, childlike, and delicate skull found in lower castes, so different from the more robust and rounded heads characteristic of the males of superior races. Evolutionary biology, making use of such evidence, provided the analogy of woman as the ‘conservative’ element to the man’s ‘progressive’ nature (Ellis, 1926). Londa Schiebinger (2000) discusses the shameful case of ‘Hottentot Venus’ as an object of scientific inquiry in modern biology via a systematic mathematisation of her body.

Though she was not the first person to be put on exhibit in Europe—a number of “savages” and “exotics” had come before (the most famous being the Arawak Indians, whom Christopher Columbus brought to Queen Isabella I of Castile’s court from the Americas in 1492)—the “Hottentot Venus” was the first to be an object at once of entertainment, media interest, “sexual fantasy,” and science. Moreover, she would later become an object of memory, history, and commemoration. At the time (between 1800 and 1830), she was at the center of a major shift that occurred at a conjunction between scientific inquiry, colonial interest (that of the British Empire), and the world of spectacle, which was always seeking new forms to maintain public interest[EL2] .

Race scientists regularly compared women, particularly in terms of the size of their skulls and brains, with representatives of “inferior races”; in turn, non-European males were depicted as having feminine characteristics. In Russia, these ideas were first publicized, even if rarely, in the late 1850s and the 1860s (Dobroliubov 1858). Later in the century, the application of conclusions from race science to gender became more prevalent in such areas of research as physical anthropology. As Engelstein demonstrates, this line of argument became particularly popular post-1905 in the works of medical professionals (Engelstein 1992). Such discourse, predicated on the assumption of women’s inferiority, was not seen in either Western Europe or Russia as contradicting the general trend toward nation-building. As demonstrated by contemporary scholars, the distinction between the public and private, articulated during the Enlightenment period, led to the allocation to men and women of unequal positions within the “imagined communities” of modern nations (Anderson 1983).

Η γλώσσα τους και οι πρακτικές τους ήταν απαγορευμένες στην Φρανκική Ισπανία, και υποβλήθηκαν σε συστεμική διάκριση σε ολόκληρη την Ευρώπη. Στην σημερινή περίοδο, ο Ρομά αντιμετωπίζουν νεοφασιστική και κεντρώα κρατική βία, περιλαμβανομένων φόνων, πογκρόμ, αναγκαστικών απελάσεων, εξαναγκαστικών στειρώσεων, και πολλές άλλες βίες σε όλη την Ευρώπη και εκτός αυτής. Η άλλη πλευρά της ασαφούς σχέσης ήταν η οικειοποίηση της Ρομ κουλτούρας – η μουσική μας, το φαγητό μας, η τέχνη μας, και οι παραδοσιακές τέχνες μας – μια οικειοποίηση που αναμιγνύει φαντασιώσεις γύρω από και μίσος για την ίδια μας την ύπαρξη. Οι γυναίκες Ρομά έχουν παρουσιαστεί ως σεξουαλικά διαθέσιμα αντικείμενα φαντασίας ή γριές μάγισσες. Έχουμε παρουσιαστεί ως παθητικά θύματα της πατριαρχίας που έχουν ανάγκη σωσίματος και κλέφτρες και ζητιάνες που πλουτίζουμε από το κράτος πρόνοιας.

In the 1960s, the contrast between white middle-class and Black women’s oppression could not have been more obvious. The same “experts” who prescribed a life of happy homemaking for white suburban women, as documented in Betty Friedan’s enormously popular The Feminine Mystique, reprimanded Black women for their failure to conform to this model. Because Black mothers have traditionally worked outside the home in much larger numbers than their white counterparts, they were blamed for a range of social ills on the basis of their relative economic independence. Socialist-feminist Stephanie Coontz describes “Freudians and social scientists” who “insisted that Black men had been doubly emasculated—first by slavery and later by [6] the economic independence of their women.” Many in the African-American media also accepted this analysis. A 1960 Ebony magazine article stated plainly that the traditional independence of the Black woman meant that she was “more in conflict with her innate biological role than the white woman.” 18 This theme emerged full throttle in 1965, when the US Department of Labor issued a report entitled, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report, authored by future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, describes a “Black matriarchy” at the center of a “tangle of pathology” afflicting Black families, leading to a cycle of poverty. Sharon Smith, 2019: 5.

I cannot entirely endorse this insistence on determinate vigor and full autonomy, for practical historiographic exigencies will not allow such endorsements to privilege subaltern consciousness. Against the possible charge that his approach is essentialist, Guha constructs a definition of the people (the place of that essence) that can be only an identity-in-differential. He proposes a dynamic stratification grid describing colonial social production at large. Even the third group on the list, the buffer group, as it were, between the people and the great macrostructural dominant groups, is itself defined as a place of in-betweenness, what Derrida has described as an 'antre’: 1.Dominant foreign groups [elite] 2.Dominant indigenous groups on the all-India level [elite] 3.Dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels. 4.The terms "people" and "subaltern classes" have been used as synonymous throughout this note. The social groups and elements included in this category represent the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the "elite." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988: 79.

καθώς οι Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), Josiah Clark Nott (1804 – 1873) και άλλα μέλη της Αμερικανικής Σχολής ασπάστηκαν τη θεωρία της πολυγένεσης, σύμφωνα με την οποία οι φυλές αποτελούν αμετάβλητα είδη, που δημιουργήθηκαν χωριστά. Η Αμερικανική Σχολή συνέδεε την πολυγένεση με την υπεράσπιση της δουλείας στον αμερικανικό Νότο. Erickson & Murphy, 2002, σ. 107

Erickson, P. & Murphy, L. (2002). Ιστορία της Ανθρωπολογικής Σκέψης. Αθήνα: Κριτική. (Μτφρ. Φ. Μπουμπούλη)

Η ιδέα αυτή αποτέλεσε τυπικό στοιχείο της βικτωριανής εποχής, στην οποία κυριαρχούσε η πίστη στην τεχνολογική πρόοδο αφενός, και στην ευρωπαϊκή αποικιοκρατία αφετέρου που συχνά δικαιολογούνταν μέσω της αναφοράς στη γνωστή φράση του Kipling για το «βάρος των λευκών, το καθήκον των Ευρωπαίων να εκπολιτίσουν τους άγριους». Eriksen, 2006: 36

Eriksen, T. H. (2006). Μικροί Τόποι, Μεγάλα Ζητήματα: Μια Εισαγωγή στην Κοινωνική και Πολιτισμική Ανθρωπολογία. Αθήνα: Κριτική. (Μτφρ. Α. Κατσικερός)