Summary Of Kimberly Springer's Skin Deep Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body In American Culture

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In Kimberly Springer’s anthology, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, she has different articles in the book that are written by a variety of women. The articles in the book break down and discuss areas of history and time-periods that shaped the representation and current understanding of the black female body. Many ideals of how society preserves the black female body to be is based on historical context that the authors in Springers book further explain. The two articles that I am going to focus on are Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of “Hottentot” Women in Europe 1815-17 and Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction. Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy Baartman was often compared to an ape because of her stature, in the text the author states, “The hottentot worked as a double trope. As a woman of color, she served as primitive primitive: she was both female and racial link to nature- two for the price of one.” (pg. 75) Because of Baartman’s race Europeans linked her to an animal who is apart of nature as opposed to a human being. Like wise, in Mastering the Female Pelvis, Sims and Harris depicted the slave women as inherently more durable than white women, they described the black women to be durable like a car, not in reference to a human being (272). Sims often argued that the slave women was able to endure excruciating pain because slavery “prepared” the women for the surgeries. In present day black women are still looked at as being strong women, but with that description comes negative. In society people often think that black women can endure any and everything that causes pain, as Dr. Kuumba once stated in class that her doctor compared her to an animal after giving her a shot. Comments like the ones made by Sims and Dunlop perpetuate the insecurities that black women have in

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