Read on Twitter
Per last retweet: I need to pop off on something that bothered me a week or so ago on here. I saw a tweet state that bell hooks was wrong to critique Bey*ncé and I disagree with my full chest and CV. What is missing from hooks’s critique is an examination on colorism in her work.
hooks is a fast writer but she is not a blogger & that’s why her criticism on Bey*ncé contains missed opportunities in that she did not spend the time to revise it but kudos to her for leaving it up & standing by it (same with her remarks in her revised preface for Black Looks).
I respect Bey*ncé (I even wrote about how much I enjoy 
) but boy are Black scholars out of their leagues when it comes to critiquing her as many of them share simliar approximations to whiteness. To challenge her capitalization of Blackness is perceived as a challenge to them.
) but boy are Black scholars out of their leagues when it comes to critiquing her as many of them share simliar approximations to whiteness. To challenge her capitalization of Blackness is perceived as a challenge to them.
Someone went as far as to say that Bey*ncé possess a fungible body or relation to that and NOPE. When Hartman wrote about Black women’s fungibility (as started during enslavement) it is in relation to the various ways in which whitness began to soldify value akin to currency.
Meaning that approximations begin to define a body & as we know with Spillers’s flesh/body spilt, BW start/continually exist in a state of fleshness lacking the integrity of a body. However, approximatations to a body are possible through whitness with colorism a key component.
Thus light skin Black women serve/d as a passageway between the “pure” flesh of brown and dark skin Black women & the bodies of the “white” world. We exist as an over representation in visual media (from 18th century paintings to now) as a mode of erasure to brown & dark skin BW.
Because colonization thrives off representational images/narratives to constitute its power what is not represented is deemed illegible for existence. What I mean by this is that if light skin BW are an overpresentation of BW’s existence our image/narrative production serves …
to negate the image and existence of brown and dark skin BW because they exist as an “impossible” image. This means that the forms of subjugation that light skin BW endure oftens has some form of “legibility” to it whereas the abuse of brown/dark skin BW is deemed “impossible.”
This means that defending brown/dark skin BW legally or personally from abuse is a difficult task as we are trained to view their bodies as a negation. Take for instance the stereotype of the mammy. The stereotype suggests that body is asexual and maternal to the master’s kids.
We obviously know how to decode that on the representational level but what the invention of the stereotype reveals is far more nefarious for its ability to collapse asexuality to that body because it was likely the “mammy” who was repeadtly raped. Only to have that body be …
deemed impossible for rape for they lacked a “body” in language. This was & is the fungible body in society. When “we” go around & claim that all BW regardless of their proximity to whiteness possess the same fungibility we are recommitting the negation of brown/dark skin BW.
So while Bey*ncé experiences antiblackness she is not at the status of fungibility in the world. hooks’s had the right instinct in her criticisms they just are underbaked. This thread hasn’t touched how kinship is kinda possible for light skins outside of natal alienation.
K, fin. I’m too wired up these days and I don’t like it. My chart is mostly Virgo and Gemini (in multiple planets) so I’m just a talkative bag of anxiety and isonmia.
