My final paper for my Reading Motherhood English class:
A few months ago, my girlfriends and I were watching Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” music video, an international hit of the Queen dancing fiercely and fearlessly, owning her sexuality as a source of power as opposed to something of which to feel shame. One of my friends laughed, sighing that Beyoncé could never dance like that again – hips swaying, chest upward and outward, lips parted ever so slightly – because the Queen was now a mother. This thought perplexed me, swirling questions in my mind of the way modern American society has desexualized mothers, as if as soon as women have a parasite come crawling out of their vagina, their sexuality vanishes like vapor. Yet despite this overt desexualization of mother’s bodies, I hear catcalling barbs such as “Mamacita” – little mother – and presidential candidates refer to their wives as “mother,” and I wonder not if the two are intertwined but rather how. As a result, I wish to explore the connections between Black motherhood and sexuality through Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life and Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved. Thus, I will attempt to argue that Black mothers and their bodies have been desexualized and sexualized as mechanisms of colonization under a heteronormative patriarchy, but Black mothers have also found empowerment in reclaiming their mother and sexual labor to subvert these narratives.
Black mothers in the U.S. have utilized their autonomy over their mother and sexual labor as a way to decolonize the very systems that have oppressed, exploited, and in many ways made them mothers. To illustrate this, Black feminist professor Patricia Hill Collins wrote that “The widespread institutionalizatized rape of Black women by white men, both during slavery and in the segregated South, created countless biracial children who had to be absorbed into African-American families” (318). Due to the perversion of white men in the United States, and the Americas as a whole during the epoch of colonization, Black women were constantly denied the choice to be mothers at all, expected and forced to bear children by their enslavers in order to create more capital and free labor for their abusers. These mothers and their children were made to maintain not just the plantations they worked on to provide stability for their enslavers but also income for a country who did not wish to share their wealth with the people who provided them with such prosperity. Because the production of enslaved people was such a vital element to the United States’ economy, Black women were continually assaulted into motherhood, their bodies hypersexualized, offering justification for white men to see them as continually avaiable at all times, which continually perpetuated this cycle of violence against them and their bodies. Consequently, Black women had no choice in whether or not they would bear children in order to preserve the country’s economy, and their motherhood was often the product of the sexualization and sexual violence imposed upon their bodies.
I’d like to pause and ask us to think logically around this disconnect between sexuality and motherhood, for two plus two does not equal five. In order for a female to become a biological mother before fertility treatments, she must have intercourse with a male, thus debunking the Madonna/Whore complex, which argues the faulty binary that all women are either pure, motherly virgins, like the Blessed Virgin Mother, or sexually promiscious and deviant women who have no children, alledgedly but inaccurately like the Christian Bible’s other Mary, Mary of Magdala (Zaina). The irrationality of this dualistic thinking seems like the two women should have their reputations flipped, Mary Magdalene being the mother since she was the one who, biologically, could mother a child, while the Blessed Virgin Mother, as her name suggests, means that she, at that historical moment pre artifical semination and in vitro fertilization, could not rear a living thing; but as Daphne de Marneffe notes in her piece “The ‘Problem’ of Maternal Desire: Essential Mothering and the Dilemma Difference,” “Desire, we’ve been told, is about sex. Motherhood, we’ve been told, is about practically anything but sex” (688). Thus, women’s sexuality has been used as a barometer and oftentimes a weapon to label women as either good or wicked, moral or immoral, saintly mothers or sinful sex workers.
More specifically to Black mothers, Collins describes how from birth sexuality is wielded against Black girls in an attempt to force them into one of three cages: “the mammy, the matriarch, or the prostitute” (322), which connects hypersexuality with bad mothering or no mothering at all and desexualization with good mothering, for sexuality means desire, desire means selfishness, and motherhood means selflessness. Hence, I wish to address each of these tropes independently and then in conjunction with one another in order to highlight the way Black women’s sexuality and motherhood has both been a mechanisim of colonization and a way Black mothers have countered these narratives, beginning with the domestic worker trope.
When analyzing 1959’s Imitation of Life, Marina Heung describes the mammy myth, or in other words domestic worker stereotype, as a Black woman who acted as a mother to and for her employer’s or enslaver’s white children and was required to be:
Self-respecting, independent, loyal, forward, gentle, captious, affectionate, true, strong, just, warm-hearted, compassionate, fearless, popular, brave, good, pious, quick-witted, capable, thrifty, proud, regal, courageous, superior, skillful, tender, queenly, dignified, neat, quick, competent, possessed with a temper, trustworthy, faithful, patient, tyrannical, sensible, discreet, efficient, careful, harsh, devoted, truthful, neither apish nor servile (Heung 27-28).
This laundry list of things to be instead of permission to be human not only reinforces colonial narratives surrounding Black sexuality and motherhood but can also, tragically, be used to describe the portrayl of Annie in Douglas Sirk’s classic. Played by Juanita Moore, Annie is a single Black mother attempting to find work as a domestic worker, which unfortunately implicitly entails acting as a mother, or in dereagotory terms a mammy, for her employer’s children, yet she informs the film’s second protagonist, Lora, that “‘People just won’t take in a woman with a child. And no matter what, I won’t be separated from my baby”” (00:07:51). Here we see Annie asserting her mother power, refusing to bow down to the white supremacist and patriarchial constructs that demands she sacrifises mothering her own child in order to devote all of her attention, energy, and love in mothering Lora’s daughter, Susie, the white daughter of the white employer. As deviant as Annie’s declaration of owning her mother love is, she must be portrayed in a way as to reassure the film’s white audience that Annie is no challenge to the social order as the Black matriarch, but rather a domestic worker so full of love, so full of inate goodness, that she’ll mother both her child, Sarah Jane, and Susie, which completely strips her of her individual traits, characteristics, and sexuality.
In many ways, Annie and Lora are foils of one another, but they are, most prominently to this paper, in terms of their sexuality or rather their sexualization. We first see this when Lora’s future lover, Steve, comes to their apartment with the pictures he snapped of Sarah Jane and Susie, the girls giggling at the image of them pulling a prank on an unsuspecting man. While Lora’s reaction is passive, barely suppressing a grin, Annie furiously berates the girls, shaming them then shepherding them off to bed so Steve may have a private moment with Lora. Albeit subtle, the look Annie gave Lora as she picked up Susie and guided Sarah Jane to bed insinuates that Annie was well aware of the fact that Steve was interested in Lora and wanted to allow the two a moment to talk. After all, the closest Steve ever came to touching Annie was handing her her suitcase in the movie’s opening scenes, yet he touches Lora in the picture’s first shot, cradeling her arm as she frantically searches for Susie, whom Annie found and bought food for. Never in the film do we see a male character approach Annie in a way that could even be considered romantic, much less sexual, but Lora is constantly objectifed and, in some instances, preyed upon by the men in the movie industry. In this vein, we see Annie heralded (in white circles) as the mammy myth brought to life, making up for the bad mothering portrayed by Lora, the sensual, never slutty but surely sexualized woman so caught up in her own desires that she has no desire for mothering. As a result of this comparison, Annie is able to claim ownership of her daughter at the beginning of the film and occasionally throughout only because she fits the archetype of the domestic worker so pointedly and perfectly. She thus is permitted to mother Sarah Jane as long as she mothers Susie in Lora’s stead first, fitting the two mothers into the Madonna/Whore, or rather Maid/Starlit, complex of mothering.
Unfortunately, for both Annie and Sarah Jane, the impositions imposed upon both of them under these colonial norms riddles their relationship, shifting our attention from the domestic worker trope to the sex worker trope previously mentioned. While Annie upholds the colonial narrative of the Black, selfless mothering towards white children, Sarah Jane is shown by Sirk as the hypersexualized Black woman, in some circles known as the Jezebel myth. Despite the fact that Lora is an actor and is often featured in glamorous gowns, shapley dresses, and fine jewerly, her high class and, in layman’s terms, her whiteness, allows her to move through her life with the notion of being beautiful but also being a lady, sensual but respectable. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane is painted by Sirk as one of, if not the only, villain in the film, a deceptive liar sneaking out to meet her white boyfriend, whom she’s fooled into thinking that the two share the same race. When her lover finds out Sarah Jane’s mother is Black however, he violently assaults her, and as Heung argues, “the attack on her seems an inevitable punishment for her masquerading as white” (32). Although I take great issue with Heung’s description of the assault as inevitable, since she does not clarify whether she means Sirk is using this scene as a disciplinary method for Sarah Jane’s alleged deception or that white men are bound to believe they are entitled to Black women’s bodies at all times due to the epoch of enslvement, I find her assertion that the attack was the lover’s response in learning he had been fooled fascinating.
In the same way that Lora was able to be sexualized, albeit at the expense of her motherhood, and still maintained some semblance of respectability, I argue that Heung’s definition of white in this context is referring to this balance that Sarah Jane was able to maintain because of her passing. Since she was seen by her boyfriend as white, she could be sexy and still potentially a respectable girl to marry and mother children, even if she would’ve been labeled, like Lora, as a bad mother. Yet because of the colonial narratives and systemic racism, Sarah Jane “use(d) the erotics of spectacle to avoid the role of Black domestic servant, a performance that Annie naturalizes as fate” (Bergner 446). Without disregarding Annie’s strong assertion to keep Sarah Jane with her and continue mothering her biological daughter, the only way Annie was able to do so was by fitting into the Black domestic worker role so exactly, completely desexualizing her body and persona and consequently stripping her of any sexual desire. Sarah Jane, in order to change her path and have a career similar to Lora’s, is to be sexualized, dismissing her from the possibility of even being a domestic servant and, by extension, a mother due to the racialized sexism surrounding her. Sarah Jane’s life following the assault deteiorites quite rapidly into the common sex worker tropes: wearing tight-fitting clothing in front of a titilated (white) male audience in a back bar in an overcrowded and dangerous city, depicting her as anything but a (good) mother. As tragic as these two images created by Sirk are, I’d like to turn our attention to the final trope surrounding Black women, the matriarch, and the way that Sethe and Baby Suggs in Beloved reclaims Black sexuality and motherhood simultaneously.
Toni Morrison’s Sethe fights the Black matriarchy myth of motherhood in order to debunk the colonial myths surrounding Black motherhood and sexuality. To highlight this, whenever Paul D finds Sethe and her daughter, Denver, at 124 after eighteen years of no communication, no knowledge if the other was even alive, we see Sethe open up to Paul D about the sexual and mother trauma she experienced at the casually cruelly named Sweet Home Plantation. Bravely, she confides in him that the enslaver’s sons, “‘held me down and took (my milk)’” (Morrison 19). Paul D responds curiously with, “‘They used cowhide on you?’ ‘And they took my milk.’ ‘They beat you when you was pregnant?’ ‘And they took my milk!’” (Morrison 20). Sethe trusts Paul D enough to tell him this, to share with him an extremely agonizing memory, yet he does not seem to be able to focus on her in this attack. All of his concerns are concerning Sethe’s state of pregnancy – the fact that they assaulted her when she was pregnant, the fact that they beat her when she was pregnant – as if she wasn’t already aware. She clearly was though, due to her repetitive claim that they stole her milk, that they only could have committed this crime against her if she was either nursing or pregnant.
As problematic as Paul D’s inability to see past her pregnancy as the allegedly worst aspect of the assault is, I wish to shift our gaze towards this however-grotesque connection between Sethe’s motherhood and the desirability she was seen as in the eyes of her abusers. In contrast to Annie, who was witness to the good mother myth through the domestic worker narrative of being completly desexualized, Sethe, like Sarah Jane, is hypersexualized; she is seen as arousing and sexually avaiable to the white men in control of her life. Yet unlike Sarah Jane who is seen as sexually deviant and promiscious and could therefore never have been a mother or have maternal desire, Sethe is a mother and still has maternal desire, like Annie. This most pointedly comes across once Morrison takes us inside Sethe’s head, the mother reassuring her daughter, Beloved, that “Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else – and the one time I did it was took from me – they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby” (236). Here, we are witness to Sethe’s encompassing desire to mother and mother wholly to her children – not to the white children she is forced to watch and care for and not for children that came from her body without her consent – but rather for the children she had that she gave birth to from the man she loved and called husband. Morrison beautifully and tragically reveals the depth of impact this traumatic event had not only on Sethe’s mother life of not being able to provide nutrients for her child but also on her sexual life of experiencing an awful violation of her body.
Although every sexual violation is terrible, the offense perputated against Sethe here is particularly horrid and I dare say unusual, causing me to ponder why grown men would have any desire in stealing a pregnant woman’s milk. After all, in modern America, pregnant women are the farthest thing from the ultra-thin and slender women society upholds as the (white) sex standard. In spite of this dichotomy, I believe we must examine the colonial and racial context in order to understand the significance not only of this assault but of Sethe’s assertion above. Although she would have, ideally, used her milk to breastfeed her own child, may we remember that she was enslaved by men who easily could have forced her to nurse one of their children and deprive her child of the milk it would need to survive, as these older men chose to do. Wetnurses are often upheld in colonial societies, yet the glory they are given by their white enslavers is only white-washing the terrible tragedy of this practice, which oftentimes led to the death of the enslaved mother’s biological child. As a result, we see Sethe in the quote above reclaiming her sexual and motherly autonomy, diverting the colonial myth of the selfless to the point of death mammy and the promiscious and always avaiable prostitute tropes in the hopes of being seen as a full person who can be both a mother and a sexually active woman.
Unfortunately, even with Sethe’s own mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, “People look(ed) down on her because she had eight children with different men. Coloredpeople and whitepeople both look down on her for that” (Morrison 246-247). Despite Baby Suggs’ ability to have various sexual partners and children with men of her choosing, society looked upon her not only as an immoral and deviant woman but as a bad mother, both because of her gender and her race. Even in the Black community at the time, she faced backlash for her love affairs, even the ones that were not consensual. Morrison seems to argue that this is not a diminishment against Baby Suggs or Sethe’s personhood or motherhood though but rather a critic of society and mothering culture under colonization:
Slaves are not supposed to have pleasurale feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can in order to please whoever owned them… (Baby Suggs) said to me (Sethe) not to listen to all that. That I should always listen to my body and love it” (247).
In this vein, I would argue that Morrison’s portrayal of Baby Suggs and Sethe breaks free of the three common stereotypes surrounding Black women in order to humanize Sethe and allow her to feel the depths of human emotion in all its beautiful brokenness. Baby Suggs embodies decolonization through arguing that her daughter-in-law should feel her body, know her body, and trust her body completely, from enjoying and taking pleasure in sex to providing milk for her children and allowing her children to grow inside her and protecting them at all costs. Consequently, Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs and Sethe show how by reclaiming their sexuality and motherhood not as polar opposites but rather as two sides of the same coin, the two are able to counter the colonial narratives placed upon them and other Black mothers that denies them their full humanity.
Despite having their bodies sexualized and desexualized in order to reinforce colonial narratives about their sexuality and motherhood, Black mothers have also found empowerment in fighting for their mother and sexual power as a manner of decolonization. Even though the women in these pieces of media tried relentlessly to survive in a world that was never built for their bodies, all of them were unable to change the structures at large or even the perceptions of how they were viewed as sexual beings and mothers in their communities. Annie passed away incredibly young, likely due to a broken heart after Sarah Jane’s departure, her white family completely unaware if she even had or ever wanted another lover after Sarah Jane’s father; Sarah Jane returns to Lora’s family, completely broken-hearted and crushed, likely doomed to become the next mammy in the family. And the reader is left to wonder whether Paul D will stay as Sethe’s lover and how Baby Suggs’ legacy will continue to reside in Sethe. But just because the stories do not have happy endings does not mean there’s no happiness in between. After the sexual assault, Sethe still chooses to have intercourse with Paul D, reclaiming her body as hers both through her sexual power and in her mother power of caring for Beloved. Annie, despite her silence through most of the film, still knows that Sarah Jane was born to be hurt and will have to face the same hurdles as she, and Annie chooses to embrace the domestic qualities expected of her, including forgoing her own sexual life, in order to provide Sarah Jane with one. Therefore, both mothers demonstrate the ways in which Black mothers in the U.S. have wrestled with, fought against, and maneuvered within the colonized systems that sought to sexualize and desexualize them for their oppressor’s pleasures, in order that they may “keep the children that (they) wanted, whether they were planned for or not” (Collins 318).
Works Cited
Bergner, Gwen. “Performing Work: Maids, Melodrama, and Imitation of Life as Film Noir.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no. 2 (January 1, 2022): 425–49. https://doi.org/10.1086/716651.
Beyoncé. “Run the World (Girls).” 4. Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood.” In Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. Edited by Glenn, Nakano Evelyn, Chang, Grace, and Forcey, Linda Rennie. Routeldge. 1994.
De Marneffe, Daphne. “The ‘Problem’ of Maternal Desire:” Maternal Theory, July 1, 2021, 373–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1s2t0hn.26.
Heung, Marina. “‘What’s the Matter with Sara Jane?’: Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk’s ‘Imitation of Life.’” Cinema Journal 26, no. 3 (1987): 21. https://doi.org/10.2307/1224906.
Imitation of life. United States: Universal Pictures Co., 1959.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: VINTAGE CLASSICS, 2016.
Zaina, Lisa. “Biblical Womanhood: Not in God’s Name.” PowerPoint Presentation. THEO 2233. Georgetown University. 20 March 2024.
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