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Can You Explain to Me What a “Ho Tape” Is?

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I think that one of the reasons why some Black women have a hard time talking about Black women’s sexuality within academic settings is because of the emotional dexterity and vulnerability that comes along with doing so.

For instance, there is a line of feedback in my paper that says “Can you explain what a ho tape is”? Now it makes sense that the professor reading my paper asked this question because it is legitimate.

You have to think about the context. She has several statements asking me to clarify my methodology, to get to my analysis, suggestions on verb usage, suggestions on how to be a more precise writer. All of which I am hella grateful for.

But it is also a bugged out thing to read first, because I came up with the idea of “ho tapes” three years ago, and so it is also audacious for me to put my own kinda blog theorizing in my academic work.

FYI, for me “ho tapes” are the internal voice that Black women hear when they are debating whether or not to engage in a sexual act. Often times, the politics of respectability play a role, and I theorize that frequently our “ho tapes” stop us from experiencing pleasure, or they allow us to center the pleasure of another while making our own secondary. #buggedout?

But there is also something very surreal about Black women’s sexuality being taken seriously in this context. It reminds me that it I am very fortunate to be able to study Black women’s sexuality, to put my own ideas out there and for them to be taken seriously. This process also forces me to clarify what I mean when I come up with new terms, which is a good practice.
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So, Josephine, I know you miss our discussions, I miss them to, but please believe you are with me because i have put you and so many of my friends in my work.

Maybe I am on to something here. Maybe writing is less lonely when you have your friends in it, ho tapes and all.

 

What do you think of the idea of a Ho Tape?

Isn’t it awkward to have to justify something like this in an academic setting?

The irony is that Black women are called “ho’s” in Black communities and in some pop culture spaces…all the time.

A Thin Line Between Protection and Domination: Thoughts About that Cleveland Bus Video

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Last week, I reached out to @sassycrass and @dopegirlfresh because I wanted to write about the thin line between protection and domination for Black women. Lo and behold, it appears that the opportunity to write about the issue has made itself known sooner than I expected.

When I talk about the thin line between protection and domination I am thinking about many things including gender roles, race and street harassment.

Ultimately, the thin line between protection and domination rests on the reasoning that if a person states that you deserve to be protected because of the body that you come in, then it stands to reason that that same reasoning assumes that you can expect to be dominated because of the body that you come in. This kind of thinking has to be taken to its logical end.

As a Black woman who doesn’t take shit off of anyone I deal with a whole of street harassment in DC. For me street harassment is a kind of racial profiling because when I am in a White area of DC (Du Pont Circle in particular) and I see how Black men fuck with me in ways that they do not attempt to do so towards White women who are nearby, it is so clear to me that this is a racialized and gendered act.

I cringed when I saw how the bus driver hit the woman in the video largely because I am reminded of how Black women are, in the streets and in pop culture are often times hyper masculinized, rendered as men and dominated by default if they step out of acceptable gender roles.

Full stop. If she was talking shit to him, and she hit him, she should have been taken off the bus and handed over to the authorities. Bus drivers already have enough bullshit to deal with.
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Hitting her was wrong not because she was a woman, it was wrong because you do not have a right to put your hands on anyone. Nor did she. As the person of authority in the situation it was his job to descalate and contain the situation and continue to get the folks on the bus from point A to point B.

In choosing to hit her the way that he did, the image read as “I will teach this Bitch a lesson.” And he did. Based on the way that he hit her, I am led to think that if he had a gun, he would have shot her.

Thoughts?

Do you ever think about the thin line between protection and domination?

Why does it matter what size she was?

 

Black Women Who Run from Their Genius (May) Make Themselves Sick. ~Kathleen Collins

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Kathleen Collins on the set of her film Losing Ground

I have been obsessed and fascinated with Kathleen Collins for the last year. She is a Black woman filmmaker, a film professor, a momma, she attended Skidmore and the Sorbonne. She died in 1988 of cancer at 46.

First I learned about her from Jaqueline Bobo’s Black Women Film and Video Directors, and then I saw her film Losing Ground (1982) and lastly I just read an article about her by Black film scholar, L.H. Stallings.

Collins says several things in her Black Film Review Interview that you can read here, but I just want to summarize the parts that have been meaningful to me.

BLACK WOMEN WHO RUN FROM THEIR GENIUS MAY MAKE THEMSELVES SICK

My basic premise is ithat all illness is a psychic connection of some kind.. And I had a preiod of time when I was ill. I still have to struggle with it. The nature of illness and female succcess and the capacity of the female to acknowlege its own intelligence is a subject that interests me a lot . because I think that women– if there’s anyway that I am a feminist, because I don’t really think of myself as a feminist, because I don’t really think of myself as a feminist– but if there is any way in which women tend to be self destructive it is in that area of creaticity where they actually feel their own power and can’t aknowlege it or go into it with as much…

They can’t go to the end of it and they retreat into ilness or into having too many babies or into destructive love affairs with men who run them ragged. Somewhere or other, they detour out of a respect for their own creativity.

Let me say first off that I do not agree that all illness that Black women experience is a result of a psychic disconnection. However, I do think there is something to be said about what happens to our bodies when we ignore the genius in our hearts and our minds when it pertains to making art.

I read this a year ago. However it was reading it last month that I was floored by not only this idea but the following statement, which has to do with the fact that she felt like her own illness was connected to a fear of her own genius.

WHEN DID COLLINS BECOME ILL?
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I think that it is very curious, curiously at a point and time when I had just finished a first movie, and knew that I had it, knew that I had the talent. Knew that my own creative power was finally surfacing, that all the years of working quietly , and quite alone, were beginning to pay off. It was basically  a long four year cycle.

Collins died in 1988 at 46 years old of cancer. It is interesting that she felt like she became ill right when she felt the power of her own creativity.

ON BEING AFRAID OF BEING ALONE AS AN ARTIST

I think I have been afraid of being alone too much,  I think that’s what was connected  to the illness. That fear that I was going to be considered nuts kind of frightened me.

This really resonated with me, not because of the fear of being seen as being eccentric; it is the fear that in order to take it to the next level I am going to have to be separated from the people that I Love. I now realize that in order to grow the voltron, I have to branch out into new spaces. I also have to have faith that my Love bears will be there when I return; that they will understand. I have also come to the conclusion this weekend, that I need to be able to be out, but I also need consistent environments so that I can hear my own ideas. Too much noise drowns out the thoughts.

ON THE INTERIOR LIVES OF BLACK WOMEN AND BLACK PEOPLE

There are real conflicts, but they are not necessarily conflicts with a capital C. All internal conflict is the only thing that is really real. Where you’re right is in saying that American culture tends to like conflict with a capital c.

This spoke to me for three reasons. One I have known that taking care of my interior life would be key to my survival for a few years now, and this crystallized for me, after re-reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. Two, Junot Diaz has been speaking in his interviews about writing the interior lives of women while on tour promoting his new book. Third, one of the reasons why I chose qualitative interviews as my method is because I am interested in the interior lives of Black women.

In Kathleen Collins I see myself and I am trying not to run. My homie Jonzey said, you need to start a binder, because you are probably going to end up writing a biography of her. She is probably right 🙂

What do you think of this idea of Black women running from their genius making them sick?

Do you agree or disagree? Why?

Kathleen Collins and the Redemptive Softness of Black Women

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Still from the film “Losing Ground” directed by Kathleen Collins.

This post has been a long time coming.

I Love Black women filmmakers, because I believe that Black women filmmakers see us. Not just the uplifting “We shall overcome” versions of us, but they see us in all of our beauty, contradictions, nuanced, strength and fragility.

Last fall, while reading Jacqueline Bobo’s Black Women Film and Video Directors, I kept coming across the name Kathleen Collins.

Come to find out the reels for Collins’ film “Losing Ground” were at the library so I took an afternoon and I watched it. The film blew my mind.

The main protagonist in the film is a Black woman philosophy professor who is searching for the ecstatic experience. Yes, honey, she is searching for ecstasy.

In an interview in Black Film Review Collins stated that,
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Actually, the only hope for any sort of feminine salvation in this country– and the sad thing is that Black women are giving it up  in favor of a quietly growing, kind of strident white feminism. But the only residual softness that is possible in this culture as far as I am concerned is in the hands of Black women.

When I read this I thought. Wait a minute, the people who have been historically represented as lewd, lascivious, unrapeable, gold diggers, rich and lonely,  hoochie mammas, are the ones who have the redemptive softness?????

Film scholar L.H. Stalling takes this idea of the residual softness of Black women and runs with it. She writes,

Kathleen Collins’s solution to the violence done to black women and their image insists that such redemption come from those who have been positioned as the most abnormal and dysfunctional in society, black women.

This idea of Black women being the site of redemption because they are some of the most maligned is interesting, and I believe that I have heard it before in Audre Lorde’s work.

For me it takes on a greater significance when I watch reality television shows featuring the narratives of Black women. Love and Hip Hop Atlanta in particular is what comes to mind.

Stallings goes on to underscore why I enjoy movies directed by Black women filmmakers when she states,

Collins produces a film that imagines a viewer or audience who can get turned on by seeing a black woman think, be conscious, and create consciousness on screen. Black independent filmmaking (be it documentary, cinematic fiction, or pornography) continues to be the only space in which black filmmakers can explore and represent various sexualities and subjectivities.

So, what do you think of this idea of the redemptive softness of Black women?

Black Women’s Hair & Gabby Douglas: Standing Straight in a Crooked Room

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In the book, Sister Citizen, Dr. Melissa Harris Perry argues that many Black women in the US find themselves standing straight in a crooked room because of how we experience both racism and sexism. According to Harris-Perry, Black women are standing straight in a crooked room

when they are confronting race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion…To understand why some Black women’s public actions and political strategies sometimes seem titled in ways that accommodate  the degrading stereotypes about them, it is important to appreciate the structural constraints that influence their behavior.

This is immediately what came to mind when I saw the conversations about Gabby’s hair, conversations, many initiated by Black women about who thought it wasn’t straight enough.

No Gabby’s hair does not look like the Black women on Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, and that is fine. The women on LHHA stay fried died and laid to the side and Gabby’s pony tail is the pony tail of a young Black woman Olympian. Full stop.

And just in terms of Black girl visibility politics, Gabby Douglass is a Black girl who had global media attention and she does not look like a well kept video vixen and she doesn’t have to. She is petite, muscular and brown with a high voltage smile. When was the last time you saw a Black girl like that getting mainstream attention? I’ll wait.

I know that some Black women felt that because Gabby was on a global stage she was “representing us.” My retort to that is Gabby belongs to herself, not to you.

Hair is serious for Black women because the mainstream standard for beauty in the US and arguably pop culture globally is long, preferably blond, straight, wind swept hair. If you think I am wrong, check out the magazine covers at your local grocery store check out stand.

I always find it peculiar when the ways when which Black women regulate on each other finds its way into mainstream media conversations. It is not that we don’t like each other. I think that socially women are not taught to like each other. Openly liking and being nice to women is a political act for this reason. The culprit in many ways isn’t Black women per se, but that many of us have internalized what White standards of beauty AND we tried to hold other women to these standards,we are also taught that the work that women do isn’t valuable.

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I also think it may may make some Black women uncomfortable to see another young Black woman who is so clear about both her purpose and focus. A young Black woman who is clear that her investment in being an Olympian is more important than having music video bone straight hair, at this moment. I am not talking about human beings here, I am talking about what happens when you encounter a spirit that is so clear you can see yourself in its reflection. It ain’t no joke. #ChangeJobs. #ChangeGods.

Gabby Douglas put herself first and her desire to be an Olympian. You can’t become an Olympic champion by being raggedy.

I also know that as Black women we are socialized to put our mothers, our children, our husbands, our wives, our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our step-children, our brothers first. But never us, and we suffer for that. Our lives are constrained in particular ways when we do that.

So Gabby, I see your gravity defying, futuristic Black girl self.

Gabby Douglas give you goosebumps?

Why is it so hard for people to acknowledge how White mainstream beauty standards figure into this conversation?