Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lipreading: Remembering Saartjie Baartman

1994; Wiley; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1835-9310.1994.tb00323.x

1835-9310

Rosemary Wiss,

Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices

This paper moves towards a retracing of an imagined ‘metanarrative’ on race and gender in emergent sciences of human difference. It is a specific bid to locate a series of ideas on transcendent notions of objectivity in one of their sites of practice and gestures to contemporary practices of defining difference. In 1810 Saartjie Baartman, a !Kung woman from South Africa, was taken to England for public display as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. Amidst contention on the colonization of the Cape and the moral and social capacities of Africans to progress to civility, Saartjie Baartman's differences were evaluated in relation to European senses of self. This paper examines a court case on the issue of Saartjie Baartman's consent to such an exhibition, and upon her death, an autopsy report by the comparative anatomist Cuvier on her capacity to reason according to emergent racial criteria. As these legal, bio‐medical and anthropological discourses on non‐European difference gained strength in the nineteenth century new categories of difference were constructed and reified as race. As the moral core of the person became increasingly bound to biology the compelling difference of Saartjie Baartman fixated on her sexual self. Signified in her genitalia, her sexuality was devalued as excessive and abhorrent to normative and masculine European self representations. By such a process the sexual difference of ‘Hottentot’ women came to signify a form of racialized difference so extreme as to create a new, and devalued racial type.