Bodies That Work. Tami Miyatsu

arithmetic), to prepare them for traditional roles and paid work.³⁸ In When and Where I Enter (1984), Paula Giddings reconstructs the resistance stories of African American women and focuses on intellectual leaders, such as Ida. B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary McLeod Bethune.³⁹ In Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987), Hazel V. Carby also reinterprets black women’s “articulation of gender, race, and class” by referring to the works of literary women, such as Harriet A. Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.⁴⁰ In the book Too Heavy a Load (1999), Deborah Gray White examines the role of black women’s collective, though not always monolithic, voice in national organizations in advancing their causes in the twentieth century.⁴¹ Karen Baker-Fletcher’s A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper (1994) casts light on Cooper’s life and thought from a theological perspective, and Vivian May’s Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist (2007) also investigates previously unrecognized aspects of this feminist educator’s ideas, philosophies, and theories.⁴² These studies deal with written records of middle-class, educated (literary) female leaders and their intellectual activities that began in progressive America.

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However, progressive black women’s efforts to enter into the mainstream were diverse, multifaceted, and physically oriented; because of racism, most of them engaged in physical labor as cooks, dressmakers, domestic workers, laundresses, and varieties of service jobs.⁴³ Furthermore, in this era, some brave, gifted black women dared to enter professions other than those requiring traditional physical work, breaking through racial and gender barriers by using their bodies in unconventional ways—work that would reshape and destabilize the social hierarchy that placed nonwhite women at the bottom of society. Therefore, to outline African American women’s layered activism, we must listen to the voices of physical laborers who lived through the change in the United States in the early twentieth century.

      As the body affects the decision-making occurring at every moment in our lives, Bodies That Work concentrates on our material human body. The body has often been ignored in the sociopolitical discourse, although it internalizes, reflects, and forms life as we know it. As Karl Marx asserts, the human body is the source of the social self, and history premises itself on “human existence”:

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself—geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.⁴⁴

“Life is not determined by consciousness,” says Marx, “but consciousness by life.”⁴⁵ All social and political thoughts start with our daily struggle to survive. In this struggle for survival, we work (earn) to sustain our physical bodies, which require food, air, water, clothing, and shelter. Just as people do today, progressive African American women sought the materialization of their wishes, goals, and ambitions through physical labor.

      Moreover, the body bridges our consciousness and the world. As French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes, the body objectifies and subjectifies our surrounding:

We must discover the origin of the object at the very center of our experience; we must describe the emergence of being and we must understand how, paradoxically, there is for us an in-itself …. And since the genesis of the objective body is only a moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it the intentional threads linking it to ←8 | 9→its surrounding and finally reveal to us the perceiving subject as the perceived world.⁴⁶

      Each life decision is often tied to a perception of how our bodies work or fail. In nature or society, our daily perceived sense of successes and failures incessantly determines how we use our bodies. In this sense, history is a perceptual accumulation of human corporeal feats and defeats.

With the recent rise in the interest of body studies, the body, to borrow Margo DeMello’s expression, has come to serve as “a full-blown site for cultural war.”⁴⁷ The body has been problematized by feminists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, whose work has continuously revised the definition, role, function, meaning, and ideology of the body—especially the female body. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), feminist philosopher Judith Butler investigates how the body is constructed through the performativity of sex and sexuality—or “the workings of heterosexual hegemony.”⁴⁸ In Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988), historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg explores how women historically “use[d]; their appetite as a form of expression” to acquire the ideal body shape long before the modern entry of the disease “anorexia.”⁴⁹ In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), Susan Bordo focuses on the continuing cultural reproduction of masculinism in public institutions, which reduces women to their bodies, whose depictions in Western philosophy are generally negative: “[t]he body as [an] animal, as appetite, as [a] deceiver, as [a] prison of the soul and confounder of its projects.”⁵⁰ In The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (1987), anthropologist Emily Martin demonstrates how women’s bodies have been treated as “mechanical factories or centralized production systems” in medical texts.⁵¹ These works examine how Western society has stigmatized and politicized the female body.

      This research contributes to body studies and pursues the interrelationship between the individual female body and the body politic by zeroing in on body parts (or organs) as the source of racialized and gendered resistance. Each chapter in this study addresses the redefinition of a female body part because, as suggested earlier, the body of black women has historically been divided, stigmatized, and assessed in terms of its parts. The parts of the body examined in this book include black women’s hair, vocal cords, wombs, and torsos (the naked body), all of which were devalued, dishonored, and made dysfunctional by slave traders and slave owners. Although some body parts may appear insignificant in a metaphysical body politic, these parts nevertheless reshaped African American women’s self-image and renewed their views of American society. As breadwinners, consumers, ←9 | 10→artists, and creators, as well as full citizens of capitalist America, they altered the public perception of the black female body by redefining its parts. Their corporeal activism began with individual body parts and proceeded to address the whole body. Although they adeptly avoided confrontation with patriarchy, they articulated, advocated, and embodied antiracist, feminist stands and challenged white cultural norms.

      Through the analytical and interpretive