First Guns

First Guns in the Ivy League!

Thinky blog The Kitchen Table, which is two feminist professors from Princeton professing, has a piece on us. They connect the media’s preoccupation with us to a historical tendency to objectify and theatricalize black women’s bodies:

In the public dissection of Michelle Obama into body parts: earlier her butt and now her arms, there is an sickening reminder of the treatment of Saartjie Baartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus. Baartmann became central to the process of arraying human beings in ascending order from apelike to human, African to European, black to white, female to male, savage to civilized. Baartmann was a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who became a canonized exhibit of London’s Picadilly circus as a result of her supposedly abnormal sexual organs. Her large buttocks and elongated labia subjected her to exhibition in both life and in death. This painful history pierces the public discourse surrounding Michelle.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell also goes on to say that she thinks Michelle is both assertively owning us and also ceding us to the American people in a kind of bondage. At this point we got confused. We did like the part where she said she envies and appreciates us, though. Stay strong, Professor Lacewell! We bet Princeton has a great gym.