Maya Pietrzkiewicz on "Images of Sara Bartman"

In Yvette Abrahams’s work, Images of Sara Bartman, she speaks of how the exhibition and depiction of Sara Bartman has promoted racism and sexism in European imperialism. However, the point I will focus on is how the depiction of Sara Bartman as a hyper-sexual black woman was used by British imperialists to divide the civilized over the savages as a means to dominate. 

 Sara Bartman was exhibited, depicted, and treated like an animal in a zoo for the British upper middle class as a way to show an explicit difference between us, the civilized, and them, the savage. Creating the image that Sara Bartman and all black women are hyper-sexual to the point it's animalistic promoted the divide between the colonized and the colonizers. I believe that this depiction was detrimental to the future of British imperialist since they believed that black women needed to become civilized which promoted the domination of other countries in Africa. 

Abraham wrote that the hyper-sexualization of Sara Bartman such as the depiction of her body to look constantly naked made her a symbol of raw sexuality of the savage. This sort of depiction of Sara as constantly naked was forced by the British to keep the image that she's an animal. This sort of depiction of Sara divided her from the British since she was look at as other, but it also took away her autonomy. Her body and the way she was staged was used against her to promote racism and sexism by the British imperialists. Overly sexualizing Sara Bartman made her into an object to be seen and gawked at and not as the human being she was.

Black women are still hypersexualized in our society in the 21^st century. One of the largest perpetrators of the hypersexualizing of black women is film industry. Black women are often misrepresented as women with extremely raw sexuality and the film industry uses their bodies to promote this misrepresentation. Not all black women express their sexuality the same way just like how Sara Bartman is not a general image of what all African women represent. These images push racist and sexist views of black women which takes away the autonomy of their bodies and sexuality. 

The past stereotypes from British imperialism, such as the hypersexualizing of black women, still occurs and promotes racism and sexism in the 21^st century.