Joan Jacobs Brumberg--The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997)

This book is the result of Brumberg’s analysis of the diaries of adolescent girls between the 1830s and the 1990s.  Her focus is on how the relationship between girls and their bodies have changed over this time; while she identifies common themes of girls concern over their bodies (menstruation, skin, body shape and weight, and sexuality and virginity), the sweeping scope of her study allows her to see how attention to these common themes has changed over this 160-year period. 

According to Blumberg, “although young women today enjoy greater freedom and more options than their counterparts of a century ago, they are also under more pressure, and at greater risk, because of a unique combination of biological and cultural forces that have made the adolescent female body into a template for much of the social change of the twentieth century” (xxv).  A primary theme of her work is that the decline of external control for girls during this period—both literal controls such as girdles and sanitary napkin belts as well as more cultural controls, such as hymen inspection and required chaperonage—has led to a requirement of more internal controls on the part of girls—dieting, individual opportunity and responsibility for sexual behavior—which we have failed to give support and direction to girls. 

Brumberg briefly makes note of the existence of more structured support for girls at the beginning of the twentieth century through groups such as Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.  She suggests that a more thorough investigation of these groups and their effects on the development of girls is called for.  I’m curious to compare Brumberg’s findings with those of Kathryn R. Kent’s 2002 Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity.  As Brumberg calls for more direct guidance to be provided for girls as they attempt to navigate a highly sexualized culture, I’m curious to see if there are any places of intersection or overlap with Kent’s work.

For my project, there isn’t a lot that speaks directly to the concept of ugliness, though there is a tantalizing quote from a fifteen-year-old Margaret Fuller about her acne which I’m interested in following up on: “Both [my parents] were very much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion destroyed….[and] my own vanity was for a time severely wounded but I recovered and made up my mind to be bright and ugly” (quoted in Brumberg 64).  Margaret Fuller’s characterization of herself as “bright and ugly” is intriguing here—is this an acceptance of her inability to participate in the economy of heterosexual romance, and an acknowledgment that alternatives exist?

Laurie Penny--Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (201)

In this book, Guardian journalist Laurie Penny attempts to “chart some of the ways in which women’s bodies are marginalised and controlled under capitalism” (2).  What is most significant is her claim to set out the “parameters for the trade in female flesh as sexual and social capital, and demonstrate…how women are alienated from their sexual bodies and required to purchase the fundamentals of their own gender” (2).  Her Marxist, materialist reading is quite enlightening.  Importantly, she points out that “it is not enough to locate women’s physical oppression in the sexual body”: “By the late 20^th century, the partial dislocation of reproduction and labour from sexual intercourse following the widespread acceptance of contraceptive methods in most parts of the West had meat that the post-Fordist capitalist control of women’s gendered labour needed to be extended beyond the sexual and into the substantive, the nutritive and the semiotic architecture of gender and physicality itself” (2-3).  Ultimately, this market alienation results in the separation between the marketable erotic and the repulsive flesh of real sex: what Penny sees undergirding much of twentieth century women’s issues is a disgust and fear of female flesh, which is “fear of female power, the sublimated power of women over birth and death and dirt and sex” (32).

Penny also points out that femininity itself has been commodified: “when femininity is intimately tied into the labour of objectification, the cues of gender itself can be bought and sold on the the labour market.  As such, any woman wishing to free herself from the mechanisms of misogyny imperils her social-constructed sex.  Why else are feminists so consistently de-sexed in the public imagination?” (36).  This is a brilliant insight, going a long way in explaining the general hostility towards feminism in the marketplace: feminism does, in fact, pose a “threat to gender as labour capital” (36).  Penny goes on to point out that what second wave feminism got wrong was, in trying to reject the “susbmissive, spayed, stilettoed stereotype of misogynist fantasy,” they instead posited an equally fantastic feminine essentialism: “A fantasy feminine essential, set against patriarchal feminine constructions and placed in binary opposition to the masculine, was never going to be an adequate foil to the machinations of capitalist patariarchy.  The feminine as fact and as ideology is too dispersed and too pervasive for any one ‘feminist’ physicality to suffice” (37).   

She then asks crucial questions which such essentialism evades: “what the female body is, who has one, and how it is made” (37).  In considering many facets of trans life and how they inform this debate, Penny notes that many trans women, even those who undergo surgery to alleviate the dissonance they feel with their bodies, often end up experiencing gender as a fluid aspect.  Importantly, she notes that while many feminists see many trans women as reinforcing gender stereotypes, both anti-trans feminists as well as trans women themselves can see that much of this stereotyping is imposed by the medical establishment, as psychiatrists are the ones who “define gender deviance” and set “gender performance criteria,” even defining what “living as a woman” means and entails before deeming a patient worth of sex reassignment surgery (43).  Further, Penny points out the ignorance behind the kind of feminist thinking which defines womanhood on a solely biological basis, as such binary definitions ignore quite a bit of biological reality.  Finally, the violence perpetrated against trans women reveals that they are “despised by gender fanatics because they do something unforgiveable: they take the rules of the game and they make them explicit.  The show that femininity is a mode of being that can and must be purchased….The bodies of transsexual women are marginalised and punished precisely because they expose the mechanisms by which the modern carapace of gender capital is maintained, threatening its hold over women’s bodies” (47).

In her conclusion about the ramifications of the “neoliberal repugnance for women’s bodies,” Penny says that “Individual women’s anxiety about keeping our own bodies under control is part of the same structure of oppression under whose auspices cultural, physical, and sexual violence is done to the bodies of low-status women, poor women, migrant workers, transsexual women, sex workers, and every other person living and working at the coalface of the so-called gender war” (64).  Penny’s answer?  The power of refusal.  She sees contemporary pseudo-feminism as a fascism of agreement: “Only by remembering how to say ‘no’ will the women of the 21^st century regain their voice and remember their power” (66).  Brilliant, insightful, concise political analysis.

Susan Bordo--Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993)

This is the tenth anniversary edition of Bordo’s book, which focuses on the female (primarily anorexic) body in Western (primarily American) culture.  One of the most interesting aspects of the work is the way in which Bordo talks back to the medical establishment, as she explains the ramifications of the pathologizing of eating disorders.  By making them diseases, medical professionals effectively erase the role of cultural norms and expectations in these epidemic syndromes.  While doctors point to the fact that most women diet and exercise without become anorexic or bulimic as evidence that eating disorders are different from these behaviors, Bordo instead insists that what this actually proves is that such behavior actually lies on a continuum of body discipline behaviors.  In addition to anorexia, she also looks at the implications of anti-abortion legislation on bodily autonomy as well as the relationship between feminism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism and how she sees postmodernism and post-structuralism obscuring fundamental feminism.

As a philosopher, Bordo is quite interested in seeing anorexia and anti-abortion legislation as manifestations of the original mind/body dualistic point of view.  Anorexia is part of a much historically longer tradition of a spiritual or moral repudiation of the body: in the tradition of spiritual mystics who denigrate the flesh in order to grow the spirit, so anorexia, too, demonstrates an attempt to control, discipline, and mortify the flesh in the service of spiritual and moral superiority.  In a society in which women are continually second-class citizens, such behaviors which often begin as a response to (inaccessible) cultural norms of appearance often evolve into a display of control and power.  Importantly, Bordo takes a fully Foucauldian perspective when talking about power, realizing that while individuals may aspire to wield power, real power is actually a systemic force which reinforces such systemic norms.

While Bordo’s deployment of Foucault’s theories of power in her analysis of cultural bodily discipline is skillful, I take issue with quite a bit of her engagement with other author and ideas which she identifies as “postmodern” and “post-structuralist.”  Claiming that much of the progress of “uncovering the pretensions and illusions of the ideals of epistemological objectivity, universal foundations or reason, and neutral judgment” which has been attributed to such theories were in reality uncovered by “the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, emerging not only to assert the legitimacy of marginalized cultures and suppressed perspectives but also to expose the biases of the official accounts” (219), Bordo is at times downright hostile to the methodologies used in these disciplines.  In addition to being worried that these new methodologies are so focused on the theoretical as to ignore the political, she is also quite critical of feminist and gender theorists who wish to see gender as something other than a binary system.

I found this criticism quite confusing, as earlier she herself was so critical of Cartesian dualistic perspectives; however, she seems to think that rejecting binary categories of “masculine” and “feminism” dangerously shifts the focus from “practical contexts to adequate theory.”  In these later sections, Bordo says that we simply cannot ignore gender binaries: “In a culture that is in fact constructed by gender duality, however, one cannot be simply “human” (241).  I’m quite curious about her use of the phrase “in fact” here (which is in fact emphasized in the original): given her earlier critique of dualism, what exactly does she mean here?  I think that she means that since a dualistic understanding of gender is the norm in modern society, to deny it as such is a non-productive stance.  However, as so much of the rest of her work is committed to pointing out the problems with many other seemingly axiomatic societal beliefs, I wonder why she is so committed to supporting this one.  To the contrary, I think that open campaigning for and exploration of alternate gender identities is important work in attacking dualistic thinking.  While I sympathize with her fear of such campaigns as unpopular and perhaps scary in the larger culture (but certainly doable—popular culture in the past ten years seems to demonstrate this, despite her fears), I think that it is important to continue to do such important work.

She saves her strongest criticism, however, for the kind of Derridean postmodern focus on difference (though she never actually addresses differance) and postmodern play, seeing such perspectives as dangerously frivolous.  She is also leery of intersectional analyses which insist on focusing on multiple axes of oppression, claiming that the attempt to take all of these axes into account at once results in a general lack of acuity in one’s overall analysis.  She rejects the idea of postmodern play as containing any potential for real subversion; in her analysis, most postmodern claims of multiplicity function to shirk responsibility of real analysis, rather than working through real complexities.  (As an aside, I was quite confused by her discussion of heteroglossia and polyvocality as an idea attributed to Donna Haraway, without any reference to Bakhtin.)  

Significantly, throughout this section she herself at times does use the very tools she is skeptical of in her critique—such as in her discussion of the exclamation during the Hill/Thomas hearings that “they just don’t get it!”.  After positing this evaluation as an example of a non-totalizing yet common understanding between women, regardless of their other positions of privilege, she then clarifies that, “‘Not getting it’ does not come written on the Y chromosome, nor does it issue from distinctively male cognitive or personality defect.  Rather, it is a blindness created by acceptance of and identification with the position and privileges (and insecurities) of being male in a patriarchal culture” (239).  She then goes on to explain that “those who aspire to, who crave, the male privileges that have been historically denied them can also be blind” (239).  Here, I see her simultaneously deploying and decrying the very suspicion of essentialism which she has been so insistent on maintaining throughout the text.

Her final chapter on what she sees as the misreadings of Madonna by postmodern feminists is so off that I’m not even going to represent all of my problems with it here.  Suffice it to say that I am much more a believer in the possibilities inherent in postmodern parody and multiplicity than Bordo is.  It seemed quite contradictory when she was so much more willing to see the inherent political possibilities inherent in anorexia as a personal inscription on the body than to see Madonna’s self-reinvention and parody as the same.  Bordo missed an opportunity to read more postmodern bodily expressions with as much complexity as she was willing to read the anorexic body with.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson--Staring: How We Look

            In this book, Garland-Thomson focuses on the interactive aspects of staring.  She is interested in why we stare, what happens when we stare, and how staring affects both the starer as well as the staree.  First, she breaks down what happens when we stare, noting that at its core, “Staring is an ocular response to what we don’t expect to see” (3).  More importantly, she observes that “We stare when ordinary seeing fails, when we want know more.  So staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story….This intense visual engagement creates a circuit of communication and meaning-making” (3).  It is the narrative and “meaning-making” aspects of staring which intrigue me most, as that seems to be at play in the southern texts I am looking at.  The ugly women in these texts grab our attention in ways that the more conventional-looking women do not.  They ask us to consider why they look the way they do, what has scarred them or pushed them outside of normativity.

            Garland-Thomson spend the first half of the book focusing on images of the freak, examining the kinds of stares which occur and why, as well as the social and cultural meanings of the stare.  Garland-Thomson does distinguish the stare from the gaze, which she defines as “an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim” (9).  She then goes on to further distinguish different kinds of stares: “the blank stare, the baroque stare, the separated stare,  the engaged stare, the stimulus-driven stare, the goal-driven stare, and the dominating stare” (9).  Each of these, she claims, has at its heart “the matter of appearance, of the ways we see each other and the ways we are seen” (9).  Despite the issues of power at play in staring, she is most interested in what she describes as staring’s “generative potential” (9).

Garland-Thomson explains how in the midst of a riot of sensory input, the brain works through the process of visual recognition called “orientation”: “Orientation is the attempt to impose a frame of reference on the chaos of a visual field by integrating what is unknown into what is already known….[requiring] scrutiny to impose a logical narrative on what at first glance seems to be random visual stimuli  ” (20)

In the second half of the book, she focuses on specific body parts which are most likely to induce stares: faces, hands, breasts, and bodies in general.  Faces, hands, and breasts are particularly charged locations on the body—faces and hands because of their key role in expression, interpretation, and primary bodily functions, and breasts because of their dual role in maternity and eroticism.  Breasts are unique in their object position in the stare, as they are an acceptable object of staring when erotic breasts, but inappropriate objects of the stare when maternal, scarred, or absent.  Faces, hands, and bodies, when non-normative, are potentially generative sites for narrative construction and information, as Garland-Thomson highlights in her discussion of photographs of handless victims of war and limbless war veterans and how they have been used to bring attention to important political issues.

Garland-Thomson quantifies the claim that Scarry makes, that beauty gives life to the beholder and the beheld, by making the heart beat faster: “The staring encounter arouses us as well.  Our heart rate increases when we are stared at; being subjected to a stare even registers on a cortical EEG.  So viscerally potent is the staring encounter that we can even feel stares directed at us.  In fact, humans from infancy can detect unseen stares.  We not only believe that we can tell when we are being stared at, but repeated experiments dating as early as the late nineteenth century suggest that in fact we do” (17).  So, contrary to Scarry’s claim that staring and gazing do no harm to the object of beauty, according to Garland-Thomson, they do have a palpable quality to them.  Whether harmful or harmless, though, I suppose is up for debate, and whether the heart-pounding is elation or palpitations is equally up for debate.

Cynthia Shearer--The Celestial Jukebox

      This novel takes place in a small rural town called Madagascar, Mississippi, following the lives in its culturally diverse community.  Angus Chien, a second-generation Chinese man, runs the Celestial Grocery, the town’s center and home of a beautiful though unreliable jukebox which was last updated in the 1960s.  He employs Boubacar, a young boy who’s part of a Mauritanian immigrant community, whose love of African music leads him to discover the blues and Christian gospel of the Delta.  It also follows Raine, an unhappy suburban wife and mother suffering worsening panic attacks at having to drive in traffic, who is in a way healed by the oracular artwork of Marie Abide, a possible love child of Henri Matisse.

Celestial Art

It makes sense that a novel called “The Celestial Jukebox” would have music as a foregrounded theme and symbol.  Throughout the novel, music is emphasized as a primary art form of the South, as it functions both as repository for the region’s history as well as a cross-cultural language.  An equally important aspect of music, however, is its imaginative aspect as artistic expression.  This aspect is highlighted by its juxtaposition with other art forms in the novel, especially the found art sculptures made by Marie which incorporate sheet music into their designs.  The importance of art and the imagination in The Celestial Jukebox demonstrates that the most promising strategy for the survival of the South is through the work of its artists and the artwork they produce.

Given the scope of this paper, I wish to focus on the figure of Bebe Marie Abide and her artwork in the novel.  Certainly, the realization about the true nature of music that Dean Fondren makes—that “music was like a seine net…trawling the air to catch the spirits of the mutilated of the world, and to romance them back into the arms of the rest, who could help them.  Anything else was just noise, a plague of grasshoppers that would strip the land bare” (410)—applies to Marie’s artwork, especially her birdhouses which find their way into the lives of many in the novel. 

Marie’s imaginative perspective as an artist allows her to see possibilities which elude others.  The sheet music which to others looks like garbage on the side of the road appears to Marie as “abandoned valentines” (62), which she works into the birdhouses she creates from bottle caps and the covers of old books.  Like the blues music present throughout the book, Marie’s artistic vision also comes from a tragic background, as she was born out of wedlock to a mentally unstable artist who may possibly have conceived Marie with the artist Henri Matisse.  Also like the blues, Marie’s artistic vision is recognized as having a uniquely spiritual component.  While there are no stories about Marie selling her soul to the devil in exchange for her art, her memory of watching an image of herself painted by her mother burn in a zinc bathtub in Paris is certainly a vision of hell.

Marie’s artistic spiritual authority is recognized in various ways by other characters.  When Boubacar sees her bottle tree, he recognizes it as the work of an African sorcière (29).  Further, Marie’s encounters with the suburban Raine often have an oracular tone to them, with Marie making tantalizingly mysterious statements such as referring to her birdhouse as “A little fresh fruit from the orchard of abandoned dreams” (73).  Marie’s birdhouses may serve a similar purpose as her bottle tree, “detain[ing] whatever spirits meant harm to the household” (28).  Especially in Raine’s case, these art objects have magical properties which seem to help facilitate change in the lives of those to whom they have been entrusted.

Perhaps most importantly, Marie’s artistic life is one which openly rejects finance- and commodity-based capitalism.  As her own artwork not only is made from scavenged items but also sold outside of the system—literally, as when she is threatened by the “hospitality man” outside of the upscale grocery store for selling without a license (72).  She is arrested for breaking televisions for sale.  She refuses to properly participate in the kind of commodity-based capitalist system which is blamed both in the novel as well as by critics for the destruction of the South, both in the destruction of its idyllic landscape as well as the erosion of its unique cultural identity.  By ending the novel with the “Benediction” chapter, which follows the life of Marie, Shearer may be privileging the artistic vision as holding out the last hope for the perpetuation of the South.  Ending the novel on an exchange between Marie and Henri Matisse which starts about art and ends with her affirming in French that he is her father, Shearer emphasizes the important familial potential of cross-cultural artistic exchange, which has been thematized throughout the novel not only in the African-inflected blues and gospel music played in the Delta, but also in the ubiquitous expressions of the ineffable through folk art.  Even if the casino seems to be winning over the farmer, the South will always have its Robert Johnsons, Howard Finsters, and Bebe Marie Abides to translate these events into a southern vernacular through their art.

Leo Bersani--Is the Rectum a Grave? (1987)

Written in 1987 during the peak of the AIDS crisis, Bersani investigates the homicidal threats underlying much of the anti-gay rhetoric in the coverage of HIV and AIDS at the time.  Not only does Bersani note how the coverage of HIV, which addresses itself to an audience presumed straight and HIV-free, is much more interested in testing for and containing the disease, rather than caring for those suffering from AIDS and researching cures for it.  Identifying “how a public health crisis has been treated like an unprecedented threat” (198), Bersani also quotes several ludicrous accounts from supposed authorities (like doctors) whose portrayal of the “gay lifestyle” which they link to HIV and AIDS is ridiculous—in one of the article’s epigraphs, for example, John Hopkins Medical School Professor Opendra Narayan claims that “these people have sex twenty to thirty times an hour” (197). 

However, the turn that Bersani makes in his argument from this is startling.  From here, he starts with the premise that the big secret about sex is that “most people don’t like it” (197).  Informed by thinkers as diverse as Andrea Dworkin and Michel Foucault, Bersani zeroes in on the fundamental problem associated with the penetrative acts associated with HIV transmission: “to be penetrated is to abdicate power” (212).  He ties the stigma of anal penetration to both misogyny as well as more specific stigmas against prostitution in the early twentieth century.  First, he comments on the larger discussion of the effect of gay stereotype “styles” on the heterosexual world.  Calling into question the very valence of camp, Bersani notes that “if you’re out to make someone you turn off the camp” (208).  Disagreeing with those who claim that gay “leather queen” styles cause insecurity in the heterosexual males it is parodying, Bersani instead argues that “nothing forces them to see any relation between the gay-macho style and their image of their own masculinity” (207).  Further, he identifies that the hyperfemininity of drag queen performances “is both a way of giving vent to the hostility toward women that probably afflicts every male…and could also paradoxically be thought of as helping to deconstruct the image for women themselves” (208), though he admits that the “mindless, asexual, and hysterically bitchy” character of such performances most likely would provoke “a violently antimimetic reaction in any female spectator” (208).

In his discussion of the connection to prostitution, he notes the similarities between the imagined insatiability of the sexual appetites of gay men and prostitutes.  Like the rate of an orgasm every two minutes imagined in the epigraph, they are “reminiscent of male fantasies about women’s multiple orgasms” (211).  The promiscuity assumed in both populations is targeted in both populations as “the criminal, fatal, and irresistibly repeated act”; this focus allows those in power to “‘legitimate’ a fantasy of female sexuality as intrinsically diseased; and promiscuity in this fantasy, far from increasing the risk of infection, is the sign of infection” (211).

After considering the work of both anti-sex feminists such as Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as well as the investigation of sexuality, especially in the realm of S&M, of Michel Foucault, Bersani comes to an important conclusion:

the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power.  It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self.  But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition.  It replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence.  If, as these words suggest, men are especially apt to “choose” this version of sexual pleasure, because their sexual equipment appears to invite by analogy, or at least to facilitate, the phallicizing of the ego, neither sex has exclusive rights to the practice of sex as self-hyperbole.  For it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to becoming a struggle for power….It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other. (218).

Bersani thinks that we should focus on this shattering as a key aspect of sexuality: what if stopped thinking of the so-called “passive” role in sex as demeaning, but rather that “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (222).  Ultimately, “if the rectum is a grave in which the masculine ideal…of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death” (222).

Bersani’s identification of misogyny at the heart of the anti-gay hysteria as well as his call to arms to re-think the sex act itself seems to anticipate Sedgwicks’ Epistemology of the Closet and quite a bit of subsequent queer theory.  Reimagining and rethinking the meanings of the sites of sexuality is key theme in queer theory, which owes a lot to this essay.

Jack Butler--Jujitsu for Christ (1986)

Ugly Violence

In Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ, the narrator’s identity is not overtly revealed until the last chapter of the novel.  Such calling attention to its narrative nature demonstrates the difficulty of restoring unheard stories to the accepted version of history.  These stories often resist being told, as the narrator Marcus admits: “This was supposed to be my story.  Turns out to be everybody else’s” (197).  In fact, it is just such a subplot on which I wish to focus: the story of Marcus’s sister, Eleanor Roosevelt Gandy, and the tragic consequences of her attempts to meet white standards of beauty.  Though her story is not the main one, it is important enough that it does break through the main narrative for a couple of chapters.  By including Eleanor’s story, the novel calls attention to the very physical dangers posed by unattainable white beauty standards on young black girls.

Thirteen year old Eleanor is described as “sensitive” because she does not like to sit in the movie theater balcony “watching the pretty white people all together and happy down below” (109).  Her crush on Roger Wing, her white college-aged neighbor, is at first rather cute.  However, when she appears at his jujitsu studio wearing her best dress, her innocent puppy love quickly takes a disturbing turn.  Roger, in his typical state of lust, uses her flirtation as an excuse to molest her.  Eleanor understands this act to be a declaration of love.  Roger, however, subsequently vacillates between guilt over his molestation of a child and anger over what he considers to be her seduction of him (111). 

Eleanor becomes withdrawn and begins pulling her hair out.  Her unconscious behavior attempts to mark on her body the abuse she has suffered, not only to make visible what is invisible, but also as a form of self-punishment for her perceived failure to keep Roger as her boyfriend.  She attributes this failure to her own ugliness—specifically, her lack of pink skin.  We see this after Roger describes the torture of a young African American girl, about which Eleanor asks, “‘Wa[s] she ugly?’” (126).  Eleanor equates racist violence with what she perceives as the ugliness of her race, and takes extreme measures to rectify this, as she “washed her face with Drano” in an attempt to bleach it (132).  Even more horrifying than this act alone is her reaction to the pain: though she yells with pain, she is thinks that she is “smiling and singing” (132), and as she is taken to the hospital she celebrates what she imagines is her victory over her brown skin, expecting her skin to grow back a beautiful pink color.

In the midst of the larger, more overtly political violence in the book, it seems strange to focus on what might be read as a minor subplot involving a disturbed young teen.  However, Butler ties Eleanor’s story to the novel’s larger themes of sex and violence to emphasize just how dangerous life was for a young African American girl in Mississippi in 1961, even if she somehow managed to avoid the riots and thrown bricks.  In fact, resistance to white standards of beauty is identified as a political act in the novel when Roger encounters a young woman who has refused to embrace white standards of female beauty: “She wore her hair in a way that he had never seen anyone wear hair before: it was a great busy globe nearly two feet in diameter, like a trimmed hedge, like a large strange hat from outer space” (39).  Both her glare at Roger and Marcus’s explanation—“She ain’t arn it….She mad at white people” (39)—emphasize that hair can be a form of social protest:

Despite his detestable molestation of Eleanor, Roger is ultimately a good guy, taking Marcus from the dangers of Jackson and raising him in the comparatively safer environment of Arkansas.  However, that he can sexually assault a girl and not only get away with it but put it behind him as he does highlights not only the entrenched violence of the system but also Roger’s own privileged position within it.  More importantly, it shows how the violence of the time was not only in the billy clubs and the Klan but also present in less dramatic elements, part of an insidious force in the larger culture.  By allowing Eleanor’s story to break through, Butler emphasizes the subtle ways in which privilege and violence intertwine in 1960s Mississippi.