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Assignment 3: Miguel Montana

One of the ways in which Jennifer Morgan approaches the issue of racism and its connection to the female body is through physiognomy of women as a whole. The word itself is defined as a person’s facial characteristics. However, she makes a point to note that Europeans had a cataloged view of what indigenous people looked like based upon the writings of people from the past. And this perspective, whether accurate to the time period, or the people being documented or not, was what shaped their understanding, and later, their perspective of superiority towards women of color, and people of color in general. One of the main ways that this is addressed is through the promiscuity that is perpetuated throughout the old literature that is being digested by the Europeans of this time period. What’s curious about this is that women of other nations, typically those of color, are described in almost complete contrast to their European counterparts. Either as being naked, long-breasted, savage, and most curiously whether they are able to have a lot of children or only a few. What’s even more interesting is that both ends of this position are seemingly bad. It’s bad for a woman to only have one child in her lifetime, but it’s also bad if she has too many as Aristotle would describe Egyptian women. For fear of risking a bad apple, apparently. That’s a curious oversight, though, I think because it shows that perhaps the intention when examining people outside of their culture and understanding, their was already initial feelings of superiority. And this natural feeling of superiority is something that perhaps biased the initial perspective of the people documenting the indigenous folk. This initial bias is probably laid the groundwork for the initial perpetuation of racism that would later give reason to enslave women and people of color in the future.