Assignment 3: Jennifer Morgan
In chapter one of Jennifer Morgan’s book she talks about the Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology. In this chapter the connection between the female body and racism are talked about especially by the analysis of the male travelers/writers. I realized that the words monstrous and human savage was repeated multiple times in this chapter. Many of the men used these words to describe the African female bodies. Richard Ligon mentions the breast of a black women, how they hung down below their belly buttons and at a distance they look like they had six legs. This implication states that they thought of the women’s body as inhuman and monstrous. The breast of the women are mentioned a lot throughout this chapter as well. Felix Spoeri, a Swiss physician, stated that the length of enslaved women breast are long due to the fact that they are naked all the time. Also since they have long breast they would just throw the breast across there shoulder and feed their babies on their backs. This leads to another racist idea they came up with which is that since the babies are on the back feeding, their noses are flattened due to knocking them continually against the back and shoulders of the mothers, concluding why all of their noses look the same (flat). Going back into the female body, Theodor de Bry depicts Indians as aggressive and savage. He shows women eating from a grill with human body parts that are being cooked. With that going on the women were presented with long breast falling below their waist. From those contexts women with long breast were considered savages to English readers.
Question: Why was the length of a women’s breast so important and why does long breast automatically have an association with being monstrous and a human savage?
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