- mY [blOOd] bOdY: Examining Racialized Sexual Violence Against Black Women through Performance Art
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- Black women’s bodies have been sites of sexual violence in public and private spaces. Tameka Norris performs the piece, Untitled (2012), using her blood and body as medium across a white gallery wall as canvas. Before a public audience, she slits her tongue with a single, slow stroke of a knife disinfected with lemon juice, then drags her bleeding tongue across the white gallery walls. Understanding sexual violence through women of color performance art reveals the politics of the flesh as the center of analysis. In this study, I interrogate the ways in which Tameka Norris contests this secrecy of violence perpetrated against black women in her performance piece, Untitled (2012), through the use of her blood and body and its exhibition, inhabitation, and control over public space. By historicizing black women’s relationship to the bible, law, and lynching, this study traces how Norris’ bodily performance addresses the historical and political violence committed against black women’s bodies. Drawing from theories of oppositional geography and the gaze, I argue that these historical relationships are forces of sexual violence that coerce the black female body into the private domain. This research focuses on the flesh as a site of political violence indicative of the sociopolitical conditions that permit the literal, intimate markings and brandings on targeted bodies.
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