The Hottentot Venus: The Iconography of Black Female Sexuality

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          When Sarah Baartman was born to her Khoisan family in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, no one knew that she would be made into the face of black female sexuality in the late 19th century. Sarah Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman who was most famous for being exhibited as a freak show attraction under the name Hottentot Venus-- "Hottentot" as the then-current name for the Khoi people and "Venus" in reference to the Roman goddess of love.

          Baartman's story begins when she was a slave for a Dutch farmer near Cape Town and a friend of her slave owner was enticed by her highly unusual bodily features so much that he wanted to take her to Europe to be exhibited. Baartman's body featured a large buttocks and an elongated labia. Her physique, particularly her buttocks, became the object of popular fascination when Baartman was first exhibited in London in 1810, at the tender age of twenty.


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          In 1814, Baartman was taken to France, and became the object of scientific and medical research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about black female sexuality. J.J. Virey, the author of the study of race standard in the early 19th century, blamed the "primitive sexual appetite" of black females on their "volumptuousness" and most of all, their "primitive genitalia". He continued on to cite that Sarah Baartman was the epitome of this sexual lasciviousness. If their sexual parts could be shown to be inherently different, this would be a sufficient sign that the blacks were a separate (and, needless to say, lower) race, as different from the European as the proverbial orangutan.
 
          In 1815, Sarah Baartman passed away unexpectedly at the age of twenty-five in Paris, France. An autopsy was conducted, but the sole purpose was not to find out her cause of death but to get the chance to examine her sexual organs. Her skeleton, preserved genitals, and brain were placed on display in Paris' Musee de l'Homme until 1974, when they were removed from public view. In August 2002, Baartman's body was returned to her homeland of South Africa nearly 200 years after her birth.

Sources:

http://icarusfilms.com/new99/hottento.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Baartman

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Exhibition.html

Gilman, Sander L. "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature." Race, Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chicago, 1986.

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