Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts

This chapter explores the transnational circulation of notions of black hypersexuality in Brazil and beyond. It focuses on three sites of analysis that explore how cross-cultural perceptions of sexual difference are produced and perpetuated in the tourism industry. First, it examines Oswaldo Sargentelli’s Oba-Oba mulata shows, which situated the mulata on stage as an eroticized spectacle for the consumption of white male foreigners. Second, it analyzes a YouTube video that depicts a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage dancing with a woman of African descent who is dancing samba. Seeing her scantily clad, he takes the opportunity to grab her behind. Finally, the presentation reflects on the Marcha das Vadias (Slut Walk) that occurred in Salvador for the three years (2011-2013). In these three sites of analysis, women of African descent, like “sluts” and sex workers, are seen as having no bodily rights worth protecting. This presentation draws upon often overlooked scholarship on black Brazilian feminisms to address how black Brazilian women “recuperate and re-imagine their own sexualities” within a transnational tourism industry that depends upon their bodies and their emotional and sexual labor.

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No Bodily Rights Worth Protecting

Black Sexual Economies ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252042645.003.0006 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 89-107

Author(s):

Erica Lorraine Williams

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Working Class ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Object A ◽

Black Popular Culture ◽

Music Making ◽

Black Public Sphere ◽

Normative Practices ◽

Sexual Labor ◽

The Relationship

The sexual labor of music making began, in earnest, with the classic Blues women of the 1920s who epitomized the turn to a national Black popular culture. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was one of the most prolific of her cohort and made a career describing, in intimate detail, the interior lives of Black women and working class communities. Her popularity was a testament to her talents as a singer and performer but also to the skill of those around her, including the “Father of the Gospel Blues,” composer Thomas Dorsey and his wife, seamstress Nettie Dorsey. The materiality of the relationship shared between Mrs. Dorsey and Rainey is found in the dresses painstakingly sewn by Dorsey and glamorously displayed on stage by Rainey. While pleasant for the eye, these dresses also carry sounds—the music of its making as well as its performative display, making this object a text. In this examination, Redmond exposes the close proximities that exist within the costumes sewn by Mrs. Dorsey and worn by Rainey—namely the relationship between pious respectability and working-class nonheternomativity, laboring femininity and sonorous vocalities. Mrs. Dorsey’s work documents dressmaking as a sonic production capable of facilitating the growth of new industries and challenging the normative practices within the early twentieth century Black public sphere. Microreadings of these items, laborers, and artists expose some of the detail of Black political cultures in this moment and highlight the intertextual and multimedia enterprise of Black women’s sexual economies.

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Japan in the 1950s: Symbolic Victims

Alegal ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823282661.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 15-37

Author(s):

Annmaria M. Shimabuku

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Interwar Period ◽

Mixed Race ◽

The State ◽

Sexual Slavery ◽

Cultural Productions ◽

Imperial Period ◽

The Family ◽

Sexual Labor

Chapter 1 presents a genealogy of sexual labor in Japan from licensed prostitution and the so-called “comfort woman” system of sexual slavery in the imperial period, through the state-organized system of prostitution for the Allied forces in the immediate postwar, and to the full-fledged emergence of independent streetwalkers thereafter. It links protest against private prostitution in the interwar period to aversion toward the streetwalker in the postwar period through an examination of Tosaka Jun’s Japanese Ideology. There, he defined Japanism as the symbolic communion between the family and state and showed how Japanists attacked private prostitution for purportedly interfering with the integrity of both. What was at stake was the ability of a budding middle class to manage the reproduction of labor power for the biopolitical state. Through Tosaka, this chapter delineates a mechanism of social defence amongst the middle class that targeted life thought to be unintelligible to the state such as the streetwalker and her mixed-race offspring. Further, it shows how this occurred through cultural productions such as anti-base reportage that focused obsessively on the figure of the streetwalker.

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