Sexual, Gender & Sexual Politic of Josephine Baker
Josepine Baker was arguably the brightest star in the world during the 1930’s. The Black press of her era were often opposed to her blatant exhibition of her partially clothed body for luridly scandalized Parisian audiences. Baker’s talent and singular ability to arouse the imagination, however, was her path to unimaginable wealth and access to places the offspring of formerly enslaved parents could never have dreamed possible.
Josephine’s path to notoriety was established with her ‘banana dance’: where the only thing she wore was a band of bananas around her sylph-like waist.
Scholar Mae G. Henderson, in her exploration of the power of Josephine; JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE LA REVUE NEGRE: FROM ETHNOGRAPY TO PERFORMANCE - describes the racial politics that were at work whenever Baker was on display for the white gaze.
“both the audience and the performer participated, the former compelled by a powerful voyeurism coupled by the latter's equally powerful exhibitionism–a dialectical performance reenacting the obsessive need of the colonizer to “look” and the obsessive desire of the colonized to be “looked at.” The argument here is that Baker's performances both secured and unsettled the colonial relations reenacted in her performances.”
In my book, Unlawful Disorder, Bowie Long, though he is unaware of it on a conscious level, is doing the same work, when he is compelled by legal order to participate in a partial hospitalization program for sex offenders. On his first day, when Johnny NoBueno asks him what he likes to do, Bowie shows him, by dancing in the middle of the day room. His dance is free and expressive, and quickly gathers the attention in a room of sexual predators.
Bowie is doing what comes naturally to him, but he is also claiming his identity as a gay man in a room of heterosexual men. He is also expressing his sexuality with the movements of his body, some of that intentional, but most of it in the minds of the heterosexual gaze of the group surrounding him.
The moment becomes less sexual as his dancing reminds these men of a time when they were free, on the outside of compulsory treatment in a locked psychiatric unit. Bowie’s gay body becomes the site of remembrance of a time when they were free to dance and to love, to appreciate the shape of a woman’s body, the scent of a woman, the laughter of better times,…
to read Mae. G. Henderson’s exploration of Baker, click the link: https://doi.org/10.1080/1046293032000141338
order UNLAWFUL DISORDER here:
https://www.amazon.com/Unlawful-DISorder-David-Jackson-Ambrose/dp/1938841972