Black Women’s Policed Bodies and Sexual Expression: Fanon’s Oversights in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom

• In Event: Social Movements, Gender, and Colonialism

Abstract

Franz Fanon, in his text Black Skin, White Masks, undertakes a psychoanalytic study of how the oppressive sociopolitical structure of colonial culture produces black identity. Thus, he unites race with psychoanalysis, a theory that typically concerns itself with the construction of gender and sexuality. His theory demonstrates how psychoanalysis is a useful tool to comprehend the effects of power and cultural hegemony. However, Fanon primarily studies the colonial relations between black and white men, while women remain simply as commodities that mediate these relationships. When Fanon does speak about black women, and their relations with white men, he completely demonizes them and describes them as traitors. Black women, unlike black men who desire white women, will never reach intellectual and social equality with white men. Thus, Fanon overlooks other crucial ways in which colonial power and racism affect the psyche of black women. Banana Bottom by Claude McKay offers a more comprehensive understanding of the sexuality of female colonial subjects. In order to move up in social class, which entails colonial education and the adoption of white ideology, the female main character, Bita learns to loathe her own body and sexuality. Thus, in my analysis, I will use Banana Bottom to show a crucial aspect of the effects of colonization that McKay presents through his characters, but Fanon overlooks in his analysis. That is, the self-denial and self-hatred involved in the sexual development of female colonial subjects and the means they employ to rupture this oppression.

Author

• Isabel G Guzzardo, University of Puerto Rico