For this video I share my thoughts on the USA popular media obsession with which celebrity is having [hetero]sexual relations with which celebrity’s yoni and how in contrast, I find it strange that most people with yonis in the USA don’t want to have a holistic and intimate knowledge of their own reproductive health. Yoni is another word for vagina.
The book I refer to in this video is call Sacred Woman by Queen Afua.
So excited! My new book is ready for pre-order. The novel focuses on 18 year old Savannah Sales, an African American closeted lesbian who is growing up in rural white New England. Through her character and the relationships she has with others, I explore: internalized racism, normatie whiteness, internalized homophobia, racialized-sexualized violence, connections that food/consumption has to ‘liberation’, and the search for self-love. Her best friend is vegan and encourages Savannah to rethink her sense of justice by pointing out Savannah’s carnicentric and pro-corporate-capitalist consumption habits. This novel is based on my personal experiences growing up in New England and my award winning Dartmouth College thesis research (1998) that focused on black feminism, queer theory, and rural geographies.http://www.amazon.com/SCARS-Breeze-Harper/dp/0985476958/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1351228806&sr=1-1&keywords=%22breeze+harper%22 .
Black Coffee Press publishers took the project and I have a ‘real’ cover design for it and real editors…. it’s even going to be available on Kindle. Go me! The artwork was specially designed by the brilliant Sarah Dorsey whose art encapsulates pushing the boundaries when it comes to ‘mainstream’ ideas about gender and sexuality. Her art reminds me of a fusion of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, and Donna Haraway on a canvas.
This novel good for all ages past 18, but in particular, 18-23 year olds. Could be great reading material for college courses focused on sexuality, rural geographies, queer theory, women and gender studies, and Black Studies. It is rare that I find novels exploring the ‘black experience’ that is not in an urban setting and not heteronormative. When I have read about the ‘black experience’ within a Northeast USA context, it always takes place in a city. Scars explores this in rural and white environment.
If you would like to pre-order this book, you can click on the image below or above. Kindle is not yet ready for pre-order, but it should be shortly.
Image of Marion Sims
(Image source: (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/James_Marion_Sims.jpg/220px-James_Marion_Sims.jpg))
As soon as I had heard what he had said, I felt my stomach tighten and nausea came several seconds later.
Disgusting.
““The female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.“
Todd Akin’s words really hit me deep when he decided to become an “expert” on “legitimate rape” the other week. I know there have been tremendous responses against the ridiculous claims that Akin has made, but I wanted to offer what his words did to me; where it sent my mind.
Even though Akin apologized, I personally do not buy it. His initial “claim” about rape made me think about what men of his ilk have done, since European colonialism, to Black female bodies; to their reproductive gifts that were commoditized and sold on the auction block…and raped.
But back then, during an antebellum era of institutionalized chattel slavery, it wasn’t “legitimate rape” when the white slave-master raped Black female slaves (as well as ones that were “free”). As their “property” they could do whatever they wanted to them. The white male power structure literally created its own logical system that justified whose suffering counted, and whose suffering did not (Fett 2002). Constructed as 3/5’s of a human, we barely hit the radars of their compassion meter. As a matter of fact, through scientific racism and twisted interpretation of the Christian Bible, these men were able to convince themselves that not only were African people “enslavable”, our people had a “naturally” high tolerance for both physical and emotional pain. This included the pain of raping us; of selling our loved ones and tearing apart our families (Robert 1997; Washington 2006)
I began thinking about a piece that Petra Kuppers wrote about black women in the mid 19th-century. These women had been victims of experimentation by a man named Marion Sims. In Western medical schools Sims is taught as being the “father of gynecology” (Washington 2006). In Petra Kuppers’ piece about the Anarcha project, she talks about how this man experimented on many Black women slaves. He experimented on them to benefit white middle-class women who would use his gynecological services. What he did was really disgusting and very cruel. Sims was trying to solve the problem of fistula amongst white middle-class women clientele. A fistula is a condition in which there is a tear in the bladder that happens during a long labor sometimes, or the improper use of forceps during labor that tears the bladder. The consequence of this ailment is that women are constantly leaking urine. Sims was using black women’s bodies to solve this “problem.” And he did this without anesthesia. One of the women that he did this on experienced this experimentation over 30 times. He cut up their vaginas and cut into their wombs without….I repeat, without anesthesia.
But Sims was the “expert”; whether he had an MD degree or not. By simply being a white male of that era, he could dic[k]tate “facts” about whose vaginas were worth experimenting on and whose vaginas were worth putting on a pedestal (“white ladies” of a privileged socio-economic class).
Sims represents an ontological perspective that would continue into today, that dic[k]tate such “facts” about certain female bodies as long as it suits their own possessive investments in what bell hooks refers to as white supremacist capitalist patriarchal system (hooks 1992). These “experts” on [black] female bodies chose to rape hundreds of black female slaves because it is not ‘legitimate rape.’ Within this twisted logic, the violent act must not have been ‘legitimate rape’ since tens of thousands of black female slaves gave birth to babies who were products of never-ending unnamed racial-sexual abuse. In the logic of Akin, had it been “legitimate”, than their bodies would have had a way of “shutting it down.” And what perfect logic to fit the needs of a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that could only acquire capital and property through the labor of enslaved Africans and their continuation of “black” offspring.
Todd Akin, your comments did not surprise me. They disappointed me, but they did not surprise me. They fit perfectly within the socio-historical context of how white elite male power structure over the past 400 + years has viciously tried to control and restrict what particular females can and cannot do with their bodies.
Works Cited
Fett, Sharla M. Working Cures : Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Hooks, Bell. Black Looks : Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.
Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body : Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid : The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Breeze Harper
Yup, that’s right.
I said “vagina.”
Stop being squeemish. (LOL)
For real, though, let’s talk about vaginal health. Yea, it’s a broad topic, but I am going to focus on maintaining vaginal moisture through herbs and food.
They sell so much lube in the stores, I have always wondered if it is ‘normal’ that so many vaginas in the USA have problems with ‘dryness’. I mean, what did people do before AquaLube?
Throughout my life, I have talked to so many females adults, sexually active or not, who are having major problems with finding a way to be wet all the time. Many experience chaffing and have to use personal lubricant just to walk around comfortably.
So, here I am, Sistah Vegan, about to talk about some suggestions to kept that vegan vagina’s moisture in harmony. And yea, you can consider these suggestions even if you aren’t vegan. But I wanted to focus on vegan vaginas more because I have also spoken to a significant number of females who have transitioned into veganism and then make the observation that their libidos are non-existent and/or they are having problems with vaginal wetness. It’s not the vegan diet, it’s probably just the fact that you aren’t getting what you need in your diet.
I have to say that of the 10, the top 3 that I really suggest are the Slippery Elm, drinking a lot of healthy water, and the Maca Root.
If you want to learn more about sexual health and increasing your vagina’s happiness as a vegan wombman, I recommend reading the chapter in the Sistah Vegan book by Angelique Shofar, who beautifully tells you the vegan foods to eat to make a happy yoni. The chapter is called “The Food and Sex Link.” You can buy a copy here: Sistah Vegan: Food, Identity, Health, and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or certified practitioner of health. Please consult your practitioner before trying anything on this suggestion list.
In this video I talk about Sol Raiz organice Maca powder that I have been taking to create healthy libido, postpartum, and grow my hair back. I also update people on how I’m trying to handle “nursing on demand” and the challenges of being the primary caretaker of 2 children under the age of 3, while living in a nation in which there isn’t much structural and institutional support to help mothers (or the primary caretakers of pre-school age children which usually do end up being females).
The brand of Maca I by is by Sol Raiz:
solraizorganics.com/
Last night I spoke at UC Berkeley, and explained the Afrocentric approach to veganism that is race-gender conscious, decolonial, and revolutionary black feminist. I did this because I wanted to explain that there are more than just Eurocentric philosophical ‘ethics’ behind why some people choose veganism. By Eurocentrism, I mean the philosophical canon of ‘ethics and animals’ that dominate the mainstream academic literature in the USA. While Eurocentric philosophy focuses on the ‘ethics’ of non-human animal consumption and non-human animal exploitation, Afrocentric veganism (through Queen Afua) focuses on how veganism becomes a decolonial tool against the unethical abduction and enslavement of Africans and the institutional of chattel slavery; an unethical institution that took away their original plant-centered dietary philosophy and “forcing” them to eat a carnicentric diet. This is what a vegan methodology of the racially oppressed can look like! Video of talk and Q&A :
Part II
If you comment in a way that is obvious you didn’t watch the video, but are “annoyed” that I am looking at race, whiteness, and decolonial theories as a way to understand vegan consciousness, I will not post your comments. For me, it simply doesn’t make sense to receive passive aggressive comments from people who don’t know anything about my work, haven’t watched the video, but then feel like they are “experts” on the subject matter and then wish to “educate” me about my “incorrect” 4+ years of dissertation research and 35 years of racialized-gendered bodily experience as a black female in the USA. If it’s not enough that I have been “educated” at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and now University of California, learned how to engage in qualitative research, and document ongoing themes in vegan cultural practices (themes that are influenced by race, class, gender, whiteness, neoliberalism), then what more can I offer? (I’m being funny with educated in quotations, because of the mainstream assumption that if you just “educate” non-white folk through the “proper” Western university educational system, they will “assimilate” and agree with the perceptions of the white middle class status quo. But if they don’t, they must simply be ‘irrational’ and ‘angry’, and must be “educated more”)
Would you Harbor Me? Vegan Activism Beyond a Single Issue, Building Coalitions, and Challenging our Race, Gender, etc., Privileges.
In this video blog cast, I speak about building coalitions, reflecting on how lack of awareness around one’s identity/positionality privileges could actually be fostering suffering, and how to confront the discomfort around “uncomfortable” transformative challenges one may face as not just a vegan activist, but human being attempting to do social justice work.
Breeze Harper
melissa danielle
