Abjection in contemporary Black Feminism

An Intersectional Approach in Doreen Garner’s Red Rack of Those Ravaged and Unconsenting

Abstract

Brooklyn-based African American artist Doreen Garner (b. 1986)’s recent sculptural assemblage, Red Rack of Those Ravaged and Unconsenting (2018) visually reiterates the history of medical experiment on enslaved Black women’s bodies conducted by white doctors in the United States from 1845 to 1849. Sculpturing the dismembered bodies of Black women in a realistic, yet grotesque manner, Garner expresses her intersectional identity of being a woman and Black in the American contemporary art scene. In this paper, the author argues that through Red Rack of Those Ravaged and Unconsenting, Garner attempts to engage with Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection to unsettle viewers, typically white male and female, as well as white feminists, by evoking two histories of America: the history of Black slavery in the nineteenth century and the history of feminist art practice in the 1980s. Instead of fully embracing Kristeva’s theory of abjection from the Anglo-feminist perspective which has dominated theoretical discourse on the pursuit of the female subjectivity since the 1980s, Garner rather takes up the limitations that came out from their feminist research into her sculpture to contest her viewers in reading her work of art from the position of contemporary Black feminist.