Alexandra Oprea

Roma Women's Initiative

The Arranged Marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba, Intra-Community Oppression and Romani Feminist Ideals Transcending the 'Primitive Culture' Argument

Keywords:

This article discusses the politics behind the recently publicized arranged marriage of a 12-year-old Romani girl, Ana Maria Cioaba. It speaks to the anti-Romani racism in Romania and abroad inherent in the media portrayal of the marriage and criticizes the racist politics behind the involvement of the different political figures in an effort to 'save' Ms Cioaba. It also discusses the implications of the media's obsession with the 'exotic' oppression of Third World women in the context of Ms Cioaba's arranged marriage. Ultimately the article also attempts to illuminate the precarious position of Romani feminism in racist countries.

oppressed communities and to deflect attention from institutionalized marginalization in Romania. The racism inherent in the Romanian and North American newspapers' coverage of the wedding of Ana Maria Cioaba is evidenced in their relentless emphasis that Ana Maria is the daughter of the self-proclaimed 'King of the Gypsies', the use of the word tigan (the pejorative term for Roma in Romanian), as well as their focus on the lavishness of the occasion. The use of 'king', 'princess', 'Gypsy nobility' and 'his majesty' are only some of the examples that illustrate the Romanian newspapers' 6 focus on exoticizing this particular Romani family and the arranged marriage. This exoticization is also coupled with ridicule in a country where 'Gypsy nobility' is considered an oxymoron by most.

Along with the media's fixation with the 'royalty' aspect, the lavishness of the wedding also received much superfluous attention. Included are descriptions such as: '4 tons of meat', 'a $4000 wedding dress', 'Mercedes limousines', 'a $3000 diamond necklace' and 'king dons an Armani suit and gold scepter' [START_REF] Popa | Paranghelie Tiganeasca la Sibiu[END_REF]. [START_REF] Ziua | Cioaba si-a Maritat Fica de 12 Ani[END_REF] mentions there being 300 bottles of wine and 150 bottles of whisky consumed, while [START_REF] Libertatea | Nunta cu Lacrimi in Tiganie[END_REF] claims there were 2600 bottles of wine and 600 bottles of whisky served at the wedding. No better, The New York Times (2003) 7 also reports that 'the bride's Italian wedding gown cost $4000' and that there was 'a dowry worth tens of thousands of dollars' (though there was no 'dowry' in the sense of a price paid to the bride's family 8 ). Aside from portraying it as a spectacle, the emphasis on the lavishness and royalty aspect serves to incite feelings of apathy towards Ms Cioaba's predicament in that she is seen as relatively privileged.

The suspect nature of the media attention given to this arranged marriage is confirmed when placed in the context of the media's systemic disregard towards other examples of the abuses faced by Roma in general 9 and Romani women in particular. The violence and lack of access to decent housing, employment and education that the majority of Roma and Romani women in particular face (Asylum Aid, 2002) never generate such international media attention. This is illustrated through the story of Olga David, a 42-year-old Romani woman from Petrosani, Romania who was beaten to death for taking coal from a local mine. On 3 November 2003, while Ms David and her niece were gathering coal, a security guard and two other men approached them and, after determining that they were stealing coal, beat Ms David to unconsciousness. Her niece escaped but Ms David died as a result of her injuries. It was only reported in the local Petrosani paper on 25 November, nine days after Tumende, a local Romani NGO, released a statement condemning the incident and pointing out that non-Roma also take coal from the mine to heat their homes but are never murdered for it (ERRC, 2003). It did not appear in any of Romania's national newspapers and needless to say, it did not make international headlines. 10 This sheds light on the motivation behind the media attention received by Ms Cioaba's wedding.

This phenomenon is not unique to Roma and is explained within the context of other Third World people: 'Only certain problems receive coverage or generate concern, namely those used to illustrate the alien and bizarre oppression of women of color; for example sati, dowry death, veiling . . . arranged marriages' (Volpp, 2001: 8). In this scenario, the culture of Third World people becomes 'the site of the raw material that is "monstrosity" [and] is produced for the surplus value of spectacle, entertainment, and spiritual enrichment for the "First World" ' (Volpp, 2001: 3). The media's exclusive focus on the arranged marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba illustrates their perverse obsession with portraying Romani culture as primitive and presenting it as a spectacle for the consumption of European and North American audiences.

An analysis of the reactions of different Romani and non-Romani political figures to this event is essential in assessing how media portrayal structures discourses. After the initial frenzy caused by the exaggerated descriptions of the wedding, politicians began to speak out against it by stating that marriages involving minors were prohibited under Romanian law. Newspapers claimed that although the legal marrying age for women in Romania is 16, 'the state tolerates the Gypsy tradition of marrying much earlier' (Evenimentul Zilei, 2003a). This juxtaposes the supposedly homogeneous Romani tradition as primitive against the allegedly non-sexist/progressive Romanian law. The Romanian organization Salvati Copii (Save the Children) also protested the entrenchment upon the minor's rights relying on the article in the Romanian constitution specifying the legal age for marriage [START_REF] Chelemen | Organizatia "Salvati Copii": Cununia Anei-Maria Cioaba incalca drepturile copilului si Constitutia[END_REF]. An editorial in Evenimentul Zilei poses the question of how to resolve the conflict between their (Romani) traditions and the law ('traditile lor si lege') [START_REF] Tapalaga | Sex, Traditie si Politie[END_REF], reflecting the oppositions drawn between wrong/primitive (Roma) and right/progressive (gadje).

The focus on the 'exotic' oppression of Romani women and the essentialist portrayal of Romani culture as primitively oppressive, placed in contrast to a supposedly progressive Romanian society, ignores the existence of sexism within the latter's culture while embellishing it in the former. It constructs a dichotomous discourse that serves to glorify Romania as a state upholding feminist ideals while ignoring the existence of Romanian patriarchy. 11 This binary discourse portrays the arranged marriage as the crux of an imaginary, unchanging, homogeneous Romani culture. However, not all Romani groups practise arranged marriages and the amount of choice given to the participants varies from group to group. 12 The religiousness of the group in question also plays a role in the marriage -Ana Maria's father is a Pentecostal pastor. Romani culture 'is not constructed under "hermetically sealed" boxes' (Volpp, 2001: 7-8). One example reflective of changing times is seen in the many teenage Romani girls -Calderash 13 and others -who now are able to at least occasionally wear trousers as opposed to long skirts. Many (myself included) only put on long skirts for community events such as weddings or baptisms or when visiting other traditional Roma. Yet another example of the fluidity of culture is the fact that about 50 years ago many of the community members in the said Sibiu community lived in tents. The males also wore moustaches and hats. Today, due to the initiatives of community leaders such as those of the late Ion Cioaba, the moustaches and hats are no longer donned, and most live in houses as opposed to tents.

Furthermore, 'culture is constantly negotiated and is multiple and contradictory' (Volpp, 2001: 4). I recall my former mother-in-law, a strong, well-respected, 48-year-old single Romani woman, who had borne five sons and was the head of her household, dominating over her sons and daughters-in-law alike, illustrating how age can also affect your status within the family and community. Another example is Lucia Cioaba, Ana Maria's aunt, who also grew up in the traditional Calderash Romani community in Sibiu but was able to obtain higher education and avoid an arranged marriage. Luminita Cioaba, Ana Maria's other aunt, is also educated and a renowned poet and activist. My point is not to deny that Romani women are profoundly oppressed but to challenge the monofocal conceptualization of 'Romani culture' as being the sole factor affecting the experiences of Romani women.

Nicoleta Bitu, a prominent Romanian Romani feminist, also points to the media's exclusive focus on the 'sensationalist' aspects of the wedding in an effort to portray it as solely the product of Romani culture:

One such detail . . . is the rivalry between 'King' Cioaba, who belongs to the Pentecostal Church, and another self-proclaimed king, who is supported by the Orthodox Church. In this context, the wedding became a public relations campaign for 'King' Cioaba. [START_REF] Bitu | The Challenges of and for Romani Women[END_REF] This aspect, along with others that would have shown the multifaceted nature of the issues behind the marriage, was left out of the discourse.

Efforts to portray the arranged marriage of Ana Maria as purely a result of Romani culture are not limited to newspapers, as is noted in Jeff [START_REF] Timmerman | When Her Feet Touch the Ground: Conflict between the Roma Familistic Custom of Arranged Juvenile Marriage and Enforcement of International Human Rights Treaties[END_REF] 'When Her Feet Touch the Ground: Conflict between the Roma Familistic Custom of Arranged Juvenile Marriage and Enforcement of International Human Rights Treaties'. One of the major flaws in Timmerman's argument is the relentless reliance on essentialist notions of 'Romani culture', based on information he derives primarily from non-Romani sources -most notably from Isabel [START_REF] Fonseca | Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey[END_REF] Bury Me Standing, a work that has been criticized for bias and inaccuracy in Romani activist circles. 14 This leads him to such essentialist conclusions as 'the Roma community itself openly embraces juvenile arranged marriage' (Timmerman, 2004: 479) and 'the ultimate goal of a Roma family unit is maximized reproduction' (Timmerman, 2004: 483).

He goes on to say that 'Roma tradition still relies heavily on archaic marital bartering mechanisms like bride prices and dowries' (Timmerman, 2004: 480) and goes on to describe the pliashka, a ceremony he claims takes place after an agreement has been reached as to the dowry. It might interest him to know that both of these rituals -the dowry and pliashka -are foreign to the Sibiu Calderash Romani community Ana Maria is from. He never bothers to make any reference to which Romani community these rituals are allegedly practised by, and because he initiates his discourse by referring to Ana Maria Cioaba's marriage, one would assume the rituals are practised by Ana Maria's community. It makes little sense to discuss an arranged marriage in a certain community and then give as 'cultural background' rituals practised by other Romani communities. There is a need to examine the myriad of ways in which policies affect Romani communities by taking into account their diversity and proceeding with careful research and analysis on a case-by-case (community-by-community) basis. His heavy reliance on problematic notions of a homogeneous Romani culture is also coupled with a disregard for how larger institutional practices in Romania shape culture and affect the vulnerability of Romani women in arranged marriages.

Furthermore, Timmerman also makes blanket statements about Romani women that deny the existence of resistance on their part and ultimately challenges their agency. He says (quoting Fonseca), Roma women see nothing unfair about mandatory spousal roles -'quite the opposite: they had the comfort of having a clear role in the world of unemployment without end . . . [T]he men, jobless and bored . . . looked the worse off.' (Timmerman, 2004: 488) His basic assertion is that Romani women are so brainwashed, they do not even know what is in their best interests. By his account, where Romani women willingly and happily submit to oppressive authority, there is no insider resistance and needless to say no Romani feminist aspirations. Any impetus for change, according to him, is a result of international bodies essentially intervening to inform Romani women that they are oppressed (the consequences of which are discussed later).

A more blatant example of 'primitive' Romani culture pitted against supposedly feminist white Romanian values, where such values are constructed as something gadjikane, is noted in the reactions generated by the media attention received by Ana Maria's marriage. Media focus on the disapproval of the marriage by non-Romani politicians and activists created an image of Romani women needing to be saved from their oppressive cultures as opposed to being actual agents. One example of a gadjikani saviour is Emma Nicholson, EU envoy to Romania, whose condemnation of the marriage cast (short-lived) doubts upon Romania's entrance into the EU. This erratic protest on behalf of Romani women must be examined in the context of Ms Nicholson's lack of a forceful stand against the systemic discrimination Romani women face in healthcare, education and employment in Romania. At the other end of the spectrum is Romani CRISS, a Romani NGO, which defended the arranged marriage by invoking the rhetoric of 'Romani tradition' (Evenimentul Zilei, 2003b), reinforcing the discourse of the 'authentic' 15 Roma as non-supportive of women's rights.

While white society's feminist ideals were posited against the Cioaba family and Romani CRISS represented 'authentic' Roma, Madalin Voicu, a Romani representative in the Romanian parliament, is the only Rom mentioned in the newspapers as being against the marriage. Within Romani circles, Voicu is remembered for his statement in 2002: 'Our Gypsies are stupid, primitive, and irritate everyone' [START_REF] Divers | Madalin Voicu Acuzat de Rasism[END_REF]. The one Rom who appears to stand up for women's rights is the one who is considered a traitor by most Romani activists and non-activists alike. Voicu is seen as 'inauthentic' and his support of women's rights is dismissed and is assumed to stem from the same place as his racist comments -brainwashing by gadje.

No feminist Romani woman activist was interviewed regarding her reaction to the marriage. The voice of Nicoleta Bitu, who opined that it was a matter of 'the right of the woman to choose against more traditional roles defined by patriarchy' [START_REF] Bitu | The Challenges of and for Romani Women[END_REF], was never heard -thereby facilitating the erasure of Romani resistance to patriarchal practices and the gadje's monopoly on feminist ideals.

With the media reinforcing the image of Romani tradition as inferior and erasing any indication of Romani women's resistance, Ana Maria's aunt, author and activist Luminita Cioaba, although initially against the marriage, eventually defended it saying, 'You've made us look like barbarians, criminals, rapists. . . . We have our unwritten laws . . . that no one is allowed to challenge' (Evenimentul Zilei, 2003b). However, weeks before the event, Luminita was extremely upset with her brother for trying to 'marry Cristina off'. 16 Yet, when her feminist values and race were pitted against one another, she chose to defend her family and race in a country where Roma are treated as second-class citizens.

This dilemma is not unfamiliar to African-American feminists in the US, where 'people of color often must weigh their interests in avoiding issues that might reinforce distorted public perceptions against the need to acknowledge and address intra-community problems' (Crenshaw, 1995: 361). This illustrates one of the dilemmas of intersectionality: being forced to choose between your gender and your race in an environment where they are constructed as mutually exclusive. Essentializing Romani culture and Romani women's reactions to subordination leads to asserting that resistance/feminist ideals come from the outside. This establishes a false dichotomy between women's rights and Romani-ness where they become construed as mutually exclusive, ultimately forcing Romani women to chose between their race and gender. 17 In the case of the arranged marriages of minors and other issues that entail critiquing intra-group practices, even activist Romani women are discouraged from protesting due to their fear of reinforcing dominant negative perceptions of Roma. However, the act of critiquing such practices is not problematic; what is problematic is mainstream society's exclusive focus on Romani women's 'bizarre' oppression and other events uncomplimentary to Roma in conjunction with 'the absence of other narratives and images' (Crenshaw, 1995: 362) reflecting a wide spectrum of Romani experiences. If the media were also to report the achievements of Roma (as opposed to the exclusive focus on crimes committed by Roma), a more balanced perception of Romani individuals would be promoted, which, in turn, would provide an atmosphere conducive to critiquing harmful intra-community practices.

The dynamics involved in critiquing intra-group oppression are obviously complicated when the group in question is a minority facing stateimposed domination, as is the case of non-territorial nations such as Roma. Often, practices that are harmful to women within such groups are either ignored in the name of preserving cultural autonomy or criticized in a way that portrays the entire culture as primitive. To deviate from these flawed approaches, it is necessary to apply feminist scrutiny to laws and practices affecting women in minority communities. Whites/westerners should not abstain from critiquing practices involving Third World subjects, mistakenly believing that they are respecting the 'other's' culture. Uma Narayan comments:

It is not clear to me that one can really learn about another culture while not subjecting it to any critical or normative evaluation, any more than one can really learn about another person without subjecting her to a variety of appraisals and evaluations, both positive and negative. Most often the commitment 'not to judge' other cultures seems in effect to be a commitment 'not to express one's judgments' -which only serves to insulate these unexpressed judgments from challenges, corrections, or interrogations they might profit from. (Narayan, 1997: 150) However, Narayan also warns that critiques should be conducted in a manner that is racially sensitive and grounded in an understanding of the West's/whites' role in the oppression of the said group.

The tactic of placing the blame solely on a monolithic, impermeable 'Romani culture' is an explanation that ultimately renders invisible institutional structures that shape culture -a copout of sorts. The most obvious way in which Romanian racism promotes arranged marriages of Romani minors is by 'turning a blind eye' to them based on plain neglect or a flawed notion of cultural plurality. Yet another way in which racism contributes to the oppression of Romani women is through the rigidification of Romani practices: since Roma live within hostile societies that threaten their way of life, efforts to maintain their identity often result in inflexible interpretations of certain practices. Ayelet Shachar refers to this as 'reactive culturalism', a force which 'is not simply the expression of a pure unalloyed culture so much as a result of cross-cultural interaction that has already occurred, in which the state has also played its role' (Shachar, 2001: 36).

A more indirect way in which state-sponsored structural marginalization contributes to the vulnerability of under-age Romani women to arranged marriages is through the lack of access to education. 18 The educational level of Romani parents affects their decisions regarding when and whether or not to marry their daughters off. In addition, the lack of educational and employment opportunities for Romani women in Romania also contributes to many Romani parents' decisions -in other words saying 'she's not doing anything with her life anyway, might as well'. 19 In addition, better educational and employment opportunities act to empower Romani women within their relative communities by increasing their options and social mobility. The implementation of policies aimed at facilitating educational and employment access for Romani women is crucial to combating their vulnerability.

One such policy that would level the playing field for Romani women (as well as their parents) is affirmative action 20 -a policy that has been the site of much controversy in the US. Affirmative action programmes aim at increasing representation for excluded groups by taking into account how an individual's group membership has impeded their access in light of historical and present institutional barriers. Opponents of affirmative action refer to it as preferential treatment and reject it based on the alleged stigma imposed on beneficiaries (Fraser, 1997: 26) and the backlash it elicits from the dominant group (Fraser, 1997: 31). However, what is usually interpreted as 'preferential treatment' for traditionally excluded groups is really the denial of privileges to dominant groups. 21 Nancy Fraser (1997: 30) rejects affirmative action based on her belief that its consequence is . . . not only to underline racial differentiation; it is also to mark people of color as deficient and insatiable, as always needing more and more. Thus, they too can be cast as privileged recipients of special treatment.

The rhetoric of preferential/special treatment or reverse discrimination would be valid if we lived in a meritocracy -a notion Iris Young (1990: 192-225) dismantles. However, despite her acknowledgement of institutionalized unequal treatment based on race and gender, like Fraser, 22 Young opposes affirmative action based on the notion that it does little to target institutional practices or aid the 'truly needy'. With regard to the former point, Harris and Narayan point out that, affirmative action was not meant to 'provide a magic bullet cure-all for a host of contemporary social problems' but rather . . . to partially counter the ways in which factors such as class, race, and gender function in our society to impede equal access, equal opportunity and equal treatment; and to foster a greater degree of inclusion of diverse Americans in a range of institutions and occupations than would otherwise exist. (Harris and Narayan, 1994: 11) Contrary to Young's assertion that affirmative action does little to increase access for the truly disadvantaged, Harris and Narayan (1994: 8) point out that affirmative action policies (and civil rights laws) are largely responsible for creating the black middle class.

Romania -a country where UNICEF polls reveal that 93.4 percent of whites would not want a Romani person as a member of their family [START_REF] Erio | Anti-Gypsyism: Romanian Case[END_REF], a country where schools remain segregated (ERRC, 2004) and de facto discrimination pervades -is in desperate need of affirmative action. The EU must adopt a firm directive on and provide funds for the implementation of affirmative action programmes in EU member states as well as requiring the implementation of affirmative action programmes as a prerequisite for accession to the EU. Affirmative action programmes should be applied in an intersectional manner (considering a variety of disadvantages including race, gender, class, sexuality and so forth) on an institution-by-institution basis. A special body, one including Romani women, should be established to monitor the results of affirmative action initiatives with the goal of increasing the number of Romani women (and other excluded groups) in universities, the professions, government (and not to mention media).

It is imperative that the EU also explicitly deals with the vulnerability of women in minority communities by establishing a special body devoted to monitoring intra-community subjugation (i.e. arranged marriages of minors, virginity practices, female genital mutilation and so forth) both in EU member states and in candidate countries. This body would be responsible for navigating a middle ground between granting blanket accommodations to groups and completely disregarding differences. One mechanism that engages the challenge of recognizing a group's differences while protecting its vulnerable members is joint governance.

The system of joint governance elaborated by Shachar's transformative accommodation approach aims at resolving just such disputes between individuals and their identity group. Transformative accommodation is 'context-sensitive' joint governance whereby the group and state 'compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents in each different social arena' (Shachar, 2001: 122). This approach is based on the principle of the division of authority into 'sub-matters' over which neither the state nor the identity group has exclusive jurisdiction. Another key component allows the individual to appeal to the competing authority in cases where she is not satisfied with the remedy provided to her; she can opt for the predetermined remedy agreed to by all parties before deliberation began. Shachar indicates that the establishment of this 'opt-out' provision will encourage the parties to come to an agreement (Shachar, 2001: 125).

This model promotes 'change from within' (Shachar, 2001: 122) and builds on the internal resistance to oppressive practices to foster a dialogue between the state, group and individual. There are a couple of considerations in implementing such a model in a case such as Ana Maria Cioaba's. Because Ana Maria is a minor and would probably be intimidated from raising a formal complaint, a human rights NGO -preferably a Romani women's NGO such as the Romani Women's Association of Romaniawould have to be responsible for negotiating on her behalf. Shachar suggests that with this joint governance model, the driving force behind reaching a consensus is the woman's wish to remain a part of her community and the community's 23 desire to maintain the allegiance of the group member. Whereas in situations where the individual has a clear interest in reaching a compromise with the group so as to not alienate herself from it, it is not clear how the negotiating stage would play out in cases where NGOs/activists step in on behalf of the wronged group member.

After a complaint is lodged by the activists representing Ana Maria, the 'case' would be referred to a kris, 24 or Romani court, comprised of community 'judges'. Since some judges -such as Ana Maria's fathermight have a vested interest in this matter, other 'less partial' judges could be recruited from neighbouring towns. Before deliberating, the partiesin this case Ana Maria, the activists, the state and the group (all under the supervision of the EU body established to monitor such conflicts) -would have to agree on an 'opt-out' remedy which would be available to Ana Maria if she was displeased with the 'verdict'. Among my concerns is that the kris is usually comprised of males, who are not likely to be sensitive to Ana Maria's predicament. One option would be for the EU to provide incentives for the inclusion of women in the kris during such negotiations. Though in need of intense tweaking, this option is more promising than any measures taken so far (or lack thereof) and could very well lay the foundation for the respective EU body's strategy for dealing with intracommunity oppression.

There is a need to address critically the many affronts to the dignity of Romani women in a way that is conscious of the multiplicity of factors shaping their experiences. Local and international attention to the problem of arranged marriages of minors in certain Romani communities should be a part of a whole-hearted dedication to improving the lives of Roma in general and of Romani women in particular. To transcend the obsession with 'exotic' oppression, which currently characterizes public attention to Romani women's woes, and foster a true commitment to empowering Romani women, we must interrogate the notion of a monolithic 'primitive' Romani culture by evaluating the role institutional 'isms' play in the shaping of cultures. Recognition of the intersectional nature of systems of oppression is necessary to facilitating internal condemnation of intra-community practices. This acknowledgement should also give rise to action aimed at equalizing opportunities for Romani women and other intersectional beings. The EU, having been made aware of the egregious entrenchment on Romani women's rights through Ana Maria's much publicized marriage, must now act firmly to attack the root as well as the ramifications of such oppression. NOTES 1. I start this article with a narrative to explain my connection to the arranged marriage of Cristina -the niece of my confidant/second-mother/sisterwhich led me to analyse the complex relationship between Romanian racism and the silencing of Romani feminist ideals. As I write I am conscious that I am participating in an act that fosters my otherization from the Romani community -in a sense that renders me 'inauthentic' according to gadje and Roma alike. However, I am also conscious that we must appropriate the act of writing (as opposed to being written about) in order to progress and take control of our identities. I occasionally include narratives in this article to illuminate a discourse with which I am deeply engaged and affected by in an effort to refute the efficacy or possibility of distancing oneself from the text. 2. Romani is the adjectival form of 'Roma', the proper term for the group pejoratively known as 'Gypsies'. Roma left India about 1000 years ago and now inhabit every continent and are primarily concentrated in Europe. For a detailed historical account see [START_REF] Hancock | The Pariah Syndrome[END_REF]. 3. I use the term 'Third World' to refer to people of colour, especially those living and racialized in western contexts. 4. This word is the adjectival form of gadje, which means non-Roma in Romanes, the Romani language. Other forms include gadjikano, gadjikani and gadjikane, which are the masculine singular, feminine singular and plural adjectives, respectively, used to describe things considered non-Romani. 5. For a more detailed account of how the anthropological perspective functions to impede the elaboration of a gendered Romani discourse, see [START_REF] Oprea | Re-Envisioning Social Justice from the Ground Up: Including the Experiences of Romani Women[END_REF]. 6. Including the major Romanian newspapers: Adevarul, Evenimentul Zilei, Ziua and Libertatea.

7. Similar portrayals of the marriage prevail in the Los Angeles Daily News and the New York Daily News. 8. This particular Calderash Romani community no longer employs the dowry (understood as the groom's family paying a sum to the bride's family). 9. One example of the Romanian media's biased reporting and manipulation of public perception is seen in the coverage of the Hadareni pogrom, where non-Roma set fire to Romani houses after a Rom killed an ethnic Romanian.

For more detailed information on how the Romanian media misrepresents abuses against Roma, see Hanganu (1999). 10. For more examples of violence against Romani women as perpetrated by whites, see WomenAction (2000). 11. One example of the dire situation of women in Romania is the lack of battered women's shelters (Mertus, 1998: 23). 12. One group of Roma in Romania, the one to which I belong, that does not practise arranged marriages are the Vatrash, often referred to as Cashtale. 13. The Calderash are a certain group of Roma who were originally coppersmiths. For more information, see [START_REF] Hancock | The Pariah Syndrome[END_REF]. The particular Calderash community that I discuss in this article has resided in Sibiu for centuries. 14. On one instance Fonseca (1996: 168-9) writes, 'I confess that I had run out of sympathy. The Gypsies were bound to be at least as bad as their accusers, I felt; chances are they deserved each other.' 15. For a more complete discussion of how the discourse of authenticity disempowers people of colour and women of colour in particular, see Narayan (1997: 142-50). 16. This information comes from the numerous conversations (my confidant/second-mother/sister) Lucia Cioaba and I have had on this issue since hearing of Cristina's planned wedding. 17. For a more complete discussion on intersectionality and women of colour being forced to choose between their race and gender in instances of intracommunity problems, see Crenshaw (1995: 357-83). 18. I believe that in addition to the patriarchy within the community, the educational level of Ms Cioaba's father also affected his decision to arrange her marriage at such an early age. Furthermore, Ana Maria's poor school performance (in conjunction with partriarchy) also played a role in her being wed. Had the Romanian educational system made more of an effort to reach out to Romani students and to have multicultural curricula, perhaps Ana Maria would not have become alienated from school. This conclusion has recently been reinforced in light of another friend of mine (who was failing her classes) being married off at 17. I can recall her mother saying that if she didn't improve her grades, she would have no choice but to have her married. 19. This argument should not be construed to deny the fact that (in cases where Roma can afford to send their children to school) Romani girls are sometimes taken out of school in order to preserve their virginity or care for siblings; my point is rather to add another facet to the discourse. 20. Romania has already implemented some affirmative action programmes that have aided Roma (see Resource Centre for Roma Communities, 2002). They are not comprehensive enough but represent a step in the right direction. 21. For more on white privilege, see [START_REF] Wildman | Language and Silence: Making Systems of Privilege Visible[END_REF]. 22. I agree with Fraser's conclusion that socialism and deconstruction are ideal for eliminating injustice; however, because we are not yet even close to implementing such radical changes, it does not make sense to oppose a policy that can act to counter some of the injustices members of neglected groups currently face. Furthermore, I do not find Fraser's redistribution-recognition approach useful for assessing the multidimensional challenges Romani women face, since Fraser analyses gender and race in isolation from one another. In this particular essay, Fraser (1997: 26) analyses injustice not from an intersectional domination standpoint but from the 'pure ideal-typical cases at the two extremes of the conceptual spectrum' (white women and men of colour) and in the end mentions that women of colour would experience the redistribution-recognition dilemma in a 'multilayered and acute form' (Fraser, 1997: 32). This might lead one to the false conclusion that the experience of women of colour can be deduced by perhaps adding together the relative experiences of white women and men of colour. I believe that such compartmentalized conceptualization leads to a simplified and incomplete view of remedies necessary for the emancipation of multiply burdened individuals such as Romani women. While Romani women would require distributive remedies as well as remedies that accommodate for differences such as language (ethnic differences) and remedies that aim at deconstructing stereotypes, they also require remedies that explicitly deal with the tension arising from the interaction between their gender, ethnicity and racialization -a problem Shachar's work engages. 23. I am assuming here that the group would have to be given initial jurisdiction over the matter because of how intrinsic this practice is considered by the respective community. Feeling that they have had a say in the remedy would provide it with legitimacy and staying power. 24. In the particular community Ana Maria is from, the kris is still active. To ensure a fair outcome in cases where one of the judges has a direct stake in the matter, other judges are brought in from neighbouring towns.

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(2)


Priscilla Netto

Reclaiming the Body of the 'Hottentot' The Vision and Visuality of the Body Speaking with Vengeance in Venus Hottentot 2000

Keywords:

The primary focus of this article is a reading of Venus Hottentot 2000, a performance-text that reperforms the hyperbolization of Black female sexuality. In using the corporeality of the Black body as a strategic site of postcolonial resignification, this performance is moreover an interrogation of the colonial gaze that has fetishized the Black body. In foregrounding Venus Hottentot 2000 as a point of departure for exploration, the article proceeds by delving broadly into the representational history of the 'Hottentot' female. Furthermore, to facilitate an understanding of the constitutive power of the colonial gaze and the possibilities of subverting and displacing that gaze from that of a postcolonial diasporic aesthetic practice, the article frames the postcolonial feminist reading of Venus Hottentot 2000 via an investigation of the processes by which the 'Hottentot' female has been festishized and scopically objectified within colonial discourse -processes whereby the 'Hottentot' female became a signifier of Black female sexuality. The article concludes by reading this performance as an example of a postcolonial 'cultural war of positioning', which offers moreover a contemporary rescripting of Black subjectivity.

INTRODUCTION

Sarah Bartman, a Khoi Khoi woman, otherwise known as the 'Hottentot Venus', was an example of a colonized Black woman exposed to the European colonial scopic gaze in which the construction of a hyperbolic European Journal of Women's Studies Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), 1350-5068 Vol. 12(2): 149-163; DOI: 10.1177/1350506805051235 sexuality was discursively produced within a visual framework. In 1810, this young Khoi Khoi woman from the Eastern Cape of South Africa was brought to Europe by Hendrik Cezar, 1 a White South African, and exhibited as a 'freak' and a 'savage monstrosity' around Europe due to the protuberant size of her buttocks (steatopyga) and her 'apron' 2 [START_REF] Lindfors | The Afterlife of the Hottentot Venus[END_REF].

Her exhibition in Britain was a 'sensation' and she was 'displayed' until 1814. She was then taken by Cezar to Paris, where she aroused further medical and scientific interest. Shortly thereafter, she died a premature death in 1815 in Paris, at the approximate age of 28. She was then dissected by Baron Cuvier and Henri de Blainville in an attempt to prove her 'animal' origins [START_REF] Abrahams | Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early Nineteenth Century Britain[END_REF]. For both scientists and lay people of those days, Sarah Bartman became a stereotype of Black female primitivism. Cuvier, for example, dehumanized her further by comparing her to an orang-utan, thereby further contributing to the then European colonial belief that Africans were closer to the order of animals than to humankind. 3 Plaster casts were made of her dissected remains and waxen moulds were made from her genitalia. Her remains including her death mask were preserved and placed on public display in Case 33 at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until their final removal in 1982 after protests were made by people who found the exhibit demeaning and offensive [START_REF] Kushner | Selling Racism: History, Heritage, Gender and the (Re)production of Prejudice[END_REF]. Sarah Bartman's remains were finally returned to South Africa and she was laid to rest in August 2002 in the Eastern Cape as part of the country's Women's Day celebrations.

From the shameful colonial history and exploitation of Sarah Bartman and her reduction to both a sexual and medical object, let us 'fast-forward' to 1994 and look at a contemporary rescripting of the Hottentot Venus. The performance Venus Hottentot 2000 (1994), emerged from a collaboration between Lyle Ashton Harris and Renee Valerie Cox, both of whom are Black visual artists. In this performance, Harris and Cox revisit the particularity of the Hottentot Venus. Cox stands, her hair in shoulder length dreadlocks, with her hands on her hips against a largely empty backdrop. Her body is partly turned away from us to the right. She has an ambiguous smile playing on her face and except for two or three bracelets on her left hand, she is partially clad. Apart from having what seems like metallic looking breasts tied by a ribbon around her chest, she also has metallic looking exaggerated buttocks, which mime those of the Hottentot Venus in the 19th century, attached to her buttocks. However, unlike Sarah Bartman, who was the passive object of the gaze, she, Renee Valerie Cox, is the author of this representation and she regards us, the viewers, with a direct, unflinching and confrontational gaze as she is photographed by Harris.

In their highly charged articulation and dramatization of the historicity of the Hottentot Venus, Cox and Harris offer a contemporary exploration and reclamation of Black identity. I also suggest that their contemporary rescripting of the Hottentot Venus offers a negotiation and representation of Black subjectivity. Cox and Harris have, for example, argued that in reperforming the hyperbolic sexualization of Black female sexuality, their aim was to enable the 'body to speak with vengeance' (ICA, 1995: 150). Further, in revisiting the colonial past, Venus Hottentot 2000 explores and recalls how the Black body, by being constituted as a specular object for the gaze of the colonizer, was sexualized and fetishized, how it was opened up, through slavery and imperialism and 'ethnological show business', 4 primarily through the gaze of the colonizer, who was in this instance also the master of 'the gaze'.

In the next section, to facilitate an understanding of the significance of Venus Hottentot 2000's intertextual relationship with that of the colonial objectification of the 'Hottentot', I first broadly highlight the historical context of the 'Hottentot' female. I suggest that the intertextual significance of Venus Hottentot 2000 lies in the way it seeks to rethink the image of the Black body by opening up a dialogue between the present and the colonial past where the Black female body became mired in colonial discourses about Black female sexuality.

Next, by situating Venus Hottentot 2000 within the representational history of the Hottentot female, I also explore the theme of the gaze. While being the nexus of signification in colonial discourse, the Black female 'Hottentot' body, as Venus Hottentot 2000 highlights, also becomes the site of postcolonial Black cultural intervention on the other.

THE FETISHIZING OF THE 'HOTTENTOT'

Sarah Bartman's predicament has been brought into the field of scholarship by [START_REF] Gilman | Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature[END_REF], who argues that the image of the prostitute and the Black female were linked and conflated through the stereotyped iconography of the 'Hottentot' female. Gilman also asserts that in the course of the 19th century, various discourses produced Bartman (along with other South African 'Hottentot' females who were brought to Europe) as a sign and metaphor that was indicative of a stereotypical Black female sexuality. As Bhabha (1994: 66) notes of the colonial stereotype:

. . . an important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of 'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as a sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy, and daemonic repetition.

In the colonial stereotype, as Bhabha signals, it is also through the articulation of the visual forms of corporeal racial/sexual difference that the 'otherness' of Black female identity was fetishized and constructed in colonial discourses.

Further, [START_REF] Bhabha | The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism[END_REF] argued that although the construction of the colonial stereotype in colonial discourse is 'an arrested form of representation' that denies 'the play of difference', it is also structurally and functionally analogous to the fetish and like the fetish, they are both defensive strategies of disavowal: the acknowledgement of both difference and otherness and its reduction to specific characteristics. Additionally, the certainty of the fetish and the stereotype is something to which the subject repeatedly returns when there is a threat of difference. Indeed, for Bhabha, the colonial stereotype and the fetish function as so-called 'informed statements', functioning to reassure the colonial subject when he confronts difference and who is consequently threatened with the possibility of a lack and the possibility of an instability of his own identity. Furthermore, the fetish involves a displacement. In Freudian terms, the phallus cannot be represented as it is considered taboo and forbidden and sexual desire and danger are therefore transferred to another part of the body or another object.

Crucially, in terms of the 'Hottentot', [START_REF] Gilman | Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature[END_REF] also translates the theory of fetishism to describe the process of racial fetishism whereby the sexual nature of the colonial gaze was displaced from her genitalia, which was what had really obsessed them, the colonial spectators, to the buttocks. For example, the 'Hottentot apron' was classified in scientific discourse as a malformation supposedly caused by sexual 'excesses' such as lesbian love [START_REF] Gilman | Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature[END_REF]. Gilman also asserts that the 'Hottentot' female became associated, in the discourse of physical anthropology, with 'deviant' and 'polluting' sexuality and most particularly with the supposed 'licentiousness' of the prostitute. 5 By constructing a deviant sexuality, 19th-century medical and colonial discourses assigned a nature to the 'Hottentot' that was different to a point of abnormality. This was further enrolled in the service of a reductive theory in which the so-called 'primitive' African female genitalia were taken as the external sign of a primitive and excessive sexual appetite. By reducing and essentializing her to the sum of her sexual parts -a fetishizing move -she became 'known' as a 'freakish' sexual object and her sexual difference was 'naturalized' within colonial discourse. As mentioned, fetishism involves disavowal in which the desire to gaze is both indulged and denied. 6 In the case of the 'Hottentot', not only is the gaze displaced from the genitalia to the buttocks but it also allows the colonial gaze to continue gazing and observing while disavowing the sexual nature of the gaze. Nineteenthcentury scientific discourses played the role of this disavowal by constructing itself as a 'dispassionate' gaze. By looking and yet not looking -an ambivalent desire is allowed to operate. What is declared to be different and 'primitive' can be obsessively lingered over because it is 'different', 'scientifically anomalous' and 'exotic'. The fetishizing of the Hottentot Venus legitimates, in short, an unregulated voyeurism and the desire to continue looking.

Through the penetrative gaze of medical and ethnographic discourses, a regime of 'truth' was constructed about Black sexuality. The 'primitive' genitalia of the 'Hottentot' women were defined within European colonial discourses as a sign and signifier of their 'primitive' sexual appetites. Indeed, in terms of visuality, Doane suggests that the 'visibility of the dark continent dictated the incessant visualisation of native eroticism' and within colonial discourse, 'the exotic and the erotic were welded together, situating the African woman as the signifier of an excessive, incommensurable sexuality' (Doane, 1991: 213). And according to Doane, the female 'Hottentot' became associated within the colonial scopic regime with a hyperbolic, 'excessive' sexuality.

Thus, vision is neither disinterested nor dispassionate. Within the field of vision, the female body is transformed into an image and object. This privileging of vision and visuality has been linked in feminist critiques to sexual privilege. [START_REF] Gallop | Reading Lacan[END_REF] argues that it is through the exercise of sight that sexual identity is constructed. In the Freudian argument, it is by looking that the child discovers sexual difference and the discovery of visible difference hinges upon vision. 7 In addition, it is not only the discovery of difference, but also its denial that is articulated through vision -women are judged according to the phallocentric standard and are consequently found lacking.

The implications of placing the female body in relation to the scopic gaze have also been theorized by [START_REF] Mulvey | Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema[END_REF] and [START_REF] Metz | The Imaginary Signifier[END_REF] as involving fetishism and voyeurism. Mulvey asserts a very specific account of spectatorship, arguing that the visual apparatus both privileges and is productive of a controlling masculine gaze, a scopophilia that simultaneously involves fetishism and voyeurism where the 'active' observing subject is male and the 'passive' object of the gaze is female (who is subsequently fetishized). In Mulvey's Freudian argument, the male gaze reduces woman to the category where she functions as a 'to-belooked-at-ness', as the other that defines man as the origin of the gaze. [START_REF] Metz | The Imaginary Signifier[END_REF] also argued that it is through the look that the observer is reenacting the mirror stage and as the observer is identified with the gaze (and since, according to Metz, the gaze cannot be returned) the observer is thus voyeuristically positioned.

Thus, within the colonial visual apparatus, the otherness of Black female sexuality as embodied by the visible difference of the Hottentot Venus became the antithesis of European sexual and 'civilized' mores. And it was through the visual regimes of scientific and medical observation and ethnological show business that the colonial fetishizing of the 'Hottentot' body was constructed within the field of visuality. But it was also within the field of vision that visible corporeal and racial differences were read as signs of 'excess' and pathology. Through the processes of racial stereotyping and fetishizing, the Khoisan female became linked in the colonial imagination to one of the central images of Black female sexuality: 'female sexuality is tied to the image of the buttocks and the quintessential buttocks are those of the Hottentot' (Gilman, 1985: 219). As a spectacle of visible difference, the otherness of the 'Hottentot' female was further appropriated and used in European caricatures, 8 popular ballads, 9 cartoons and melodramas.

Finally, it should be noted that this obsessive scopophilia and fascination with gazing on the 'other' is still very much alive. In the South African Kagga Kamma Game Park, a group of approximately 40 'Bushmen', the Khoi Khoi, have become 'attractions', objects for the consumption of the tourist gaze. Visitors pay about US$125 to stay the night and US$7 to see the Khoi Khoi, who are only given a tiny portion of the profits [START_REF] Daley | Endangered Bushmen Find Hope in Game Park[END_REF]. While contemporary South African artists and intellectuals have made the recovery of Sarah Bartman's remains a cause célèbre, others are still queuing to see her descendants 'perform the authentic native' for their touristic pleasure. [START_REF] Kushner | Selling Racism: History, Heritage, Gender and the (Re)production of Prejudice[END_REF] also highlights the example of the continued popularity of prints of the Hottentot Venus at the Brighton Museum, asserting that this continued marketing of the image of Sarah Bartman as the Hottentot Venus constitutes an example of the persistence of cultural racism in Britain.

Before the next section's postcolonial reading of Venus Hottentot 2000, where I suggest that as a performance-as-critique Venus Hottentot 2000 foregrounds the attempt to question and destabilize the colonizing and phallocentric gaze that has contributed to a colonial inscription of Black sexuality, I want to briefly acknowledge in passing that any attempt to comprehend this particular performance also highlights the complexity of reading the image within normative theories of the gaze particularly if one were to use the critical orthodoxies as represented by both Mulvey and Metz. Theorizations about the practices of vision and the constitution of the positioning of the reader's gaze are political. Consequently, Venus Hottentot 2000 resists an unproblematic reading particularly when any theorization of spectatorship has to take into account the issue of multiple spectatorial subject-positions, particularly, for example, the interrogation of the gender/race positioning of the reader/spectator. Indeed, whose vision is being privileged in Venus Hottentot 2000?

Because of the necessary constraints of space, suffice it to state briefly that dominant theories of spectatorship as represented by Mulvey and Metz have failed to produce a more nuanced theory of spectatorship. The normative male gaze as theorized by Freudian-Lacanian models has evicted both the female and the Black spectator. Moreover, in this theory of the masculine, voyeuristic gaze does not account or allow for the active return gaze of the Black female artist, Renee Valerie Cox -a gaze that counters and, it could be argued, challenges and destabilizes the voyeuristic phallocentric gaze. Diawara (1988: 66) has also highlighted the ethnocentrism of these theories, asserting that 'certain theories of spectatorship have not . . . accounted for the experiences of Black spectators'. Similarly, Jacqueline [START_REF] Bobo | The Female Spectator[END_REF] also argued that when the female spectator is spoken of and spoken for, the female in question is inevitably White and middle class, which in turn implies how dominant theories of visual technologies have continued to marginalize Black subjectivity. Venus Hottentot 2000 usefully highlights this 'colour blindness' where the preferred reading of the photographic image would have to depart from traditional formulations of the gaze in relation to the woman in the photographic image.

READING VENUS HOTTENTOT 2000: THE COUNTER-GAZE AND THE REPOSITIONING OF THE BLACK FEMALE SUBJECT

The preceding section discussed how the body of the Hottentot Venus was sexualized and fetishized, opened up and reduced to the status of an object of the colonial gaze. Significantly, Venus Hottentot 2000, in revisiting the site of that original trauma, rethinks the ways in which the Black body could be visualized and rescripted -the site also for a critical displacement of negative stereotypes and essentialist notions of Black female sexuality.

By returning to the site of that traumatic history, Venus Hottentot 2000's performance-as-critique enables the postcolonial cultural resistance to the fixity of the colonial stereotype of Black female sexuality. As Harris indicates, I am interested in returning to the idea of the body, and asking the body to speak with vengeance. . . . This reclaiming of the image of the Hottentot Venus is a way of exploring my psychic identification with the image at the level of spectacle. . . . And yet, I see my work as less a didactic critique and more an interrogation of the ambivalence around the body. Engaging the image of the Hottentot Venus has deepened my understanding of the body as a sight of trauma and excess. (ICA, 1995: 150) By returning to the presence of the body, perhaps what is also sought in Venus Hottentot 2000 is a decolonization of interior spaces particularly the ways in which this image raises and pursues questions about the constitutive role of visual representations in understandings of Black subjectivity.

But, first, let us turn to Cox's performance-as-critique of the 'Hottentot', which is enabled by the way in which this performance orchestrates the reader's gaze. While the object is in the scopic field, Cox's direct countergaze beckons the observer, in a moment of identification, to be sutured into the image. The viewer and the viewed become entangled in contact, complicit in the scene and made simultaneously aware of the ironic fetishizing of the Black female body. Through an authored selfperformance, her counter-gaze engages ours. The gaze of the discriminated is turned back on the eye of power.

Significantly, this performance-as-critical-displacement is also enabled by Cox and Harris's active appropriation of the technological gaze of the camera, representing a postcolonial authorial assertion to reposition the Black female subject. By using the high modernist style of photography, Cox and Harris reclaim, in their reperformance of the 'Hottentot', and explore the image of the Hottentot's body, particularly the ways in which the Black female body became an object of White colonial (male) desire, curiosity and disgust. Cox's deliberate performance of the historicity of the 'Hottentot' challenges the fetishistic and scopophilic (and normative) male gaze -the eye of power. This is enabled by Cox's self-performance of herself in a sexually charged narrativization of the 'Hottentot' and extends her dis-identification with the normative White (masculine) discourses that have sought to authorize the 'primitivity' of Black female sexuality.

By deliberately donning the paraphernalia of the fetishized body-parts of the 'Hottentot' that have become signs of the 'excessiveness' of Black sexuality, the female body is deliberately authored by Cox as hyperbolized and sexualized. But, by also deliberately including herself as the object of the look, Cox's postcolonial masquerade of the 'Hottentot' 'doubles representation'. Consequently, through repetition and mimicry, Cox and Harris attempt to destabilize the racist stereotype of the 'Hottentot' by allowing the body to become 'almost the same but not quite'. Indeed, 'the masquerade confounds this masculine structure of the gaze. It effects a defamiliarisation of female iconography' (Doane, 1982: 82). But mimicry also has a 'comic turn' in that the self-proclaimed noble intentions of the colonizer's construction of the colonial subject ironically hinge on the ignoble effects of repetition, mimicry and farce.

Indeed, mimicry has an edge and Bhabha theorizes mimicry as a complex form of representation that involves repeating or doubling the image of the other. If mimicry can be articulated as the disciplining gaze which doubles its subjects, then the menace of mimicry is the potential return or ricochet of that gaze: 'The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.' Thus, 'the reforming, civilising mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double' (Bhabha, 1984: 128).

In attempting to expel a pathologized identity through this somatic mimicry, Venus Hottentot 2000's performance-as-critique of the colonial discursive production of the 'Hottentot' is aimed at detaching the Black woman's perception of herself from White (and male) colonial inscriptions of Black women's sexuality. Consequently, Harris and Cox's somatic mimicry turn on a representational history that has attempted to colonize, fix and naturalize a specific Black female sexuality. What is witnessed in Cox's performance is her simultaneous identification and dis-identification with a body that has become a space and a territory in which battles have been raged. Significantly, rather than repudiating the sexuality of the Black body, Harris and Cox revel in the authored and affirmative display of the Black body in all its sexual, racial and gender particularities. The performance excavates and explores those moments of colonial objectification in relation to Black subjectivity. In this contemporary rescripting of the 'Hottentot', Cox projects herself as a fully embodied authorial subject in a performance where she is also (but not only) an object in relation to her viewers (her others). She, Cox, is an embodied woman who is not only the object of the camera's gaze but also the author-subject of the image. As a performance-as-critique of the objectification of the 'Hottentot', Cox is not only the object of the White (male) gaze but also a subject and author of her own image. She is not simply an 'object' that exists 'to-be-looked-atness' but a Black female subject who is actively articulating an intersubjective relationship between herself and the viewers in a constant and continual negotiation of desires and identifications. The strategy used by Cox is that she deliberately poses as an object in order to be a subject.

While the Hottentot Venus was inscribed as a passive object within the colonial gaze, Cox's counter-gaze speaks of the literal manifestation of authorial power. She is most definitely not the passive object of the gaze. And her overt solicitation of the spectator's gaze challenges the masculinism embedded in the assumption of disinterestedness behind conventional notions of the gaze. As noted, for Mulvey, the female body in western culture connotes a 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. Thus, the female must grapple with her assignment, within the logic of White, heterosexist patriarchy to passivity. Simply, men are active agents of the gaze and women are passive objects of the gaze. But the directness of Cox's counter-gaze both solicits and confronts the White heterosexist 'male gaze'. She, Cox, is not 'cornered' by the gaze. Instead, by recognizing that the Black body is the locus of desire, disgust and curiosity, Cox's countergaze solicits the very gaze that hopes to stage it as an object. By presenting herself in an exaggerated self-performance of the 'Hottentot' and by confronting us through her 'counter-gaze', Cox complicates the simplistic logic of those scenarios in which women are consigned to a passivity -the locus of the White male gaze. Rather, through the assertion of her authorial-body in performance, she takes away, via her authorial assertion of her counter-gaze, from the White heterosexist 'male gaze' its strategic function of reducing women to the passive function of 'to-be-looked-atness'. Cox's performance-as-critique, in short, makes use of the conventional codes of feminine display to disturb the conventional dialectics of the gaze inherent in the relationship between supposed male activity and female passivity. The observer thus becomes the observed.

Clearly, Cox is refusing the fetishizing process. While Sarah Bartman was fixed within the penetrative colonial scopic gaze, the directness of Cox's counter-gaze displaces that normative phallocentric gaze while simultaneously highlighting the ambivalence of the colonial stereotype. Cox gives her body back to herself.

In short, Cox's direct counter-gaze solicits her viewers' gaze and makes them self-conscious of their processes of looking. But, more importantly, this direct solicitation of our gaze makes us aware of our responsibility in terms of the effects of our own perceptions and interpretive judgements. By operating in, and against the forms of knowledge production about Black female sexuality, Harris and Cox's reperformance of the 'Hottentot' also radicalizes and questions the whole notion of the 'essential, Black subject' and encourages us to question instead the entire premise of normative, essentialized conceptions of femininity, blackness, sexuality and identity.

Venus Hottentot 2000 thus offers a contemporary rescripting of the body as well as an interrogation of the gaze in relation to Black subjectivity. From its practice of resignification via mimicry, the interrogation of the constitutive role of the voyeuristic and fetishizing nature of the gaze as a site of power/knowledge is effected through the disarming nature of the counter-gaze. Through the parodic and critical literalization of the 'Hottentot' female's body, Harris and Cox simultaneously stage a version of a Black female stereotype while displacing the figment of an essentialized and fetishized Black female sexuality from within and offer an example of a contemporary strategy of postcolonial representation, bringing into the field of vision concepts of memory, fantasy and desire. Black identity, as demonstrated by Venus Hottentot 2000, is a process of negotiation and translation, exemplifying what Kobena Mercer and Stuart Hall have referred to as a postcolonial cultural war of repositioning.

CONCLUSION: READING VENUS HOTTENTOT 2000 AS A POSTCOLONIAL WAR OF POSITIONING

With Harris and Cox's Venus Hottentot 2000, we cannot ignore the fact that both their individual works as well as their collaboration represent a response to the discursive colonial production of Black sexuality. 10 Indeed, Venus Hottentot 2000's performance-as-critical-displacement of the colonial stereotype is enabled by a form of quotation and reconfiguration that aims to make possible a historically informed politicized aesthetic practice that seeks to displace the colonial myth-generation of Africa that had contributed to an erasure of a Black creative subjectivity.

Consequently, Venus Hottentot 2000 highlights the matrix of concerns arising out of a politicized postcolonial aesthetics that is characterized by the practitioners' refusal of the dichotomy between theory and practice, actively foregrounding a dialogic relationship with a colonial discursive production and scripting of Black sexuality. Postcolonial aesthetics could be characterized as praxis via a performance-as-critique and is activated by the authorial insertion of Black experience into the dominant visual technologies that have traditionally positioned them as objects of the colonial gaze. As Kobena Mercer (1996: 117) observed, issues such as paranoia, ambivalence and fetishism are critically explored by the practitioners 'as a point of departure for interventions into a cultural war of position'. Postcolonial aesthetic practice can therefore be said to intervene in colonial representational practices that cohere around the power/knowledge nexus. Power, in this sense, is power to mark, assign and classify. Power is exercised not only in terms of economic exploitation and territorial appropriation. It is also exercised in the sphere of visual technologies that produce in turn regimes of representational practices. These regimes of representational practices function within the apparatus of power where 'discourses of sexuality and race relate in a process of functional overdetermination' (Bhabha, 1994: 74). As Kobena Mercer (1996: 19) describes it:

The principal counter-strategy here has been to bring to the surface -into representation -that which has sustained the regimes of representation unacknowledged: to subvert the structures of 'othering' in language and representation, image, sound and discourse, and thus to turn the mechanism of fixed racial signification against themselves, in order to begin to constitute new subjectivities, new positions of enunciation and identification.

By intervening in the colonial visual production of a fetishized and spectacularized Black sexuality and by offering a contemporary rescripting of the Black body, Venus Hottentot 2000 thus belongs to a postcolonial hybrid polyvocal space which calls for 'contextual appreciation of the multiple conduits and rhizomorphic connectivity that makes postcolonial aesthetics a strategic site of "the dialogic imagination" ' (Mercer, 1995: 16).

By returning to the historical Hottentot Venus, in an attempt to unloosen these past codifications of differences in colonial discourse, that attempt to construct identities within the optic of visible and embodied 'racial' differences, Harris and Cox raise questions about the discriminatory nature of the 19th century's (and perhaps even contemporary White society's) constructions of the so-called natural and unchangeable biological 'essence' and 'truth' of Black female sexuality. In other words, racist stereotypical discourses reinforce the power relations that were based on the attempt to fix the binary oppositions between self and other, White and Black. In the case of the Hottentot Venus, this was worked through the denigration of Black female sexuality as monstrously other. However, Cox and Harris's reperformance of the 'Hottentot' enabled an interrogation of the representational practices of the White heterosexist gaze. By grafting the 'Hottentot' onto Cox's body-self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back, Cox and Harris expose the ways in which the Black female body has been the site of multiple inscriptions and overdeterminations.

By using the 'Hottentot' body to 'speak with vengeance', Harris and Cox foreground the possibility of transgressing seemingly fixed positionalities. It is this transgression in which variable positions of identification and places of enunciation are overlaid by the interwoven and potentially internally antagonistic nature of gender, 'race' and sexuality. In short, by reperforming and mimicking the 'Hottentot', Venus Hottentot 2000 challenges the constructions of 'racial' and sexual difference -a tactic that highlights the performative nature of sexuality that is not fixed but is extremely mobile at the level of fantasy. Such a strategy highlights the fact that Black subjectivity is far from fixed. Rather, it is subject to continuous 'play' of history, culture and power.

According to Lacanian thinking, our identities can never be finally fixed. Meaning and signification only exist through differentiation and for Lacanians, the attempt to construct a closed and self-contained identity is ultimately impossible [START_REF] Rose | Sexuality in the Field of Vision[END_REF]. Identity then is read as proceeding from a production that is always in process and always incomplete. So, while Venus Hottentot 2000 engages in a dialogue with the colonial past, at the same time, it is also an authorial assertion on the part of the Black female subject in the present. As such, it represents a restoration of 'an imaginary fullness or plenitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past' (Hall, 1990: 212).

This displacement and critique of the gaze and reproduction of identity in the visual apparatus highlights that it is not the visual apparatus that is the problem, but the fact that it has been produced, used and defined within dominant ideological and social formations. Dominant codes do not own narrative and visual pleasure. Understanding how to rewrite the monolithic accumulations of conventional understandings of the visual apparatus requires a more complex understanding of visual practices than Freud's story of scopophilia.

In sum, this article sought to highlight that the Black body, as exemplified by Venus Hottentot 2000, be recognized as a battleground of Black cultural intervention, interrogation and a postcolonial war of repositioning, where a radical authorial assertion of Black subjectivity could be seen and not overseen. NOTES 1. Abrahams (1998) also argues that there is considerable evidence that Bartman was a slave and that the 'pornotroping' of Sarah Bartman along with other Khoisan women should be understood as occurring within a period of Khoisan slavery. 2. The so-called 'Hottentot apron' refers to an enlarged clitoris, while steatopyga is the Latin name given to large, protuberant buttocks. Sarah Bartman's elongated labia and nymphae, obtained through the manipulation of the genitalia, were a sign of beauty among the Khoisan peoples. However, to the 19th-century European medical gaze, it was a sign of 'hypertrophy' -an 'anomaly' and a sign of 'primitivity' [START_REF] Lindfors | Courting the Hottentot Venus[END_REF]. 3. Cited in Kirby (1949: 60). 4. The phrase 'ethnological show business' is used by Bernth Lindfors to describe the colonial exhibition of 'foreign peoples for commercial and/or educational purposes' (Lindfors, 2003: 29). 5. The 19th-century medical gaze scrutinized the prostitute's body for external signs of her 'deviancy'. 'Signs' of her 'immorality' and 'degeneracy' were 'deduced' from the configuration of the bumps on her head, the asymmetry and masculinity of her facial features and the unusual size of her genitals.

After analysing the external form of approximately 800 prostitutes, Adrien Charpy, in 1870, comments that the 'characteristic' elongation of the prostitute's labia majora is similar to that of the 'disgusting' 'Hottentot apron' (Gilman, 1985: 229). Within 19th-century evolutionist ideology, the 'grotesque' body of the prostitute and the 'Hottentot' were conflated, becoming signs of their being supposed 'atavistic throwbacks'. 6. Bhabha (1994: 80) observes, 'It is a non-repressive form of knowledge that allows for the possibility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs, one official and one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division.' 7. According to [START_REF] Gallop | Reading Lacan[END_REF], Freud articulated the discovery of castration around a sight -the sight of phallic presence in the male and the sight of phallic absence in the female. 8. [START_REF] Kushner | Selling Racism: History, Heritage, Gender and the (Re)production of Prejudice[END_REF] cites the example of a George Cruikshank print The Court at Brighton a la Chinese, published in 1816, in which a 'Hottentot' female stands on a plinth labelled 'Regency Taste'. Kushner asserts that by using the figure of the 'Hottentot', Cruikshank links the decay of the Regency period to the presence of the 'Hottentot'. Kushner also highlights another example of the usage of the 'Hottentot' image to lampoon the Prince Regent's coalitional government, who were known as the 'Broad Bottoms'. 9. Lindfors (1985: 145) cites an example of a popular ballad of the day but space prevents me from citing it in full. However, here is an example of one of the verses:

. . . [START_REF] Bhabha | The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism[END_REF]( ), reprinted in Read (1996)).

Priscilla Netto has a doctorate from the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her current research interests focus on the intersections between postcolonial theory, Continental philosophies of vision, feminism and visual culture and its relation to the political formations of space, subjectivity and community. Address: Plas Frongog,Fronfraith Lane,Llanbadarn Fawr,Aberystwyth SY23 3HN. [email: Priscillanetto7@hotmail.com] ◆

  But you may ask, and well, I ween, For why she tarries there; And what, in her is to be seen, Than other folks more rare. A rump she has, (though strange it be,) Large as a cauldron pot, And this is why men go to see This lovely Hottentot. . . . 10. See, for example, Lyle Ashton Harris's Construct no.10 (1989) and Sisterhood

European Journal of Women's Studies 12(2)