There are three main groups of black women according to the stereotyping in media: mammy, jezebel and sapphire.(i
am paraphrasing my research paper :D)Mammy is fat, middle-aged, not carrying any ambitions like marry with a white man, cannot be sexy,very happy to
serve whites, all the time they are smiling and laughing:Jezebel is desirable and always sexy black lady:
And Saphirre is assertive, successful but unreliable lady who has obsessions about her appearance, romantic lover, precludes all woman who is trying to attract her male. (Şen, 2010) :)
And beside these there is one more stereotype , it is independent from these three, but in m
y opinion it fits more on sapphire type, Tragic-Mulatta. Tragic Mulatta is a character who is light-skinned. She is not white and she is not black. She acts like white people and has got higher statue however she is still being humiliated. Her biggest aim is to marry with a white man and live exactly like whites.According to Kretsedemas, our era's tragic-mulatta character is Wilhelmina from Ugly Betty,do you remember her?
I think she is the future of Maureen Peal, especially the ey
es and clothes :)And other thing is Shirley Temple, when i opened and put my book in front of me in living room, my mother looked at it and saw the name "Shirley Temple". She said: " Ohh, i now it, she was beautiful,cute,lovely girl, we were watching her and we were doing our hair just like her. Why did they mentioned her in this book?" I described her Shirley's function in The Bluest Eye. It was very different from her thoughts :)
Pictures retrived from, 28 April,2010:
http://www.rankopedia.com/CandidatePix/33237.gif
http://www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/sapphire/
http://www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/jezebel/
http://www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/mammies/
How cool to make connections between the novel and your research!
ReplyDeleteAhh, now I know who Wilhemina is.. ;)
That's very interesting to me that Turkish people were also idolising Shirley Temple. How was Shirley's appearance in the book different to your mother's thoughts?
I can't quite figure out the difference between the Jezebel and Sapphire stereotypes though, can you give any examples from film or TV?
Sonja,
ReplyDeleteI actually don't know some example about Jezebel character but according to the articles sapphire character is more strong image in front of white people than jezebel.
Jezebel is a women who is only forming with her sexual identity. But sapphire is angry-black women who is trying to be powerful in every subject , doesn't accept the weakness in front of white people.
My mother thought that they included her to the book because of for example, she is the favorite star of a child.
Well, it was like that for Pecola and others, but Claudia was openly hated her. And i think her job was in this book was about media's stereotyping "cute" childrens.
For example, in the baby advertisements, noone is using black babies, they are all the time blond babies and mostly coloured-eyed.