The Life and Times of Sara Baartman Essay Example

of her body and brain and even more, pickled her genitalia in specimen jars. Cuvier published a scientific paper on Baartman about her sexual organs which led to generalizations of all African women. All of the pain, objectification, and surgical procedures inflicted on Baartman were done in the name of "science". The film claims that scientific racism was birthed out of her life experiences.Scientific racism was very valuable to the Europeans in the justification and rationale of colonialism and slavery (Fausto-Sterling,1995: 87.).

European travelers and scientists found the lives those contrasting their white supremacy and hegemonic ideology, in this context, solely the African female body as "desirable and repulsive, available and untouchable, productive and reproductive, beautiful and black (Morgan, 1997: 39). These ambiguous descriptions of the black female body led to a need for an empirical support other than religion and morals; therefore, scientific support was introduced. Scientific racism can be defined as the use of "science" to support concepts, theories, and beliefs that create a system that conditions the white race as supreme and all others ranked lack humane qualities as well as their humane rights. Unfortunately, Sara Baartman was not the only case of scientific racism.

Nazi's used it in attempt to genocide millions of the Jewish community. Asians, Caribbean peoples, and many other races have been used as crash dummies for European expansion in the knowledge of the unknown. European males even used science against their own women. Hysteria was a quack disease created to explain women's change in attitude, thought, and role from the submissive housewife to the working thinking woman of the turn of the century (Briggs, 2000:330). It had to be

scientifically justified because there could not be any sound reason for women to disobey man and become so independent, political, and strong.

Those are masculine characteristics, of course! After Baartman's dissection and victimization, J. Marion Sims' published a paper on the onset of gynecology. In 1852, this paper he published described the perfection of his technique on slave women purchased just for his gain in the science arena (341). Even in the 20th century, scientific racism was present in governmental agencies. The US Public Health Service performed a forty year experiment on the bodies 400 men which affected the African American community severely. Scientific racism is institutionalized in our society.

Because of scientific racism, Sara Baartman is well known to England and France as a scientific specimen, yet to feminists around the world she is woman. Baartman is considered a symbol of how the black female body has been rejected and denied equality due to hegemonic comparison to the white female body. A change has to come.