transqueermediaexchange:

by Emma Shakarshy and Cordelia Nailong

Click the title for the full article.

Queer communities have a long way to go to be the welcoming places that we would like them to be, especially when it comes to racism.

Orange is The New Black’s “Big Boo”, Lea Delaria, recently viewed Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety”, an exhibit in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory that highlights the legacies of white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, anti-blackness, slavery, and patriarchy that have shaped the past 500 years. The Domino Sugar Factory was chosen as a venue for this piece for a number of reasons including the fact that enslaved folks were the foundation of the sugar economy that Domino rose from and were the enslaved labor of the sugar plantations. This is not to mention that factories like this one literally processed sugar from brown to white. Walker’s exhibit features sculptures of enslaved children made of molasses to highlight the sugar factories, as well as many other industries’, reliance on black labor to benefit white capitalistic goals.

The center of Walker’s exhibit is a 40 foot-tall sphinx created out of sugar, with the head of the black “mammy” stereotype, representing the racist iconography of the black female domestic servant at the hands of white families. The sphinx’s body is that of the oversexualized black woman, often seen as props in music videos (think Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”) and TV and film.

Many white viewers of Walker’s piece have made the news by taking racist,misogynistic selfies with the piece, cupping, licking, and generally abusing the work. In his piece, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” Nicholas Powers writes that the pornographic jokes are recreations of the very racism that the art is meant to critique.

Lea Delaria, queer comedienne and celeb with an Instagram following of 167,000 users, unfortunately offered no exception. DeLaria posed with the piece, positioned between the sphinx’s breasts, with the head of the work cut off, and the caption “Sugar Tits.” Her next photo is of her looking smugly from beneath the buttocks and vulva of the sphinx, with the caption, “That’s what I call looking into the face of god. #karawalkerdomino #theeffectsofgammaraysonmaninthemooncunt.” This is incredibly disrespectful. In viewing a sculpture critiquing the oversexualization and white exploitation of black bodies, DeLaria is perpetuating that same sexualization and encouraging her followers to do so as well.

OITNB star visits Kara Walker’s exhibit, misses point: some notes for our fellow white queers