By Pamela Scully & Clifton Crais

The decision by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) to investigate the gender of South African runner Caster Semenya has resulted in numerous editorials, blogs and discussions in which the IAAF’s examination of Semenya’s body and sexuality have been compared to the sufferings endured by Sara Baartman, the 19th century South African woman better known in Europe and the USA as the “Hottentot Venus.”

Do the parallels drawn to Sara Baartman’s experience help explain the experience of Caster Semenya, who a South African magazine has recently clothed in fashionable garments and jewelry presumably to appear as stereotypically “female”?

Or do such analogies reproduce the continued invocation of the “Hottentot Venus” as the figure who we never allow to rest, but who is always hovering ghost-like in discussions of race and sexuality?

Baartman was displayed on London and Parisian stages in the early nineteenth century as a European joke: a woman who could not be a Venus because she was black.  As we have shown in our book Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, 2009), European audiences could only see Sara Baartman through the prism of their own assumptions about race and gender.  Their viewing of Baartman as a freak, and later as a scientific case, depended upon their assumptions about what qualified as beauty, about the primitiveness of the Khoekhoe, Baartman’s natal society, and about which bodies could be publicly discussed and which could not.

After Baartman’s death in 1815, Georges Cuvier, the leading French scientist, performed an autopsy on her body to see if she was a link between animal and humankind.  His published report greatly influenced the elaboration of European and American racist thought.  In 2002, the South African government brought Sara Baartman’s remains home from France, where they had remained on public display until 1974.  Her nationally televised funeral took place on Women’s Day in August 2002.  South Africans, in short, are very familiar with the perils of using science to determine the truth about race, gender, and about the meaning of a particular body.

In conducting a scientific investigation to determine Semenya’s sex assignment, the IAAF believes science can determine a neutral truth about sex untrammeled by cultural norms and prejudices.  South Africans familiar with the history of Sara Baartman, however, are far more skeptical about science’s ability to determine truth, free of dominant assumptions about how things “should be.”  Scholars of medical science share this skepticism.  Even the Olympic committee dropped gender verification testing in the late 1990s precisely because there is no firm scientific ground to stand on.

South African popular culture however, is less sympathetic to women who defy gender and heterosexual stereotypes outside of the arena of celebrity sport culture.  The disturbing reports of “corrective rapes” and murders of women regarded as lesbian gives one major pause about the extent to which the wonderful South African constitution can safeguard the rights it officially protects, including sexual preference and identity.  In the past few days, Semenya has appeared on the cover of South Africa’s You magazine, in a black dress, lots of gold jewelry, and with her hair straightened and coiffed.  Presumably, the magazine is telling South Africans not to worry – Semenya is a woman.  The disciplining of Semenya into a stereotype of respectable womanhood misses what could have been an opportunity to celebrate the various wonderful ways of being human.

Most journalists and commentators have been sympathetic to Semenya, drawing parallels with Baartman to emphasize the treatment Semenya is receiving.  One could argue, however, that commentators too easily draw parallels between Semenya and Baartman, as if nothing has changed in the last two hundred years: Caster Semenya is not a twenty-first century Sara Baartman.  She has far more autonomy over her life than Baartman ever did, and her celebratory return to South Africa is something Baartman never was able to experience in her life time. Racial science in its most overt forms is mostly dead and buried.

And yet very public discussion about Caster Semenya’s body and sexuality demonstrates how comfortable so many people are with subjecting black women’s bodies to public display and commentary.  One wonders if media would have subjected a young white woman to so much scrutiny.  Even while ostensibly supporting Caster Semenya, writers still enter into the debate about the black femable body in ways that reproduce the continued gaze on black women and their sexuality.  Caster Semenya is caught in the racial and gendered webs of meaning and oppression suffered by so many black women.

There is something eerie about the continued public fascination with the relationship between science and black women’s bodies, and with the very long life of stereotypes of black women engendered by the image of the “Hottentot Venus” and now so pervasive in popular culture.  So much has changed.  So much remains the same.

Pamela Scully, a professor of Women’s Studies and African Studies at Emory University, and Clifton Crais, a professor of African History at Emory University, are the authors of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography.