They Never Asked to be Heroines: Shame, Trauma, and Emotional Labor
My last media experiment I posted was about the main words that the women I interviewed used to measure their success or to imagine what success looks like. In some of the responses that people posted to the post key issues were brought to light, like why women didn’t often measure success based on money. Maybe women don’t want to talk about money, or maybe women are brought up to believe that money is something that men discuss. In my observations, I am drawing parallels between women and their family life, women often prioritize their family and kids over the success of their business, or over having a successful career. Something that I wanted to explore was the fact that women in business may have a harder time achieving conventional success because of the added pressure of performing emotional labor, a gendered skill/job/expectation. Black women are faced with the task of performing emotional labor in the workplace, as well as combating the negative stereotypes and assumptions that come along with being a black woman in America. The perception of the “bad black mother,” “the welfare queen,” and “the hoe” means that black women must work three times as hard to overcome these images and be viewed as successful entrepreneurs.
For this post I wanted to do a critical engagemnt of Mookherjee’s Spectral Wound because I saw similarities between the way the birangonas were being used to promote national pride, as survivors of war, and yet were experiencing pain they had to keep hidden because of shame associated with it; and black women who also experience the pain and shame of their negative images in society. Black women have been sexually objectified while simultaneously being praised for their ability to maintain, and to overcome, all while upholding the black man and the image of the black family. Black women perform emotional labor in a much different way than some other women because they must meet and perform contradictory expectations. Being in the workforce hasn’t been strictly reserved for men for quite some time now, but being the head of the family, and the breadwinner of the household is traditionally thought to be a male role. However, black women are often equal partners to their husbands, or they are the breadwinners of the families themselves.
This goes back to the history of slavery and the way the black family structure emerged from that time period, but it also has to do with the mass incarceration of black men. However, women who carry the financial responsibility for their whole family often sacrifice family time in order to get ahead in their careers are then criticized for being bad mothers. They must balance the emotional side of their womanhood along with embodying the more “masculine” gender roles in order to make sure that they can have happy and successful lives, and keep their families afloat. All while being entangled with a culture that devalues their very existence.
Female slaves were often raped by their slave masters, and when they gave birth to mixed race children were expected to raise them along with their other children. The shame associated with being raped was coupled with the fact that their husbands place in the family, as well as his masculinity, was being challenged by the very existence of the slave master’s child with the black slave; a constant reminder of the rape and the breakdown in the family structure, this blame was also put onto the women. Black bodies were given monetary value based on the kind of work they can do, but black women’s bodies were sexualized in such a way that it carried over in time, and we see this same ideology reproduced in contemporary society. Constant reminders of what kind of suffering the black women, who came before them, endured; because they, too, must endure the same.
The ideologies that have carried throughout time and history, that have become encoded in gender and race, can be read as symbolic violence. The birangonas suffered from constantly reliving the “open secret” of their wartime rapes, and I think that the same thing is happening to black women in American society. They are praised for upholding the black family, and then being chastised for not having the social/institutional/financial ability to fit into traditional gender roles. The fact that women of color tend to experience these kinds of constant and public forms of violence says something about the kind of world that we are living in today, and why it chooses not to value women more.
“Traumatic memory here is expressed as encoded not only in the body but also in social and everyday relations with objects and with the world around them, in which violence is folded away from sight. Fragmented imagery in the oral and visual accounts of the women shows the inadequacy of linear narrative theories in exploring experiences of violence.” — Nayanika Mookherjee, Page 125
