All the things you could be by now if Pinky Pinky wasn’t your Madam: Black gender, Human subjectivity and the terror of solidarity

Abstract

abstract The South African legend of Pinky Pinky presents a striking opportunity to think with Hortense J. Spillers’ theorising of incubus in Harriet Jacobs’ Life of a Slave Girl (Brent 1973). These demons of urban legend enable my theoretical intervention on the question of Black gender which breaks with Human gender subjectivity, and which implies that there can be no solidarity between Human women and Black wxmxn. I utilise Spillers’ historical materialist, theoretical and psychoanalytic inspired formulation of Black Flesh to think the structuring relation of the Black wxmxn in modern South Africa’s political ontology in order to consider our emancipation dreams within the confines of the modern Enlightenment's Human and their ontological struggle for difference against a quintessential Other, the Black. This critical intervention concerning feminist solidarity and hindrances to Black intramural unity strives to reframe and constitute afresh the organising sentiment and politics of any ideological outlook which considers itself. That is that Black Feminism has been structurally excommunicated from the community of the Human and its gender-forming terms, which demarcate the domestic spaces wherein gendering processes are possible. I conclude that shared experiences of violence between Humans and Black wxmxn do not preclude the Madam from her Master function as phallic potentiality for the violent sexual gatekeeping required to secure the Human, nor should this be conflated with the ontological violence necessary to produce the Black for the Human. Blackness’ constitutive social death structures the Black wxmxn/slave as always and already coerced under the Human’s political prerogative, under a parasitic relation with no worldly emancipation path.