Just as Black females come in all shape, sizes and shades of color, there is no one box that can contain a Black woman’s sexuality. Since slavery days, there has been a suppressive chain placed by society dictating that Black women were either sex toys for someone else’s pleasure or an asexual laborer that could be treated even worse than a Black man. Sojourner Truth described the reality of being a Black female in 1851 with “Ain’t I a Women?” declaring that can work just has hard as man and her body has produced lives new lives, yet she never receives the best places or has a man help her into carriages even though she is a woman. In 1962, Malcolm X told the world that nothing has changed since Truth spoke with his speech “Who Taught You to
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Forced into the closet by her parents and rejected from social groups because of societal norms, Alike is what Evelynn Hammonds calls “doubly silenced.” Because the “sexualities of black women have been shaped by silence, erasure, and invisibility in dominate discourses,” it is safe to assume that black female lesbians do not have a safe medium to explore not only the sexuality of sex but also how they identify with sex (Hammonds). So for females like Alike, who do not have the support of their peers or family, what do they do? The problem with being a black queer woman is that society forces them choose which minority they will support. However, asking for a person like Alike to choose between her blackness, queerness, and womanhood, is asking them to shove a part of themselves away to never bee discussed and advocated for. It does not help that Alike’s parents enforce the idea that homosexuality is not tolerated in black communities or that for society as a whole “the culture of dissemblance makes it acceptable for some heterosexual black women to cast black lesbians as proverbial traitors to the race” (Hammonds 491). Because of this conflict, the viewer does not get to see the real Alike until the end of the movie. We see the Alike she pretends to be to satisfy Laura, her parents, and her friend Bina, which does well to show how sex and sexuality can be dynamic, but it also shows how limited the discussion of sexuality is in the black community. There was not safe
Forced into the closet by her parents and rejected from social groups because of societal norms, Alike is what Evelynn Hammonds calls “doubly silenced.” Because the “sexualities of black women have been shaped by silence, erasure, and invisibility in dominate discourses,” it is safe to assume that black female lesbians do not have a safe medium to explore not only the sexuality of sex but also how they identify with sex (Hammonds). So for females like Alike, who do not have the support of their peers or family, what do they do? The problem with being a black queer woman is that society forces them choose which minority they will support. However, asking for a person like Alike to choose between her blackness, queerness, and womanhood, is asking them to shove a part of themselves away to never bee discussed and advocated for. It does not help that Alike’s parents enforce the idea that homosexuality is not tolerated in black communities or that for society as a whole “the culture of dissemblance makes it acceptable for some heterosexual black women to cast black lesbians as proverbial traitors to the race” (Hammonds 491). Because of this conflict, the viewer does not get to see the real Alike until the end of the movie. We see the Alike she pretends to be to satisfy Laura, her parents, and her friend Bina, which does well to show how sex and sexuality can be dynamic, but it also shows how limited the discussion of sexuality is in the black community. There was not safe