SOURCE: “Effaced into Flesh: Black Women's Subjectivity,” in On Your Left: The New Historical Materialism in the 1990's, edited by Ann Kibbey, Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen Berry, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 184–205.

In the following essay, Brody dwells on the image of the black female in “The Winding Sheet,” applying black feminist theory to concepts of race and gender.

When do we start to see images of the black female body … made as acts of auto-expression, the discrete stage that must immediately precede or occur simultaneously with acts of auto-critique? When does the present begin?

—Lorraine O'Grady, “Olympia's Maid”

Artist Lorraine O'Grady's questions pose an important problem for black feminist theory: how can black female flesh be represented as other than an other's other given that the coherence and specificity of black female subjects is effaced by the logic that cannot produce her positionality except paradoxically...