‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

Between rock and a hard place: narrating nona hendryx's inscrutable career

Elaborating on the imperialist grasp of rockism, Kelefa Sanneh writes 'There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers—just so long as they, y'know, rock.' What's striking is how closely Nona Hendryx's career fits within these categories—doo-wop singer, disco queen, rocker—yet, she still hasn't received her due, even within that flawed, proverbial rockist Hall of Fame. Building on Mark Anthony Neal's rich analysis of the proto-disco trio LaBelle and their prophetic collaboration with singer/songwriter Laura Nyro in the early 1970s, this paper traces the lengthy and varied solo career of former-LaBelle, Nona Hendryx. My argument takes as a point of departure the challenge of telling a 'non-rockist' story about how Hendryx rocks, how she doesn't, and why issues of legibility and legacy rest on these questions. I investigate the consolidation of race, gender and genre in the formative period of the 1970s, when rock and disco were situated within popular media as warring sub-cultures. In particular, I track the ways that the purported artifice of disco and its associations with blackness, gayness and overtly performative, 'feminine' modes of display render Hendryx's later experimentation with other genres of music illegible, even to her most devoted fans.