SARA "HOTTENTOT VENUS" BARTMANN

Sander L. Gilman points out that in the early decades of the 1800s, even before photography's ascendancy. There was a general fascination in Europe with the "Hottentot Venus," as represented by series of black women who were imported from South Africa and exhibited in the major cities of Europe because of their large and fatty buttocks. In this way, representations of black women with large and fatty buttocks came to signify not only black women but all other categories of women, such as prostitutes, who were thought to be as sexually wanton as black women.

-Michele Wallace, "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture" in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures [ed. Cornel West, et. al., 1990]