2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Just as public, circulating images can reinforce and challenge racialized and gendered identities today, they did so in the past as well. This panel examines visual representations of gender and race in nineteenth- and twentieth- century America. While scholars have analyzed the use of racialized images in the antislavery and Civil Rights Movements, these papers demonstrate the ways Americans used imagery to debate constructions of race and gender.

Rachel Walker begins by explaining how white and black Americans “read” portraits in distinctive ways during the mid-nineteenth century. She reveals how Americans used facial analysis to present antithetical visions of female beauty and black mental capacity. Paula Austin similarly demonstrates that white and black Americans used images for opposing aims in the 1920s. She argues that W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, despite their ideological differences, used similar photographic images to challenge dominant assumptions about black masculinity and femininity. Allison Lange then analyzes the power of images in the suffrage movement at the turn of the century. She demonstrates that white female leaders strategically erased black women from visual representations of the movement in order to win support for white women’s votes.

Taken together, the panelists contend that Americans deployed images as potent tools in their efforts to construct racial ideologies and demarcate the limits of “respectable” womanhood and manhood. Americans harnessed the power of visual culture to alter popular understandings of race and gender. This panel brings their significant efforts to light to better understand these historical debates.