Daughter's Of The Dust Analysis

In the 1980’s, female artist addressed the dominance of cultural perceptions regarding female agency, pleasure, and spectatorship. In order to make their voice heard in a white male dominant art industry, they created works of art from paintings to films that challenged the social stereotypes and ideologies about female identity. This essay will define these three perceptions and examine the artworks from artist such as Julie Dash, Kobena Mercer , and Jenny Saville. These artists paved a way for the feminist movement through the use of disturbing the normative constructions of femininity, racial identity, and the body.

Female Agency Female Agency can be defined as “women’s experiences of making the most of their situation, in the following
ty; assertion of identity; and how she continues to survive and make changes for herself and her immediate environment and community” 1 In the film, Daughter’s of the Dust directed by Julie Dash, cultural perceptions
This is highlighted through Yellow Mary’s character. The new age of the main land and the old traditions of the island exhibited a large degree of differentiation. It would be appropriate to say that Yellow Mary lost her true identity when she moved to the main land. Aside from the fact that she was not particularly “yellow,” her hair appeared to be relaxed and her style of clothing was much different from her family. Kobena Mercer touched on this topic in her article “Politic of Hair.” She questioned that if African Americans manipulated their hair out of its natural state, would it then suggest that they were not proud of being black? Was this the feeling that Yellow Mary had running through her head, or was it racism within hair politics on the main land that forced Yellow Mary to alter her racial identity? “Black hairstyling may thus be evaluated as a popular art form articulating a variety of aesthetic ‘ solutions’ to a range of ‘problems’ created by ideologies of race and racism.”