Mutation and an eco-queer perspective on black femininity

The use of collage in art is an incredibly subversive medium. It takes images, largely ones proliferated through capitalist marketing, and transforms them into images completely divorced from the image’s original form. Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born and Brooklyn-based artist, uses collages to this effect.

London’s Saatchi Gallery describes Mutu’s work as “hybrids of multiple sources referencing the scars of cultural imposition. Placed atop medical diagrams, they feed off their cancerous classifications, directly confronting cultural preconception and bias” (Saatchigallery.com). Again the body is returned to as the vessel for how Afrosurrealists perceive attacks on blackness.

What’s notable about Mutu’s work is that, while black woman are the focus of the work, their bodies and forms are comprised of parts of white women as well. In the image on facing page the forehead, temple, mouth, and chin belong to the body of a white woman. Only the skull is that of a black woman, yet the subject is unmistakably black. This series of work addresses what the Saatchi Gallery had described as a confrontation of cultural appropriation. It can both be seen as a comment on white women stealing the aesthetic of black womanhood with no consequence, and also the expectation for black women to adhere to white standards of beauty to be considered feminine. In the example she mutates the form of the subject to reflect this dichotomy.

In other works she also uses plants, animals, and machines to comment on female blackness. In the next two examples Mutu “offers a futuristic totality of womanhood that’s both fiery and liberated. Comprised of motorcycle parts, she’s a machine built for speed: corpulent, sexy, with the dazzling power creation” (Saatchi). These images also present an eco-queer vision of the black futurisms, where orangic material, machine, and bodies combine in an expression of sexuality addressing “similarities between [racism, classism, and sexism] and the oppressive structures of speciesism and naturism” (Gaard). Her dystopian visions of a futuristic black womanhood mirror that of the contemporary one that exists in the ecological wasteland of black spaces.