Grace McGowan

Grace McGowan is currently a PhD candidate at Boston University in the American & New England Studies Program. She took her undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature from University of Oxford in 2017. She has held the William V Shannon memorial fellowship at Boston University. Her work explores how Black women writers use the classical tradition from Ancient Greece and Rome in their writing and her paper “I Know I Can’t Change the Future, But I Can Change the Past: Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and the Classical Tradition” was published in Contemporary Women’s Writing under OUP in 2020. Her essay “In ‘Rumors’, Lizzo and Cardi B Pull From the Ancient Greeks, Putting a New Spin on an Old Tradition” was published in both The Conversation and The Boston Globe. Her work on Phillis Wheatley was awarded an honorable mention for the Mary Kelley prize under the New England American Studies Association in 2021.

The Fate of Medusa: Objectification and the Classical Tradition in Black Women’s Art

In a recent article for The Conversation I explored the reclamation of the classical tradition by Lizzo and Cardi B in their music video “Rumors.”[1] The classical tradition is a style (of writing, art, fashion, etc) rooted in the aesthetics (real or imagined) of ancient Greece and Rome. I explained how the music video’s centering of Black women in a classical aesthetic style, something which has long been coopted by white supremacy, was part of a longer Black feminist reclamatory tradition and was artistically powerful in its messaging. In this article, I offer a more specific close reading of the closing image of the two artists when they are transfigured into a painting on a piece of Grecian pottery.[2] In my ongoing work I have been exploring my concept of “transformative classicism,” a concept I employ to theorize about how/the ways in which Black women transform the classics, specifically stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to interrogate and resist both their historical exclusion from the classical tradition and their historic experience of literal and metaphorical objectification. By reclaiming classical figures and deities associated with great beauty such as Venus/Aphrodite, Black women restore themselves to the history of antiquity and resist their exclusion from beauty standards born of and built on white supremacist constructions of antiquity. However, the more I probe these reclamatory pieces of art the more I have become aware of a second, underlying phenomenon: the tension between reclaiming classical figures of beauty both as a resistance to objectification, and the ways in which beauty is acutely and perilously bound up in further objectification. This brought to mind a second classical figure that is governing these explorations of objects and objectivity in Black feminist classicism, Medusa. 

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Perseus tells the story of Medusa who is sexually assaulted by Poseidon in Athena’s temple and is punished by Athena for the sacrilege by transforming her hair to snakes.[3] He recounts how he used Athena’s polished shield to avoid Medusa’s petrifying gaze in order to behead her. He was then able to use her own power against his enemies. Medusa, in many ways, is the missing piece of my work. Medusa’s ability to transform people into objects (stone statues) and the way her female gaze becomes literally objectifying so this power is both sword and shield, weapon and protection, is the other side of the “transformative classicism” I am investigating. After her death, Medusa’s head becomes an object, a grisly trophy, and her power is weaponized and used to benefit her killer. The objectifying gaze is re-harnessed under the male power of Perseus and “order” is restored. When Perseus has no further use for Medusa’s head, it is gifted to Athena and made to adorn her shield and breastplate with it.

The figure of Medusa is reproduced ubiquitously in ancient art, highlighting her monstrosity; she is represented as both male and female, human and animal. Her alterity is inescapable.[4] She appears on quotidian objects as well as on architectural details. She is reproduced and literally objectified again and again, mostly deliberately fragmented; her head separated from her (usually missing) body. Charmaine Nelson has argued in her chapter on the figure of the Black Venus that ““notions of white Beauty…served to expel black bodies from the possibility of aesthetic wholeness.”[5] It is this exclusion from “aesthetic wholeness” that captures my attention with regard to her constant fragmentation and re-assemblage. Represented as both great beauty and grotesque monstrosity, powerful gorgon and victim of sexual assault, objectified, able to objectify, and ultimately rendered object (again, and again, and again, initially as trophy and as armor in the myth, and then in jewelry, art, and architecture in reception), Medusa captures the tension at the core of my dissertation: can reclamations of classical aesthetics, especially with regard to beauty, ever shake off the shadow of objectification that haunts them?

Largely thanks to a fellow contributor to this issue, Emily McConkey, the limitations of my conceptualization of transformative classicism, and its major pitfalls, began to coalesce around the figure of Medusa. McConkey’s work explores how Medusa was reimagined, reconceptualized, and reclaimed by women artists, both writers and sculptors, in the nineteenth century.[6] She outlines how, since that period, feminist retellings and iterations of the Medusa myth have proliferated and the new ways in which Medusa has been and is being imagined have a profound effect on how the classical tradition is received in the present. McConkey’s work illustrated to me the ways in which the Medusa figure could be read in a transatlantic context and perhaps specifically migrated into a Black Atlantic context. As women sculptors and artists were traveling to Rome increasingly in the nineteenth century there were consequences for how the classical tradition was being imagined through a lens of women’s empowerment. Despite the fact that the majority of the American women who were sculpting in Rome at this time were white, not all of them were. For example, Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) was a Black and Indigenous sculptor who worked in Rome in the 1860s and 1870s and sculpted figures from African antiquity such as Cleopatra and Hagar. Henry James termed the women sculptors in Rome at this time the “white marmorean flock,” a description intended to phenotypically and culturally exclude Lewis and other Black women from the collective as well as turn the artists into objects.[7] Reading and thinking about this transatlantic collective of women sculptors, at least one of whom was Black and Indigenous, it became increasingly clear to me how women artists were seeing the ways in which their own work could be weaponized against them, and work to the benefit of their oppressors/enemies, just like the Medusan gaze. The ways in which any such reclamations of a classical tradition have the potential to be weaponized and turned against the subjects, further entrenching their objectification, looms over these artistic projects.

In turn, I realized that in a racialized context for Black women this takes on a new significance thanks largely due to a wonderful past contributor to Ampersand, Ravynn K. Stringfield.[8] Stringfield expanded my thinking about the ways in which the Medusan experience is explored by contemporary Black women artists through her article “Remix a Myth & Sing a Black Girl’s Song” which explores the cultural resonance the Medusa myth has for contemporary Black women artists including its use in Chloe Bailey’s “Have Mercy” music video.[9] Using the video Stringfield shows the cultural resonance the Medusa myth can have for Black women as a celebratory reclamation of the classical tradition, including rewritten beauty ideals, and imagined empowerment. Empowerment is central to the workings of Chloe’s music video in which she seduces men and transforms them to stone. This satirical and subversive approach to “Greek life” in sororities and fraternities on American college campuses turns the politics of objectification on its head. It is the men in the video who are ultimately, and literally objectified, as the video opens with a sinister missing person’s report for a young man. But it is only after the young men have been seduced by the beauty and sex appeal of the sorority led by Bailey that this outcome is reached. As popular feminist internet recreations of Medusa increasingly imagine her power to be bestowed as a way to protect herself from sexual assault, the application of the myth in the #MeToo era on American college campuses gives it significant weight. However, despite this deft subversion, the visuals of the music video; centered as they are on the Black women artists’ bodies, complicate the message. The fate of Medusa, beheaded and eternally objectified, cannot be extricated from the video.

My fellow graduate student scholar-friends have made it clear to me that something specific and nuanced is present in Black women’s artistic and cultural production that reclaims, repurposes, and, in Stringfield’s terms, remixes the classical tradition, particularly the Medusa myth. The awareness that these transformations of the classics could potentially be incomplete or weaponized carries the threat of ongoing objectification, a Medusan fate. I have therefore been recalibrating and looking again at the concept of “transformative classicism” and its potential to transform and mutate outside of the control of the artists’ vision. Stringfield’s attention to music videos and remixing prompted me to rethink the closing image of the “Rumors” music video.

And so now to turn to said closing image. How does this closing image in the music video interact with Black feminist classicism that tackles the history of that objectification and objections/resistance to that same history? Or with the dynamic reclamatory energy of the rest of the video? The music video opens with a painting of Lizzo in classical fashion on Grecian style pottery which comes to life, is animated as the song begins, and then Lizzo is able to step out of the object and into the video fully recognized as a subject. The conclusion that sees the re-objectification of the artists may seem like a neat return but the political implications linger.

While the lyrics push back against the hateful comments both artists have received about their bodies online and from the mass media and assert their agency, artistry, and beauty, the visuals realize the difficulty of expressing this without objectifying the artists. Lizzo and Cardi B’s video is undoubtedly and inarguably joyful, creative, optimistic, and beautiful but the shadow of objectification continues to loom large. From Cardi’s gorgeous headdress that has her resemble an ionic pillar, to her gold upper body top that has her resemble the other gold statues in the video, to Lizzo’s resemblance to the figures depicted on the animated Grecian pottery, to the closing image, the threat that even in reclamation of the classical tradition the potential for objectification remains prevalent. The tension that the artist/sculptor may become the object is also present in my favorite frame of the music video. For exactly two seconds while Cardi B “invokes” (to use the parlance of the classical tradition) Lizzo by calling her name, Lizzo is visible as a sculptor working on a white marble statue. Represented so obviously as artist in this vanishingly short clip the tension with the closing image, in which the artists are transfigured into art, is clear. The final frame has the two artists touch their acrylic nails together in a gesture reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and in a flash of lightning they’re transfigured into a Grecian vase. 

What does this mean that both artists become literally objectified to conclude the video? Or that the exact body-shaming comments that were repurposed to make an empowering song rear their ugly heads in the comments section of the video on Youtube, to the extent that Lizzo reportedly broke down in tears at the potency of the fat-shaming and racist comments she encountered after making the video?[10] Like the fate of Medusa, the power of the artist to render objects is ultimately (and cruelly) retrained on them. To first objectify and then to fragment. Those who are “spending all their time tryna’ break a woman down” are able to weaponize even her reclamations. Once again, regardless of the prowess of the artist in reclaiming a tradition they have been long excluded from and rewriting it to center themselves, the alterity is reaffirmed and seems inescapable. 

It is clear, much of my thinking in this article has been questioning and exploratory rather than definitively argumentative. I am purposefully picking holes in my own arguments and illustrating how complicated any reclamation of the classical tradition is, particularly when it involves issues of gender, sexuality, and particularly race. But I am no pessimist. There is still something successful and optimistic about this reclamation of classical aesthetics in the music video, particularly in the way that the classical tradition promises a kind of artistic immortality. Like heroes and goddesses, myths and legends, Cardi B and Lizzo are inscribed in Grecian pottery. The point perhaps being, the things we make survive (sometimes) even when we do not. To claim that immortality for one’s own art, particularly in the legacy of the traditions from Ancient Greece and Rome, as Black women artists is as subversive and powerful as it is complicated. Most importantly perhaps, it prompts us in American Studies to ask, what new lessons can we draw for studying objects by implementing the lens of Black feminist classicism? How do our understandings of objects and objectification change when we center Black women’s artistic production? And can the treacherous path of celebrating beauty while avoiding objectification be navigated?

Endnotes

[1]  Grace B. McGowan, “In ‘Rumors,’ Lizzo and Cardi B Pull from the Ancient Greeks, Putting a New Twist on an Old Tradition,” The Conversation, accessed December 8, 2021, http://theconversation.com/in-rumors-lizzo-and-cardi-b-pull-from-the-ancient-greeks-putting-a-new-twist-on-an-old-tradition-166318.

[2] Lizzo – Rumors Feat. Cardi B [Official Video], accessed December 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P9XUrniiK4.

[3] Publius Ovidius Naso and D. A Raeburn, Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation (London: Penguin, 2004).

[4] “Medusa in Ancient Greek Art,” accessed December 8, 2021, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/medu/hd_medu.htm.

[5] Charmaine Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 160.

[6] Emily McConkey, “Evelyn De Morgan’s Ovidian Medusa Bronze” in Ampersand: An American Studies Journal (Winter 2022).

[7] Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth Century America (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 14. 

[8] Ravynn K. Stringfield, “Remix a Myth & Sing & Sing a Black Girl’s Song”, Flow Journal, accessed December 8, 2021, https://www.flowjournal.org/2021/10/remix-a-myth-sing-a-black-girls-song/.

[9] Chlöe – Have Mercy (Official Video), accessed December 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfesqRkdSEk.

[10] Lizzo in Tears After Hate Follows New Song ‘Rumors,’ accessed December 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAG-AQYWlpQ.