Displaying Sara Baartman, the 'Hottentot Venus'

Article - Read in Advance

Our next article will be Penny's suggestion of Sadiah Qureshi's (2004) 'Displaying Sara Baartman, the 'Hottentot Venus''. The article is available here, but please note it is not open access so if you don't have institutional access, please let me or Finn know and we can send you a copy.

Penny has helpfully set us some guidance questions and provided a content warning for this article and our discussion next week. Please get in touch if you have any concerns given the below.

Content warning: This article contains “references to racism, colonial violence, sexual exploitation, and the scientific abuse of human remains; some of the materials mentioned contain graphic descriptions and images created and circulated without consent”. 

Questions: 
1.    In this article, Qureshi mentions the ‘illusion of objectivity’: how can we (or should we) separate  ‘objective’ scientific work from scientific racism?
2.    How can we confront the historic exploitation of Sara Baartman without repeating it?
3.    Qureshi avoids reproducing images or explicit descriptions of Sara Baartman’s body. What ethical differences exist between viewing images and reading textual descriptions, and how does the digital accessibility of such material today affect how we should engage with it?

Look forward to discussing this article with you all next week.