"Othering"

Huie, Wing Young. Still Life. Black Memorabilia. 2014. https://www.wingyounghuie.com/p988258601. Accessed: September 21, 2018.

This is an image by Wing Young Huie. It is one of the many images contained in his Still Life set of photographs. The author had this photograph under a sub-section known as Black Memorabilia. The image was taken within the years leading up to its publishing in 2014 and there is no place of publication included on the author's website.  

When examining this image from a denotative point of view, the surface level characteristics include a cloth doll wearing a dress with an apron and a rag on her head. The doll appears to be an African American female and its owner has it placed next to the windowsill on a kitchen counter. From a connotative examination standpoint, we can look further into the origins of a doll such as this one. The doll can be seen as a symbol for the typical role that an African American woman played back in the slavery and post-slavery era. This role included cooking, cleaning, household chores and sometimes even caring for the homeowner's children. Whoever the owner of this doll is would most likely have it in their kitchen as a memorabilia piece of art.

Wing Young Huie presents the concept of "othering" through this image by highlighting the fact that African womens' sole purpose was to take on the role of household jobs. Many dolls made in the past depicting black women looked such as this one while white dolls were more popular and manufactured of valuable materials such as porcelein; this was all a result of the racial social structure of the time period. This doll would have been seen as more "alien" due to the misrepresentation of the African race in popular culture. All children had white dolls, even including black children. The idea that African women had specific roles in the past however, connects to the ideas presented in the Handsmaids' Tale by Margaret Atwood where women dress for their specific roles in the society of Gilead. Just how Atwood presents the Marthas in the Handsmaids' Tale as the ones who do the cooking and cleaning while wearing basic clothing with a rag to cover their hair and an apron, so does Huie through the African doll. The Marthas are considered "others" because they are defined by the fact that they are not necessarily chosen for their fertility (or even beauty), such as the Handsmaids. This depicted by the fact that they wear dull colored clothing and the Handsmaids wear red, representing fertility. African women of the past were considered "others" simply because of their skin color. The color scheme of the Handsmaids' Tale can also be connected to the role of white vs. black women in the past where white women were the ones to wear brightly colored clothing with more valuable fabric and would typically bear chilren for the master/husband, while slave women would wear cheaper, dull material and were considered less valuable in society and would typically not have children of their own. Both the Marthas and African women of the past are considered "others" as they are shoved into their domestic roles and treated as less desireable by their society.