misogynistic law, medical theory, and religion
that have complicated the female body. As Lup-
ton notes, ‘‘Like many of her metaphors, the idea
of enslavement refers both to woman’s bondage
and to racial bondage.’’ In the fifteen lines of
‘‘homage to my hips,’’ Clifton undertakes noth-
ing less than the recapture of the inherent
strength of her race and of her womanhood, to
thus free herself from white ideas about black
bodies and from patriarchal assertions about
female weakness.
Ajuan Maria Mance, in a chapter inRecov-
ering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations
by African American Women, argues that ‘‘hom-
age to my hips’’ offers an ‘‘emancipatory vision of
the black female corpus,’’ a vision that allows
Clifton to free herself from conventional assump-
tions about beauty, a project she continues in
‘‘homage to my hair.’’ The blue-eyed, blond-
haired princess of Euro-American fairy tales
does not hold a candle to the hip-swinging, wild-
haired enchantress of these two poems. Rather
than succumbing to white standards of beauty
requiring the African American woman to imitate
Caucasian features, Clifton defines her own cri-
teria of beauty in these two poems, locating these
standards in features that are stereotypically
black physical attributes. She rejoices in her hair
and revels in her hips. As Mance asserts, ‘‘Clifton
reinterprets the outrageousness and excess asso-
ciated with the African American female body as
a source of power and a point of pride.’’
Likewise, Clifton unravels centuries of
Western patriarchal misogyny, or hatred of
women, as it has been codified in the teachings
of law, medicine, and religion. Legally, women
were typically under the control of first their
fathers and then their husbands until very recent
history. In the Middle Ages and the Renais-
sance, for example, laws regarding rape were
located not in criminal codes but rather in prop-
erty law. A rape, therefore, was a crime against
the man to whom the woman ‘‘belonged,’’ not
against the woman. In addition, women were not
granted the right to vote in the United States
until 1920 (some fifty years after African Amer-
ican men were granted the same right). Before
that time, virtually all legal decisions concerning
women were handled by men. If a woman was
charged with a crime, for example, she could not
expect a jury of her peers, since women were
prohibited from sitting on juries.
Similarly, medical texts and traditions from
Aristotle onward through the early twentieth cen-
tury perpetrated a construction of the female
body that suggested that women were inferior
members of the species. In fact, many medieval
medical writers argued that women were perhaps
not even of the same species as men. Aristotle’s
influential teachings perpetuated the notion that
all fetuses start out male, but then because of
some error in development, some fetuses become
female.
Clifton clearly rejects both legal and medical
traditions, claiming that her hips are her own,
not her father’s, nor her husband’s, and that her
strength is even greater than that of a man. She is
perfection in her own right, both as a woman
and as an African American; she is neither an
imperfect male nor an imperfect human being.
Clifton also takes on masculine, patriarchal
preaching about the dangers and lewdness of the
female body. As far back as the early Middle
Ages, Christian church fathers taught women
to hide and be ashamed of their bodies. After
all, Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden,
according to early biblical interpretations, led to
the downfall of all mankind. Clifton vehemently
rejects this construction. At the same time, she
also rejects the Western religious and philosoph-
ical position of binary opposition. That is, West-
ern thought has traditionally and conventionally
divided reality into pairs of opposites, such as
man/woman, right/left, white/black, mind/body,
religion/magic, Christian/pagan. In each of these
pairs, the first term is in a position of privilege in
relation to the second, such that the second term
is often defined by negation. For example, a
woman can be defined as not a man. Thus, in a
discussion of the differences between men’s and
women’s sports, for example, women are often
deemed inferior because they do not have the size
or strength of some men; they are judged by whatWITH THE INTRODUCTION OF MAGIC IN THE
LAST FOUR LINES OF ‘HOMAGE TO MY HIPS,’ CLIFTON
ASSOCIATES HERSELF WITH AFRICAN, FEMININE,INTUITIVE, SUPERNATURAL POWER, AND WITH A LONG
LINE OF SPELL CASTERS.’’homage to my hips