Major Project Assignment - The Black Femme as the Caged Bird and the Mule

Ambria Jefferson Professor Harris ENGL2050-65125 17 April 2026 Major Project Assignment - The Black Femme as the Caged Bird and the Mule

Over the course of this semester, something I’ve tried to always affix to any aspect of the black vernacular tradition is the relation of black gender and black femme existence. In my original proposal for this project, I had a much wider scope of what I aimed to present, and while it made for several drafts, none of them ultimately represented what I wanted to communicate. In the end, I chose to cut some content to do just that, and will delve into the choices made in my digital mixed media collage. Right away, I wanted the base of the body to be various shades of brown to bypass what I’ve come to see often in online queer spaces, even black queer spaces. Darker tones are relegated to the dom, stud/butch, seme, etc., with little regard to their own presentation. Lighter tones are relegated to the sub, femme, uke, etc., in the same way. Criminality being linked to black skin/’deviant’ black genders is a major aspect in the thesis being made in ‘Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender’, as well as the driving force behind the arrest of Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee – the three black femmes the writing centers around. Moving forward, I chose the mismatched nature of the entire piece because I wanted the presentation to be a clear choice. All the pieces look as though they’re laid atop each other, and therefore, could be removed just the same. I specifically chose to make the mouth smaller than the eyes because I wanted there to be more emphasis on what can be gleaned from the ways each eye looks forward, since vernacular tradition isn’t strictly an oral tradition, and body language is especially poignant in black queer spaces. I took inspiration from Lindsay Carraway’s works at ULM for the structure, though my own work is not nearly as extensive. Additionally, though it may remove room to speculate, I chose to incorporate symbols from the writing of both Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou– the mule(s) and the caged bird, though slightly changed. The femme in the collage wears brown mules as shoes. She chooses to carry herself on the weight of her lived experience and the experience of others like her. When we talked about dirty south feminism in class, I thought it was really interesting how much weight was put behind recognizing the women that make up dirty south feminism, from rappers, sex workers, ‘video vixens’ and beyond, as capable of making the choice to navigate the spaces they occupy. Not only in recognizing their choice, but in witnessing their sexuality and eroticism without degrading their work. In my chosen writing, Ellison brings up the way in which the LAPD creates an image of ‘deviant femininity’ and forces it upon Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee by describing the way they walked before being arrested as ‘mincing’ to “...not only punish Tisha, Rita, and Mary Lee, but also to eroticize Black domestic workers and position them as potentially deceptive and in need of surveillance,” (Ellison 9). The overlap is succinct enough to show why black gender, especially the performance of black femininity in all shapes and forms, cannot just be seen as a choice, it has to be a respected decision regardless of any other circumstances. I took more liberties with the caged bird, as seen by the fact that three birds fly free and the femme holds the gilded cage of one of their fingers. I will not claim that either Hurston or Angelou wrote from queer perspectives, nor do I view this piece as a re-imaging of any of their respective works, but the intertwined themes of being trapped as an African American woman in the South and exploring the culture you live in to free yourself as a realized person is easily malleable to that of the black femme. The cage the black femme begins in may sometimes be beautiful and sometimes not, but it is always meant to put them on display for others– an object for the world’s consumption and simultaneously, its deepest malice. Such an idea is further explored by Ellison, stating,”....the juxtaposition of jail denims with what remains of their chosen femme attire: their makeup, shaped eyebrows, and manicured fingernails and toenails, is meant to highlight their gender and sexual indeterminacy so that they can be viewed as objects for others, objects to titillate and discipline a reading public,” (Ellison 12). Notably, all the things meant to act as juxtaposition to jail are aspects of the performance of gender under the black vernacular tradition, made almost indifferent from minstrelsy to nonblack, non-queer eyes. And in this way where the truest expression of self is immediately met by punishment, the reason the femme can exist outside the cage and even alongside it, but never escape it, is fully encapsulated.