More on Pigmentum Nigrum

Remember pigmentum nigrum??? It's back with a vengeance and has found itself, as follows, in a footnote for my 2nd chapter....

"Most notable in racializing gender is gynecologist Dr. Charles Meig’s who, as noted by Dana Nelson, asserts that women, when menstruating, pregnant, or nursing develop “pigmentum nigrum,” wherein the corpus mucosum of the skin becomes “endowed”with what he refers to in a 1847 lecture as “a pigmentary membrane, like that that lies beneath the skin of a Negro, a Malay, or an American Indian; but does not exist beneath the skin in the Caucasian race” (Nelson 155). Nelson states, “a woman’s own sexual arousal replaces her ‘innocent nature’ with an animal presence, so for Doctor Meigs, the bodily changes associated with pregnancy seem capable of overflowing a woman’s whiteness with a marked raciality” (155). Interestingly, “pigmentum nigrum” is also used in relation to occularity in Thomas Young’s “Structures of Vision” (1793). Young, along with Anthelme Richerand, a noted phrenologist, argued that pigmentum nigrum, or the melanin found in the eyeball, could corrupt vision, or the clarity of perception and sight. The ability to perceive and assess, as we have seen, was paramount to political and social theories about race, gender, class, and sexuality in the 19th century. To compromise one's sight, these men argued, was to compromise one's whiteness, since the ability to render other bodies transparent and therefore legible was given primacy in Caucasians, as representatation of whiteness in ethnological and phrenological tracts detail. Phrenologically speaking, Caucasian were considered the race most closely associated with sight, and the health of the eye—noted as its power of perception—was seen as a yardstick of civilization (for more on phrenology and eye health, see Thomas Cooley and Charles Colbert; for more on ethnological assessment of vision and bodily legibility see Nott et al's The Types of Mankind). Pigmentum nigrum not only threatened to physiologically corrupt the whiteness of eyes (both literally and figuratively), and the progress of civilization they represented, but white women specifically, as “germiferous” (to use Meigs’ term for women’s uteri; Nelson 155) and “endowed” with pigmentum nigrum (a biologically corrupting force) doubly embodied this perceived threat to the future health of the nation (since it was when she was in the process of reproducing that she became so “endowed”). Pigementum nigrum, therefore, served as the hinging point between physiological studies of the eyes, early gynecology, and phrenology. As such, pigmentum nigrum locates race as a biological category and as a dormant “disease” that could then infiltrate white bodies. Even more strikingly, this ideological nexus locates race, through pigmentum nigrum, as both an indelible and permeable category, since pigmentum nigrum could or may corrupt a white eye, but does not always. However, according to Meigs, white women were considered carries of dormant pigmentum nigrum which would be ignited with the presence of sexual desire. The origin of disease (and dis-ease) in white women was therefore doubled, since both their uterus and the dormant pigmentum nigrum threatened to corrupt their bodies and the nation. As such, white women’s health was, at all times, racialized. As previously noted Fowler and Wells', noted phrenologists, publication of Delia's Doctors alongside physiological treatise, phrenological texts, hygienic tract, and conduct manuals more clearly contextualized the ideological nexus surrounding Creamer's assessment of women's health mid-century."

I think I also want to say something about how the origins of disease and, therefore, the notion of biological racial/gender difference are hyperreal (lack but pretend to have a "true" or verifiable origin), a simulation of biological veracity (thanks, Baudrillard!) that nonetheless relies on the opacity of human bodies, symptoms, and the origins of disease at the same time it argues for their transparency....