Healing

In the article "Healing a Cultural body," Clarissa Sligh is an African American female who had many struggles as a child because of her female gender and her ethnicity. Her pieces deal with issues of discrimination and gender roles. One of her pieces illustrates the issue she had with her family and as a little girl. In her piece "Fun With Dick and Jane," she explores the taboo subject of molestation. In it she uses the words of the iconic reading primer Dick and Jane to give a voice to a voiceless girl. The piece quotes "Jane saw Dick go, Stop Dick, said Jane. 'Stop,stop,stop" after the little girl removes her clothes at her brother’s request (Marks 2). This is an example of how Sligh challenges the public perception of a happy family, but underneath there are dark, unspeakable secrets that photographs do not show.
Sligh grew up during the civil rights movement. She saw firsthand the struggles blacks had in America. However, she felt discrimination within the civil rights movement and black community because of her gender. There were strong gender roles that were deeply entrenched in the community. Women were not on the front lines of the movement and forced to take part in supportive roles. The African- American community had strong sexual overtones that forced women to remain submissive members of the community. Stokley Carmichael noted the lack of sexual power that women had by stating that "the only position for a women in the movement is prone"(Marks 4). Sligh depicts this by strongly emphasizing masculine features of men and placing them in places of power in her works. She uses this to challenge the established gender roles in the African-American community and to highlight the inequality that runs counterintuitive to the civil rights purpose.