"Doing Josephine": The Radical Legacy of Josephine Baker's Banana Dance

For over a century, Black women performers have challenged racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. However, the ephemeral traces of historical performances are always in danger of being erased or misinterpreted. In the 1920s and 1930s, Josephine Baker both shocked and delighted audiences at Parisian dance halls with her scandalous banana belt. For many critics, the belt symbolizes either her agency or her submission to primitivist caricature and racial/sexual objectification. Instead, through what I call female phallicism, I theorize the belt as a multiple dildo harness that intervened in complex ways in colonial racial and sexual discourses. The banana belt offers contemporary critics a multidimensional, dialogic space for dismantling racial and sexual hierarchies.