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Popular Culture Review
invites both new negatives and new positives as they contest those previously
established. When Dandridge accepted this identity, she participated in her own
exploitation; yet, when she resisted being marginalized, she rejected it. By accepting
her otherness Dandridge was placating the cinema industry; she became the
sexLialized and racialized being they desired. By resisting her otherness (refusing
to complete a motion picture that exploited her racial and sexual construction) she
became stigmatized as an undesirable, as one who was difficult to work with and
as one regarded problematic as an actress. She was constantly trapped between
these two competing identities. The internalization of this conflict between
acceptance and rejection of this otherness could be interpreted as the death of the
self — again, a death that is represented in Dandridge’s photo.
The otherness that Dandridge internalized and that we see manifested in
her death is also apparent in her body. While Dandridge’s skin color suggests that
she is of African American origin, her skin can be read as a fetish signifying a
range of associations that can be made of African Americans. In the racial bigotry
of the language of that period, the lightness of her skin signified whiteness and
therefore, life, while her darkness signified blackness and therefore, death. Such
contrasts were augmented in the photo by the shadows created by the lighting that
brightens one side of her face and body while deliberately darkening the other
side. Upon closer examination, Dandridge’s face appears to be much lighter than
her neck, leaving unanswered the question of whether the photo, through a
highlighting effect, has caused this implied whiteness or whether Dandridge wore
facial cosmetics to appear lighter when photographed. Dandridge’s racial
construction has been subverted, and when we take into consideration that even
though she was African American, her copper-toned complexion could allow her
to represent any number of ethnicities, it becomes readily apparent that not only
was Dandridge’s ethnicity deliberately diluted, but also that she was being promoted
as something “Other” than African American. Dandridge’s racial construction is
further problematized by the fact that although she was an African American, she
possessed European features (evident by the thin nose, etc.). She simultaneously
symbolized Eurocentric standards of beauty.
If Dandridge, classified as African American because of her color, is coded
as something other than African American, she then becomes the “Inappropriate
Other.” Already “Other” in race and so-called black sexuality, she has blurred the
lines by presenting herself as belonging to an unknown ethnicity, this opaque quality
allowing her to become “inappropriate.” No longer identifiably African American,
she had her racial construction manipulated to appeal to a broad audience, both
those who accepted only white and those who might be fascinated by any woman
of color.
If the photo then becomes symbolic of a mirror by which Dandridge could