My Body, My Rules. A Black Card Named Desire by Rébecca Chaillon in the Context of French Colonial History and Culture

The article proposes an analysis of the performance Carte noire nommée désir by the Afro-French artist Rébecca Chaillon and situates it both in the sociohistorical context of France and in the intersectional theories of such scholars as Elsa Dorlin, Sander L. Gilman and Patricia Hill Collins. It demonstrates how Rébecca Chaillon highlights the overlap of oppressive systems, such as racism, sexism and heterosexism, and uses her own body to dismantle sexist and racist clichés. In her performance the body becomes not only a topic, but also a tool in the fight of black French women for their subjectivity and right to self-determination. The article also draws attention to other black French theatre directors and choreographers whose artistic works have been noticed on the French stage in the last 15 years. This permits the author to consider an emergence of a new type of spectacle of blackness in which race is not an ideological category (biological and unchanging) as it was in the case of the colonial spectacle, but a political and identity category (referring to a common history and experience of discrimination).