In the Beginning, There Was a Body: Saartjie Baartman, the Gaze, and the Coin of Costless Consumption
In the Beginning, There Was a Body: Saartjie Baartman, the Gaze, and the Coin of Costless Consumption In the Beginning, There Was a Body Saartjie Baartman, the Gaze, and the Coin of Costless Consumption The Gamtoos River Valley, Eastern Cape was the home of Saartjie Baartman. A landscape of return and of silence. You scroll. A prophet is in the stocks, a woman is on a pedestal. The platform is different, the coin is the same. You pay with your attention, and you receive a regulated inner state: a hit of moral certainty, a thrill of transgression, a soothing of anxiety. The human on the other side of the screen is not a person; they are fuel. A stimulus for your biopsychological regulation. This is not new media. It is old sin, wired into the reward pathways of a fallen world. And its most precise, unforgiving historical map is the body of a woman named Saartjie Baartman. Her exhibition was not an anomaly. It was a litur...