Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism Jean Walton University of Rhode Island, Jwalton@Uri.Edu

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1995 Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism Jean Walton University of Rhode Island, [email protected]

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Citation/Publisher Attribution Walton, Jean. ʺRe‑Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism.ʺ Critical Inquiry. 21(4):775‑804. Summer 1995. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344067?origin=JSTOR-pdf

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This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychosnslytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism

Jean Walton

1. Introduction

It has becomea commonplacefor psychoanalyticfeminist scholars to return to the "greatdebate" of the 1920sand 1930s,when centralfigures in the movementexplored the questionof whether an autonomous modelof femalesexuality should or couldbe delineatedas distinctfrom the male-basedmodel that had been privilegedin Freud'saccounts. In- deed, thisdebate is recapitulatedin diversecollections of essays,in which the argumentsof the originalprotagonists in the debateare variously summarized(Freud, Jeanne Lampl-deGroot, Helene Deutsch,Ruth MackBrunswick, Marie Bonaparte, Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, Joan Riviere,Melanie Klein), and thencontemporary analysts or theoriststake up the argumentsanew, extending or revisingconceptualizations of"femalesexuality" in bothclinical and appliedareas of psychoanalysis.'Psy-

I would like to thank Mae Henderson for having provided a public forum for a short version of this paper by accepting it for the "Proprietiesand Improprieties"Panel at the 1993 MLAConvention in Toronto,and Sally Druckerand James E. Morrisonfor inviting me to read the section on Riviereat the ':JourneyProud" conference in Durham, N.C. in June 1994. I am indebted also to Lauren Berlant, ElizabethAbel, and E. Ann Kaplanfor encouraging me to complete the long version. Most important, Mary Cappello is to be creditedfor her invaluableobservations, insights, and editorialadvice during every stage of this project,as well as for inspiringme, by the example of her own rich and comprehensive scholarship,to broaden the scope of my criticalundertakings. 1. Accordingto Teresa Brennan, feministtexts of the 1970s and 1980s constitutethe second "great debate"after a relative silence following the first debate of the 1920s and

CriticalInquirw 21 (Summer1995) i) 1995 by The Universityof Chicago.0093-1896/95/2104-0008$01.00. All rightsreserved. 775

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 776 Jean Wakon Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse choanalysishas, in otherwords, been fromits inceptionan explicitand obviousterrain for exploringand critiquingsexual and gendereddiffer- ence. It has been both a tool for and obstacleto politicalintervention in genderand sexualoppression. By contrast,until the workof FrantzFanon in the 1950s,and, more recently,of othertheorists in the lastdecade, psychoanalysis has not been seriouslyconsidered a likelyarena for the explorationand critiqueof racializedconstructions of subjectivity.2As it wasbeing institutionalized, psychoanalysisseemed to thriveon the "eternalproblem" of how to extend and modit Freud'smale-centered theories of sexualdevelopment so that they wouldbe equallyapplicable to women,but it shrankfrom the chargethat it was also focussedtoo narrowlyon the subjectivityof the white, Europeanpatients who providedthe clinicalmaterial from which it was elaborated.It is as if the integrityof the psychoanalytic projectwas threatened by the treatmentof perceivedand fantasizedra- cialdifference as potentiallyconstitutive of psychicdevelopment. Perhaps

1930s. See Teresa Brennan, The Interpretationof the Flesh: Freud and Femininity(New York, 1992), p. 37. Before the second debate, notable publications included Marie Bonaparte, FemaleSexuality, trans. John Rodker (New York, 1953) (which includes an overview of the early literature); Psychoanalysisand FemaleSexuality, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (New Haven, Conn.,1966) (with essays by ErnestJones,Jeanne Lampl-de Groot,J. H. W. van Ophuijsen, Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Joan Riviere, Sandor Lorand, Bonaparte, Clara Thomp- son, Phyllis Greenacre, A. H. Maslow, Judd Marmor, and David A. Freedman); and Female Sexuality:New PsychoanalyticViews, trans. pub., ed. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1964; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970) (includes an overview of the early literature and essays by Chasseguet- Smirgel, Christian David, Bela Grunberger, C.-J. Luquet-Parat, Maria Torok, and Joyce McDougall). The second debate, which is still in progress, got underway with the publica- tion of Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysisand Feminism(Harmondsworth, 1974), and branched out into two main directions, one drawing from Lacan's work (for example, Jacques Lacan and the e'colefreudienne, Feminine Sexuality, trans. Jacqueline Rose, ed. Mitchell and Rose [New York, 1982], with introductory essays by Rose and Mitchell recounting the early debate), the other, directly or indirectly, from Kleinian psychoanalysis (for example, Nancy Chodorow's object-relations oriented The Reproductionof Mothering:Psychoanalysis and the So- ciology of Gender [Berkeley, 1978]). The participants in feminist psychoanalytic discourse around female sexuality over the past two and a half decades are too numerous to list in detail here. 2. For a sense of how little attention has been given to race in feminist intersections with psychoanalysis, see the following entries in Feminismand Psychoanalysis:A CriticalDiction- ary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford, 1992): "black feminist critique of psychoanalysis" by Bio- dun Iginla, "black feminist psychotherapy" by Beverly Greene, and "race/imperialism" by Rey Chow, who notes that "works devoting equal attention to race, imperialism, feminism and psychoanalysis are rare. This has much to do, historically, with the socially and econom-

Jean Walton is assistantprofessor of English and women's studies at the Universityof Rhode Island. She is currentlywriting a book on white women's fantasiesof racialdifference in psychoanalysis,film, and fiction.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 777 this integritywas, after all, based on psychoanalysis'sunacknowledged racialwhiteness. A criiicsuch as BronislawMalinowski, who questioned the ethnocen- trismof psychoanalysis,was roundly and dismissivelyattacked by Ernest Jonesin his 1928review of the anthropologist'sSex and Repression in Sav- age Societ. Malinowski'scriiicism of psychoanalysis,except for its evoca- tion of the "savage"and "barbarous,"seems just as valid and pressing today: The complex exclusivelyknown to the Freudianschool, and as- sumedby themto be universal,I meanthe Oedipuscomplex, corre- spondsessentially to our patrilinealAryan family with the developed patriapotestas, buttressed by Romanlaw and Christianmorals, and accentuatedby the moderneconomic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie.Yet this complexis assumedto exist in everysavage or barbaroussociety. This certainlycannot be correct.3

And elsewhere:"'It is obviousthat the infantileconflicts will not be the same in the lavishnursery of the wealthybourgeois as in the cabinof the peasant,or in the one-roomtenement of the poor workingman"' ("R,"p. 369).To challengethe universalityof the Oedipusconflict was to threatenthe psychoanalyticenterprise at its veryfoundations; Jones had to deflectsuch an argumentby diagnosingMalinowski's critique as a patient's "resistance"to a painful psychologicaltruth: "Dr.Malinowski breaksout into a vigorousrepudiation of the psycho-analyticalviews icallyprivileged status enjoyed by the practiceof psychoanalysisin the West"(p. 363). Fol- lowing are a few of the recent exceptionsto the silence on race in psychoanalysis:Elizabeth Abel, "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis?Opening Questions,"in Conficts in Feminism,ed. MarianneHirsch and EvelynFox Keller (New York, 1990), pp. 184-204; in the domain of psychoanalyticallyinformed feminist film theory, see E. Ann Kaplan,"The Couch Affair: Gender and Race in HollywoodTransference," American Imago 50 (Winter1993): 481-514, and MaryAnn Doane, "DarkContinents: Epistemologies of Racialand Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysisand the Cinema,"Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,Psychoanalysis (New York, 1991), pp. 200 48; hereafterabbreviated FF: Sander L. Gilman'songoing work has been invaluablefor its documentationof the relationshipbetween race and gender in the medical,literary, sexological, and psychoanalyticdiscourses of the past two or three centu- ries; see, for example, his Differenceand Pathology:Stereotypes of Sexualit, Race, and Madness (Ithaca,N.Y., 1985). Of note in the clinicaldomain are PatrickColm Hogan, "The Politics of Othernessin ClinicalPsychoanalysis: Racism as Pathogenin a Case of D. W. Winnicott," Literatureand Psychology38, no. 4 (1992): 36-43, and Dorothy Evans Holmes, "Raceand Transferencein Psychoanalysisand Psychotherapy,"InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 73 (Spring 1992): 1-11, a continuationof a discussionthat has been ongoing for the last decade and a half among clinicalpractitioners about the extent to which race is a factorin the psychotherapeuticsituation. 3. Quoted in ErnestJones, review of Sex and Repressionin Savage Societ, by Bronislaw Malinowski,InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis9 (July 1928): 365; hereafterabbreviated ss 1:) ss rv .

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 778 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse aboutthe Oedipuscomplex, denounces them as 'metaphysical,'and com- mits a numberof easilyavoidable misunderstandings of my statements whichpresent all the familiarmarks of'unconscious resistance"' ("R," p. 368);or by caricaturinghis argument,then countering it by implyingthat the samplingof analysandsupon whichthe Oedipuscomplex was based wasmuch more diverse than Malinowski realized: It all comes of the wickedpsycho-analytic habit of restrictingtheir observationsto the upperclasses of the largeEuropean cities and not takinginto accountother classesand other races.Whatever makes Dr. Malinowskithink that this is so? Has he not even heardof the existenceof free psycho-analyticalclinics? ["R," pp. 368-69] Jonesis not suggesting,of course,that the "savage"Trobrianders whose sexual life Malinowskiconstructs could be found seekingtreatment in "Ereepsycho-analytic clinics," but he does implythat patients who are to be found in such clinics(presumably the workingclasses and people of color)provide enough of a diversesampling of humanitythat conclusions based on them are applicableto people in all cultures,whatever their relative status in a given socioeconomicstructure. Malinowski, who seemedat firstto be an allyin demonstrating"the application of psycho- analyticmethods to a savagerace" (thereby proving these methods to be universal),had to be disownedby Jones becausehe "eitherdenies alto- getheror reducesto the utmostshadowy proportions the threemost fun- damentaltenets of psycho-analysis:the doctrinesof infantileincest, of repression,and of the unconscious"("R," p. 373).Early challenges to the androcentrismof Freud'stheories led to vigorousand extendedengage- mentin the questionsof how subjectsbecome gendered and sexualized; but as Jones'sreview of Malinowski'sbook demonstrates,comparable criticismsof psychoanalyticethnocentrism had to be relegatedto the "outside"of whatwas coming to be a powerfuland influentialinstitution, so that the questionof how subjectsbecome racialized could not even becomea legitimateone withinthat institution.4

4. See Henrietta L. Moore'sentry "anthropologyand cross-culturalanalysis" in Femi- nism and Psychoanalysisfor more on the Jones/Malinowskicontroversy. According to Moore, their disagreementset the terms of debate about "whatanalytical weight and statusshould be given to cross-culturalvariation" (p. 3). She notes that the result of their clash was "a splitbetween anthropology and psychoanalysis,"though her entry concernsitself more with this split's"profound effect on subsequentdevelopments" in anthropologythan on its implications for psychoanalysis(p. 3). For example, she notes evidence in anthropological researchthat "the concept of the person based on the humanistnotion of the SUBJECTis not universal:concepts of the person and the acting, knowing subject vary enormously cross-culturally"(p. 7). She goes on: "It is evidence of this kind that could be used to produce a radicalcritique of certainpsychoanalytic theories and to questionassumptions about the universalityof developmentalprocesses; but anthropologyhas yet to produce such a critique"(p. 7). Nor, it could be argued, has psychoanalysis,insofar as it, too, has been

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Indeed,with a fewnotable exceptions, little has been askedthrough- out the historyof psychoanalysisabout what kind of knowledgemight be producedif articulationsof gendered subjectivitywere consideredin termsof theirbeing dependentupon or imbricatedin implicitassump- tionsabout "whiteness" and "blackness,"given that perceptions and fantasies of racial differencemight form a significantaxis of identity formation.In muchof the earlypsychoanalytic literature, "femininity" or "masculinity"was comingto be understoodas a "mature"stage one at- tainedafter successfully completing a developmentalsequence that cul- minatedin heterosexualizedgendered adulthood.5 In the casesI willbe consideringhere, however,it appearsthat a racialsubtext informs this developmentalmodel, in whichmaturity also implies the full assumption of a heterosexualizedraced adulthood; according to thismodel, one must be fully"white" (or perhaps fully one's "race," however that might locally be constructed)in orderfully to becomea subject.Such a subtextcould not becomeexplicit, perhaps because early psychoanalysts would have arguedthat a male/femalebinary is a muchmore "universal" one thana black/whitebinary insofar as all humansare assumedto grow up in a contextwhere they are distinguishedfrom one anotherby gender,and whereone is constitutedby one'sidentification within and desireacross thatbinary division. According to this argument,it wouldmake sense to examinethe impactof a genderdivision if one is attemptingto elaborate (as the psychoanalystswere) a "universal"understanding of the human psyche,of humansexuality, of humandesire and identification;but it wouldnot makesense to interrogatehow one identifiesand desiresas a racializedsubject because not everyoneis presumedto growup affected by a black/whitebinary. Andyet, as I willdemonstrate, psychoanalytic literature itself reveals that racializedbinaries were and continueto be a realityin the world inhabitedby Freud'spatients and the patientsof otherpsychoanalysts for as long as the institutionhas existed.Certainly this is the case for white Americansin a countrywith a veryprecise history of a racializedslavery system,of racializedlynching practices, of racializeddivisions of labor, indeed, of a racializedhistory of child care, where the tasks of the "mother"so typicallydescribed in psychoanalyticaccounts of earlydevel- opment(nursing, cleaning, eroticization of certainzones of the body,as- sistancein the acquisitionof language,mediating in the mirrorstage, wherethe child'simage is misrecognizedas his own)were (and continue

marked by its necessary disavowal of anthropology's questions since the Jones/Malinowski debate. 5. For a persuasive account of the heteroteleology in psychoanalytic accounts of gender acquisition, see Judith Butler, "Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Het- erosexual Matrix," GenderTrouble: Feminism and theSubversion of Identity(New York, 1990); hereafter abbreviated GT.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 780 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse to be) undertakenby blackwomen in the whiteslave-owning or servant- employinghousehold. It couldbe arguedthat it is just as muchthe case for Europeans,whose fantasmatic life is permeatedby the Orientalistand Africanistideologies that underwrite and justify what, by the timepsycho- analysiswas in its nascentstages, had become a long andvexed historyof Europeancolonialist expansion and decline.Yet in mostpsychoanalytic literature,which was concernedalmost exclusively with white subjects, racialdifference was only an intermittentand peripheralfocus of attention.It onlycame up when,as in the caseofJones's review of Malinowski, psychoanalystsresponded to the way in whichtheir assumptionswere borrowedor challengedby anthropologists.Even in theseinstances, fan- tasizedor perceivedracial difference was stillnot relevantto an understandingof how the white Europeansubject was constructed;"race" functionedrather as a kind of untheorizedbut characteristicmark of a "primitive"culture that had not as yet been repressedby civilizationand its discontents."Race" was blackness, in otherwords, and seemedto have nothingto do withthe "civilized"white human subject. One need not even turn to the recordsof Jones's"free clinics" to find analysandswho providedmaterial with which racialized subjectivity couldhave been moreexplicitly theorized by psychoanalysis,even in the earlyyears when the institutionwas being codified and consolidatedas a scientific,clinical, and modernistinstitution. In the examplesI willconsider at length here, the constructionsof racialdifference provided by thesewhite analysands are so deeplyimbricated in theirsexual and gender identitiesthat it is curiousthat the analysts,who are otherwiseat pains to makesignificant contributions to the understandingof female subjectivity,treat the referencesto race as though they are irrelevant. Subsequentreaders of thesetexts haveparticipated in whathas come to be a hegemonicsilence on the issueof race;and feminists,whose invest- mentin the "greatdebate" of the 1920saround gender and sexualityhas been perhapsthe deepestof all, are unwittingparticipants in this col- lusion.

2. (White)Femininity as a MasqueradeinJoan Riviere One of the most frequentlycited essaysof the great debateof the 1920s is Joan Riviere's1929 paper "Womanlinessas a Masquerade," whichhas repeatedlybeen deployedfor its potentialto deconstructan essentializednotion of femininityand to characterizeit, rather,as a "masquerade"in a phalliceconomy of desirethat may or maynot hide a re- pressedbut potentiallydestabilizing female eroticism. As is evidentfrom the work of ClaireJohnston, Stephen Heath, MaryAnn Doane,John Fletcher,Teresa de Lauretis,and others,Riviere's essay (and Jacques La- can'spassing mention of masqueradein "TheMeaning of the Phallus")

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 781 has becomea primegenerative site for theoreticalinterventions in gendered subjectivityin the realmof feministfilm theory.Elsewhere, Luce Irigaraydraws upon the masqueradeto posita femaledesire that exceeds a dominantmasculine economy; Judith Butlerpoints up the extent to which the masqueradeis indicativeof a coerciveheterocentric matrix; and EmilyApter critiques it, using it as a foil for her elaborationof a feministontology of femininitygrounded in theoriesof femalefetishism.6 Riviere'scase studyis indeed tantalizinglyrich with implications;it providesa suggestiveglimpse of the politicaland culturalmilieu within which she practicedand wrote and could functionas a crucialsite at whichto continuethe projectof historicizingthe way in whichpsycho- analysiscame to be institutionalizedas a discursiveand clinicalinstru- ment of controland resistance.Yet there is an explicitdelineation of racialdifference in the essaythat has not been adequatelyexplored; if feministshave been able to mobilizeRiviere's work to reconceptualize femalesubjectivity, they havenot, as yet, acknowledgedhow thatsubjec- tivityis a specificallywhite one, how it dependsfor its coherenceon the figuringof blackmen on the one hand,and the elisionof blackwomen on the other.As MaryAnn Doane has pointed out (thoughnot withrefer- ence to Riviere),"The force of the categoryof racein the constitutionof Othernesswithin psychoanalysis should not be underestimated.... Psy- choanalysiscan, from this point of view,be seen as a quiteelaborate form of ethnography-as a writing of the ethnicityof the white Western psyche"(FE p. 211). A brief reviewof the key featuresof Riviere'sessay will serve as a reminderof how strikingit is that little has been made of its fantasyof racial difference.After announcingthat she will demonstratehow "womenwho wishfor masculinitymay put on a maskof womanlinessto avertanxiety and the retributionfeared from men,"Riviere introduces us to a "particulartype of intellectualwoman" whom she has been treat- ing as a patient.7The unnamedsubject of thiscase studyis describedas "anAmerican woman engaged in workof a propagandistnature, which

6. For the most extensive uses of the masquerade in film theory, see FF; Claire John- ston, "Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies," in Psychoanalysisand Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York, 1990), pp. 6F72; Stephen Heath, 'tJoan Riviere and the Mas- querade," in Formationsof Fantasy,ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (Lon- don, 1986), pp. 45-61; John Fletcher, "Versions of Masquerade," Screen29 (Summer 1988): 43-70; and Teresa de Lauretis, "Recasting the Primal Scene: Film and Lesbian Representa- tion," The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and PerverseDesire (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), hereafter abbreviated PL. Luce Irigaray draws on the masquerade in her This Sex WhichIs Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 83-85. Butler's incisive analysis of Riviere appears in GT, pp.43-57, and Emily Apter critiques the masquerade in her Feminiz- ing the Fetish:Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsessionin Turn-of-the-CenturyFrance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 65-98. 7. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," in Formationsof Fantasy,p. 35; hereafter abbreviated "W."

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 782 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse consistedprincipally in speakingand writing"("W," p. 36). Afterevery publicperformance, she is obsessedby a need for reassurance,which leadsher "compulsivelyon any such occasionto seek some attentionor complimentarynotice from a manor men at the closeof the proceedings in whichshe had takenpart or been the principalfigure; and it soon becameevident that the men chosenfor the purposewere always unmis- takablefather-figures" ("W," p. 36). Rivieregoes on to saythat this "masquerade"of womanliness(excessive "flirting and coquetting")is to be understoodas a meansof"propitiating" the potentiallyretaliatory father figureby offeringherself to him sexually("W," p. 37). But when Riviereendeavors to tracethis compensatorybehavior to the woman'searly fantasy life, we find the woman"defending" herself not againstwhite, powerful father figures, but againstanother figure who might,like her, experience a similaranxiety about speaking from a positionof authority:the blackman living in the southernUnited States. Rivi- ere tellsus that [this]phantasy [of offeringherself sexually to a potentialattacker] hadbeen very common in her childhoodand youth, which had been spent in the SouthernStates of America;if a negro came to attack her,she plannedto defendherself by makinghim kissher and make love to her (ultimatelyso that she could then deliverhim over to justice).But therewas a furtherdeterminant of the obsessivebehav- ior.In a dreamwhich had a rathersimilar content to thischildhood phantasy,she wasin terroralone in the house;then a negrocame in and foundher washingclothes, with her sleevesrolled up and arms exposed.She resisted him, with the secretintention of attractinghim sexually,and he beganto admireher armsand caressthem and her breasts.The meaningwas that she had killedfather and motherand obtainedeverything for herself (alone in the house),became terrified of their retribution(expected shots throughthe window),and de- fendedherself by takingon a menialrole (washingclothes) and by washingoff dirt and sweat,guilt and blood, everythingshe had obtainedby the deed, and 'disguisingherself' as merelya castrated woman.["W," pp. 37-38] Riviereinterprets the "negro"of these phantasiesas another of the power-wieldingfather figures who must be reassuredthat she has not stolen their masculinity:"In that guise [as castratedwoman] the man [presumablythe "negro"of the fantasy]found no stolenproperty on her whichhe need attackher to recoverand, further,found her attractiveas an objectof love"("W," p. 38).Apparently it makesno differencein Rivi- ere'saccount that the "man"in questionhere is black,that culturally sanc- tionedfantasies in whicha whitewoman is sexuallyattacked by a black manform a significantcomponent of dominantwhite racist hegemony in the UnitedStates. Only the imaginedattacker's gender is significant,not his race.

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As we shall see, Riviere'sessay is similarto other instancesin the l910s and 1920swhen racialdiffierence forms the content of the fantasy life of a whitefemale subject, and yet it is not apparentlya constitutive componentof the psychoanalyticinterpretation of the analyst.In other words,the explicitdiscourse on genderand sexualityof the periodwas informedby implicitassumptions about racial difference; because of its laterimportance for feminists,Riviere's essay is a crucialstarting point fromwhich to explorethe ramificationsof this doubleimbrication. To facilitatesuch an exploration,it will be usefulto note how the questionof who does or does not havethe pents in Riviere'stext couldbe translatedinto a questionof one'srelation to thephallus as it is elaborated in Lacan'slater discussion of masqueradein "TheMeaning of the Phal- lus"(1958). By shiftingthe emphasisfrom penis to phallus,we maybe able to see how Rivierehas possiblymisread her patient'simagined at- tackeras a fatherfigure; it maybe morepertinent to see himas occupying a positionsimilar to that of the woman,insofar as he, too, might have reasonto engagein masqueradeto wardoff retaliationby thosewho fear he has usurpedtheir positionof privilege.Before exploring the implicationsof sucha rereading,however, I wantto addressthe possibilitythat Riviereand her patienthave subverted at leastone aspectof hegemonic racismby imaginingblack men as equallycapable as whitemen of serving as fatherfigures.8 To perceivethe blackman as a fatherfigure, in other words,might seem to lay the groundworkfor restoringto blackmen the patriarchalpower that had been historicallydenied them, even as it was deemedessential to masculinesubjectivity. In this sense,it mightbe argued that accordingthe blackman the statusof fatherfigure is (in an antiracistproject) a positivelyweighed fantasy. Such an imaginary"gift" to the blackman is cruellycompromised, however, by the wayin which the fatherfigure is codedin Riviere'stext: that which will punish women who dare to competeand that musttherefore be seducedand diffused. If the blackman was, indeed, perceivedas a fatherfigure by Riviere's patient,he was,at leastin one versionof the fantasy,soon divested of that statusso thatit couldbe restoredto whitemale figures of authority. It is then morein keepingwith the realmaterial conditions faced by blackmen in the 1920sto considerthat, contrary to Riviere'sinterpreta- tion, her patientmay have perceived the "negro"of her fantasyas occu- pyinga positionmuch like her own, thatis, thathis claimto patriarchal powerwould, like hers, havebeen interpretedby whitemen as a trans- gressionworthy of punishment.In Lacanianterms, both the womanand her "attacker"behave as though they possessthe phallus,though only one of them has recourseto femininemasquerade as a defenseagainst

8. My thanksto a readerat CriticalInquier for promptingme to considerthis interpretation of the passage.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 784 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse retaliationfor suchbehavior. Riviere says of her patientthat the exhibitionin publicof her intellectualproficiency, which was in itselfcarried through successfully, signified an exhibitionof herself in possessionof the father'spenis, having castrated him. The display once over,she was seizedby horribledread of the retributionthe fatherwould then exact.Obviously it wasa steptowards propitiating the avengerto endeavorto offerherself to him sexually.["W," p. 37] It is at this point that Riviereintroduces the childhoodfantasy of an attacking"negro," and she takesit for grantedthat since the blackman has a penisthat could be "stolen,"he cantherefore be interpretedas another versionof the fatherfigure whose anger must be assuaged.But, though the peniscan be attributedto all men (asopposed to women),it mustbe pointedout thatthe phalluscannot. By fantasizinga blackman, Riviere's patientis callingupon a figurewhose relation to the phallus,as signifier of whitemale privilege in a racialized,patriarchal society, is as tenuousas her own. Considerwhat takes place in the Riviereessay in termsof its implied elaborationof a phalliceconomy. According to Lacan,no one can really "have"the phallus,though men and womenof all racesmay striveto appearto have it, withvarying material repercussions.9 In the standard Freudianaccount of masculinesubjectivity, what is perceivedas a "lack" in women(that is, the absenceof the penis)is not tolerablefrom the little boy's(nor apparently the man's)perspective. This "lack"in the womanis threateningbecause it meansthat the manmay also lose his organ;hence, he feelsthe necessityon his partto disavowand coverover her "lack"via the fetish.'°In Lacan'swork, the standardbinary that forms itself around the phallusis not "havingthe phallus"on one sideand "lackingthe phallus"on the other.Rather, lack must, once more,be coveredover; thus, in Lacan,the manmust appear to "havethe phallus"while the womanmust appearto "bethe phallus"(this way no one is "lacking"the phallus).In- deed, the womanmust appear to "bethe phallus"precisely so that the man maybe assuredthat he "has"it. Judith Butlerclarifies this in the followingway: "For women to 'be'the Phallusmeans, then, to reflectthe powerof the Phallus,to signifythat power,to 'embody'the Phallus,to supplythe site to whichit penetrates,and to signifythe Phallusthrough 'being'its Other,its absence,its lack,the dialecticalconfirmation of its identity"(GT p. 44). A masqueradingwoman in Lacanis one who mas- 9. The "relationsbetween the sexes," Lacan says, "revolvearound a being and a having" the phallus, which is in itself a matter of "'appearing"'to have the phallus, "so as to protect it on one side and to mask its lack on the other" (Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus,"in FeminineSexuality, pp. 83-84). 10. See Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism,"The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Worksof SigmundFreud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 21:152-57.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 785 queradesin orderto be the phallusfor the man,in orderto be the phallus thathe mustbe reassuredhe has. Riviere'spatient has placedherself in relationto her so-calledlack in conflictingways. At no pointdoes her "lack"appear as such;when she speaksin a publicforum, she appearsas "havingthe phallus,"and she rightlysuspects that this will not be toleratedby her maleaudience. Thus, afterthe performance,through the masquerade,she reappearsas "being the phallus,"in order to reassurethe listeningmen that they "have"it afterall. But the introductionof the cross-racialfantasy signals that we are not dealingwith a simplemale/female binary at all; rather,a third term enters the picture.The fantasyof the attacking"negro" suggests thatthis woman's relation to the phallus,and thus to her "womanliness" as a masquerade,is inflectedby her imaginedrelation to the blackman's relationto the phallus.Riviere simplifies matters by seeingthe blackman as anotherrepresentative of the "father"on the male side of a gender binary.But Riviere'spatient is addressingher masqueradeto two quite diffierentlyconstructed male audiences.Consider the specificdetails of the fantasyagain: "if a negro cameto attackher, she plannedto defend herselfby makinghim kissher and makelove to her (ultimatelyso that she could then deliverhim over to justice)."Since her "defense"is to seducethe attacker,it wouldappear that she does not regardhis aggression to be sexuallymotivated at first.In other words,she understands him to be attackingher for otherreasons. Given the historicalrealities of postslaveryAmerica, it is worth noting that she appearsto "have"the phallus(that is, to be in a positionof power and authority)both as a womanand as a whitewoman. As a whitewoman, her appearingto have the phallusis culturallysanctioned when it is a questionof her relation to a blackman. Historically, white men and women who had enjoyedthe privilegesof whitesupremacy in the Southduring slavery were, during and afterReconstruction, experiencing loss of powerand perceivingit to be usurpedby blackmen. To desirethe phallus,then, as a whitewoman wasto desiresomething both culturallyproscribed (insofar as she was a woman)and culturallysanctioned (insofar as she was white)by a white hegemonicracist and patriarchalculture. The questionis, Howdoes the whitewoman negotiate this contradiction,particularly as it is playedout in her fantasiesabout black masculinity? By playingthe masqueradeto the blackman as audience,she will appearto "bethe phallus"in orderthat he will,in turn,want to haveher as the phallus,to haveher as the "siteto which"he willpenetrate. As soon as his imaginedaggression has been thusdefined as sexualin nature,she will then "deliverhim over to justice."That "justice,"of course,in the violentlyracialized context that is the AmericanSouth, will likely consist in the literalcastration and lynchingof the offendingblack man at the hands of the white men whose legal and socialprerogative it is to be the properpossessors of the phallus.In masqueradingas the phallusfor

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 786 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse the blackman, Riviere's patient will have succeeded in transforminghim into the phallus,which she can then handover to the truefather figures in thisscenario, the whitemen who are the administratorsof the "justice" thatis evoked.Indeed, according to MarthaHodes, though it mighthave been a blackman's "political or economicauthority and independence" that led to violentretaliation on the part of whites,that authorityand independencewere customarilylinked to a supposedsexual threathe posedto whitewomen, so thathis lynchingwas understood to be a result of his sexual,as much as his political,aggression: "whether true or un- true, what comes throughconsistently in the testimony[of KKKwit- nesses]is the way in whichextreme white anxietyover sexual liaisons betweenwhite women and blackmen waslinked to fearsof blackmen's politicaland economicindependence.''ll In Riviere'sessay, then, we find evidenceabout the wayin whichthis "extremewhite [male] anxiety" in- flectsa whitewoman's attempt to negotiateher own "politicaland economicindependence." Riviere notes that for this woman"womanliness . . . couldbe assumedand wornas a mask,both to hide the possessionof masculinityand to avertthe reprisalsexpected if she wasfound to possess it-much as a thief will turn out his pocketsand ask to be searchedto provethat he has not the stolengoods" ("W," p. 38). Whileshe can turn her pocketsout and showthat she has no penis afterall, the blackman she fantasizesabout cannot do so, and his horrificpunishment will be, afterall, his literalcastration and death. Thereis a secondpart to the cross-racialfantasy, however, that com- plicatesthis picturesomewhat. Again, Riviere sees the blackman in the patient'sdream as analogousto the fatherwhose retribution the patient fearsfor havingusurped his position.Her washingof the clothesis interpretedas her attemptto washoff the "dirtand sweat,guilt and blood, everythingshe had obtainedby the deed"of killingher parents.How- ever,it is just as plausiblethat thiswashing is evidentof her desire,and her anxietyabout this desire,to identifywith blackness. As SanderGil- manhas pointed out, it wouldhave become a commonplaceby the 1920s to associatesexuality, and in particulara sexualitythat exceeded or con- tradicteda clearlyheterocentric model (as in the case of the prostitute, the lesbian,or the hysteric),with the imageof the "hottentot,"the stereo- typeof blackfemale subjectivity.l2 Interestingly, the patient'sdream does not end withthe turningover of the blackman to "justice";this time, she is content"'disguising herself' as merelya castratedwoman," as Riviere

11. MarthaHodes, "The Sexualizationof ReconstructionPolitics: White Women and BlackMen in the South after the CivilWar," in AmericanSe7cual Politics: Sex, Gender,and Race Since the Civil War,ed. John C. Fout and MauraShaw Tantillo (Chicago, 1993), pp. 65, 64. 12. See Sander L. Gilman, "BlackBodies, White Bodies: Towardan Iconographyof Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-CenturyArt, Medicine, and Literature,"in "Race," Writing,and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates,Jr. (Chicago, 1985), pp. 223-61; hereafter abbreviated"BB."

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 787 putsit, so thathe willcaress her armsand breasts.Significantly, the only other eroticdreams she has are "frequenthomosexual dreams with in- tenseorgasm" ("W," p. 39). Up untilthis point, Riviere's patient has been presentedas eithersuperficially heterosexual (gaining satisfaction in sexual relationswith her husbandonly becauseher anxietyis thus allayed) or as frigid.But, as Butlerpoints out, Riviere'spatient could be understoodas a kindof"homosexual without homosexuality"; "the donning of femininityas maskmay reveal a refusalof a femalehomosexuality and, at the sametime, the hyperbolicincorporation of thatfemale Other who is refused[the patient,through masquerade, becomes the object-that is, a woman-whom she forbidsherself to love]"(GT p. 53). Moreover, Butlerexplains, this predicament is "producedby a matrixthat accounts forall desirefor women by subjectsof whateversex or genderas originating in a masculine,heterosexual position. The libido-as-masculineis the sourcefrom which all possiblesexuality is presumedto come"(GT p. 53). If a personfeels desire for a woman,in otherwords, this person must be understoodto be desiringfrom a masculine,heterosexual position, since it is assumedthat the libidois, by nature,masculine. But I wouldadd thatjust as the culturalmatrix is "[hetero]sexualized"in a certainway, it is also "racialized"in a certainway, and this mustbe takeninto account in anyconsideration of howeither "femininity" or sexualityis beingcon- structedin psychoanalytictexts of the 1910sand 1920s.For if thismatrix is markedby an assumptionof the libido-as-masculine,it is alsoparadoxi- callymarked by an equallycoercive assumption of the libido-as-black,a trope that informedthe fantasylife of more than one analysandin the earlydays of psychoanalysisand yet wasnot seriouslyinterrogated until the workof FrantzFanon.

3. TheLibido-as-Black and Phobogenic Objects In "Contributionsto the MasculinityComplex in Women"(1917), Dutchanalyst J. H. W.van Ophuijsen recounts his analysisof fivewomen who suffer from a "masculinitycomplex." He notes with interestthat threeof the women"informed me of theirown accord that they possessed 'Hottentotnymphae"'; this fact, which they had alreadynoticed very earlyin their lives, led them to the convictionthat they were different from other women.''l3By "Hottentotnymphae," van Ophuijsenmeans the supposedlyenlarged female sexual organs that black women in Africa werereputed to possess.As SanderGilman points out, ethnographiccon- structionsof the "Hottentot"had becomeby the end of the nineteenth century(and, judging by van Ophuijsen'sarticle, well into the twentieth)

13. J. H. W. van Ophuijsen, "Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women" (1917), in Psychoanalysisand FemaleSexuality, p. 63.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 788 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse the paradigmof blackfemale sexuality, notable less for her blackskin than for the supposedabnormal development of her genitaliaand buttocks.Anthropological and medical"research" in the nineteenthcentury servedonly to confirmthe observationsof eighteenth-centurytravelers who had "describedthe so-calledHottentot apron, a hypertrophyof the labiaand nymphaecaused by the manipulationof the genitalia"("BB," p. 232). Throughoutthe century,African women were exhibitedin Eu- rope as examplesof a "primitive"sexuality, dissected upon their death, and their genitaliaput on displayfor scientific(and public)scrutiny. Thus, Gilmandescribes the fate of SarahBartmann, an Africanwoman displayedthroughout the earlypart of the century: The audiencewhich had paidto see her buttocksand had fantasized aboutthe uniquenessof her genitaliawhen she wasalive could, after her deathand dissection,examine both, for Cuvier[a contemporary pathologist]presented to "theAcademy the genitalorgans of this womanprepared in a wayso as to allowone to see the natureof the labia."["BB," pp. 232, 235]

The Europeanfixation on the "Hottentotnymphae" endured for well over a hundredyears according to Gilman:"Sarah Bartmann's genitalia and buttockssummarized her essence for the nineteenth-centuryob- server,or, indeed,for the twentieth-centuryone, as they are stillon display at the Musee de l'hommein Paris"("BB," p. 235). Gilmanalso documentsthe continuingpublication of booksinto the earlytwentieth centurylinking the "pathological"and "atavistic"sexuality of European prostitutesand lesbiansto the "primitive"sexuality of the Hottentot.'4 It is as thoughvan Ophuijsen'spatients sought to assertsexual and genderidentities that would challenge and contradictthe strictly(white) feminineone thathad hitherto been culturallyprescribed (and was about to becomepsychoanalytically codified) in termsof passivity,receptivity to the "active"male, and de-emphasisof the pleasuresof the clitoris.Since it had becomeprobable by the 1910sthat defianceof the femininerole

14. For example, he notes a study of the "criminalwoman," subtitled The Prostituteand theNormal Woman,by CesareLombroso and GuillaumeFerrero (1893) in which illustrations "dealwith the image of the Hottentot female and illustratethe 'Hottentotapron' and the steatopygia";Lombroso "regards the anomaliesof the prostitute'slabia as atavisticthrow- backs to the Hottentot"("BB," p. 245). An 1870 text by Adrien Charpy "beginsby com- menting on the elongationof the labiamajora in prostitutes,comparing this with the apron of the 'disgusting'Hottentots" ("BB," p. 248). In Theodor Billroth's 1877 handbook of gynecology,"a detailed presentationof the 'Hottentot apron' is part of the discussionof errors in development of the female genitalia"and "the Hottentot's anomalous sexual form"was linked to "theoverdevelopment of the clitoris,which [Billroth]sees as leading to those 'excesses'which 'are called "lesbianlove."' The concupiscenceof the black is thus associatedalso with the sexualityof the lesbian"("BB," p. 237). In 1905, Abele de Blasio "publisheda series of case studies on steatopygiain prostitutesin which he perceivesthe prostituteas being, quite literally,the Hottentot"("BB," p. 248).

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summerl 995 789 would inevitablybe "diagnosed"as a "masculinitycomplex" (that is, if you do not wishto be "feminine,"you mustwish to be "masculine"),these womenwould seem to have soughtan alternativemeans of assertinga genderedidentity that both was and wasnot officially"feminine." Draw- ing fromthe kindsof clinicalor anthropologicaldepictions of the genitals of Africanwomen that would doubtless have been circulatingin the early twentiethcentury, they foundimages of themselvesin a mirrorthat was strikingfor its racialized,not its masculine-gendered,depiction of sexual difference.If van Ophuijsen'spatients are "claimers"(to use Freud's term,later promulgated by MarieBonaparte, for womenwho refuseto renouncethe sexualpleasure of the clitoris),it is an imaginedblack, but neverthelessfemale sexual identitythey are claiming,not a male one. Yet,caught up in the rigidbinary of masculine/feminine,in which black as synonymouswith genital and libidinal-ispermanently subsumed under masculine,van Ophuijsencannot acknowledgethat these white women are enacting a specificallycross-racial, rather than cross- gendered,identification. His ensuingobservations reveal that, although he cannotfind a "masculinedisposition," "appearance," or "expression" in thesewomen, he neverthelesstakes their remarks as primarilyindica- tiveof theirfantasies of possessingmale genitalia: I did not find to any greatextent in any of thesecases what is called a masculinedisposition; nor indeeda masculineappearance and expression,a contemptfor men, or a predilectionfor masculineactivi- ties. I wouldrather define the attitudepresent as one of rivalrywith men in the intellectualand artisticspheres.l5 Doubtlessit is their "rivalrywith men in the intellectualand artistic spheres"that has markedthese white women as somehowdeviant in termsof theirsexuality or genderin the firstplace, and thatmight have promptedin themthe sameanxiety about white, male retribution felt by Joan Riviere'spatient. Once again, a racializedOther is invokedby a womanas a meansto distanceherself from "femininity" while at the same timenot seemingto encroachon "masculinity."But psychoanalysisas an institutionwas not ableto theorizethe importanceof this,since it wasnot until Fanon'swork that the categoryof the Othercould be conceivedof in racialized,as wellas sexualized,terms. In "The Negro and Psychopathology,"Fanon reconsiders Lacan's theoryof the mirrorstage in an explicitlyracialized context: It wouldindeed be interesting,on the basisof Lacan'stheory of the mirrorperiod, to investigatethe extentto whichthe imagoof his fellow builtup in the youngwhite at the usualage wouldundergo an imagi- naryaggression with the appearanceof the Negro. When one has graspedthe mechanismdescribed by Lacan,one canhave no further 15. Van Ophuijsen,"Contributions to the MasculinityComplex in Women,"p. 63.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 790 Jean Walton Racein (White)PsychoanalyticDiscourse doubtthat the real Otherfor the whiteman is and will continueto be the blackman.l6

This chapterof BlackSkin, White Masks is an extendedelaboration of the ramificationsfor psychosexualdevelopment in a culturethat has fostered the productionof the blackbody as "phobogenic"(that is, the causeof phobiain whites,and, morecrucially, in blackswho havebeen brought up to believethey are white).To followthrough on this analysis,Fanon drawsupon, thoughdoes not explicitlyacknowledge, the wayin which the femalebody is also phobogenic(as that thing whose "lack"is so fearedit cannotbe perceivedas such).Fanon's explanation of the white woman'sfantasy 'S Negro is rapingme" suppliesa strikingcounterpart to Joan Riviere'stext. For in his text, too, the white woman who experiencessuch a fantasyis exemplaryof"certain failures or certain fixations"in womenwho have not successfullyacceded to their mature sexual roles as passive partners(BS, p. 178). Fanon relies without questionon the work of Helene Deutschand MarieBonaparte, both of whomshared the generalconsensus in the debateof the 1920sthat, as Fanonputs it, alternativelyclitoral and clitoral-vaginaland finallypurely vaginal, a woman havingretained, more or less commingled,her libidoin a passiveconception and her aggression,having surmounted her double Oedipuscomplex proceedsthrough her biologicaland psycho- logicalgrowth and arrivesat the assumptionof her role, whichis achievedby neuropsychicintegration. [BS, p. 178] There remainvestiges in thesewomen of an "activeOedipus complex," correspondingto "theclitoral stage," meaning that the clitorisis "perceivedas a diminishedpenis," and that the girl, like the boy, has "impulses directedat the mother;she too would like to disembowelthe mother"(BS, pp. 178-79). This fantasyof disembowelingthe motheris, by the timeFanon reit- eratesit, a commonplacein the psychoanalyticliterature of maleand female analystsalike. It makesup an obligatorycomponent of Riviere's analysis: In consequenceof disappointmentor frustrationduring sucking or weaning,coupled with experiencesduring the primalscene which is interpretedin oral terms, extremelyintense sadism develops towardsboth parents.The desire to bite oS the nipple shifts,and desiresto destroy,penetrate and disembowel the motherand devour her and the contentsof her bodysucceed it. Thesecontents include the father'spenis, her fces and her children.["W," pp. 40-41] 16. FrantzFanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. CharlesLam Markmann(New York, 1967), p. 161 n. 25; hereafterabbreviated BS.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Sumrner1995 791

Riviereis drawingdirectly from Melanie Klein, whose 1929 discussion of reparationI willconsider at lengthin the next sectionof thisarticle. Klein theorizesthat [themost profound anxiety experienced by girls]is the equivalentof castration-anxietyin boys.The littlegirl has a sadisticdesire, origi- natingin the earlystages of the Oedipusconflict, to robthe mother's bodyof its contents,namely, the father'spenis, faeces, children, and to destroythe motherherself.l7 However,for each analyst(Klein, Riviere, Fanon) the way in whichthe womanwill mitigatethe anxietyproduced by this fantasyis theorized differently;in all threecases, racial difference becomes an elementin the analysis,but only in Fanon'stext is it explicitlyacknowledged. For ltivi- ere, the daughterwards off anxietyby occupyingher father'sposition, fromwhich she can seem to put herself"at the service" of her mother: In this appallingpredicament the girl'sonly safetylies in placating the motherand atoningfor her crime.She mustretire from rivalry with the motherand, if she can, endeavourto restoreto her what she has stolen.As we know,she identifiesherself with the father;and thenshe usesthe masculinityshe thusobtains by putting it atthe service of themothex She becomesthe fatherand takeshis place;so she can 'restore'him to the mother.["W," p. 41] But, as we have seen, this strategyis inevitablyinflected by fantasiesof the attacking"negro" and of her own "blackness,"which must be washed off.That it is possibleto "steal"an imaginedpenis from the mother(that is, the father'spenis in her)suggests again that the penis,or phallus,that is stolenfrom the attackingblack man is imaginedas originallybelonging to the [white]father. Klein ignores the questionof eitherpenis or phallus, focussingon how a daughtereffects "reparation" to her injuredmother via artisticimpulses, though, as we shallsee, at leastone of the paintings this daughterproduces depicts a racializedfigure that, once again,goes unremarkedby the analyst.Fanon, however, brings racial fantasies to the forefrontin his accountof how a woman,still under the influenceof an inadequatelydisplaced clitoral sexuality, negotiates her anxietyabout desiringto disembowelher mother. As a young womanenters what Fanoncalls "the folkloreand the culturealong roadsthat we know,the Negro becomesthe predestined depositary"of her aggressiontowards the mother.Thus whena womanlives the fantasyof rapeby a Negro,it is in someway the fulfillmentof a privatedream, of an inner wish.Accomplishing 17. Melanie Klein, "InfantileAnxiety-Situations Reflected in a Workof Art and in the CreativeImpulse" (1929), Love, Guilt, armlReparation and Other Works,1921-1945 (London, 1975), p. 217; hereafterabbreviated "I."

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 792 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse the phenomenonof turningagainst self, it is the womanwho rapes herself.We can find clearproof of thisin the factthat it is common- place for women,during the sexual act, to cry to their partners: "Hurtme!" They are merelyexpressing this idea: Hurt me as I would hurt me if I were in your place.The fantasyof rape by a Negrois a variationof thisemotion: "I wish the Negrowould rip me open as I wouldhave ripped a womanopen." [BS, p. 179] In Fanon,as in Riviere,there is a sense that a woman'sracial fantasy occursalmost as a consequenceof a "failure"to attaina fullymature femininity;or, rather, the fantasybecomes a meansto negotiateher forbidden "masculine"tendencies. Here, the womanidentifies with the blackman who (via "folkloreand the culture")is reputedto have the instrument she wouldneed to disembowelher mother:a mythicallylarger-than-life penis.But as a womanshe alsooccupies the positionof the motherwhom she wishesto disembowel,thus giving expression both to her "masculine" aggressionand her guilt at this aggression.Though it is valuablefor its critiqueof the libido-as-black,Fanon's analysis of the cross-racialrape fantasynevertheless becomes a meansto reifythe mythof femininityas masochism;the fantasycan onlybe understoodas a meansfor womento expresstheir own self-destructive impulses, and no interrogationis made of the meansby whichthe female(maternal) body must be constructedas a phobogenicobject. In Riviere,on the otherhand, the fantasybecomes a meansto reify the myth of the blackman as wielderof a threatening phallus;he can only be conceptualizedas a fatherfigure, so thatboth a significantaspect of his commonalitywith the whitewoman, as wellas the specificityof his differencefrom her, are necessarilyelided. Fanon is well awareof the specificallyracialized matrix that informsthe rape fantasy he considers;what he is not ableto articulateis the heterocentricmatrix thatprompts him to positthis fantasy as symptomaticof a somehowfailed whitefemininity, and to admitthat he knowsnothing about the woman of color(see BS, pp. 179-80).By the sametoken, the absenceof an aware- ness of the racializedmatrix subtending her patient'sfantasy prevents Riviere,as well as most of the feministcritics who rely upon her, from seeinghow womanliness as a masqueradeis simultaneouslya masquerade of whiteness.

4. (White)Reparation with a NakedNegress in MelanieKlein In the same year that Rivierepublished her essayon femalemas- querade,friend and colleagueMelanie Klein developedher theoryof "reparation"in an essaythat is, for our purposes,just as strikingfor its evocationand then dismissalof a racializedfiguration in the fantasylife of a femalesubject. Though Klein was not primarilyconcerned with elab- oratinga theoryof"femininity" or "femalesexuality" at the time, she

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 793 wascareful to distinguishbetween the genesisof reparationin womenas opposedto men;hence, her essay"Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Workof Art and in the CreativeImpulse" is dividedin two parts, one focussingon a male,the other on a femalesubject. After discussing the male protagonistin the librettoof a Ravelopera (TheMagic Word, writtenby Colette),Klein analyzes an essayentitled "The Empty Space" by KarinMichaelis, in whichMichaelis gives a biographicalsketch of her friendRuth Kjar, a wealthywoman who becomes a painterand who is the "casestudy" upon whichKlein bases her conclusionsabout the "earliest danger-situationin a girl'sdevelopment" ("I," p. 215). As we have alreadyseen, Klein was instrumentalin emphasizing earlyinfantile aggression toward the motherand in theorizingits succes- sionby a "reparation"phase, which becomes the sourceof creativitylater in life.18 The storyof Kjar,as Kleinsummarizes it fromMichaelis's account, concernsa "beautiful,rich and independent"woman who, asidefrom a flairfor interiordecoration, has "nopronounced creative talent" ("I," p. 215).Although she seemsto havea fulllife, is an activetheater and concert goer,climbs mountains, and travelsextensively, she experiencesbouts of severedepression, which Michaelis describes in theseterms:

"Therewas only one darkspot in her life. In the midstof the happi- nesswhich was natural to her,and seemedso untroubled,she would suddenlybe plungedinto the deepestmelancholy. A melancholythat wassuicidal. If she triedto accountfor this,she wouldsay something to thiseffect: 'There is an emptyspace in me, whichI can neverfill!"' [ I, p.215] Kjarseems to experiencesome happinessafter she is married,but the "emptyspace" returns and continuesto haunt her. Klein quotesfrom Michaelisthus:

"HaveI alreadytold you thather homewas a galleryof modernart? Her husband'sbrother was one of the greatestpainters in the coun- try,and his bestpictures decorated the wallsof the room.But before Christmasthis brother-in-lawtook awayone picture,which he had only lent to her.The picturewas sold. This left an emptyspace on the wall,which in someinexplicable way seemed to coincidewith the emptyspace within her." ["I," p. 215]

18. On the importance of Klein to more recent feminist theory, see Margaret Whit- ford's entry on Klein in Feminismand Psychoanalysis.Whitford suggests that Klein's influence on feminism has been only indirect (via object-relations theory, for instance), partly "because her work appears to locate FEMININITY and feminine heterosexual desire in innate drives" (p. 192). Recent publications, however, suggest a more direct '4return" to Klein among feminists; see, for example, Rose, WhyWar? Psychoanalysis,Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford, 1993), and Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, FromKlein to Kristeva: PsychoanalyticFeminism and the Searchfor the "GoodEnough" Mother (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992).

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Unableto waitfor a new paintingfrom the brother-in-law,Kjar declares to her husbandthat she will"'try to dauba littleon the wallmyself"' ("I," p. 215).This firsteffort launches a verysuccessful painting career, which Kleinbriefly describes before explaininghow this story illustratesher theoryabout infantile anxiety. "Now what is the meaningof this empty spacewithin Ruth," Klein asks, "or rather, to put it more exactly,of the feelingthat there was something lacking in her body?"("I," p. 216). We are alreadyfamiliar with the answer: The littlegirl has a sadisticdesire, originating in the earlystages of the Oedipus conflict,to rob the mother'sbody of its contents, namely,the father'spenis, faeces, children, and to destroy the mother herself.This desire gives rise to anxietylest the mother shouldin her turn rob the little girl herselfof the contentsof her body (especiallyof children)and lest her bodyshould be destroyed or mutilated.["I," p. 217] The restof the articleis takenup witha descriptionof the contentof the paintingsKjar produced after her firstattempt to fill the space;they are almostall portraitsof femalefamily members, the mostsignificant ones (for Klein)depicting Kjar's mother first as an old, then as a young, woman.Klein remarks: It is obviousthat the desireto makereparation, to makegood the injurypsychologically done to the motherand also to restore herselfwas at the bottomof the compellingurge to paintthese portraitsof her relatives.That of the old woman,on the thresholdof death,seems to be the expressionof the primary,sadistic desire to destroy.The daughter'swish to destroyher mother,to see her old, wornout, marred,is the causeof the need to representher in full possessionof her strengthand beauty.By so doingthe daughtercan allayher ownanxiety and can endeavourto restoreher motherand make her new throughthe portrait.In the analysesof children, whenthe representationof destructivewishes is succeededby an expressionof reactivetendencies, we constantlyfind thatdrawing and paintingare used as meansto restorepeople. ["I," p. 218] As I have alreadymentioned, however, Klein's analysis is quite aston- ishingin its indiffierenceto the contentof the firstpainting Kjar produces to fill up the "emptyspace" on the walland in herself.Kjar's husband is far from indifferent:"'She drew him with her, saying:"Come, you will see!"And he saw.He couldnot takehis eyesfrom the sight;could not take it in, did not believeit, couldnot believeit"' ("I," p. 216).Her brother-in- law is equallyalarmed: "'You don't imagine you can persuademe that you paintedthat! What a damnedlie! This picturewas painted by an old and experiencedartist. Who the devilis he? I don'tknow him!"' (quoted in "I,"p. 216).And yet, this same picture has no bearingon Klein'stheory

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Sumrner1995 795 of reparation,since this is the only passingreference she makesto it: "In seekingthe explanationof these ideas [of infantileanxiety and reparation], it is instructiveto considerwhat sort of picturesRuth Kjarhas paintedsince her firstattempt, when she filled the emptyspace on the wallwith the life-sizedfigure of a nakednegress" ("I," p. 217). The de- emphasisof the racializednature of this preludeto a seriesof portraits of the artist'smother and sisteris all the more remarkablegiven that Michaelis,in the articlefrom which Klein draws, gives special attention to the paintingand even goes so faras to implyan identificatoryrelation betweenthe artistand her subjectmatter. In the opening of"The EmptySpace," Michaelis notes that her friendis Danishand IrishCanadian, and then inexplicablyshe attributes to her "acouple dashes of blackAfrican blood" ("ein paar schwarze Afri- kablutspritzer'').l9Whether we can attributethis fantasy of mixedrace to Michaelisor Kjarherself is uncertain,but Michaeliscontinues the sugges- tion in her secondreference to Kjar'spainting: That night Ruth can not sleep much. The pictureon the wall is painted,that is certain-it is not a dream.But how has it happened? And whatnext? Is paintinglike writingbooks? One saysthat every humanbeing could write a book,the bookabout oneself. Should this picture-which by the way portraysa young negress-should this picturebe the firstand lastat the sametime? ["RK," pp. 20F5]

Accordingto Michaelis,then, Ruth here considers the possibilitythat this firstpainting is, like one's firstand only book,autobiographical. In her narrationof the story,Michaelis has withheldthe raceof the womanin the paintinguntil this moment,as thoughto strikethe readermore em- phaticallywith the notionthat Kjar is givingoutward expression to a felt identificationwith racial blackness. In the firstreference to the painting, perhapsbecause she is eagerto emphasizeKjar's unexpected artistic ex- pertise,Michaelis leaves out indicationsof the woman'srace, focussing primarilyon her gender,on her posture,on compositionand lighting: "Theempty space is filledwith a lifesizedwoman. She is halfsitting, half lying,her skinis like gold, she lowersher faceagainst one shoulder,the lightfalls through a smallwindow. In frontof thiswindow an ebonytable with a large stonewarepitcher" ("RK," p. 204). These are the details meant to conveyto the readerwhat so astoundsKjar's artist brother- 19. Karin Michaelis,"Ruth Kjar," Flammende Tage: Gestalten und Fragen zur Gemeinschaft derGeschlechter (Dresden, 1929), p. 200; hereafterabbreviated "RK." This is a Germantrans- lation of the same book written by Michaelisin Danish, published in the same year. It is possiblethat Kleinread the articleon RuthKjar in an Englishor Germanversion published in a differentforum with the title "The Empty Space."I am indebted to Beverley Driver Eddy,who is writinga biographyon Michaelis,for having sent me a copy of the Kjarchap- ter in FlammendeTage. I would also like to thank my colleague Doris Kirschnerfor her Englishtranslation of this text.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 796 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse in-law;he cannotbelieve the paintinghas not been producedby an experienced,male artist("Who the devil is he? I don't knowhim!"). In her narrowfocus on the mother-daughterrelation, Klein neglects to reflect on howthis painting becomes Kjar's admission ticket to the male-defined and -dominatedworld of high artisticproduction. Her home,as we have been told, is a "galleryof modernart"; yet she cannotfind herself,as artist,included among her brother-in-law'spaintings. That she is yet an- otherof van Ophuijsen'swomen who seek"rivalry with men in the intellectualand artisticspheres" seems suggestedby the fact that she feels compelledto fillthe emptyspace left by the malepainter with an attempt of her own. Like Riviere'spatient, by taking up the paintbrushand therebyendeavoring to usurpher brother-in-law'splace as artisticpro- ducer,she risksbeing perceived as having"stolen" his tokenof masculinity.It is reasonableto supposethat she is as anxiousabout the father'sas aboutthe mother'sretribution for her gendertransgression. The contentof the firstpainting is crucial,then, to understandhow it is designedto simultaneouslyeffect Kjar's entry into a primarilymale domainand placatepotentially retaliatory father figures for having"stolen"the phallus.To painta femalenude is, perhaps,in and of itselfto seek legitimacyas creatorof high art. As LyndaNead suggests:"More thanany other subject, the femalenude connotes 'Art'. The framedimage of a femalebody, hung on the wallof an art gallery,is shorthandfor art more generally;it is an icon of westernculture, a symbolof civilization and accomplishment."20To become an artistis to placeoneself in a very specificposition vis-a-vis the femalebody; it is to becomethe meansby whichthat body is abstractedand contained:

The femalenude can thus be understoodas a meansof containing femininityand femalesexuality. If. . . the femalebody has been re- gardedas unformed,undiffierentiated matter, then the procedures and conventionsof high art are one way of controllingthis unruly bodyand placingit withinthe securingboundaries of aestheticdis- course.[FN, p. 2]

By attemptingto maintainand police the "boundariesof aestheticdis- course,"Kjar seeks to escapethe body that standsfor "unformed,un- diffierentiatedmatter," that same body which she has experiencedas harboringan "emptyspace." Andyet Kjarpaints, not simplya "femalenude," but what Michaelis, at the end of her essay,refers to as a "lifesizedfigure of a nakednegress." It is a representationof a woman'sbody that wouldseem to be racially diffierentiatedfrom the artist'sown, but she suspectsit might be the

20. LyndaNead, TheFemaleNude:Art,Obscenity, and Sexuality(London, 1992),p. 1; hereafter abbreviatedFN.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 797 paintedversion of the "bookabout oneself." It is curiousthat, given her eagernessto assertKjar's unexpected artistic talent, Michaelis uses the wordnaked at this point ratherthan the more high-tonednude. While muchart-historical debate has attemptedto establishand valorizea dis- tinctionbetween naked and nude,21 as Neadhas pointedout, since"even at themost basic levels the body is alwaysproduced through representation.... There canbe no naked 'other' to the nude" (FN, p. 16).Another way of puttingthis is to say that if there is a "naked'other,"' it is not the body outsideof representationbut, rather, the bodywithin a representationthat is recog- nized,in someway, to be materiallyspecific. Manet's Olympia bears what T.J. Clarksees as the "signs"of nakednessprecisely because it indexesin someway its subject'ssocial class. And, as Gilmanpoints out in his 1985 readingof Olympia,the "signs"of nakednessinclude not only classbut racialindicators. According to Gilman,Olympia is sexualizedby the pres- enceof herblack servant, and, though she is a whiteprostitute, this whiteness is meantto be suspect.22A nude, then, is a depictionof a (female) body whosewhiteness is notin any waysuspect, since it is assumedthat to be whiteis not to be specifically"raced." To paintan unclothedblack womanis, it would seem, by definitionto paint a "naked,"sexualized woman.

21. Nead clarifiesthe implicationsof this choice of termsin her genealogyof the nude/ naked debate in art-historicaldiscourse. Drawingfrom the work of Kenneth Clark,John Berger,and T. J. Clark,Nead documentsa persistentbinary that characterizesthese writers' positions,concluding with Clark'spraise for the "nakedness"of Manet'sOlympia because it is a "signof class (or, more precisely,working-class) identity," thus refusing to function as a classicalnude, which would be "'a picture for men to look at, in which Woman is constructedas an objectof somebodyelse's desire"'(FN, p. 16). As Nead points out, however, in the workof all three art historians"the discourse on the naked and the nude . . . depends upon the theoreticalpossibility, if not the actuality,of a physicalbody that is outside of representationand is then given representation,for better or for worse, through art"(FN, p. 16). 22. Indeed, that part of Olympia'sspecificity is her "blackness"is attestedto by Picasso's satiricrendition of the paintingin 1901, which Gilmandescribes thus: Olympiais presented as a sexualizedblack, with broad hips, revealedgenitalia, gazing at the nude faneur bearing her a gift of fruit, much as Laura bears a gift of flowers in Manet'soriginal.... Picassoowes part of his reading of the Olympiato the polar image of the primitivefemale as sexual object, as found in the lower-classprostitutes painted by Vincent van Gogh or the Tahitianmaidens a la Diderot painted by Paul Gauguin. Picasso saw the sexualized female as the visual analogue of the black. ["BB,"p. 251] Gilmanpoints out that, in a later painting depicting Zola'sNana, the white prostitutehas taken on the characteristicsthat had been establishedby medicaldiscourse as typicalof the "Hottentot":plumpness, pronounced buttocks, and the atavistic"Darwin's ear." "Thus," writes Gilman,"we know where the black servantis hidden in Nana within Nana. Even Nana'sseeming beauty is but a sign of the blackhidden within"("BB," p. 251). For Gilman, "Manet'sNana thus provides a further reading of his Olympia, a reading which stresses Manet'sdebt to the pathologicalmodel of sexualitypresent during the late nineteenthcentury"("BB," p. 251).

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Why, then, might Ruth Kjarexpect her first painting to accomplish the double task of effecting her entry into the male domain of high art while simultaneously deflecting retaliation from angry father figures whose phallus she has "stolen"?As a wealthywoman who travelledexten- sively and whose house was a "galleryof modern art,"Kjar was no doubt familiarwith the traditionof the (white)female nude and its naked black counterparts in Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso. Michaelis's varying descriptions of Kjar's "naked negress" suggest that its status within the tradition of this naked/nude dichotomy is ambiguous. The painting is described, at first, as a semi-recliningwoman with "skin like gold," lit by the light falling through a window, her racial identity dis- placed perhaps onto the "ebonytable" nearby; then later she is described as "a young negress";it is not until the end of the sketch that Michaelis reveals that she is unclothed, referring to her as "the lifesized composi- tion of the naked negress"(the term Klein adopts).Thus we are, by turns, invited to consider her status first as a classicallyarranged figure belong- ing to the abstract,universal domain of the aestheticized female body, then as a particularizedfemale figure insofar as she is designated by a racial term, then finally as both racialized and "naked" (rather than "nude"),which would seem to contradict the implied classicismof the first description. If Kjar has presumed to fill an "empty space"hitherto reserved for the male paintbrush, it is possible that, by this ambiguous depiction of an unclothed female body that is at once both black and classical,she hopes, like Riviere'spatient, to appear to restore the phallus to its "rightful"wielders. The "nakednegress," like the "attackingnegro," could be interpreted as a kind of sacrificewithin the gendered scene of power negotiations between a white woman and the white men whose retaliation she fears. Indeed, just as Riviere's patient imagines she will "deliver to justice" her attacking "negro,"so too Michaelis invokes the authorityfigures by whom Kjar'spaintings will be judged: "Now that the first pictures are being brought before the right art criticism,whose duty it is to show mistakes,one will say that Ruth Kjaris supposed to 'learn"' ssRK, p. 206). But Michaelisfollows this line of thought by proposing that Kjarbe exempt from suchjudgment and therefore exempt from the necessityof "learning"or being officiallytrained as an artist. "But it is smarterif she didn't ['learn'].Because what she has now she has because of God'sgrace" ("RK,"p. 206). It is as though an implied double primitivismis finally being admitted here: Kjarpaints "primitively"because she has no prior training, and the first thing she paints is a "primitive""naked negress." It might be suggested that her masquerade is a masquerade of "primi- tiveness"; the potentially retaliatory brother-in-law need not punish Kjar for having stolen the paintbrush since she is not an artist in the sense that he is an artist; rather, as her "self-portrait"as "naked ne-

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 799 gress"will attest, she is an untutored primitive whose nakedness reveals no stolen instrument. Even within the terms of a theory of reparation, where both Kjar's "empty space" and her reparative painting are understood to have re- sulted from anxiety about an infantile desire to disembowelher mother, Klein's admission of, then subsequent silence about, the racializedcon- tent of that first painting is suspect. That Klein's theory is predicated upon an example containing this unexamined representation suggests that it is, in itself, a theory of a specificallywhite female subjectivity.Klein closes the essay by noting that, although the "earliestanxiety-situation" for girls arising from fantasiesof aggression towardsthe mother may "be the cause of serious illness and many inhibitions,""the case of Ruth Kjar shows plainly that this anxiety of the little girl is of greatest importance in the ego-developmentof women, and is one of the incentivesto achievement" ("I,"p. 218). Klein'stheory has been valorizedfor its contradiction of Freud'sschema, in which the woman's"super-ego is never so inexora- ble, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men"because it is only those who can be threatened by castration that is, those who have penises who will experience an "incentive"to culturalachievement.23 Klein, on the other hand, insists that both ego and superego are possiblein women; moreover,they do have "incen- tives to achievement"by virtue of their fear, if not of castration,then of being disemboweledby a retaliatingmother. Yet it turns out that, at least in one representativecase, such incentive is announced by a reparative image that tells us the white female imaginaryis occupied not only by a fantasized retaliatorywhite mother but also by a racially differentiated Other.This Other is not male, not white, and apparentlycrucial in nego- tiating how attempts at achievement will be received in a world where achievement is traditionallya white man's prerogative. The filling of a psychologicalempty space with a naked negress was clearly a significant trope for both Kjar and her enthusiastic biographer. But something about the specificobsessions of psychoanalysisprevented Klein, the third white woman in this mise-en-abzmeof female representations,from exploring that significancein such a way that it might seriously transformthe institutionshe was both entering and creating.

5. Conclusion

Psychoanalyticfeminist theory participatesin what can only be a self- defeating process of disavowalinsofar as it deploys psychoanalysisas a

23. See Freud, "Some PsychicalConsequences of the AnatomicalDistinction between the Sexes,"Standard Edition, 19:248-58.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 800 Jean Walton Racein (White)PsychoanalyticDiscourse means of rewriting female subjectivityyet remains silent about race.24 Given the urgency that still informs (since the l910s and 1920s) the proj- ects of feminist and lesbian interventions in psychoanalysis,and in psychoanalyticallyinformed feminist critique, it has seemed strategically crucial to bracket off, elide, ignore, or trivialize the ways in which race (however that may be constructed in a specific context) might manifest itself in the process of theoretical, social scientific, and identity-driven investigations.While it is not alwaysmade explicit, the assumptionseems to be that instancesof racializedidentifications and desires must be sepa- rated or siphoned off from case material(such as Riviereand Klein's)that seems particularlypromising as a matrix for interrogating how gender and sexuality have been constructed,performed, and policed. By remov- ing or ignoring race, the case material can thus be restored to a more "pure"state in which an exploration of gender can proceed unhindered by "extraneous"considerations. The Riviere essay is perhaps the most striking case in point. It may be t-hatits enduring fascination for feminist scholars of both gendered and sexual subjectivityinheres only partlyin its elaborationof femininity as a masquerade.While masqueradehas undergone a richlydiverse array of theoreticalreinscriptions, revisions, and transformations,Riviere's in- difference to the racializedcomponents of her patient'sfantasies is reproduced with a striking monotony by her feminist successors. It would seem, thus, that the peculiarreadiness of Riviere'sessay as a "usable"text lies to a great extent in the permission it gives to invoke, only to ignore, the cultural constructionsof race that inform it, the better to focus on the more seemingly universal issues of gender and sexuality. With the exception of EmilyApter's discussion of masqueradein her book Feminiz- ing the Fetish, Mary Ann Doane's appropriation of Riviere'swork is the only one I know of to have at least mentioned in passing that

Riviere'spatient has a number of sexual fantasieslinking blacks,sexuality, power, and degradation fantasies which are rarely, if ever,

24. Toni Morrison'sbook Playing in the Dark: Whitenessand the LiteraryImagination (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1992) offers a literaryanalogue to this disavowal.In the long essay "Black Matters,"Morrison notes with fascinationthe way in which some of the most powerful literarycritics, in their "lavishexploration of literature"manage "not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatricalpresence of black surrogacy an informing, stabilizing,and dis- turbingelement in the literaturethey . . . study"(p. 13). As a criticwho is herselfa writer, Morrisoncame to realizethat in literaturewritten by whites,"the fabrication of an Africanist personais reflexive;an extraordinarymeditation on the self;a powerfulexploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerlyconscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity"(p. 17). Instead of turning politelyaway from the racialconstructions in the "great"white texts of Westernliterature, Morrisonurges that we interrogatethe precise waysin which the compellingrichness and complexityof these texts depend upon and are buttressedby those racialconstructions.

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discussed in the criticalaccounts of Riviere'sconcept of masquerade. [FFfp. 38]

And yet, in her 1991 book FemmesFatales, even Doane restrictsher analysis of psychoanalyticconstructions of race to a separate chapter on Freud's "darkcontinent" trope;25 though she makes mention of the racial material in Riviere, her two chapters on feminine masqueradeproceed as if a discussion of female subjectivitycould somehow transcend, or forget, its racializedcontexts. Emily Apter's reference to the racial fantasy of Riviere'spatient is, like Doane's, also somewhat cursory and functions merely as a supple- ment to her analysisof why the concept of masqueradeis inferior to the concept of the fetish as the grounding for a feminist elaborationof femininity. She points out that "with its language of veils, masks, and sexual travesty,the discourse of the masqueradeseems always to participatein the very obfuscationof femininitythat it seeks to dispel."26But if feminists are not convinced by this argument (Apter seems to imply), then they might want to dissociatethemselves from Riviereon the basis that to rely upon her case study would be to participatein racistassumptions. Apter concludes her brief discussion of the racial fantasy in Riviere by suggesting that the "lessonwe might draw"from it is that "the chosen prototype of the masquerading woman is a problematic figure abstracted from history and culture and blind to the psychosexual politics of racism."27As I have suggested, however,it is preciselythe way in which Rivi- ere, and her masquerading woman, are problematic that makes them especiallypromising as prototypesfor understandinghow femininityhas been constructed and played out within its particularlyracialized con- texts. Teresa de Lauretis provides a striking example of how fore- grounding the (racially)problematic prototype is equally important in

25. In "DarkContinents" in FI;;Doane offers a rich explorationof the implicationsof Freud'strope of the "darkcontinent" as a metaphorfor femalesexuality, as well as a critique of the sexual politicsin Fanon'stexts, and suggestivereadings of The Birth of a Nation and Sirk'sImitation of Life. And yet, even though the term masqueradereappears in this chapter, it has by this time been evacuatedof its valence as a concept for (white)female subjectivity, and functions rather as a generalizedindicator for how "Blacknessis a costume which is worn or removed at will by whites [as in blackface],while whitenessin its symbolicdimen- sion (the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan)is also a form of masqueradewhich concealsan identity"(FI;; p. 229). What would happen in Doane's reading of The Birth of a Nation, for example, if the link were made explicit between the woman in Riviere'scase study and the LillianGish character,Elsie, who must be saved from the lustful desire of Silas Lynch?Or, more to the point, how might our understandingof Rivierebe alteredif we were to see her as sharingin the same white fantasyof racializedsexuality that informsthe Griffithfilm? 26. Apter,Feminizing the Fetish,p. 90. 27. Ibid., pp. 91-92.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 802 Jean Walton Racein (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse the project of elaboratingspecifically lesbian subjectivities.In discussing van Ophuijsen's article on the "masculinitycomplex" in her book The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexualityand PerverseDesire, de Lauretis restricts her considerationof the racializedtrope of the "Hottentotnymphae" to a "briefdigression" (that is, presumablynot centralto her criticalexplora- tion of the constructionof female homosexualityin psychoanalyticliterature) (PL, p. 35). After summarizing Gilman's work on the Hottentot Venus, de Lauretisdirects our attention to the work of CarlaScott, whose Ph.D. qualifyingessay, "The Hottentot Effect:The Crisisof BlackLesbian Representation"sketches out how black lesbian narrativessuch as Audre Lorde's Zami can function as "sitesof resistanceto 'the legacy of the Hot- tentot Venus'and as the creation of a new discursivespace for theorizing black lesbian subjectivity"(PL, pp. 36-37). The project of specifyingand reclaiming black lesbian subjectivityis, indeed, a crucial one. Yet, this section of de Lauretis'stext tends to give the impressionthat white women's fantasies of having "Hottentot nymphae"are more pertinent to an investigation of black than of white female subjectivity.The "sexuality" in de Lauretis'sbook title is marked only as "lesbian,"not as "white," unwittingly,perhaps, making the book seem to pose as establishinga racially unmarked theory of lesbian subjectivity(its whiteness barely acknowledged) to be supplemented by other raciallymarked "versions"in texts such as Scott's. This problem is reproduced in "Recastingthe Primal Scene," de Lauretis's otherwise brilliant reading of Sheila McLaughlin'sfilm She Must Be Seeing Things, which first appeared as "Filmand the Visible"in How Do I Look?Queer Film and Video(the publishedversion of papers given at a conference by the same name in New Yorkin 1989) and then revised and incorporatedinto The Practiceof Love. In the transcriptionof the discussion that followed de Lauretis'spaper at the New Yorkconference, de Lauretisis asked if she can "saysomething about the critiqueof She Must Be Seeing Things [which depicts a white woman and a black Latina in a lesbian couple] in regard to its treatment of racial difference." In re- sponse, de Lauretis notes that a common objectionto the film "seemsto be that [it] poses the question of racial difference, but then avoids it by collapsingit into questions of culturalor ethnic difference.This observa- tion strikes me as correct, but I don't think the film allows one to deal with it beyond locatingit as a problem."Because, as she explains, the film does not explicitly address its own constructionof racial difference in a way that would allow her to "rethinkand say something interestingabout the relations of race, sexuality, and desire," she remains adamant throughout the discussionperiod (during which she is challenged repeat- edly on the issue) that there is little more to be said, in the context of her project,about the film'sdepiction of race. She contraststhe film to "other lesbian texts that do not elide race, like Audre Lorde'sZami" and Cherrie Moraga'splay Giving up the Ghost, which have allowed her to write about

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CriticalInquiry Summer1995 803

"the issue of race in feminist theory and in lesbian representation."28 Though she makes reference to them in a brief footnote, the conference participants'questions about the racialtrope in She Must Be Seeing Things, as well as de Lauretis'sconsideration of them, are dropped from the version of her reading of the film that appears in The Practice of Love, the better to foreground the film's primaryconcern with "sexualityand fantasy"as well as how it is "informedby the critique of representationpro- duced by the work of avant-garde filmmakersas well as feminist film critics and theorists"(PL, p. 86). Not surprisingly,given her interest in the work of (white) "feminist film critics and theorists," de Lauretis's reading of McLaughlin evokes once more Riviere's masquerade essay and the feminist uses to which it has been put, without remarkingon the racial trope at the center of the essay or elaborating on how it might inform subsequent white women's (indeed, white lesbians') fantasies of racial difference. Having asked how Riviere's white patient engages in culturally produced and reinforced fantasies of racial difference in order to negotiate proscribed intellectual pursuits as well as prohibited sexual desires, we might then ask how a white lesbian filmmaker like McLaughlineither reproduces or departs from Riviere as she mobilizes locally constructedassumptions about racial diffierencein the 1980s and 1990s, even though, like Riviere,she is not explicitlyforegrounding those assumptionsin her project.As I hope I have been suggesting, analysisof white-authoredworks that evoke, even as they elide, race can tell us much about the "issueof race in feminist theory and lesbianrepresentation," in particular,about how to make visible the otherwise unmarked whiteness of such texts and of how they subtend the whitenessof "lesbiansexuality" as it has been constructed thus far. The rich and subtle work of white lesbian/feministtheorists such as de Lauretis can no longer affiordto bracket oS the question of how white fantasies of racial difference, whether or not they seem to be about race, inflect the work they do. I have brought into view the racializedcomponents in the case studies by Riviere, van Ophuijsen, and Klein not in order to displace the theorizationsof gender and sexuality enabled by those texts but to foreground how those theorizationsdepend upon an untheorized racial domain. So far, white-authored psychoanalytic attempts to make an argument for a specifically"feminine" or "female"subject-position have only succeeded by their persistent refusal to ask questions about the his- toricallydetermined whiteness of the models they employ. Feminismas an institutionhas thus reenacted,perhaps, the way in which psychoanalysis as an institution(as illustratedby the Jones/Malinowskidebate) defen- sively armored itself against charges of ethnocentrism. Having acknowledged this, I would suggest that the project now seems to be to

28. Nancy Graham et al., "Discussion," in HowDo I Look?Queer Film and Video,ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle, 1991), pp. 264, 273, 268-69.

This content downloaded on Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:03:47 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 804 Jean Walton Race in (White)Psychoanalytic Discourse investigate, in very specific and detailed ways, local constructionsof racialized identificationand desire, especiallyin those areas where the dis- courses of psychoanalysisand feminismintersect and enrich each other.29 The objectiveof such a project would not be to establisha more comprehensive ontology of femininity, or of female or lesbian sexuality but, rather,to interrogate the ways in which the feminist ontologies hitherto constructed are implicated in a vexed genealogy of racializeddiscourse. We need to expose and address the way in which whiteness has come to pose as deeply constitutive of female subjectivity,even in the most groundbreakingwork of feministsto date.

29. ElizabethAbel has undertakena projectanalogous to this one in her comprehensive and provocativeessay "BlackWriting, White Reading:Race and the Politicsof Feminist Interpretation,"Critical Inqulry 19 (Spring 1993):470-98. See also RacializingFemaleSubjec- tivities:Feminism, Psychoarlalysis, Cultural Production, ed. Abel, BarbaraChristian, Helene Mog- len (forthcoming).

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