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đŸȘ” The Threshold

A white woman's racial fantasies can weaponize race against patriarchal authority

Properties2
tagsja-picks, definitional_content, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@goldberg_companion_2002, loc. 1287, @hooks_aint_1981, loc. 526, @razack_casting_2008, loc. 190

4 min read

A white woman’s racial fantasies can weaponize race against patriarchal authority

Evidence

In her famous theory of masquerade she elaborated a model of the feminine psychic defenses that were mobilized against the destructive, castratory effects of patriarchal authority. To illustrate her ideas she discusses the case of a patient who had fantasies of being attacked by a “Negro” whom she would first seduce and then hand over to the police. Riviere notes that this fantasy had been very common in her patient’s childhood and youth, which she had spent in the southern states of America; in fantasy then, her patient asserts the power of female desire in the face of male violence, by exploiting her position of racial superiority to attack black potency. 
 Riviere calls this series of displacements, through which the place of the sexual and racial other is assumed only to be disavowed, a process of masquerade, and she links it to the arts of seduction which women learn as the only way of asserting their own desire within the field of male sexual dominance (Hughes, 1991). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1287 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Sexist ideology was the core of the matriarchy myth. Implicit in the assertion that black women were matriarchs was the assumption that patriarchy should be maintained at all costs and that the subordination of the female was necessary for the healthy achievement of manhood. In effect, Moynihan suggested that the negative effects of racist oppression of black people could be eliminated if black females were more passive, subservient and supportive of patriarchy. Once again, woman’s liberation was presented as inimical to black liberation. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and
, 526 (#complicates, via linked claim)

It is in the interest of confronting a ‘fascist poetics,’ and out of the need to move beyond the mythologies (of cultural difference) that so easily reconciles the West to the sexualized torture of Arabs and Muslims, that I have pursued an interlocking analysis of prisoner abuse. Drawing on scholarship on lynching, I have been advancing a theoretical framework that suggests how white masculinity is constituted simultaneously against warmth and sensuality as well as against desire for (oneness with) the racial other. 
 Culture has been the language of contemporary narratives of terror. Cultural difference, understood as their cannibalism, their treatment of women, and their homophobia, justifies the savagery that the West metes out. ‘The Christian in me says this is wrong,’ Charles Graner, one of the soldiers charged with abuse and the alleged ringleader, is reputed to have said, ‘but the corrections officer in me can’t help making a grown man piss himself.’ The West has appointed itself as the corrections officer to the non-West, and Charles Graner should not be understood as a man who has simply taken his duties too far. For what else is a civilized man to do in his encounter with savages but civilize them? — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 190 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: White women defended racial hierarchy because it mediated their own gender subordination. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as
, 186; White women historically invoked racial superiority to assert sexual agency against patriarchal control. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1287; The Moynihan matriarchy myth prescribed female subordination as the cure for racial oppression — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and
, 526 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

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