Racial violence functions as a homoerotic affair between white and black men.

Evidence

When scholars theorize racial violence as a ritual, they stress that it is an ‘an affair between men.’ As in Baldwin’s story, men’s disavowal of the maternal, the feminine, and the body, as well as the replacing of the body with the phallus, is required to mark the boundary between whiteness and blackness, producing what William Pinar poetically describes as ‘the despair of the loveless.’ For Pinar, racial violence cannot be understood unless queered – that is to say, in the words of Frantz Fanon, ‘the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual.’ The problem is that white men are neither permanently white nor permanently men and white heterosexual manhood is constituted by perpetually disavowing homoerotic desire for black men. … For Robyn Weigman too, the obsession with black men’s genitals in lynching reveals desire and a sadistic homoeroticism that is being disavowed. Similarly, Andrea Dworkin maintains: ‘The essential sexual antagonism that is basic to racism is expressed as if the possession of women were the issue, but fundamentally the antagonism is homoerotic.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scholarly literature on lynching and white-supremacist homoeroticism (Pinar, Fanon, Weigman, Dworkin) — relevant to the reader’s interest in how erotics and race intersect.
• QUESTION: How directly does the homoerotic ‘affair between men’ frame transfer from American lynching context to the Abu Ghraib tortures, where women were also perpetrators?