White savagery is inverted into civilized protection of women

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Suburban anti-integration appeals target white women’s safety fears — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 498; 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; White women gain citizenship rewards by participating in imperial violence (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• White women historically invoked racial superiority to assert sexual agency against patriarchal control. #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1287