White women historically invoked racial superiority to assert sexual agency against patriarchal control.

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Riviere’s ‘masquerade’ concept is defined: assuming the place of the racial other only to disavow it, learned as women’s sole avenue of desire within male dominance.
• XREF: The masquerade concept parallels gender-as-performance theories (Judith Butler’s later work) and psychoanalytic race theory (Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks). — connects to: White women fear black women’s power to expose their hypocrisy — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 203; Englishwomen earned equality claims by demonstrating superiority over colonized women — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 162; White women defended racial hierarchy because it mediated their own gender subordination. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 186 (+4 more)
• SEED: Article angle: the specific mechanism by which marginalized identity groups borrow prestige/dominance from another axis of hierarchy to negotiate within their own subordination — a recurring dynamic in race, class, and caste intersections.