Fair Sex, Savage Dreams

Walton Jean Walton

Description

In Fair Sex, Savage Dreams Jean Walton examines the work of early feminist psychoanalytic writing to decipher in it the unacknowledged yet foundational role of race. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, a time when white women were actively refashioning Freud's problematic accounts of sexual subjectivity, Walton rereads in particular the writing of British analysts Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein, modernist poet H.D., the eccentric French analyst Marie Bonaparte, and anthropologist Margaret Mead.Charting the fantasies of racial difference in these women's writings, Walton establishes that race-particularly during this period-was inseparable from accounts of gender and sexuality. While arguing that these women remained notably oblivious to the racial meanings embedded in their own attempts to rearticulate feminine sexuality, Walton uses these very blindspots to understand how race and sex are deeply imbricated in the constitution of subjectivity. Challenging the notion that subjects acquire gender identities in isolation from racial ones, she thus demonstrates how white-centered psychoanalytic theories have formed the basis for more contemporary feminist and queer explorations of fantasy, desire, power, and subjectivity.Fair Sex, Savage Dreams will appeal to scholars of psychoanalysis, literary and cinematic modernism, race studies, queer theory, feminist theory, and anthropology.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 16 février 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822380931
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

* FAIR SEX, SAVAGE DREAMS

* FAIR SEX,

SAVAGE DREAMS

Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Di√erence

Jean Walton

Duke University Press

Durham & London, 2001

∫2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Adobe Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted material appear on page 245, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

For my nieces and nephews: Justine, Casey, Ilia, & Joey

144

ix

viii

Acknowledgments

1

SIX A People of Her Own: Margaret Mead

Introduction

* CONTENTS

THREE Marie Bonaparte and the ‘‘Executive Organ’’ 82

FIVE The Ethnographic Alibi

FOUR ‘‘The Black Spitting Girl!!’’

177

ONE Masquerade and Reparation: (White) Womanliness in Riviere and Klein 17

TWO ‘‘Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-Folk’’: Psychoanalysis and the Queer Matrix ofBorderline41

197

Conclusion

190

SEVEN A Rap on Race: Mead and Baldwin

227

219

List of Figures

102

Bibliography

Index

Notes

129

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

* FIGURES

Pete photographed against the ‘‘natural’’ backdrop of cumulous clouds 54 Astrid clenches her hands in ‘‘neurotic-erotic suppression’’ 54 Pete reconciles with Adah, in her ‘‘shop-bought’’ hat 56 Thorne and Astrid in their room, after Astrid’s ‘‘masquerade’’ of death 56 Kenneth Macpherson shoots a scene with Paul Robeson assisted by Borderlinecast and crew 58 The manageress and barmaid look on as Astrid engages in a racist tirade in the cafe 72 The pianist 73 Pete and Adah in a moment of intimacy in their room 75 Thorne and Pete in their final scene of forgiveness 79 Director Kenneth Macpherson and Paul Robeson taking a break during the shooting ofBorderline80 Table correlating clitoris-vagina distance with details of sexual activity 84 Diagram showing three possible positions of the clitoris in relation to the vaginal opening 85 ‘‘Suzette’s Journey’’ 132 Mead and Luther Cressman 170 Mead with Katharine Rothenberger 170 Mead in Vaitogi 172 Mead with Reo Fortune 172 Mead with Gregory Bateson 173 Mead with Paulo 173 Mead with Ponkiau, Bopau, and Tchokal 174 Mead with daughter, Catherine 174

* ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people contributed to the writing of this book, either by literally reading and responding to it or by making the world the kind of place in which it could be written, that I hardly know where to begin acknowledg- ing them here. I should say first that for the past few years, I’ve relied heavily on a core of friends and colleagues for their sustaining friendship, generous encouragement, and inspiriting intellectual exchange: Jim Mor- rison, my favorite expert on queer film and modernism; Laura Doan, the lesbian postmodern queen of sexology; Marlene Mussell, who along with Laura has provided incomparable Cumbrian hospitality for the past three years; Arthur Riss, whose critical acumen is always a spur to my own; Stephen Barber, for his Woolfian intensity; and Jennifer Manlowe, for her wit and her smarts, and for always knowing how to keep things moving. I’ve been especially inspired by the work of Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks and Ann Pellegrini, whom I consider to be my closest intellectual colleagues in the area of psychoanalysis and race. For their comments and suggestions, as well as for providing an ideal intellectual and creative community while I was writing the middle chap- ters of the book, I’m grateful to my friends and colleagues in the Provi- dence Arts and Writing Group and the University of Rhode Island Works- in-Progress group: Sheri Wills, Arthur Riss, Nina Markov, Marie-Christine Aquarone, Monica Allen, Mary Casale, Jennifer Manlowe, Paula Bolduc, Jim Hersh, Nancy Cook, Dana Shugar, Stephen Barber, Karen Carr, Russell Potter, and Wally Sillanpoa. My gratitude also to participants for their feedback in Judith Butler and Diana Fuss’s seminars at the 1995 summer session of the Dartmouth School of Criticism and Theory, as well as in the 1996–1997 seminar at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. I’d also like to thank many individuals whose observations and suggestions were invaluable at various stages of the writing: Lee Ann Brown, Lise Carlson, Mathilda Hills, Melissa Ragona, Abigail Child, Caren Kaplan, Terri Barnes, Elizabeth Francis, Katherine Rudolph, Lynne Joy- rich, Charlie Shepherdson, Elizabeth Weed, Louise Newman, Ara Wilson, Nina Arzberger, Daniel Boyarin, and Maria Pramaggiore. I owe a special