White Men Aren't

DiPiero Thomas DiPiero

Description

Psychoanalytic theory has traditionally taken sexual difference to be the fundamental organizing principle of human subjectivity. White Men Aren't contests that assumption, arguing that other forms of difference-particularly race-are equally important to the formation of identity. Thomas DiPiero shows how whiteness and masculinity respond to various, complex cultural phenomena through a process akin to hysteria and how differences traditionally termed "racial" organize psychic, social, and political life as thoroughly as sexual difference does. White masculinity is fraught with anxiety, according to DiPiero, because it hinges on the unstable construction of white men's cultural hegemony. White men must always struggle against the loss of position and the fear of insufficiency-against the specter of what they are not.Drawing on the writings of Freud, Lacan, Butler, Foucault, and Kaja Silverman, as well as on biology, anthropology, and legal sources, Thomas DiPiero contends that psychoanalytic theory has not only failed to account for the role of race in structuring identity, it has in many ways deliberately ignored it. Reading a wide variety of texts-from classical works such as Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to contemporary films including Boyz 'n' the Hood and Grand Canyon-DiPiero reveals how the anxiety of white masculine identity pervades a surprising range of Western thought, including such ostensibly race-neutral phenomena as Englightenment forms of reason.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Ethnic studies
• Social

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 09 septembre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383949
• Langue: English

Extrait

WHITE MEN AREN’T

WHITE MEN AREN’T

Thomas DiPiero

duke university press

Durham & London 2002

∫2002 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Rebecca M. Giménez

Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

An earlier version of chapter 2

appeared as ‘‘Missing Links: White-

ness and the Color of Reason in the

Eighteenth Century,’’The Eighteenth

Century: Theory and Interpretation40,

no. 2 (summer 1999). Part of chapter 5

appeared as ‘‘White Men Aren’t,’’

Camera Obscura30 (1994).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments, vii

Introduction: Believing Is Seeing, 1

1. Complex Oedipus: Reading Sophocles, Testing Freud, 23

2. Missing Links, 52

3. The Fair Sex: It’s Not What You Think, 102

4. In Defense of the Phallus, 151

5. White Men Aren’t, 183

Afterword, 229

Notes, 235

Works Cited, 309

Index, 331

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book originated out of a curiosity to determine whether the obser- vations I had read in a great deal of feminist scholarship concerning men and their desires—observations made largely, although in no way exclusively, by women—were true. My curiosity turned to frustration when I realized that if I couldn’t determine whether the observations were true about me, then there wasn’t any hope for determining their veracity for men in general. I nevertheless continued interrogating sit- uations in which I or others I knew (not all of whom, by the way, were men) did or did not evince the particular features deemed characteristic of masculinity. Thus was born a hypothesis of masculine hysteria, which, if it didn’t yet have the clinical or theoretical backing, neverthe- less had the particular advantage that it just felt right. Fortunately for me, a great number of people were willing to put up with the hysteria. It is often the case that one’s closest friends are not one’s best readers. Emotional or a√ective proximity sometimes seems to oppose critical distance. My friends, however, have been only too happy to tell me when I don’t make any sense; my students seemed to consider it their duty, and those in ‘‘Contemporary French Thought,’’ ‘‘Constructions of Masculinity,’’ and ‘‘Freud and Lacan’’ helped shape significant portions of this book. Friends and colleagues at the University of Rochester in the Depart- ment of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of En- glish, as well as in the interdepartmental programs in Visual and Cul- tural Studies and the Susan B. Anthony Institute collaborate in producing a lively intellectual climate, and a great deal of this book grew out of our discussions and debates. I am also indebted to specific people for their special help. In particular I thank Sue Gustafson, Cilas Kemed-

jio, Trevor Hope, Joel Morales, Noreen Javornik, Tim Walters, Kien Ket Lim, Michael Holly, Douglas Crimp, Claudia Schaefer, Darby English, Eva Geulen, Babacar Camara, Beth Newman, Kathleen Parthé, and Mohammed Bamyeh (who did me the added favor of making me real- ize I needed a much bigger house). To Pat Gill, who is sometimes me, there is no need to express thanks, because she’ll finish this sentence for me anyway. Randall Halle valiantly defended my defense of the phallus, and John Michael let me get away with nothing, which requires more energy than anyone should have to expend. Thanks also to Richard Estell, who showed me that you actually can learn how to see, and to Sharon Willis, who over the years has done me the tremendous favor of reading me especially well. I thank Rajani Sudan for her theo- retical insights, and also and especially for asking di≈cult questions totally in the dark. I thank Je√ Hilyard for still hearing the saxophone music after so many years.

viii

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: BELIEVING IS SEEING

I object to a strategy which situates men in such a way that the only speaking positions available to them are those of tame feminist or wild antifemi- nist. —K. K. Ruthven,Feminist Literary Studies

ometime during the early 1990s, the dead white male, that extraor- S dinarily prolific author who wrote most of the books featured in high-school and college curricula across the United States, died. An- other white male took his place, but this one wasn’t dead—he was angry. Suddenly angry white men were popping up everywhere, and what they were mad at, at least according to the dozens of newspaper and maga- zine articles reporting the phenomenon, was the decline in their value, both cultural and economic, to the general population. From the front pages of theNew York Timesand theWall Street Journal,feature stories inTimeandNewsweek,and from discussion groups on the Internet, we have learned that angry white men resent the imposition of a≈rmative action and the so-called reverse discrimination it produces. They de- plore the competing definitions of family, history, and politics that arise along with increasingly diverse—and increasingly vocal—minority pop- ulations. Perhaps most of all, however, they rage against the mutating definition of white masculinity itself as it responds to shifting social, political, and economic tides. There is really nothing new about white men being angry, however. In fact, anger seems to be constitutive of the identity. Even if we go as far back in time as Homer’sIliad,what we see is that white men—or at least men belonging to those cultures that would later be identified as white—are not only angry, but confused about who they are supposed to be as well. ‘‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus,’’ theIliad opens, and that perhaps first of angry white men must later decide whether revenge or a burgeoning form of compassion should be what