Abstract
Unquestioned, whiteness provides the models by which the Western subject judges culture. As the norm, whiteness passes unremarked, perpetuating the canonical conventions and traditions that sustain its privilege;1 whiteness is assumed, while only otherness is pronounced.2 Any study of whiteness, therefore, has to consider the role it plays as the universalist measure against which all other identities become particular—made too particular to be applied universally. Although woven into the very fabric of Western culture, it is a discourse that makes bodies matter and that gives matter meaning.3 The situation of whiteness is that of a body historicized and racialized to the point where its material particularity is obscured. Otherness is violently suppressed in order to promote the idea of a universal figure of disembodied, metaphysical transcendence.4
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