Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns

Abstract

Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns Krista Comer (bio) In the turbulent summer of 2020—amidst an uncontrolled pandemic and massive protests against police brutality on US streets—op-ed writers reported a "great white awakening on racism," an assault on white innocence without the typical hem and haw, the fragility or defenses of white guilt (Thornton). Springing up in geographies not on anyone's antiracist map of America, the first draft of a new history of race relations in this country seemed to be in process. Older white people stood with signs on unlikely suburban street corners. Throngs of multiracial young folks were getting in front of tear gas, putting their bodies on the line. Terms like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" circulated in public discourse with new legitimacy and ubiquity while the white studies scholar Robin DiAngelo made the rounds on cable TV, astounded her 2018 book White Fragility was sold out. The election of 2020 reveals the roughness of this first draft of a new history of race relations, how potent white supremacy remains as a political force, and how divided the US West is between red and blue states, urban and rural political culture. Now that the results are in, and Donald Trump defeated, the tens of millions who signed on for another term of white nationalist rule will not go away. Indeed, the affective discourse of white grievance that brought Trump to power is stronger. The famous "suburban white woman's" vote showed her to be less tired of Trumpism than predicted. Whatever racial reckoning was happening among white progressives about white women's politics has, however, been eclipsed by the January 6 insurrection of white nationalist patriarchs at the US Capitol. While horrifying, the action was also familiar to US West [End Page 101] researchers tracking extremism in the region. NPR's Kirk Siegler, in the "Roots of U.S. Capitol Insurrectionists Run Through American West," reports on extremist street activities, since 2014, of the People's Rights movement led by Ammon Bundy. Bundy has called his followers to live and die as "free men" as they stormed federal buildings and threatened officials, in effect providing a "Western ethos" playbook for Trump loyalists like the Proud Boys (Siegler). Escalated white violence makes understanding grievance politics all the more urgent. Do white progressives have anything to offer those who occupy this aggressive injured standpoint other than critique, superiority, or condemnation? Can feminists who are white (by descriptive definition, white feminists) not flinch at the term "white feminist," perhaps use it to engage the trope of "white feminism" that women of color feminisms continue to invoke as meaningful to them? Such questions about whiteness, the social geographies of the nation, and to what feminist politics are accountable are among the most pressing for feminism and for critical regional theory and action. The pervasive suspicion of feminism as "white feminism" (unless it is otherwise named, i.e., black feminism) fundamentally structures feminist alliances. This relational strain, so familiar to feminist histories and persistent, is white women's problem to fix. To do so, white feminists need to understand the problem of whiteness for white women so much better. I begin through recent political events to keep the stakes of whiteness at the top of the ticket, so to speak, at the forefront of critical concerns. Certainly, the fact of racial hierarchies in histories of conquest has been one center for the field of western American literary and cultural studies over the last thirty years and including, in the last ten years, a transformative turn to frameworks from Indigenous studies and settler theory. This essay continues that trajectory as well as builds on work over the last several years to theorize the political and aesthetic concerns an explicitly feminist critical regionalism can help critics analyze. If the advent of more "critical" regional frameworks in the field of western literary and cultural studies substantiated and gave name to a problem that too often had no name, the problem of whiteness, I will be [End Page 102] concerned here with whiteness not from the more familiar vantage point of critique or disavowal but rather from the perspective...