Writing/Reading Selves, Writing/Reading Race

Abstract

For several years now, feminist theory and philosophy have been faced with criticisms from African American feminists for not taking race sufficiently into account in discussions of women's issues. This criticism was embroiled in the recent controversies over essentialism in feminist theory. A number of feminist theorists have acknowledged the validity of this criticism and several of those most important to continental thought have given race more attention in their most recent work. Elisabeth Grosz acknowledges that bodies are raced as well as gendered and sexed (Volatile Bodies). Kelly Oliver cites bell hooks as an ally in claiming that the term "woman" (and the idea of sexual difference) needs to be kept in play for the sake of feminism. Oliver argues that dropping "woman" in favor of a generalized humanity would only benefit women whose male counterparts are at the top of the heap; that is, white men (Womanizing Nietzsche). Drucilla Cornell devotes several pages to an analysis of the interaction of race, gender, and sexual desire manifested in a disturbing incident in her own life (Transformations). Three essays in Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter focus on those charged intersections in literary and film settings. Butler and Cornell, no doubt because they give race the most attention, even go as far as to say that it is impossible to understand gender without interrogating race. All these theorists realize that the fact of racial difference poses some fundamental challenges to the way feminism construes its subject. They acknowledge that multiple factors go into the production of any particular woman and argue for the need to think "woman" as multiple. Feminist theory seems to be moving toward what Rosi Braidotti calls the nomadic subject; a subject theorized as constituted by a shifting set of differences (The Nomadic Subject). However, white feminist theory has yet to develop a sustained discussion of race, especially as a factor of white women's subjectivity. Race only becomes an issue when feminist theory confronts the other of its same; that is, when the race of the other woman is in question. Whiteness becomes visible only against the screen of other women's blackness and then disappears. Why is it so difficult for white feminist theory to keep race in view? Tina Chanter argues that Irigaray's analysis shows that sexual difference is to feminism what Heidegger argues that Being is to metaphysics: the assumed foundation of its project whose meaning has yet to be thought out (Ethics of Eros). I would argue that the difference race makes to gender occupies an analogous position in white feminist thought. It is as though the fact of its difference-ing is too obvious to require analysis, on the one hand, and perhaps too threatening to white feminism on the other. For this reason, I am concerned that moving too quickly to an abstractly multiple "woman" will not satisfactorily dislodge feminist theory's dominance by white solipsism. On the other hand, I think a sustained interrogation into the difference race makes to what it means to be a woman would move white feminist theory's subject toward a more genuine and concrete multiplicity. I want to experiment with making the whiteness of feminism's "woman" more visible as a racial mark through a reading of two autobiographical texts, one by African American feminist legal theorist Patricia Williams (Alchemy of Race and Rights) and one by white Radical Lesbian feminist Mary Daly (Outercourse). Turning to autobiography rather than to white feminist theoretical texts might seem an unnecessary detour if my aim is to take white feminist theory beyond the current impasse. However, I would argue that autobiographical texts especially these two texts offer unique resources for the project I am proposing. In "Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex," Judith Butler argues that identifications are multiple and contestatory; that is, they are "in-corporations" of negotiations with multiple "vectors of power" that include sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc. …