White Subjectivity Research Articles

Racial melancholia, ambivalence, and shame: a psycho-social examination of white student resistance to anti-racism in a secondary classroom

ABSTRACT This critical ethnographic study uses the concept of racial melancholia to investigate white student resistance to anti-racism in a secondary classroom. I employ a psycho-social (the interplay between psychoanalytic and social processes) approach to examining racialisation through a theoretical and empirical exploration of racial melancholia’s role in engendering a traumatic conflict between desiring anti-racism and betraying whiteness, a conflict that I argue serves as the core of white subjectivity. I analyse three different ways in which racial melancholia caused white students to vacillate between coveting anti-racism and reproducing racism. These students waged a psycho-social battle with whiteness that was mediated by social forces including family, friends, and classmates intersecting and overlapping with psychical processes related to ambivalence and shame. I conclude with how methods for storytelling can open pathways for working through racial melancholia.

Disordered whiteness: A shape/an unwound sonnet late on the tide

AbstractThis paper is a multifaceted exploration of white subjectivity and the social phenomena of whiteness, about which there is a considerable body of psychoanalytic literature spanning decades. Hazel White's “unwound sonnet late on the tide” explores themes of traumatic legacies, family, shame, and mourning. Critical poetic inquiry is used to consider these themes and make links between the poetics of psychoanalytic processes and the psychoanalysis of poetics.

Exploring queer people of colour’s perceptions of pride in Sydney

Pride events in majority-White contexts reflect social structures and power relations which privilege individuals from that group. The normative Whiteness that shapes these societies influence the dominance of Whiteness in queer spaces and Pride events which take place in them. This paper focused on queer people of colour (QPoC), in Australia, to understand how their intersectional identities shape perceptions of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Drawing on intersectionality as a framework, the study analysed interviews with 12 individuals. Results indicate participants feel a disjuncture between their queer identities and ethnicities and that queer spaces in Australia are premised on a normative Whiteness. While Mardi Gras is a meaningful and positive experience for respondents, the findings suggest the event perpetuates a narrow understanding of what it means to be queer by centring a White subjectivity and stereotypical queer representations. Findings suggest greater inclusivity can be achieved by ‘inviting in’ QPoC, meaningfully supporting more diverse expressions of ‘queerness’, including QPoC in all stages of the event, and being sensitive to the diverse needs of different groups.

White Supremacist Submission

Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly their most popular novel, Cecil Dreeme (1861). For Winthrop, bottoming desires occasion two modes of self-expression. First, they facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging an experience of womanliness predicated on the racist contrast between their own white body and that of nonwhite men they see as exceptionally virile. Second, they allow Winthrop to imagine ways of being other than the self-possession and corporeal autonomy of white subjectivity. In both instances, Winthrop's fantasies rely on the plasticity of the white body under the influence of nonwhite men, even as they underscore the biopolitical unidirectionality of plasticity, tracing patterns in which Black, brown, and Indigenous men exert influence on whites while remaining fundamentally incapable of transformation. This history of racialized access to malleability provides a cautionary tale about the incorporative nature of whiteness and how contemporary politics of self-determination might unwittingly replicate white supremacist logics.

Theory (And/Or) Fiction: Academic Writing, Inhuman Horror, and the New Weird in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia

ABSTRACT H.P Lovecraft’s inhuman horror represents a site of both creativity and controversy, complicating his innovative depictions of the unknown by his racially problematic politics. This article presents Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as a dramatic reappraisal of Lovecraftian horror from a twenty-first century non-Western perspective. Negarestani’s academic prose – specifically concepts and footnotes – centralizes the inhumanity of oil to dramatize the limits of subjectivity. Initially, oil provides a means of conceptualizing gaps within the text, adding a theoretical form of coherence to textual expressions of the unknown and the inhuman. The counterintuitive return to a subjectivity, relegated to the margins and footnotes of the text, recalibrates rather than rejects human form. This disruption of a human/inhuman binary challenges Lovecraft’s formulation of white Western subjectivity, while retaining a Lovecraftian horror aesthetic. Furthermore, by presenting academic prose as an intensifier of textual horror, its aesthetic function also challenges an implied literary/theory hierarchy, whereby literature serves the needs of theory. Cylonopedia’s theory-fictional form presents an intersection between the New Weird and the inhuman turn of contemporary theory; one which radically challenges humanist, anti-humanist, and posthumanist notions of subjectivity.

Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture by David C. Oh (review)

Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture by David C. Oh (review)

Racial capitalism and spheres of influence: Australian assertions of white possession in the Pacific

Australian governments and security analysts have long claimed that Australia exercises a sphere of influence in the South Pacific. This paper argues that this assertion of a sphere of influence is driven by a racial capitalist dialectic of possession and dispossession. This dialectic has legitimised and facilitated the expropriation of Pacific land, labour, resources and sovereignty for the building of the Australian colonial settler state. It is premised on geographic moralities consisting of intertwined white supremacist, antiblack, anti-Indigenous and anti-Asian ideologies which confer on Australia a right and obligation to assert influence over the Pacific based on geographic contiguity and racialised discourses of Pacific incapacity. The paper makes this argument using Aileen Moreton-Robinson's notion of white possession, Nancy Fraser's expanded conception of capitalism and José Martí’s concept of geographic morality, tracing the evolution of Australia's sphere of influence politics over four periods: the imperial era, the Cold War period, the post-Cold War period until the 2010s, and the present era of inter-imperial rivalry between China and the United States. This analysis brings together perspectives from critical race and indigenous studies, critical geopolitics, and radical geopolitics to connect race, capitalism and the construction of geopolitical space in Australia's assertion of a sphere of influence in the Pacific. It advances recent conceptual discussions of spheres of influence, which are race-blind because they draw on theories that foreground white subjectivity.

Book Review: Oh, David. <i>Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture</i> (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022)

<strong>This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.</strong> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Calibri Light, sans-serif">Review of David Oh’s White-Washing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture</font><br>

Narcissistic States of White Privilege and the Constructive Potential of Shame

ABSTRACT A psychoanalytic formulation of privilege can be constructed by capturing how shifts and restrictions in awareness create a sense of narcissistic wholeness. Paradoxically, these states of being render the individual incomplete, unaware of certain dissociated aspects of identity. Experiences of White privilege in the United States of America involve this self-conserving, yet narcissistically fragile system of reflection. To challenge and repair the limitations that occur within White privileged subjectivity (“going-on-privileged”), shame represents a radioactive affect that can both interfere and facilitate. Drawing upon the works of Jacobs (2016), Watkins (2018), Grand (2018), and Harris (2020), this paper attempts to consider how checking privilege is a process that can be supported by harnessing the constructive and creative potential of shame available through objective states of awareness.

Pants on Fyre: parasitic masculinity and the Fyre festival documentaries

ABSTRACT The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of an imitative form of white masculine subjectivity that thrives in precarity, even as they recuperate the status of late-stage neoliberalism by symbolically removing parasitic masculinity from the neoliberal social order that it feeds on.

From ‘Bon’ to ‘Bond’: The ‘Tragic Mulatto/a’ and the Repetition of the Plantation Mythology

This essay performs a reading of William Faulkner’s <em>Absalom, Absalom!</em> by way of Hortense Spillers. Tracking Spillers’ analysis of Faulkner through various essays in the collection <em>Black, White, and in Color</em>, I pose a question of how the imaginary figure of the tragic ‘mulatto/a’ functions within the narrative repetition of the plantation romance. This question is oriented by Christina Sharpe’s <em>Monstrous Intimacies</em> in exploring how the spectacularized violence of the scene of the plantation is both obscured and re-presented in the construction of ‘post-slavery’ subjects. Using Faulkner, Spillers elaborates the role of language as a key link between psychic and social reproduction: as the mythic patriarch writes a narrative in the blood of his descendants, so too do the civilization-founding crimes of incest and miscegenation echo in cultural memory. The figure of the mulatto/a, or in a more contemporary environment the ‘mixed-race’ person, thus presents a certain problem or site of anxiety for white subjectivity, recalling and repressing the inaugural violence of the age of the plantation.

Review: Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture, by David C. Oh

Review: <i>Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture</i>, by David C. Oh

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

Introduction to the special issue: mobilizing Indigeneity and race within and against settler colonialism

ABSTRACT Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough introduce the concepts of ‘settler anchoring’ and ‘mobility sovereignty.’ They argue that settler colonial spaces are structures of mobility injustice, and that securing Indigenous mobility must account for the ability of Indigenous peoples to choose when, where, how, and for what purposes to engage in movement (or not). They illustrate how the practice of mobility underlies the fiction of ‘settling,’ offer examples for understanding Indigenous mobility principles and practices, and examine the potential incommensurabilities between mobility justice and mobility sovereignties that reject settler colonialism. The authors argue for the urgency of integrating the ‘mobilities paradigm’ with Indigenous studies and ethnic studies analyses of settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and race. The article also serves as introduction to the special issue of Mobilities, ‘Mobilizing Indigeneity and Race Within and Against Settler Colonialism.’ The authors preview how the special issue offers new insights into settler colonialism’s mobile architectures, competing technologies of maritime mobility, decolonial forms of landscape conservation on travel corridors, how ‘voluntourism’ enables the crafting of White settler subjectivity, the roles of digital media for displaced peoples, and what it means to move as a sovereign Indigenous nation.

Dirty Subjects

In the early 1900s in the settler colonial states in Southern Africa, the nascent Jewish community institutions took actions to avoid the racialised accusation of dirtiness, thus shaping the community into adopting white colonialist subjectivities. Using Albert Memmi’s analytic framework of colonisers and colonialists, and Anne McClintock’s conceptualisation of the racial function of dirt, this article reassesses existing archival sources through the lens of dirty bodies, dirty sex, and dirty work to show how communal subjectivities were formed through close collusion with the colonial state and the internal enforcing of the social habits of Whiteness. This article argues that this colonial subject formation foreclosed the possibilities of a peruvnik: a potential South African anticolonial Jewish barbarism.

White Guys in the Borderlands: Boundary Surveying, Imperial Technoscience, and Environmental Change in the Nile Valley and at Lake Rudolf (Turkana), 1898–1909

Through a focus on British imperial boundary surveys in Anglo-Ethiopian borderlands, this article argues that an elite White masculine subjectivity emerged from surveying’s technical practices. I suggest, drawing on Barad (2007), that ontological interpretations of surveying practice could help us understand how this elite subjectivity was formed through both surveying’s drive to abstraction and its embodied, “nomadic” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013) mode of production. I also note, in line with Singh’s (2018) notion of mastery, that the subjugation of natures involved in this practice was matched by surveyors’ subjugation of people: racialized divisions of surveying work and the racist mistreatment of survey personnel.

The intellectual body, the body intellectual

AbstractMedieval Studies is embodied through whiteness, limited by whiteness, and created by the white imagination. In this field, as it is, objectivity is white subjectivity. In this paper, I argue that unless we practice embodied criticism, there is no way to think about the time and space we define as “Medieval Studies” without inhabiting whiteness. Embodied criticism sanctions, if not requires, that we find entry points to history that are not historical. By valuing all of ourselves, by making our critical landscape all of us, we make it impossible to abandon, overlook, or forget the present as we engage with the past. The Middle Ages that I think about and write about is one that is processed through me. In this Middle Ages, nothing that affects how I am in the world is deemed anachronistic because the theoretical, political, social, and legal forces that govern how I operate in the world are the ones that affect how and what I know about history, how and what I think about space. In it, there is value for the questions grief yields. Any work I produce as I process history is radically transparent as a production by me of me, a Muslim, Iranian‐American body in this place and time.

“THE CREATURE ITSELF IS NASTY, BUT NOTHING REALLY COMPARES TO THE BUILDING OF DREAD BEFORE YOU EVER GET TO IT”: ONLINE PLAYER AND DEVELOPER COMMENTARY ON FEMALE MONSTROSITY IN VIDEO GAMES

Gender representation in video games has long been a fraught topic of discussion within online gaming communities. In game scholarship, analysis of the usually harmful tropes and trends of female representation has resulted in countless studies demonstrating that video games are often a regressive medium in terms of representation, privileging heterosexual white male subjectivities and erasing, marginalizing, or even vilifying anyone outside of that specific demographic. These conversations and scholarly studies tend to focus on the representation of human women, especially as victimized damsels-in-distress. Considerably less work has been done to analyse the portrayal of villainous and monstrous nonhuman women in games, even though countless science fiction, fantasy, and horror games feature these kinds of characters. Many of these games utilize harmful tropes and design practices related to female villainy and monstrosity, thereby reinforcing misogynistic ideologies. With the understanding that gender representations in games can have deep cultural ramifications, especially as they intersect with representations of race, sexuality, queerness, body size, disability, mental illness, and age, this paper examines online player and developer discourse regarding female-coded monsters from a selection of commercially successful “AAA” video games. The intent of this project is to contribute to ongoing scholarship on monstrosity in games by looking at how developers explain and justify their design processes in online interviews and forum posts and how players/fans articulate their attitudes towards and reception of these monstrous creatures.

Of Cops and “Karens”: Language and the Bureaucratic Arm of Policing

This essay considers how racial paradigms in the United States produce white subjectivity as part of a broader structure of policing Blackness that becomes bureaucratically encoded through law enforcement agents and their discursive practices. Given this, it is not unexpected that the figure of the “Karen” and agents of law enforcement police similar behaviors and figures, given they embody the same ethos of white supremacy, differentiated largely by virtue of the bureaucratic structures in place to direct, reproduce, and legitimate anti‐Blackness within an institutional framework.

Decolonising the Indigenised curricula: preparing Australian graduates for a workplace and world in flux

ABSTRACT This article argues that current Australian graduate attributes – the strategy for assuring graduate employability – are inherently and uncritically Western and privilege white subjectivity. Drawing on Moreton-Robinson’s critique of whiteness in Australian academia we challenge the idea that all students must achieve the same narrow list of generic attributes informed, we argue, by Western traditions. In doing so, we aim to create a space to explore Nakata’s cultural interface as a means to simultaneously deliver key capabilities essential for future work and expand the sector’s thinking beyond assuring a singular kind of graduate. Decolonising processes led by local Elders, based in authentic relationships forged at the cultural interface, we argue, would assist Australian universities to overcome tokenistic approaches to ‘Indigenising the curriculum’ and the challenges of ‘assuring’ graduate attributes. Through reimagining approaches to graduate employability, we explore how learning experiences informed by local place-based Aboriginal values, principles and perspectives present an opportunity to develop graduates equipped to reimagine themselves in response to a world and workplace in flux.