Rac(e)ing Questions III

Detailed Table of Contents

Editorial

Sabine Broeck: Property: White Gender and Slavery

Abstract: The article will focus on the problematic workings of white women's function as allegorical embodiment of white dominance and their subjective agency, their involvements in the violence and desire of the racial divide of slavery. Of course, this requires a theoretical grounding which the space of this article permits to sketch out only in roughest form. The first part of the article therefore means to frame what is actually an extensive project of study as a kind of opening, a suggestive plea for debate, discussion and cooperative results. Its second part engages a cross reading of Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers by way of clearing mental space for a re-reading of the complexly charged scene of race/gender and gender/race as conditioned by slavery. In its third part, I will engage a literary text by a contemporary white female writer which tries to come to terms with the legacy of an inextricable connection of white femininity to slavery

Beth Kramer: "Postcolonial Triangles": An Analysis of Masculinity and Homosocial Desire in Achebe's A Man of the People and Greene's The Quiet American

Abstract: This article provides an original approach for understanding postcolonial representation through queer theory. I argue that mapping Sedgwick's view of triangulated desire onto literary models of postcolonial representation uncovers how authors create gender hierarchies in their novels that mirror the inherent power disjunction in the colonizer/colonized relationship. Specifically, I examine two postcolonial works which employ the love triangle, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People. By integrating Anne McClintock's and Frantz Fanon's conception of imperial imagery and power into this exploration, I show how Achebe and Greene use the love triangle to portray the relation of masculinity and patriarchy to neo-imperialism and the new world order. This study is ultimately an attempt to explore the following question- can the love triangle, an age old literary device central to the European novel, in fact be decolonized?

Author's Bio: Beth Kramer is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in English literature at New York University. She specializes in Victorian Literature and her interests include gender and material culture. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled "Negotiating Power: The Balance of Domestic and Professional Authority" which centers on the connection between the Victorian women's reform movement and representations of domesticity. She earned her BA from University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and her MA from New York University in 2004.

Damien W. Riggs: Priscilla, (White) Queen of the Desert Queer Politics and Representation in a "Postcolonising" Nation

Abstract: The brief analysis presented here of both The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the work of Padva has highlighted some of the problems facing white queer politics in Australia. My intention has not been to provide a definitive reading of either text, but rather to draw attention to some of the problems that they present for representations of white queers in Australia. Not only does the analysis demonstrate the troublesome ways in which white queerness engages with race in Australia, but it also highlights some of the assumptions around racialised and gendered privilege that inform queer politics. As three white queer characters, and myself as a white gay man, we experience considered privilege as a result of our social location. This is something that I believe requires accountability, and something that is not easily theorised away or discounted through recourse to "good intentions." Being a white queer in Australia does not place us outside of racism, nor does it mean that our self-representations are not seen as oppressive by those who identify as non-white.

Author's Bio: Damien W. Riggs is a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Adelaide, Australia. His research focuses on race and whiteness in Australia, queer rights, and lesbian and gay parenting. He has published widely in these areas and is the editor of two books (one on critical race and whiteness studies and the other on lesbian and gay psychology) and is the author of two books both to be published in 2006: Becoming Parents: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Family (Brightfire Press) and Priscilla, (White) Queen of the Desert: Queer Rights/Race Privilege (Peter Lang).

Molly Thompson: "The Body is a Bloody Battlefield": Jackie Kay and the Body in Flux

Abstract: This article focuses on the poetry and short stories of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay and seeks to investigate possible reasons why the black feminine body in Kay's texts is often represented as either diseased or in a state of conflict. Thompson demonstrates how a longstanding mythical association between blackness and disease may have affected black subjectivity. Her claim is that the mental and physical states of dysfunction that Kay utilises may be read as a metaphor for a bifurcation of the mind and body due to a damaging discourse that has designated her body as "other." Thompson argues furthermore that, because black women may experience their environment differently from white women (due to prejudice and ostracism for example), such a rift could be due to living in a largely racist society.

Author's Bio: Molly Thompson completed her PhD at the University of Exeter in 2003 and currently teaches part-time at Bath Spa University College. Her doctoral research focused on the representation of the black feminine body in writing by Black women in Britain.

Review (Review): Marlon B. Ross. “Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era.” New York: New York UP, 2004.

Review (Review): Deborah Caslav Covino. “Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture.” Albany: SUNY Press, 2004.

Abstract: Deborah Caslav Covino's Amending the Abject Body identifies the importance of the study of the makeover in popular culture, and sets a high standard with which to compare more recent investigations into makeover culture. Using Julia Kristeva's theoretical conceptualizations of the abject from her Powers of Horror (1982), Covino traces the impetus behind the explosion of aesthetic surgical procedures. She situates her work among feminist theory of cosmetic surgery, but determines that a new a mode of analysis is necessary in order to move beyond previously reductive interpretations of female cosmetic-surgery patients (as either victims or agents of makeover culture).

Review (Review): Oyèrónké Oyewùmí, ed. “African Gender Studies. A Reader.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.