Editorial
1 Rac(e)ing Questions III is the third issue of gender forum to address interrelations of gender and race from a variety of perspectives. The four featured articles analyse the mutual implication of race and gender in US-American white gender theory, Black Scottish poetry, British and West-African literature as well as in Australian white queer politics and represent important contributions to this highly productive discourse in new and enlightening ways.
2 In "Property: White Gender and Slavery" Sabine Broeck sketches a project aimed at investigating how white women positioned and defined themselves in a culture whose very existence depended on the desubjectification and ownership of human beings. Arguing that US-American white gender theory has largely failed to confront white women's valuing of their privileged position in the system of slavery, Broeck expresses the need to re-examine their role in the perpetuation of white dominance and of the manner in which white women's self-perceptions were affected by their involvement in this system. Her cross-reading of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and the work of Hortense Spillers illustrates how white gender theory can be made fruitful to a (re-)examination of gender roles in the Deep South. Broeck demonstrates her thesis with a reading of Valerie Martin's Property focusing on the novel's representation of white female subjectivity and of the (self-) positioning of the white mistress in the race-gender system of the Deep South.
3 Molly Thompson's "'The Body is a Bloody Battlefield': Jackie Kay and the Body in Flux" investigates the interrelation of race and health in poems and short stories by the Scottish poet Jackie Kay. Focusing on Kay's representations of black corporeality, the article explores the links which her works frequently establish between the black female body and physical as well as mental illness. Thompson illustrates how Kay's poems use the body in flux to present effects of illness and racist attacks on the self as similar, both of which are shown to result in the disembodiment of the self and a loss of identity. Rather than reinforcing discourses which construct black women as carriers of contagion, Kay's poems, Thompson argues, invite us to question these "medical mythologies" and signal a need to heal the illnesses caused by a racially oppressive social environment.
4 Damien W. Riggs' contribution, "Priscilla, (White) Queen of the Desert: Queer Politics and Representation in a 'Postcolonising' Nation" takes issue with white queer politics' failure, particularly in the Australian context, to interrogate its implication within "normative assumptions about gender and race." In his combined reading of the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Gilad Padva's article "Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture," Riggs aims to show how the representational foregrounding of the oppression of white queers in Australia at times entails a problematic disregard for, if not a continuation of, racial oppression. In contrast, Riggs's exemplary analysis argues for a "white queer accountability" which confronts its own entanglement within white, heteropatriarchal discursive structures.
5 Beth Kramer's "'Postcolonial Triangles': An Analysis of Masculinity and Homosocial Desire in Achebe's A Man of the People and Greene's The Quiet American" likewise conjoins queer and postcolonial concerns. By employing both Sedgwick's and Girard's concept of the love triangle, the article investigates how the selected works are plotted around a "triangulated model of desire." Against the backdrop of postcolonial politics, this familiar literary device of the European novel produces gender hierarchies in the respective postcolonial narratives which mirror the power distribution in colonizer/colonized relationships.