Rac(e)ing Questions III

6     US-American gender theory has basically developed within a framework of — as I want to call it — racially innocent modernity and its emphatic philosophical foundations of the subject and subjectivity (Broeck, Amnesia). In US-American society, modernity has constituted itself in a particular logic of the subject (Broeck Slavery and Early Modernity), and it has done so by reverting to a philosophically justified freedom of white subjectivity that presupposes the desubjectification of others by way of ownership of those others. US-American gender theory has avoided searching for the traces of its own historical rootedness within this philosophical and political regime of freedom as ownership; it has entered a dialogue almost exclusively with the theories of European modernity and postmodernism, rather than with philosophical approaches generated by Black diasporic theory that has given center stage to the meaning of slavery for modern ideas of subjectivity. Neither psychoanalysis, nor Foucauldian theory, nor gender studies — for that matter — have sufficiently dealt with the history of subjectivities created within extreme human conditions characterized by divisions as well as convergences between and across gender and race constellations in a historical situation marked by the conditions of ownership of human beings. The aim of my project is to come to understand the intricate and individually invested psychic mechanics of this culture of ownership, as well as the subjective mental figurations of this relation. How did owning, having to work and control other human beings in a chronotope such as slavery and enjoying unlimited access to those beings one way or another, affect white women's sense of their capacities, their limitations, the reach of their desires? How did white female subjects learn to become owners of beings and to desubjectify those that appeared day in day out before their very own eyes as human beings, how did they learn to un-think another human being's access to human subjectivity? What acts of aggression (directed at self or other) were employed in order to compensate for the social and psychological compulsion to embody white domination? To what extent could a desire for closeness, intimacy and satisfaction of their own needs be gratified within the social divide of slavery, and which role did their privilege and ownership play in this? How did white women deal with the right to sanctioned white violence which afforded a perpetual invitation to excess?

7      Female domesticity of plantation ladies was inevitably contingent on female slaves' labor capacity (Weiner). For a white lady, domesticity meant a kind of compulsive but luxurious construction of the white female body, which required extreme efforts at staging this body. Part of this was, for example, the creation of an ethereal aesthetics, bearing no correspondence to the reality of the climate, or to bodily functions, or a repertoire of white feminine body language, such as calculated faints. Fictions of the South, as well as autobiographical material speak volumes to these camouflage acts. However: which role was attributed to black women in order for these acts to be successful? And how did white women perceive themselves, knowing that their success was dependent on black women's work? Domesticity meant being trained to expect and to accept black labor for one's own sustenance as a matter of course; it entailed a dependent relation to that labor: even though white ladies had the power of representing their oftentimes absent husbands in matters concerning the "big house." According to black female slave narratives white women relied on their female slaves for the actual execution of almost all household tasks (taking care of the children and the sick, cooking, household logistics, sewing, washing, keeping store, feeding slaves and animals, gardening, but also of such intimate tasks as emptying chamber pots) (Mullen, Davis, Women, Race and Class). Moreover, domesticity for the Southern Belle included a very ambivalent position concerning her role as mother and her offspring: white children were to the largest extent raised by black nannies. This parasitical state of affairs did create a subjective feeling of being at the mercy of the household's slaves, which in turn means that a paranoid preemptive despotism must have been the order of the day. White women were routinely surrounded by black people, who, in their imagination figured as loyal chattel, and must have caused great wonder and aggressive disappointment if they chose not to function properly.

How To Get Beyond the Analogy of Race and Gender?

8      Even though a historical reappraisal of plantation slavery has been available for years it has hardly made an entrance into white gender theory; by the following exemplary engagement with Judith Butler's early argument in Gender Trouble I turn to this lack directly, trying to tease out the possibly productive implications of a necessary address of slavery's scenarios for gender studies. I will look at two paradigmatic passages from Judith Butler, which reflect — though in a rather condensed fashion — the state-of-the-art knowledge gained by Euro-American gender theory which, in my view, still rests with the far-reaching insights Butler provided into the performativity of gender. Some gender theorists, like Butler herself, have recently transferred that approach to a selective discussion of race — which, however, has remained connected mostly to an examination of issues concerning "raced" people, as in African-Americans (Butler, Bodies and Salih); what has been missing is a general address of gender theory's genealogy which has been so profoundly implicated in slavery's division of women into gendered subjects, and ungendered body things. To quote black feminist critic Hortense Spillers first for contrast and clarification:

Under these conditions [of slavery], we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point biological, sexual, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes converge. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time — in stunning contradiction — it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor; (3) as a category of "otherness," the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general "powerlessness" […]. (206)

9     In contrast to that argument, Butler's Gender Trouble marks a crucial void in white gender studies in the very theoretical universality, and the abstraction in which it appears. I quote two passages which condense what has become a widely uncontested paradigma for gender theory. First: "If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is 'before', 'outside', or 'beyond' power is a cultural impossibility" (30), and, the second one:

As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations […]. Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender of the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. (10, 140 - 141)

This paradigm could be, in principle, very useful for a discussion of gender relations in the Deep South, which reveal the precariousness of the category gender. Why then, has white US gender theory so rarely looked at slavery and the role of white women within it? The question of the racial constitutedness of/in gender — which has, after all, become one of the most crucial questions for gender studies — could be much more productively theorized if the discourse included an address of US history. One explanation might be that the lack of such a historicizing approach in gender studies is the result of a re-universalizing tendency within theory as genre, in which the obsession with the abstract leads to an a priori, always already, white subject. Theory — in this logic — knows only the universal kind of performativity of gender (which is by white by default); authors and readers as agents of a mutually shared symbolic can in the end only imagine post-enlightenment white subjects. European theories of modernism (and postmodernism) in their exclusively abstract contemplation of the master-slave dialectic, which has consistently functioned as the key-metaphor for oppressive relations, could only imagine human beings who were not enslaved as subjects. In reverse, and one could say, rather perverse logic, it decided not to see the enslaved as subjects. Gender theory's affective and epistemological liaison with post-enlightenment theory resulted in an avoidance of American history to which the paradigm of the master-slave dialectic could never be applied only as a metaphor, but for which, instead, the issue of the enslaved's access to subjectivity (and thus to gender) was the most crucial, and visceral, question, and one which has had repercussions until today.

10      These are, of course, polemical suggestions. I want to go on in the same spirit and share some observations which could be useful for a reconsideration of gender in and through slavery, and race. These observations have been inspired mostly by Hortense Spillers, who, in her already quoted "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," (a 1987 article which has gone largely unnoticed by white theorists, reprinted in Spillers), has already pointed to fundamental problems for a grammar of gender grammar, that is, for gender theory:

[…] in the historic outline of dominance, the respective subject positions of "female" and "male" adhere to no symbolic integrity. At a time when current critical discourses seem to compel us more and more decidedly toward gender 'undecidability', it would appear reactionary, if not dumb, to insist on the integrity of female/male gender. But undressing these conflations in meaning, as they appear under the rule of dominance [i.e. slavery], would restore, as figurative possibility […] the potential for gender differentiation as it might express itself along a range of stress points […]. (206)

Spillers refers here to the division of female beings in "women" equal white-female and "slaves" equal ungendered, which made it impossible for black female slaves to access the cultural capital available to gender. Spillers also scandalously suggests that this reduction of black women and men to tortured and torturable flesh (206, 207) established manipulative rights to sexual, mental and psychological infringement on slaves for both white men and women. This made any interpellation of female slaves into gendered subject positions impossible. This structural impossibility then marks a kind of ground zero for theoretical notions of gender differentiation of heteronormative sexuality in the United States, in which the availability of gender neutral flesh significantly undermined the naturalness of binary gender constellations and of socially stabilizing gender differentiation along the straight axis of male versus female subjectivity.