Property: White Gender and Slavery — Page 3:
11 Spillers' article also suggests that motherhood was an impossibility for black female slaves, whose children did not belong to them or their men, but became white owners' chattel. This deliberate bastardization, or orphanization of black children had dire consequences: triangularization and oedipal identity formation within the family triad mother-father-child became outlawed for generations of African-Americans. White intervention required a psychological, mental and social act of compensation from the black community, beyond the gendered task of individual legitimate mothering in order to counter this imposition of white patriarchal interest of reproduction onto their own kinship structures, and the destruction of a black male subject position as father. Insight into these conditions of slavery thus necessitates a reconceptualization of theoretical statements about gender differentiation: a re-assessment of the assumption that only those allegedly universal gender relations may be constitutive for social and individual reproduction, and thus, nothing outside a binary white gender purview requires theory's interventions. Spillers concerns herself mostly with the effects of slavery's constellations on the black community in US-American history, and especially on the position of black women, as perceived by themselves and by others. Robyn Wiegman, the only white gender scholar who clearly refers to Spiller's thesis of the "ungendering" of the black community, in her book American Anatomies. Theorizing Race and Gender, also focuses on the long term effects of this psychological and social de-subjectification of the black community and the resulting American difficulty to imagine sovereign race relations. The agency of white women in slavery's quadrangulations, as it were, thus still awaits theoretical address. What I will suggest in the following then are some preliminary speculative questions which gesture in that direction.
12 White femininity which, in the antebellum South, works as an aesthetic representation of gender at the cost of almost total disembodiment of white women, functions as a central defining moment of white dominance, as visceral allegory of an unassailable white gentility. This in turn is made possible by ascribing to black female slaves a status of pure flesh, so to speak (in the sense of sexual and reproductive accessibility and functionality). The Deep South needed female whiteness in order to allegorize racial difference, but its livelihood depended on making this allegory materially visible and physically effective. It thus granted white women an agency of being white that was based on an authoritative privilege of gender which could only, by necessity — since equity within patriarchy was out of the question — have slaves as its defining object. The possession of a white gender subjectivity was bound to owning black objects — materially or symbolically, female gender could only exist, and thus support the white power structure, only because and if female slaves were split off from it.
13 The construction of gendered subjectivity depends largely on the successful management and controlled pursuit of a human being's libidinous desire. But what does this easily acceptable sentence mean within the orbit of slavery? How has a definition of white desire within the bounds of race and its complete and terrorist restriction to the white race succeeded in the face of stunning day-to-day intimacy of black-white relations and of white violence? A human relation which was characterized simultaneously by a high degree of intimacy and an extremely rigid hierarchical divide and disavowal must have carried within itself the latent possibility of transgression of which we have as yet no protocol, as Spillers would phrase it. Can a post-Lacanian analysis of the law of the symbolic and its regulations of human desire into and within gendered constellations be transported universally into a historical scenario that has juxtaposed raced and gendered beings in a way that explodes and multiplies beyond the binary difference of gender that European theory assumes? The sexual nexus of slavery functioned in a way that excluded the black non-subjects from the symbolically legitimate circulation of desire; it did, as Althusser would say, not interpellate black human beings as gendered subjects, but worked so as to de-subjectify them. What was white women's function in that game? How did white women function in a scenario with four actors, in which both, "possessing the phallus" and "being the phallus" was seriously thrown into question by the presence of a second binary gender constellation, to which the white couple had a relation of ownership — so that it was viscerally present at the same time that it had to be aggressively disavowed? Psychoanalytically speaking, what do we make of the fact that the white woman was situated in a gender quadrangle in which the black man could not have the phallus, and the black woman could certainly not be phallic — or both of these only to the point of a hysterical breakdown of the system of white control? Post-Lacanian theory has as yet not ventured to self-reflexively address psychosexual scenarios that were not inscripted in/as binary differences and which might have effected the emergent white subjects' situatedness within the symbolic, as well as the black human non-subjects' barred access to it, and the psychosexual, and cultural conflicts resulting thereof, to a considerable extent.
14 Furthermore, what do we make of the complicated games with their own sexuality which white women must have been playing: in which way did white ladies use their black female slaves for their own strategies against repeated unwanted pregnancies? In which way did white women access black bodies for their own pleasure — or are we to remain theoretically fixed within Victorian strictures of make-belief that framed interracial desire of any kind as impossible, and therefore, non-existent? Or, to step up the complication of questions: Black slaves were not allowed to mother their children in many cases, but raised their white owners' babies for whom they became a proverbial fountain of motherly care and nurturance. How then does a theory, for which oedipal disavowal and the loss of the maternal object have been most crucial in the formation of gendered, individual subjectivity, apply? The maternal object was not only to be, as it were, passively lost, or forsaken; it had to be actively disowned so that the human being (who had performed as maternal object) could be owned prospectively, could mature and become realized as a legal and material object, as it were. What becomes of the taboo restriction for the child to grow beyond symbiosis if it has to work not only in order to enter the child in his/her own sexual subjectivity apart from the parents, but also to rid the child of an improper racial attachment? How did the culturally enforced and sanctioned exchange of the maternal function affect white women's psychic constitution? What did it mean for white girls in the first place, as well as for them as prospective white mothers with black mammies for their children? My article means to appear as an inquisitive accumulation of stress points, to paraphrase Spillers again, which need to be disseminated, worked through, and possibly answered; this question in this part thus work as a list, not as a presentation of an organic picture.
On Being the Subject of Property Relations: Valerie Martin's Exploration of Possession and Domination
15 In the last part of my article I want to read two crucial passages from Valerie Martin's 2003 novel Property — thus referring readers to a contemporary text which addresses the conundrum of gender in slavery by way of a daring fictional re-imagination of the master/mistress/slave entanglement. Martin works with the steamy props of antebellum romance (an almost gothic plantation setting, cruel and greedy white male characters, an assortment of narcissistic Southern Belles, wicked creoles, and self-indulgent splendor on display) but employs those to shore them up, as it were, against the very genre conventions they conjure up. In her text, slaves organize for a successful uprising, the white master of the Louisiana sugar plantation, male protagonist of the novel, is murdered in the revolt; the light-skinned female house slave, who has been abused as rape object by the master, manages to run away in the fracas and escape to Boston. The slave woman is abetted by her lover/partner, a free New Orleans Black man, only to be apprehended by a slave catcher at the novel's end, not because of his detectival intelligence but because — by a deus-ex-machina narrative twist — the slave's mistress, daughter and inheritor of the dead master's slaves and estate, has a fit of female intuition, driven by the desire to re-obtain her property.