Description
Book SynopsisExamines the work of early feminist psychoanalytic writing to decipher it in the unacknowledged yet foundational role of race. The author focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, a time when white women were actively refashioning Freud's problematic accounts of sexual subjectivity.
Trade Review“In this groundbreaking book Jean Walton subjects psychoanalysis to a sustained and highly illuminating ethnographic critique. She has isolated a period—the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the great debates about femininity—in which there is a critical confrontation between questions of gender/sexuality and questions of race. Her incisive analyses of five women writers of this period are often fascinating, always provocative, and she demonstrates persuasively the inextricability of sexuality and race in their attempts to negotiate a ‘speaking position’ for themselves within a masculine domain.”—Mary Anne Doane, author of
Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis“This intelligent and clear-thinking book provides a fascinating look into the racial fantasies of five modernist women. Focussing our attention on the evasions and displacements of both psychoanalysis and feminism, Walton demonstrates that race is never very far from twentieth-century culture’s founding narratives of sexual difference. A welcome and important investigation of white women’s racial imaginaries, a study as intellectually subtle as it is boldly original.”—Diana Fuss, author of
Identification PapersTable of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Masquerade and Reparation: (White) Womanliness in Riviere and Klein
2. “Nightmare of the Uncoordinated White-Folk”: Psychoanalysis and the Queer Matrix of
Borderline 3. Marie Bonaparte and the “Executive Organ”
4. “The Black Spitting Girl!!”
5. The Ethnographic Alibi
6. A People of Her Own: Margaret Mead
7. A Rap on Race: Mead and Baldwin
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
