Vampires-Anxieties-And-Dreams.pdf

Vampires, Anxieties, and Dreams:

Race and Sex in the Contemporary

United States

SHANNON WINNUBST

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire

to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of

disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of uidity, of dependency itself. I then turn

to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with

Donna Haraway’s reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self

that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

“philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

There is a recurring dream, a nightmare, in the unconscious of these white

United States. It is a dream of passion, violence, transgression, invasion—and

all the perverse titillation that these bring. It is also a dream of power, viola-

tion and purity, of strict and rigid and obsessive fascination with boundaries.

It frightens, infuriates, traps or protects us according to the bodies and subject

positions we inhabit within this cultural symbolic. Stirring the worst anxieties

of some of the nastiest parts of U.S. history, it is a nightmare rarely mentioned

but always circulating, rarely noticed but always present. It boils and bubbles

just below the surface, silently but perpetually, shaping that surface without

itself surfacing.

The nightmare is the scene of the black rapist, particularly of the black male

raping a white girl. It is the nightmare that convicts Bigger Thomas, the alleged

Hypatia vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2003) © by Shannon Winnubst

2 Hypatia

black rapist of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), in our national psyche, and

innocent black men in our federal and state penal systems. It is a nightmare

in both its ideal and real senses—as a fantasy that structures and ensures the

hegemony of a phallicized whiteness and as a horrifying material reality that,

despite its ontological status as a fantasy, traps and kills black and brown men

in the contemporary United States With no foothold in actual statistics on

interracial violence or rape, it nonetheless functions as a myth that structures

race, gender, sexuality, and class in the United States. Both real and unreal,

it is a collective nightmare that structures power in U.S. culture. But who is

doing the dreaming?

Several subject positions are idealized and worked out in this scene. They

are idealized not as utopic but as regulative ideals. Functioning much as Jacques

Lacan (1977) diagnoses the phallus’ function in phallicized systems, they erase

or subordinate historical variation to their insistence on themselves as the

“true” subject positions. As ideals, these subject positions are never materially

achieved and rarely consciously embodied. But they structure experience, desire,

expectations, and history. They oat “above history,” inhabiting a transcendent

and idealized space from which they direct how those historical experiences

ought to be judged and read. They write themselves on our bodies and psyches

through layers of history and cultural discourses. And yet, despite the cracks

and ssures that historical differences present to defy the “truth” of this myth,

we remain haunted by these speci c, idealized subject positions. 1

The codings of this particular scene are fairly explicit: the “raced” 2 man is

designated as violent; all girls are designated as potential victims of rape; the

white girl is designated as the most highly cathected target of “raced” male

violence; and rapists are designated as “raced.” “Raced” men and white girls/

women are thus clearly pitted against one another and “raced” men and “raced”

girls/women nd themselves in only a slightly easier relation. Divided against

one another in positions of aggression and defense, sex and violence become

the sites at which gender and race are negotiated. The dynamics between these

subject positions are ones of fear, aggression, violence, and mutual distrust—and

threaded through all of these is a subtle intonation of desire, evidenced in the

fantasizing of the crime as a sexual crime. Coalitional politics is unthinkable,

rendered virtually impossible.

This collective nightmare performs some of our worst cultural anxiet-

ies—about desire, fear, and aggression; about gender, sexuality, and race;

about history, bodies, and violence. It sets the scene of gender and race as the

scene of sex and violence, instilling fear in all gendered and raced (that is, all

“marked”) bodies. It is a myth that will not stop haunting us, even as we prove

its mythical status.

But notice that one salient subject position is missing here: the white man.

The unmarked body. What is his role here? Protector of girls, particularly of

Shannon Winnubst 3

white girls? Benevolent patriarch? Innocent? Nonviolent? The scene does not

explicitly tell us: it only tells us that he is missing, invisible. Is he the one pro-

tected by this fear that courses through these other subject positions? Is he the

one dreaming this nightmare?

Is he also the one who loves the myth of vampires? And will he love the

de-centering, vertiginous myth of Jewelle Gomez’s vampires in her Gilda Stories

(1991)?

Western Subjectivity: The Haunting Otherness of the Body

Perhaps here my more philosophical telling of this story can begin. I begin with

Lacan (1977) and his predecessor, G.W.F. Hegel (1977).

As both of these writers, writers who are surely exemplars of “western

civilization’s ethos,” develop across their corpus of texts, Otherness is that

disavowed but constitutive necessity for the possibility of subject formation.

Otherness is that which “we” (that is, we white, rational, upstanding subjects)

depend on and simultaneously disavow. We disavow our dependence, thereby

announcing ourselves as freely created individuals, freely chosen subjects in a

world made for our taking.

For Hegel, the subject craves the recognition of another subject to af rm

his—and for Hegel and Lacan, it is always “his”—place in the world as a subject

who is seen, not an object who is looked upon (1977, 111–19). It is that scopo-

philic locking of eyes that the Hegelian subject craves. And yet, as the drama

of the Phenomenology (1977) unfolds, we nd that it is exactly this reciprocal

“looking” that seemingly can never be achieved. Bound by his Cartesian roots,

Hegel cannot fathom the possibility of two subjects. And so the subject him-

self splits into the warring factions of Master and Slave, where the drama of

disavowal and dependence concludes with a consciousness that can never be

happy, a consciousness that can never enter into a subject-subject relation—a

consciousness that is body-less, oating off through skepticism into the ahistori-

cal, immaterial world of pure spirit.

The stuff of dreams . . .

In good twentieth-century form, Lacan rewrites this drama in the register of

psychic development, replete with yet more harrowing twists, turns, reversals,

and evasions. In the dense eight pages on the mirror stage, he narrates the

emergence of this necessary—and necessarily disavowed—Otherness as a pro-

jection of the infant’s battles with his own re ected image. Beholding his own

re ection, the infant is torn between the re ected whole body that signi es his

own physical otherness and his relentless internal fragmentation. This con ict,

this simultaneous desire for and fear of this wholeness, marks his dynamics with

4 Hypatia

Otherness throughout his psychic development. It is this simultaneous desire

and fear, simultaneous dependence and disavowal, that shapes him into a split,

violent subject warring always against the Otherness of his own embodiment.

The stuff of nightmares . . .

I want to look more carefully at these boundaries—boundaries between self and

Other; and the projection of this internal, psychic Otherness onto boundar-

ies between physical selves and others. I want to look more carefully at these

boundaries and projections, at our cultural obsession with them, and at the

violences that these produce.

It is perhaps too easy in the telling of this story to turn one more time to

René Descartes (1986) and lay this all at his doorstep—Descartes, the dualistic

madman who forever severed our bodies from our minds, and consequently

our selves from other selves. That story is perhaps too easy and too worn to

illuminate these dynamics. In a more contemporary telling of the Cartesian

dualism, Lacan portrays for us in the mirror stage the formation of a subject

as an effect of the idealization of a body-in-control. To become a body-in-

control—or at least to pursue this as an ideal, which is necessary to become a

legible and meaningful subject in western symbolics—the subject must clearly

identify the rigid boundaries between itself and others, including that Other

re ected back to it in the image of the mirror. The warring against his Other-

ness that marks this subject as forever split demands that he separate himself

from that Other—that he construct clear and distinct and rigid boundaries

between himself and the Other, even if this Other resides internally within

his own psyche, within his own body. It is a futile task. But the effort becomes

frantic in the face of its futility: the more the subject realizes his dependence

on the Other, the more vehemently he rejects all connection to and violently

distances himself from that Other. 3

While many feminists have also labored to show that this subject is always a

male subject in Lacan’s discourse (for example, see Grosz 1990; Irigaray 1985a),

locating this subjectifying separation in the idealization of the phallus, I want

to show that this subject is also always a white subject, a subject of phallicized

whiteness. It is both the whiteness and the maleness of the Lacanian subject

that belie our cultural racializing of sex and sexualizing of race. It is both the

whiteness and the maleness of the Lacanian subject that perpetuates my open-

ing dream sequence and lingers in anxious fascination before the images of the

vampire. 4

Shannon Winnubst 5

Whiteness, Maleness, Heterosexuality: The Guises of Universality

Richard Dyer, in his provocative book White (1997), argues that heterosexuality

always protects whiteness in the contemporary cultures of the United States

and Great Britain (1997, 3–8). (One could argue, further, that this protective

stance between heterosexuality and whiteness also extends globally, given the

hegemonic status of the United States and Great Britain across transnational

boundaries.) Giving us a thumbnail sketch of the white male sexuality guarded

by this protective stance, Dyer links the white ideal of masculinity to the gure

of Christ, notably invoking race and Christianized religion simultaneously as

signi ers for “whiteness” (1997, 14–18). As the savior of a religion fraught with

somatophobia, Christ represents that incomprehensible fusion of the divine

and the human—or of the spirit and the body. The principle of incarnation,

which sets Christianity apart from other monotheistic religions, is to be in the

body but not of it—to appear in the world in esh but always to be capable of

transcending it, to suffer the temptations of the esh but always to transcend

them into the puri ed realms of spirit.

This tension, this pull, this Lacanian splitting is what distinguishes whiteness

and maleness from their counterparts of “non-whiteness” and “non-maleness,”

as the characteristics of racial and sexual difference are signi ed, in our binary

symbolic. Rather than fastening on more “feminine” traits of Christ or his

teachings (for example, his doctrines of peace or championing of the meek and

humble), white male heterosexuality in U.S. and British culture has idealized

the speci c trait of Christ’s transcendent relation to corporeality. With this

transcendence as their structuring, regulative ideal, whiteness and maleness can

come together in white male heterosexuality to engage this struggle between

spirit and body with the assurance of ultimately transcending the body and

conquering the struggle. In its idealized form, the white male is in the body,

but is not ultimately captured or constrained by it (and hence is never at fault

or slandered for submitting to it). 5 He stands in a place that transcends the

messiness of materiality.

The resonances with western subjectivity’s haunted relation to otherness

thus ensue. Just as the Hegelian-Lacanian subject is haunted by his dependence

on the Other for his concept of self, so too is the white male haunted by his

dependence on his body for his identity—both physically and psychically. As

a quintessentially Cartesian subject, it is clear to him that he must have a body

to exist (and to feel pleasure, those temptations of the esh), but he also cannot

get mired in particularities that will block his participation in the universal, in

that “human nature” which has played such a large role in shaping our white,

male symbolic. He must have a body, but just as necessarily he must get rid of it,

transcend it. How does he navigate these dependencies that must also (neces-

sarily) be disavowed? Where does he project these dependencies?

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: