Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T15:05:03.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Gwen Bergner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Black Skin. White Masks, Frantz Fanon transposes psychoanalysis from its gender-based framework of subject formation in order to interrogate racial subjectivity in the colonial context. Though the work inaugurates a psychoanalytic discourse of racial identity, Fanon—like Freud—takes the male as the norm. Women are implicitly present, nonetheless, in Fanon's conception of colonial identity—a mirroring relationship between white men and black men that is mediated through the bodies of women. This colonial dynamic suggests a sex-gender economy circulating women among men to construct and maintain racial categories. Though Fanon's analysis of black women's sexual desire has been dismissed as obviously sexist, the terms of his critique reveal norms of gender, class, and sexuality by which black women are bound and against which he formulates black masculinity. Analyzing gender in Fanon's text works to broaden the outline of black women's subjectivity and to delineate the interdependence of race and gender.

Type
Special Topic: Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 1: Special Topic Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition , January 1995 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” Screen 312–31.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition.” Remaking History. Ed. Kruger, Barbara and Mariani, Phil. Seattle: Bay, 1989. 131–13.Google Scholar
Capécia, Mayotte Je suis martiniquaise. Paris: Corrêa, 1948.Google Scholar
de Lauretis, Teresa Alice Doesn't. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doane, Mary Ann “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.” Femmes Fatales. New York: Routledge, 1991. 209–20.Google Scholar
Doane, Mary Ann “Film and the Masquerade.” Screen 227–22.Google Scholar
Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard “Freud as a Jew.” Rev. of Freud, Race, and Gender, by Sander Gilman. New York Times 9 Jan. 1994, sec. 7:30–31.Google Scholar
Elliot, Patricia From Mastery to Analysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks. 1967. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1991.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz Peau noire, masques blancs. 1952. Paris: Seuil, 1965.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.Google Scholar
Felman, Shoshana “Rereading Femininity.” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 19–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freud, Sigmund “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex.” Freud, Standard Edition 19:173–17.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” Freud, Standard Edition 17:3–122.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes.” Freud, Standard Edition 19:248–24.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. Strachey, James. 23 vols. London: Hogarth, 1961.Google Scholar
Gaines, Jane “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” Cultural Critique 4 (1986): 59–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallop, Jane Thinking through the Body. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr “Critical Fanonism.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1992): 457–45.Google Scholar
Gilman, Sander The Case of Sigmund Freud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Gilman, Sander Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Gilman, Sander Jewish Self-Hatred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce This Sex Which Is Not One. 1977. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Maran, Rene Un homme pareil aux autres. 1947. Paris: Albin, 1962.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Juliet Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Vintage, 1975.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 1–34.Google Scholar
Parry, Benita “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review 9.1–2 (1987): 27–58.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R “White Skins, Black Masks: Minstrelsy and White Working Class Formation before the Civil War.” The Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso, 1991. 115–11.Google Scholar
Rogin, Michael “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 417–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline Sexuality in the Field of Vision. New York: Verso, 1986.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle “The Traffic in Women.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Reiter, Rayna R. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. 157–210.Google Scholar
Sadji, Abdoulaye “Nini.” Presence africaine 1 (1947): 89–110; 2 (1948): 276-98.; 3 (1948): 485-504.; 4 (1948) 647–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Screen, ed. The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kaja “White Skin, Brown Masks: The Double Mimesis; or. With Lawrence in Arabia.” Differences 1.3 (1989): 3–54.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense J “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2(1987): 65–81.Google Scholar
West, Cornel Prophesy Deliverance. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982.Google Scholar