American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (review)

In American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman analyzes the formation and deployment of racial and gender identities in America, exploring the ways in which these identities have historically been, and continue to be, constructed within a cultural system that seeks to maintain white racial supremacy and patriarchy. For several years, feminist and cultural critics have become increasingly involved in the difficult process of rethinking and de-essentializing identity, and Wiegman builds upon their work to demonstrate convincingly that the supposedly “real” and “natural” categories of race and gender came into being as part of the “deeply problematical and asymmetrical production” of an epistemology of the body (4). Such an epistemology, she argues, is structured around a logic of visibility, and locates difference in the apparently incontrovertible physical “evidence” of corporeal signifiers such as skin color and skull shape. In the transformation from natural history to the human sciences, and to comparative anatomy in particular, Wiegman traces the increasingly rigid epistemological framework that positioned racial and gender differences as inherent “facts” of the body, “facts” that rationalized social hierarchies and justified political inequity.

Above all, American Anatomies is concerned with investigating the historically specific relationship between race and gender that first arose within a context of cultural and scientific debates about race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Challenging “various feminist assumptions and methodological practices in which race becomes the additive to gender” (10), Wiegman explores a variety of American cultural contexts that illustrate the ways in which sexual difference has often surfaced within the category of race itself. This imbrication of identities has resulted not only in the historical imposition of the feminine onto the black male body, but also in the categorical exclusion of black women from contemporary cultural rhetoric that attempts to redress exclusions based on race and gender by linking the two categories together—“writing ‘blacks and women’ as the inclusivist gesture of post-1960s politics” (7). In her study, Wiegman chooses not to follow the trajectory of a feminist politics that would center the black woman as a focus of inquiry—an important methodological gesture, she argues, but one that risks reinscribing “the logics of presence and visibility conditioning and contributing to the black woman’s historical expulsion” (77). Instead, she turns her attention to cultural relations among black and white men, hoping to understand more fully the black woman’s historical erasure through an analysis of “the way the discourse of sexual difference defines, constructs, enforces, and negotiates hierarchies within the masculine” (13).

The results of Wiegman’s inquiry are as compelling as they are complex. Rigorously avoiding facile solutions, pursuing her analysis even into spaces of apparent contradiction, she unflinchingly faces the difficulties of theorizing race and gender in the context of the African-American subject. Under slavery, as Hortense J. Spillers has demonstrated, this subject was “ungendered” insofar as the slave’s body was understood not a human, but rather as a commodified abstraction within which the socio-symbolic structure of gender failed to signify. ¹ Evoking Spillers’s concept of the ungendered flesh of the slave, Wiegman argues that “[f]or the African(-American) in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . the ability to be gendered marked the entrance to the human, public community” (68). The political and social stakes of this claim to a gendered subjectivity, however, were not the same for male and female African Americans: “the black female could only be insinuated into enfranchisement, so thorough was her gendered disqualification from the public sphere. . . . [t]he black male, on the other hand, entered enfranchisement through the symbolic possibilities that accrued to the masculine” (68). The socio-symbolic structure of gender, so crucial to the slave’s claim to “personhood,” worked within patriarchy to confer rights and privileges to male subjects. This structure, of course, not only profoundly excluded black women from the public sphere, but also created a black male subject who, in his very masculinity, was deeply threatening to the logic of white...