Queering Freedom

Notes

209 Notes Introduction 1. Foucault writes of “the historical a priori” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), part 3, chapter 5. This theme echoes across virtually all of his writing, and is most explicit in his distancing himself from Kantian transcendental idealism. 2. See Borges 1968, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” 3. Frankenberg argues that whiteness is unmarked only in those specific historical periods in which it is stabilized (1997a, 5). This leads not only to a heuristic device for reading anxiety in history, but also to the political strategy of exposing whiteness with the hope of thereby destabilizing it. 4. For this reason, I continue to be deeply suspicious of and resistant to any formation of a disciplinary field that might call itself “whiteness studies,” just as I am resistant to any disciplinary field called “masculinity studies”—or, what I have not yet heard of but will undoubtedly emerge, “straight studies.” 5. As Frankenberg writes, “if focusing on white identity and culture displaces attention to whiteness as a site of racialized privilege, its effectiveness as antiracism becomes limited” (1997a, 17). 6. See Chanter (1995, 45), who argues that the valorization of gender over sex in Anglo-American feminism also, through inattention to the body, feeds blindness to race, particularly blindness to the pernicious effects of the alleged neutrality of whiteness. 7. See Gilroy 2000, 15–20. 8. See Echols 1989; Giddings 1984. 9. There were clearly exceptions to this kind of agonistic pitting of sexism against racism. For example, consider the remarks of two early feminists who moved from the Civil Rights Movement to the Women’s Rights Movement. Drawing on their experiences as civil rights workers, Casey Hayden and Mary King, two field secretaries for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, tentatively voiced comparisons between their situation and that of southern blacks, thereby attempting some brand of coalitional politics. Writing in 1966, Hayden and King argued that, just like blacks, “women seem to be caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power which exclude them. Women seem to be placed in the same position of assumed subordination in personal situations too” (1966, 36). I am grateful to Eric Selbin for bringing this example to my attention. (See also the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union’s Historical Archive, at http:// cwluherstory.com/CWLUArchive/archive.html.) From a different angle, Kelly Oliver has argued that the early dismissal of “French” feminists (Luce Irigaray is Belgian, Julia 210 Notes to pages 11–13 Kristeva Bulgarian, and Hélène Cixous Algerian) may have been an effort on the part of Anglo-American feminists to deflect the criticism launched by feminists of color (bell hooks [1981, 1984], Angela Davis [1981], and Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrı́e Moraga [1983]) of essentializing gender over race. For Oliver, the relation of Anglo-American feminists to French feminist theory is not only a matter of Francophilia and Francophobia , but also a question of how white feminist theory in the U.S. has negotiated the vexing dynamics of race and racism. See Oliver 1993, 163–68. 10. As Tina Chanter develops in her problematizing of the sex/gender distinction and the essentialist/constructionist binary that it spawned in the late ’80s and early ’90s, “It is worth noting that among the (perhaps unintended) results of feminists emphasizing gender over sex there has been a fostering not only of sex-blindness, but also of colorblindness . . . . Despite the ostensibly neutral discourse of gender, the standards of patriarchy have remained more or less in place, just as the privileges enjoyed by whites over blacks have gone largely unchallenged” (1995, 45). As I will develop at length below, ostensible neutrality has become one of the most forceful masks that white supremacist racism dons. It seems to be one of the masks that the sex/gender distinction cannot fully shed. 11. To offer an incomplete and fairly arbitrary list, the works of bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Cherrı́e Moraga, Judith Butler , Drucilla Cornell, and Donna Haraway have all troubled the possibility of reading the body or its more general mode, materiality, outside of historical discourses through which it is deployed. Some may be surprised by, or even want to contest, my inclusion of Anzaldúa and Moraga in this list of post-structuralist feminists. I argue that their work, while not drawing explicitly on these European texts, nonetheless...