White Men Are Hysterical

White Men Aren't. Thomas DiPiero. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. viii + 338 pp.

In the introduction to his provocative book on white male subjectivity—or rather, on the frighteningly powerful, constructed "absence" of white masculinity itself—Thomas DiPiero argues that white men "feel cheated out of occupying a center stage" and thus enact their rage as a form of hysteria (2). Interestingly, DiPiero's book coincides with a pop cultural moment in which the white male has once again taken center stage as an object of hilarity, if not necessarily as a theoretically nuanced, hysterical subject. The hit television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for example, vividly stages this investment in the renewal and transformation of the beleaguered straight white guy into a gloriously queer image. White Men Aren't is a significant and important book for scholars of race and sexual culture not only because it has presciently anticipated this disturbing cultural moment in which the other gleefully bears the burden of showing the white heterosexual man how fabulous he can be, but because DiPiero explains how, historically and philosophically, we have managed to come to this situation.

Through idiosyncratic but convincing readings of Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, and eighteenth-century philosophy and ethnography, White Men Aren't exposes the teetering foundation on which white male hegemony is built. White masculinity relies on a dialectic of mastery and hysteria for its discursive power, according to DiPiero. While vacillating between these poles, the white male subject enlists others to unlock his ontological mysteries: "Mastery and hysteria complement one another in modern white masculinity to the extent that what is excluded from the discourse of mastery reappears in the hysterical discourse in the form of a radical interrogation requiring from the other a stabilizing answer" (205). Hence the white masculine subject derives his power not from what he is but from what he isn't. In fact, he depends on women, men of color, and, to a lesser extent, queers to show him what his powers really are.

DiPiero spends much of his time working with, as well as chipping away at, psychoanalytic discourse. For him, psychoanalysis is complicit in stabilizing white masculinity, because it insists on one primary mode of difference—sexual difference—as its organizing principle. Meanwhile, the national and cultural concerns that arise in the exemplary narratives of psychoanalysis, such as Oedipus's anxieties about his "lack of identity within a particular history and culture" (39), are subsumed in a phallic anxiety that, since Freud, has become the interpretive focus of Sophocles' tragedy. In an innovative reading of Oedipus the King, DiPiero dwells on the often ignored ambiguity about whether Oedipus or a group of many (as described by the herdsman, the lone witness to the crime) actually slew King Laius (24-25). The significance of this ambiguity for DiPiero lies not in the question of whether Oedipus is his father's murderer but in Oedipus's eagerness to jump to this conclusion: "Put quite bluntly, Oedipus would rather assume a criminal identity than risk having none at all" (30). What motivates Oedipus to embrace the identity of an incestuous patricide, according to DiPiero, is not merely his desire to have killed the father, as Freud believes, but also his wish to "insert himself into the history and culture of a group—the city of Thebes—by legitimizing its narratives and assuming them to be unironically true" (31). By submitting himself to his Thebean culture's way of knowing, Oedipus exposes what is truly at stake in the oedipal drama: an ideology of interpretation, a mode of "believing is seeing," to use DiPiero's words, that relies on a "fundamental absence" or ambiguity for the production of its hegemonic narratives (1, 53).

The strength of White Men Aren't—its innovative readings of Freud, Lacan, and contemporary critics like Judith Butler, Jane Gallop, Slavoj Zizek, and Kaja Silverman—is also its...