Frantz Fanon’s analysis of white negrophobic women’s masochistic sexuality and sexual fantasies in Black Skin, White Masks, is, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes, among his most contentious work for feminists. Susan Brownmiller, in her 1975 classic Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, charges Fanon not only with hating women but also with being personally confused and anguished, on account of this portion of the text. In this essay, I examine Fanon’s approach to theorizing white female negrophobia in light of (...) his sociogenic project and the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition with which he was working; I also take a close look at his potentially most problematic remarks, from a feminist angle. I argue against Brownmiller's interpretation of Fanon as condoning rape or expressing personal attitudes through these lines, maintaining instead that he is ultimately calling for psycho-affective change. (shrink)

This essay draws on a wide range of feminist, psychoanalytic and other anti-racist theorists to work out the specific mode of space as ‘contained’ and the ways it grounds dominant contemporary forms of racism i.e. the space of phallicized whiteness. Offering a close reading of Lacan’s primary models for ego-formation, the mirror stage and the inverted bouquet, I argue that psychoanalysis can help us to map contemporary power relations of racism because it enacts some of those very dynamics. Casting the (...) production of subjectivity on the field of the visual, Lacan performs some of the fundamental conceptions of space and embodiment that ground the dominant forms of racism in these cultural symbolics. Namely, he articulates a body that is bound by skin, structured by a logic of containment, cathected through aggression and distance, and read primarily through the way it looks – both how it appears and how it beholds the appearances of other bodies. Unraveling this nexus of power relations, I argue that a fundamental anti-racist strategy is to interrupt, interrogate and re-deploy this interpellation of images. Key Words: ego-formation • embodiment • historicity • Lacan • ontological • phallus • race/racial difference/racism • space • visual • whiteness. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And finally, I end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body and Society’s special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute (...) to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges. (shrink)

Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the F...

This paper revisits Fanon’s relationship with psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian psychoanalysis, via a close reading of his rhetorics of childhood – primarily as mobilized by the ‘Look, a Negro!’ scenario from Black Skin, White Masks, the traumatogenic scene which installs the black man’s sense of alienation from his own body and his inferiority. While this scene has been much discussed, the role accorded the child in this has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on the role and positioning of the child (...) to reconsider Fanon’s ideas, in relation to his contribution to the social constitution of subjectivity, arguing that reading Fanon alongside both his citations of Lacan and some aspects of Lacanian theory opens up further interpretive possibilities in teasing out tensions in Fanon’s writing around models of subjectivity. Finally, it is argued that it is where Fanon retains an indeterminacy surrounding the child that he is most politically fruitful. (shrink)