Race, Gender and Identity Richard Dyer The Matter of Whiteness

2] There is no more powerful position than being just human being able to speak for the commonality of humanity; Raced people cant do this, they can only speak for their race. White people are seen as non-raced absence of reference to whiteness in habitual speech/writing of white people we speak of the blackness, or Chinese-ness of people (even in a genuinely friendly/accepting manner), but not the whiteness. Synopses of TV listings: Comedy in which a cop and his black sidekick investigate a robbery; Feature film from a promising Native American director studying black literature etc. 3] At the level of racial representation whites are not of a certain race, theyre just the human race 7] Racist thought is part of the cultural non -consciousness that we all inhabit 9] As Peggy McIntosh argues a white person is taught to believe that all they do, good and ill, all they achieve (job/nice house/education etc), is to be accounted for in terms of individuality not because of skin colour. White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people ; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other peoples white people create the dominant images of the world and dont quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail 10] White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange Risks with this: green light and me-too-ism. Sense that being white is no great advantage being uptight, out of touch with bodies, burdened with responsibilities didnt ask for etc. 11] Guilt is another problem would write being sensitised to racism and history of white peoples actions against non -whites overwhelmed with guilt a blocking emotion. Differentiation between white people and coloured people is bad, need to appreciate that white is a colour too. 12] To be normal, even to be normally deviant is to be white. White people in their whiteness, however, are imaged as individual and/or endlessly diverse, complex and changing 13] The work of Toni Morrison, Edward Said et al suggests that white discourse implacably reduces the non -white subject to being a function of the white subject, not allowing her/him space or autonomy, permitting neither the recognition of similarities nor the acceptance of differences except as a means for knowing the white self. This cultural process justifies the emphasis, in work on the representation of white people, on the role of images of non-white people in it. 20] All concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality. Race is a means of categorising different types of human body which reproduce themselves. It seeks to systematise differences and to relate them to differences of character and worth. Heterosexuality is the means of ensuring, but also the site of endangering, the reproduction of these differences Two ways of categorising race: genealogical (origins, lineages) and biological (identifying difference on/in the body itself). The biological seems to have eclipsed the genealogical in recent times. 22] In the quest for purity, whites win either way: either they are a distinct, pure race, superior to all others, or else t hey are the purest expression of the human race itself (Aryan/Caucasian). In depictions of the place of humans in great scheme of things, white men are the highest. In some, black men are just above apes (e.g. based on skull shape/size) 23] Biological race research as an arm of imperialism and domestic control, whose aim is to know, fix and place the non-white rather than, as the genealogical approach does, to establish the characteristics of whiteness. The significance of biological approaches to race is precisely their disinterest in, and even perhaps unwillingness to consider,

the racial character of white people, for that would be to understand white people as, like non-whites, no more than their bodies. 24] At the level of representation, whites remain, for all their tra nscending superiority, dependant on non-whites for their sense of self Such dependency could form the basis of a bond, but has more often been a source of anxiety. 26] Seen as better to be white, and sexual reproduction is the key to achieving whiteness the recurrence of rape in race fiction non-white on white rape is represented as bestiality storming the citadel to civilisation sex then seen as bestial/antithetical to civilisation conundrum for whites: To ensure the survival of the race, they have to have sex but having sex, and sexual desire, are not very white the means of reproducing whiteness are not themselves pure white. This is the logic behind the commonly found anxiety that the white race will fade away

James Snead Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look
3] Onscreen and off, the history that Western culture has made typically denies blacks and black skin of historical reference , except as former slaves or savages. The black particularly the black woman is seen as eternal, unchanging, unchangeable Blacks character is sealed off from the history into which whites have trapped them blacks in Africa are seen to behave wi th the same ineptitude and shiftlessness, even before the three hundred years of slavery and oppression 4] The three most frequent devices whereby blacks have been consigned to minor significance on screen include what I refer to as mythication; marking; and omission. Mythication involves the realisation that filmic codes describe an interrelationship between images, American films dont just include the debased black image, or the glorified white hero, but correlate them both. Mythication is the replacement of history with a surrogate ideology of elevation or demotion along a scale of human value. Mythication also implies identification E.g. Gone With the Wind the dominant I needs the coded other to function : white females (coded as subordinate to white males) employ black maids to be more authoritatively womanly, white males need black butlers/sidekicks to be more authoritatively manly 5] Marking the colour black is repeatedly over-determined, marked redundantly visually clear that black skin is a natural condition turned into a man-made sign. It is necessary because the reality of blackness cannot always be determined the racial terms black and white cannot always be positively described by being this or that only by negative contrast: black is not white. In early films, white actors used blackface, but even black actors/actresses ha d to darken their skins. Common markings include clothing, professions, and dialect etc. 6] Omission exclusion by reversal, distortion, or another form of censorship. Black absence from locations of autonomy/importance ( blacks belong in obscurity/dependence). Blacks edited out of being lawyers, teachers and doctors. 7] King Kong links the black with the monster takes a white woman! Robin Wood: contemporary society has repressed sexual desires which would threaten its stability figure of the monster. Society represses sexual energy itself, bisexuality, female sexuality/creativity the other = woman/non-Western people. 21] If Kong is objectified blackness (beastliness), then the girl is objectified beauty both are freed from a lowly state, but must then serve Denhams design. They only exist to satisfy the male viewers active and erotic look. 22] The viewers attention focuses on the danger that the girl seems to be in, while overlooking the actual dangers to which Kong (blacks) is being exposed 24] If Robin Wood is correct the figure of King Kong would allow the white male to vent a variety o repressed sexual fantasies: the hidden desire of seeing himself as an omnipotent, phallic black male; the desire to abduct the white woman

Judith Butler
2536 Butler insists nothing is natural, not even sexual identity. Even anatomical differences can be experienced only through the categories and expectations set out by cultures signifying order. Anatomical differences are mapped to expectations about sexual desire to societys compulsory heterosexuality which posits that there are two sexes and that desire runs from one to the other. Modern Western cultures understanding of sexuality is ill-equipped to recognise bodies that confound the strict binary male/female division, or desires that cross, combine, or otherwise fail to conform to a narrow understanding of sex. Modern culture sees sexuality as a fundamental constituent of identity, Butler wants to disrupt this linkage. The norms of both acceptable sexual desires and of identity construction and maintenance are oppressive, forcin g individualism into the straitjacket of prevailing heterosexual categories. The naturalised notions of gender that support masculine dominance and heterosexist power are written into our psyches and are in the dominant institutions of political/social life. 2537 Butler proposes that we understand sex and gender as citational repetitions various cultural discourses converge in the prevailing understanding of what boy, girl, man, woman signify individual actions then cite these meanings power functions pervasively through these meanings e.g. the boy learns that crying is not manly must grow into masculinity so that his male behaviour becomes second nature; the girl learns certain things make her a tomboy encouraged to dress feminine. This identity is a trap, a hardening into rigid, binarised categories (identitys straitjacket). 2538 Deviants from these categories are inevitable (homosexuals, bisexuals, hermaphrodites). Butler wants a loosening of the categories, a relaxation of our fixation on identity. Identity is not something planted in us to be discovered, but something that is performatively produ ced by acts that effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal

Gender Trouble Preface

2541 Does being female constitute a natural fact or a cultural performance, or is naturalness constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Chapter 3. Subversive Bodily Acts 2542 The sex/gender distinction and the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a generalisation of the body that pre exists the acquisition of its sexed significance. This body often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscrip tion from a cultural source figured as external to that body 2543 the figure of history as a relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for culture to emerge. From Interiority to Gender Performatives 2548 acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if reality is fabricated as an interior essence, the very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse. 2549 The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, crossdressing, and the sexual stylisation of butch/femme relations. Within feminism, these have been considered as degrading to women. 2550 In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as its contingency Fredric Jameson: Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, spe ech in a dead language. Without parodys ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter Pastiche is blank parody

2552 Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. 2553 Gender reality is created through sustained social performances this means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals genders performat ive character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality