RaceSex by Zack Naomi

Author:Zack, Naomi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134718979
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

OUR EPIGRAPHS are two classic statements on sexuality and one classic, provocative statement on its intersection with race.1 In Aristotle’s world, where the hierarchies of a mythology are writ large and are at the core of a rational ordering of the universe, we find that the question of gender is colored by an indirect reference to the cold and consequently the dark. In that world, where the biological is linked to the reproductive, woman is worse than a derivative of man; she is also a derivative of the human being. For whereas male stands as the formal constitution of human reality, female is treated as an undeveloped male and consequently an undeveloped human being, a less-than-human being. To be is to be both form and a mover, which Aristotle linked to fertility. The male was a fertile mover who brought form into matter (female) and hence the concrete reality of the human species. In that world, then, one does not see female as a gender at all, another constituent of the human species. One sees simply males/human beings and less-developed-males/less-developed-human beings—that is, one gender.2

By the time of Freud, we witness a schism between reproductive capacities and gender, where male and female refer to realities that are fertile, in spite of the etymological link between gender and Greek words like gênesis (birth) and genos (kind). For Freud, the psychological constructions of sexual identity need not be linked to the markers male and female. In Freud’s world, then, a female can be what psychologists regard as masculine and a male can be what psychologists regard as feminine.3

Separating the gender-sex link does not entail, however, a schism between the acts signified by the previous relationship. Thus, the masculine performance of a female can restructure her relation to a feminine male. This coding is made particularly multivalent when we add, as does Fanon, racial significations to the context. If we make as our model the context that I have coined elsewhere4 as an antiblack world, we can see immediately how Fanon’s remarks come into focus. For if a group is structured in a phobogenic, overdetermined way to signify hot/active/masculine/white and another group is constructed as cold/passive/feminine/black, then relationships between males and females in such a world may be skewed with subtexts of transformed sexual meanings: white males and black males may relate to each other in homoerotic ways that may be more genital than social; on the social level, the relation may be heterosexual and misogynous.

In chapters 14 and 17 of my book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I explored the significance of intersections between sexual relationships and race through Sartrean conceptions of desire and provided an analysis of black and white bodies in bad faith. My discussions of sexuality there were cursory, however, since they were situated only as considerations along the road of a phenomenological ontology.5 In this essay, I would like to provide a discussion of racial and sexual matrices and their significance for the understanding of phenomenological treatments of social role.

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