Abstract
In this article, the author questions psychoanalytic responses to interracial relationships and subjectivity. She argues that much psychoanalytic discussion on interraciality has been shaped by denial and repression of race, fears of miscegenation, and normative assumptions about the superiority of endogamy. From the perspective of hybridity studies and analytic frameworks predicated on the primacy of relationality, it is time to ask different psychoanalytic questions.
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Notes
See, for example, Leary, 1997, 2000; Altman, 2000; Dalal, 2002; Dimen, 2002; Straker, 2004; Suchet, 2004; Holmes, 2006; Layton, 2006.
The concept of “race” may have no intrinsic meaning outside of a race-conscious society, but within racialized systems phenotype and skin colour retain particular meanings. Thus, my use of the term “race” is similar to that of race theorists such as Cornel West (1993), who adopt a mode of viewing racial difference which neither treats race as factual, fixed or categorical, nor denies the specific experiences of those whose appearance marks them as potential targets for abuse and discrimination.
According to Wright et al., 2003, p 65, the term “miscegenation” was coined in the US in the 1860s from the Latin miscere – to mix – and genus – race, and was used as a political tool in the 1864 presidential election campaign, soon finding its way into the popular lexicon.
While some contemporary philosophers make important distinctions between the primacy of relationality and intersubjectivity (see, e.g., Butler, 2004; Oliver, 2004), in post-Hegelian psychoanalytic discussion on relationality and intersubjectivity there appears to be little, if any, distinction between the two. According to James Fosshage; “Intersubjective and relational fields are equivalent concepts, both capturing the embeddedness of the individual within an intersubjective or relational field” (2003, p 411).
It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the nature/culture debate surrounding the concept of race, but suffice it to say that I find Lacanian theorist Charles Shepherdson's (1998) argument that we need new conceptual tools that neither assume race as a biological category to be an empirical fact, nor reduce the body to discursive effect or symbolic function, very persuasive. My own thinking about the usefulness or otherwise of retaining any notion of “race” is also shaped partly by anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw's work with indigenous Australians and their ways of understanding and talking about race. Cowlishaw writes: “…contrary to popular perception, racial identities are highly valued, not just by white supremacists but also by the racially subordinated. The progressive attempt to rid ourselves of racial categorization has been a marked failure, as was the 1970s feminist strategy to undermine sexual categories by denying the significance of the sexual binarism because it seemed always to entail one term being subservient to the other” (2004, p 11). While Cowlishaw suggests that it is “subservience”, or inequality, that is the problem, rather than categorization in itself, Shepherdson asks whether rather than theorizing race as biologically determined or socially constructed, or a balanced mixture of the two, it might be better to say that race is neither, just as sexual difference cannot be reduced to either sex or gender. Perhaps new language is needed, but perhaps, too, we are always faced with the limits of language, and the terms hybridity and interraciality are “good enough”.
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Stopford, A. Psychoanalysis and Interraciality: Asking Different Questions. Psychoanal Cult Soc 12, 205–225 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100121
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100121