Gender Trouble in the Deep South : Women ; Race and Slavery

Cahiers Charles V Gender Trouble in the Deep South : Women ; Race and Slavery Sabine Broeck Citer ce document / Cite this document : Broeck Sabine. Gender Trouble in the Deep South : Women ; Race and Slavery. In: Cahiers Charles V, n°40, juin 2006. L'objet identité. Épistémologie et transversalité. pp. 115-132; doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/cchav.2006.1462 https://www.persee.fr/doc/cchav_0184-1025_2006_num_40_1_1462 Fichier pdf généré le 08/11/2019 Résumé Cet article prend pour point de départ une hypothèse partagée par des historiens tels que Nell Painter et Elizabeth Fox-Genovese : les femmes blanches du Sud des États-Unis trouvaient tout leur intérêt dans le système de l ’esclavage et ce, en dépit de l ’ambivalence possible résultant de leur propre statut. Dans cette perspective, on se propose d’étudier la complexité du rôle dévolu aux femmes blanches, allégorie incarnée de la domination blanche, tout comme leur marge de manœuvre personnelle ou leur participation active dans la mécanique de violence et de désir mêlés propre à l ’esclavage et à la séparation raciale qu ’il induit. Alors qu ’il est maintenant manifeste que l ’historiographie consacrée aux femmes .du Sud a généralement confiné cette problématique aux seules questions de genre, la place des femmes blanches dans la société sudiste d’avant la guerre et leur implication personnelle, aux motivations raciales, ont étrangement été passées sous silence dans les textes de nombreux auteurs blancs. Abstract This article starts from the assumption, shared with historians like Nell Painter and Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, that white Southern ladies had reasons to value the system of slavery — despite their own possible ambivalences. From this perspective, I want to study the problematic workings of white women’s function as the allegorical embodiment of white dominance as well as their subjective agency, their involvement in the violence and desire of the “racial divide” of slavery. While in the circulation of Southern women’s historiography taken as a whole, a confusion of simple gender-lines has become obvious, the issues of white women’s active position within antebellum society, and their subjective racialized investments, have remained strangely muted in the texts of many white authors.  Gender Trouble in the Deep South: Women; Race and Slavery Sabine BROECK* [...] modern life begins with slavery [...] Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way [...] It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can ’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll themselves. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but Morrison in Gilroy 221 The images the Deep South will evoke are likely to be titil¬ lating— even though the contemporary public has learned to distance itself from all too naive and stereotypical mind frames. Nevertheless, the sensationalist imagery of abolition¬ ism has had a long and persistent life: a mixture of Uncle Tom ’s Cabin, The Awakening, Gone With the Wind and Roots ; hysterical wasp waists and piles of white, pure, feminine mus¬ lin, porches filled with rustling Mammy-underskirts, mint ju¬ leps, strained female idleness and male self-importance, alongside scenes of nameless terror: back-breaking labor in cotton fields, auction block, whippings, a baby child’s mother sold down the river. It is only outside the reign of the grip- pingly affective, that Deep South historiography may offer facets of the social and cultural practices of slavery pointing beyond clichés which are distinguished mostly by their value of political correctness, but which otherwise leave even a University of Bremen, Germany. Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) white critical readership, like academic gender studies, unim¬ plicated. Such a fragment appears in a groundbreaking essay by Eve¬ lyn Brooks Higginbotham. In its bleak innocuousness it has the power to throw the array of white Gender Studies into sharp relief. This is the story Higginbotham imparts; my arti¬ cle in the following will take this story as its point of depar¬ ture for an inquiry into the complexities of gender trouble in the Deep South. The following is my summary of Higginbotham’s research into a historical incident from 1855 known to the court according to files about the case as “State of Missouri versus Celia.” The slave Celia is bought at age 14 by the slave-owner Robert Newsome, who sexually abuses her in the subsequent years. At age 19, she has a child by him and is expecting a second (both of them his future slaves). During the second pregnancy, she is very ill and tries to keep him from further raping her. He ignores her warnings and she kills him frontwith of the an door. ice pick, Of course bums his Celia body is and arrested scatters andthe accused ashes of in murder. The defense counsel tries to obtain a defense for man¬ slaughter in self-defense, because Celia had the right to defend herself according to Missouri-law, which protects—quote — “every woman” against abuse, rape and insult to her honor. “Every woman” is the explicit wording of this law, which in other parts constantly insists on qualifications like “white women,” “slave,” or “negro.” According to the defense, the slave owner’s right of ownership did not include legitimation of the rape of a woman. Celia was convicted of murder and hanged in December 1855 after the birth of her child (a new slave). The court’s grounds were: if Newsome had the habit of having sexual relations with the plaintiff, who was his “prop¬ erty,” Celia’s deed was indeed willful murder. In other words: the category “woman,” or a female right to honor and inviola¬ bility does not apply in Celia’s case, she is not included in the group “every woman” (Higginbotham 98). 116 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery The chronotope of the Deep South obviously keeps recreat¬ ing itself in conflicting representations, which seem to exist simultaneously in strangely unconnected and non-scrutinized ways. The aim of this article is to take up such scrutiny. The impulse to this kind of questioning reaches back to earlier contributions in Black feminist scholarship, such Angela Davis’ groundbreaking Women, Race and Class from 1981, but also to the 19th century legacy of black women’s address of issues of gender trouble in their slave narratives, and other writings (Davis 1981, Mullen, Painter). The questions I want to raise are meant to address particular limitations of US- gender research/theory and to possibly reach beyond, by em¬ phasizing the importance of dialogical approaches “across race” and asking for a theory that does not argue in the ab¬ stract beyond historical contingency. “Question” here has to be taken quite literally, as will become visible; the article may function rather as a construction site of inquiry than as an ul¬ timately satisfying set of research results. The following con¬ siderations are the beginnings of some sort of path-finding into a research project based on the assumption, shared with researchers like Nell Irvin Painter and Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, that white Southern ladies had reasons to value the system of slavery— despite their own ambivalence. From this perspective the focus is on the problematic workings of white women’s function as allegorical embodiment of white domi¬ nance and their subjective agency, their involvement in the violence and desire of the racial divide of slavery. Of course, this requires a theoretical grounding which the space of this article permits to sketch out only in roughest form. The first part of the article therefore means to frame what is actually an extensive project of study as a kind of opening, a suggestive plea for debate, discussion and cooperative results. Its second part engages a cross reading of Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers by way of clearing mental space for a rereading of the complexly charged scene of race in gender and gender in race. 117 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) The assumption of freedom, i.e. the generative semiosis of an individual human subject as the owner of a right to free¬ dom, was the self-authorizing gesture of modernity par excel¬ lence, just as it has provided the philosophical and epistemo¬ logical foundations for emancipation movements such as feminism. Yet this assumption required a massive break within cultural memory. It required a self-inscription of West¬ ern modem subjects as not-enslaved and, at the same time, as opponents to slavery at a historical point at which modernism fostered the slave trade most profitably, and was at the same time fostered by the latter in surprisingly effective ways. In their basic denial of transatlantic slavery critical philosophies of modernity were marked by split consciousness; the Enlightenment in particular, with its impetus for individual self-ownership, self-responsibility, subjective and objective right to freedom and productive self-realization, learned to op¬ erate within a system of a large-scale parasitism. Social cri¬ tique used the slave trade and slavery in a very creative, but also mostly metaphorical way. Slavery in the abstract pro¬ vided the modem symbolic with an intricate apparatus for the formulation and critique of mechanisms of social inclusive¬ ness, exclusiveness, and liminality (Broeck 2004, Buck- Morss, Davis 1975, Gilroy, Patterson). The social and cultural practices of trade and slavery changed the history of sexuality in the transatlantic realm, in which a voyeuristic drama for the submission of people un¬ folded. This encouraged the development of a large-scale white pornographic perspective and allowed for a permissivity of white male rape, by which whole generations were cor¬ rupted (Painter, Spillers). It is also necessary to speak about the almost absurd degree of fusion of economic motives and human greed, which turned female human beings into breed¬ ing machines in order to maximize profit and social control— which has had a profound effect on the representations and self-representations of black women until the present day. Most crucially in my context, slavery must be seen as a “cul- 118 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery ture of ownership,” or, where white women, adolescents and children are concerned, “co-ownership” of people, a culture of an aggressively defended right of access to de-subjectified be¬ ings, to so-called chattel, their labor, and their reproduction. The elements of white dominance over black add up to a pic¬ ture of an extreme precariousness of social and individual re¬ lations, as Orlando Patterson and other scholars have so amply configured (Mullen, Patterson). What interests me about these relations is the process of idealization and division of gender. The status of white women within the plantation complex is difficult to assess. It was aggressively marked by an almost schizoid antagonism between not having civil rights on the one hand and being extremely privileged, socially and cultur¬ ally, on the other. After decades of neglect, Deep South histo¬ riography has, over the last 30 years, become gendered: an¬ thologies and monographs have been published on a variety of aspects of white female life and gender relations in the ante¬ bellum South, ranging from studies of white women in South¬ ern politics, to domesticity, to motherhood, to male-female power relations, class distinctions among white women, women’s cultural, particularly literary contributions and more (Clinton, Faust, Juncker, Scott). Many of these studies by white researchers, with the notable exception of Elisabeth Fox-Genovese’s work, are characterized by what I would call the unacknowledged desire to counterwrite the abolitionist myth of the lazy, hysterical “Southern Belle” with representa¬ tions of white women fully integrated into social functions, responsibilities, and ethical obligations that bound their lives on the plantations into structures of production and reproduc¬ tion in which they played a crucial and distinct role vis-à-vis white men to whom they still remained legally and culturally subjected. Black women, if they appear at all in those publica¬ tions, appear marked as such, marginalized from those recon¬ structions of the centrality of gender divisions and relations for plantation society, often pluralistically and rather naively subsumed under politically correct multicultural approaches to 119 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) gender studies issues like mothering. Strikingly absent are specific studies which might confront the parasitical configu¬ ration of dominance and oppression which enabled white women’s position in the plantation system vis-à-vis black women, and black men, for that matter. Differing from those approaches, an inquiry is necessary as to how white women pursued their own privileged status, how they defined their own mistress (or “co-master”) position within the slave system, how they judged the investment of their femininity for the physical and cultural representation of white dominance, and how they reacted to the splitting off of black female slaves from their gender. The discourse of do¬ mesticity will have to be re-examined with an eye to the role white women’s structurally legitimate and largely exploitative access to black women’s labor, their emotional resources, and sexual availability played in the production of both, the icono¬ graphie constitution of white ladyhood, and white women’s subjective readings of their situation. Historian Nell Painter’s investigations have prepared a road map: her essays should be read as signposts for further necessary archival scholarship on letters, diaries and correspondence; one might also suggest tracing those complex contradictions in a web of literary rep¬ resentations —even if that might entail a reading for what Toni Morrison would call ornate absences. A further object of in¬ terest could be the small number of contemporary counter fic¬ tions, such as The Wind Done Gone (Randall) and Property (Martin) which have imaginatively tried to fill in those repre¬ sentational lacunae. US-American gender theory has basically developed within a framework of— as I want to call it — racially innocent modernity and its emphatic philosophical foundations of the subject and subjectivity (Broeck 1999). In US-American society, modernity has constituted itself in a particular logic of the subject (Broeck 2004, Venn), and it has done so by reverting to a philosophically justified freedom of white subjectivity that presupposes the desubjectification of others 120 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery by way of ownership of those others. US- American gender theory has avoided searching for the traces of its own historical rootedness within this philosophical and political regime of freedom of and as ownership by having entered a dialogue almost exclusively with the theories of European modernity and postmodernism, rather than with philosophical approaches generated by Black diasporic theory that has given center stage to the meaning of slavery for modem ideas of subjectivity. Neither psychoanalysis, nor Foucauldian theory, nor gender studies for that matter, have sufficiently dealt with the history of subjectivities created within extreme human conditions characterized by divisions as well as convergences between and across gender and race constellations in a historical situation marked by thé conditions of ownership of human beings. The aim of my project is to come to understand the intricate and individually invested psychic mechanics of this culture of ownership, as well as the subjective mental figurations of this relation. How did owning, having to work and control other human beings in a chronotope such as slavery and enjoying unlimited access to those beings one way or another, affect white women’s sense of their capacities, their limitations, the reach of their desires? How did white female subjects learn to become owners of beings and to desubjectify those that appeared day in day out before their very own eyes as human beings, how did they learn to un¬ think another human being’s access to human subjectivity? What acts of aggression (directed at self or other) were employed in order to compensate for the social and psychological compulsion to embody white domination? To what extent could a desire for closeness, intimacy and satisfaction of their own needs be gratified within the social divide of slavery, and which role did their privilege and ownership play in this? How did white women deal with the right to sanctioned invitation to excess?white violence which afforded a perpetual 121 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) Female domesticity of plantation ladies was inevitably con¬ tingent on female slaves’ labor capacity (Weiner). For a white lady, domesticity meant a kind of compulsive but luxurious construction of the white female body, which required ex¬ treme efforts at staging this body. Part of this was, for exam¬ ple, the creation of an ethereal aesthetics, bearing no corre¬ spondence to the reality of the climate, or to bodily functions, or a repertoire of white feminine body language, such as cal¬ culated faints. Fictions of the South, as well as autobiographi¬ cal material speak volumes to these camouflage acts. How¬ ever: which role was attributed to black women in order for these acts to be successful? And how did white women per¬ ceive themselves, knowing that their success was dependent on black women’s work? Domesticity meant being trained to expect and to accept black labor for one’s own sustenance as a matter of course; it entailed a dependent relation to that labor: even though white ladies had the power of representing their oftentimes absent husbands in matters concerning the “big house.” According to black female slave narratives white women relied on their female slaves for the actual execution of almost all household tasks —taking care of the children and the sick, cooking, household logistics, sewing, washing, keep¬ ing store, feeding slaves and animals, gardening, but also of such intimate tasks as emptying chamber pots (Davis 1981, Mullen). Moreover, domesticity for the Southern Belle in¬ cluded a very ambivalent position concerning her role as mother and her offspring: white children were to the largest extent raised by black nannies. This parasitical state of affairs did create a subjective feeling of being at the mercy of the household’s slaves, which in turn means that a paranoid pre¬ emptive despotism must have been the order of the day. White women were routinely surrounded by black people, who, in their imagination figured as loyal chattel, and must have caused great wonder and aggressive disappointment if they chose not to function properly. Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery Even though a historical reappraisal of plantation slavery has been available for years it has hardly made an entrance into American white gender theory; by the following exem¬ plary engagement with Judith Butler I turn to this lack di¬ rectly, trying to tease out the possibly productive implications of a necessary address of slavery’s scenarios for gender stud¬ ies. I quote two paradigmatic passages from Judith Butler, which reflect—though in a rather condensed fashion— the state-of-the-art knowledge gained by recent gender theory. First, “If sexuality is culturally constructed within existing power relations, then the postulation of a normative sexuality that is ‘before,’ ‘outside,’ or ‘beyond’ power is a cultural im¬ possibility” (Butler 30) and, the second one: As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of conver¬ gence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations [...] Gender ought not to be constructed 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. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender of the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mun¬ dane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. (Butler 10, 140-1) This paradigm could be, in principle, very useful for a dis¬ cussion of gender relations in the Deep South, which reveal the precariousness of the category gender. Why then, has white US gender theory so rarely looked at slavery and the 123 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) role of white women within it? The question of the racial con¬ stitutedness of/in gender —which has, after all, become one of the most crucial questions for gender studies —could be much more productively theorized if the discourse included an ad¬ dress of US history. One explanation might be that the lack of such a historicizing approach in gender studies is the result of a re-universalizing tendency within theory as genre, in which the obsession with the abstract leads to an a priori, always al¬ ready, white subject. Theory —in this logic —knows only the default universal kind of performativity of gender (which is white); authors and readers as agents of a mutually shared symbolic, can in the end only imagine post-enlightenment white subjects. European theories of modernism (and post¬ modernism) in their exclusively abstract contemplation of the master-slave dialectic, which has consistently functioned as the master-metaphor for oppressive relations, could only imagine human beings who were not enslaved as subjects. In reverse, and one could say, rather perverse logic, it decided not to see the enslaved as subjects. Gender theory’s affective and epistemological liaison with post-enlightenment theory resulted in an avoidance of American history to which the paradigm of the master-slave dialectic could never be applied only as a metaphor, but for which, instead, the issue of the en¬ slaved’ s access to subjectivity (and thus to gender) was the most crucial, and visceral, question, and one which has had repercussions until today. These are of course, polemical suggestions. I want to go on in the same spirit and share some observations which could be useful for a reconsideration of gender in and through slavery, and race. These observations have been inspired mostly by Hortense Spillers, who, in her “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (an article which has gone largely unnoticed by white theorists), has already pointed to fundamental problems for a “gender grammar” that is, for gender theory : 124 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery [...] in the historic outline of dominance, the respective subject positions of “female” and “male” adhere to no symbolic integrity. At a time when current critical discourses seem to compel us more and more decidedly toward gender “undecidability,” it would appear reaction¬ ary, if not dumb, to insist on the integrity of female/male gender. But undressing these conflations in meaning, as they appear under the rule of dominance [i.e. slavery], would restore, as figurative possibility [...] the potential for gender differentiation as it might express itself along a range of stress points. (Spillers 2004) Spillers refers here to the already mentioned division of fe¬ male beings in “women” equal white-female and “slaves” equal ungendered, which made it impossible for black female slaves to access the cultural capital available to gender. Spillers also scandalously suggests that this “reduction” of black women to “tortured and torturable flesh” established manipulative rights to sexual, mental and psychological in¬ fringement on female slaves for both white men and women. This made any appellation of female slaves into gendered sub¬ ject positions impossible. This structural impossibility then marks a kind of “ground zero” for theoretical notions of gen¬ der differentiation of heteronormative sexuality in the United States, in which the availability of “gender neutral flesh” sig¬ nificantly undermined the “naturalness” of binary gender con¬ stellations and of socially stabilizing gender differentiation along the straight axis of male versus female subjectivity. Spider’s article also suggests that motherhood was an im¬ possibility for black female slaves, whose children were not “owned” by them or their men, but became white owners’ “chattel.” This deliberate bastardization, or orphanization of black children had dire consequences: triangularization and oedipal identity formation within the family triad mother- father-child became outlawed for generations of African- Americans. White intervention required a psychological, men¬ tal and social act of compensation from the black community, beyond the “gender-task” of individual legitimate mothering 125 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) in order to counter this imposition of white patriarchal interest of reproduction onto their own kinship structures, and the de¬ struction of a black male subject position as “father.” Insight into these conditions of slavery thus necessitates a reconceptu¬ alization of theoretical statements about gender differentiation: a reassessment of the assumption that only those allegedly universal gender relations may be constitutive for social and individual reproduction, and thus, nothing outside a binary white gender purview requires theory’s interventions. Spillers concerns herself mostly with the effects of slavery’s constella¬ tions on the black community in US -American history, and especially on the position of black women, as perceived by themselves and by others. Robyn Wiegman, the only white gender scholar who clearly refers to Spider’s thesis of the “ungendering” of the black community in her book American Anatomies . Theorizing Race and Gender , also focuses on the long term effects of this psychological and social de- subjectification of the black community, and the resulting American difficulty to imagine sovereign race relations. The agency of white women in slavery’s quadr angulations, as it were, thus still awaits theoretical address. What I will suggest in the following then, are some preliminary speculative ques¬ tions which gesture in that direction. White femininity which, in the antebellum South, works as an aesthetic representation of gender at the cost of almost total disembodiment of white women, functions as a central defin¬ ing moment of white dominance, as visceral allegory of an unassailable “white gentility.” This in turn is made possible by ascribing to black female slaves a status of “pure flesh” so to speak (in the sense of sexual and reproductive accessibility and responsibility). The Deep South needed female whiteness in order to allegorize racial difference, but its livelihood de¬ pended on making this allegory materially visible and physi¬ cally effective. It thus granted white women an agency of be¬ ing -white that was based on an authoritative privilege of gender which could only, by necessity —since equity within 126 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery patriarchy was out of the question— have slaves as its defining object. The possession of a white gender subjectivity was bound to owning black objects— materially or symbolically, female gender could only exist, and thus support the white power structure, only because and if female slaves were split off from it. The construction of gendered subjectivity depends largely on the “successful” management and controlled pursuit of a human being’s libidinous desire. But what does this easily ac¬ ceptable sentence mean within the orbit of slavery? How has a definition of white desire within the bounds of race and its complete and terroristic restriction to the white race succeeded in the face lations and of ofstunning white violence? day-to-day A human intimacyrelation of black- which whitewas re¬ characterized simultaneously by a high degree of intimacy and an extremely rigid hierarchical divide and disavowal must have carried within itself the latent possibility of transgression of which we have as yet no protocol, as Spillers would phrase it. Can a post-Lacanian analysis of the law of the symbolic and its regulations of human desire into and within gendered con¬ stellations be transported universally into a historical scenario that has juxtaposed raced and gendered beings in a way that explodes and multiplies beyond the binary difference of gen¬ der that European theory assumes? The sexual nexus of slav¬ ery functioned in a way that excluded the black non-subjects from the symbolically legitimate circulation of desire; it did not, as Althusser would say, interpellate black human beings as gendered subjects, but worked so as to de-subjectify them. What was white women’s function in that game? How did white women function in a scenario with four actors, in both, “possessing the phallus” and “being the phallus” was seriously thrown into question by the presence of a second binary gen¬ der constellation, to which the white couple had a relation of ownership — so that it was viscerally present at the same time that it had to be aggressively disavowed? Psychoanalytically 127 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) speaking, what do we make of the fact that the white woman was situated in a gender quadrangle in which the black man could not have the phallus, and the black woman could cer¬ tainly not be phallic — or both of these only to the point of a hysterical breakdown of the system of white control? Post- Lacanian theory has as yet not ventured to self-reflexively ad¬ dress psychosexual scenarios that were not inscripted in/as bi¬ nary differences and which might have effected the emergent white subjects’ situatedness within the symbolic, as well as the black human non-subjects’ barred access to it, and the psychosexual,extent. considerable and cultural conflicts resulting thereof, to a Furthermore, what do we make of the complicated games with their own sexuality which white women must have been playing: in which way did white ladies use their black female slaves for their own strategies against repeated unwanted pregnancies? Or, to step up the complication of questions: black slaves were not allowed to mother their children in many cases, but raised their white owners’ babies for whom they became a proverbial fountain of motherly care and nur- turance. How then does a theory, for which oedipal disavowal and the loss of the maternal object have been most crucial in the formation of gendered, individual subjectivity, apply? The maternal object was not only to be, as it were, passively lost, or forsaken; it had to be actively disowned so that the human being (who had performed as maternal object) could be owned perspectively, could mature and become realized as a legal and material object, as it were. What becomes of the taboo re¬ striction for the child to grow beyond symbiosis if it has to work not only in order to enter the child in his/her own sexual subjectivity apart from the parents, but also to rid the child of an improper racial attachment? How did the culturally en¬ forced and sanctioned exchange of the maternal function af¬ fect white women’s psychic constitution? What did it mean for white girls in the first place, as well as for them as pro- 128 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery spective white mothers with black mammies for their chil¬ dren? My questions which appear here as but an inquisitive accu¬ mulation of stress points, to paraphrase Spillers, need to be disseminated, worked through, and possibly answered; this article—I warned you at the beginning — accordingly works as a list, not as a presentation of an organic picture. A largely un¬ examined nexus of impulses and effects of violence and desire constituted white women’s emotional and psychic investments within the affective orbit of slavery (to paraphrase Fox- Genovese’s term), and, more importantly, of post-slavery ra- cialized social constructions of gender. Gender studies, despite their politically correct affectation of the race and gender man¬ tra, have widely avoided reading a growing corpus of black gender theory as theory and applying it to a cultural analysis of white women. Going back to the history of slavery and its implications —paying the referential debt to history, as Sho- shona Felman once called it —could, however, improve (white) gender theory far beyond any explicit, or implicit fac¬ ile appeals to universalism. 129 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) Bibliography Broeck, Sabine (1999), White Amnesia — Black Memory? American Women ’s Writing and History, Frankfurt/New York, Lang. _ (2004), “Never Shall We Be Slaves: Locke’s Treatises, Slavery and Early European Modernity” in Raphael-Hemandez, Heike (ed.), Blackening Europe. The African-American Presence, New York/London, Routledge. Buck-Morss, Susan (2000), “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24(4). BUTLER, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York/London, Routledge. Clinton, Catherine (1982), The Plantation Mistress. Women’s World in the Old South, New York, Pantheon Books. Davis, Angela (1981), Women, Race and Class, New York, Random House. Davis, Brion Davis (1975), The Problem ofSlavery in the Age of Revo¬ lution, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Faust, Drew Gilpin (1996), Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. FELMAN, Shoshona and Laub, Dori (1992), Testimony. Crises of Wit¬ nessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York, Routledge. Fox-Genovese, Elisabeth (1988), Within the Plantation Household. Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press. Gilroy, Paul (1993), The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Con¬ sciousness, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks (1993), “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race” in Clark, Veve A. et al. (eds.), Revising the Word and the World, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 130 Sabine BROECK: Women; Race and Slavery Juncker, Clara (2002), Through Random Doors We Wandered: mark. Women Writing the South, Odense, University Press of Southern Den¬ Martin, Valerie (2003), Property, London, Abacus. Mullen, Harryette (1999), Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity, and Differences Press. in Slave Narratives, New York, Cambridge University PAINTER, Nell Irvin (2002), Southern History Across the Color Line, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Patterson, Orlando (1982), Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Randall, Alice (2001), The Wind Done Gone, New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. SCOTT, Anne Firor (1970), The Southern Lady. From Pedestal to Poli¬ tics 1830-1930, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Spillers, Hortense [1987] (2004), “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” in Black, White and in Color. Essays on American Press. Literature and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Venn, Couze (1997), “Beyond Enlightenment? After Foucault, Who Comes?” in Theory, Culture and Society. Explorations in Critical So¬ cial Science, Vol. 14(3). Weiner, Marli (1998), Mistresses and Slaves. Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80, Urbana, University of Illinois Press. WlEGMAN, Robyn (1995), American Anatomies. Theorizing Race and Gender, Durham, Duke University Press. 131 Cahiers Charles V n° 40 (2006) Résumé Cet article prend pour point de départ une hypothèse partagée par des historiens tels que Nell Painter et Elizabeth Fox-Genovese : les femmes blanches du Sud des États-Unis trouvaient tout leur intérêt dans le système de l ’esclavage et ce, en dépit de l ’ambivalence possible résultant de leur propre statut. Dans cette perspective, on se propose d’étudier la complexité du rôle dévolu aux femmes blanches, allégorie incarnée de la domination blanche, tout comme leur marge de manœu¬ vre personnelle ou leur participation active dans la mécanique de vio¬ lence et de désir mêlés propre à l ’esclavage et à la séparation raciale qu ’il induit. Alors qu ’il est maintenant manifeste que l ’historiographie consacrée aux femmes .du Sud a généralement confiné cette probléma¬ tique aux seules questions de genre, la place des femmes blanches dans la société sudiste d’avant la guerre et leur implication personnelle, aux motivations textes de nombreux raciales,auteurs ont étrangement blancs. été passées sous silence dans les Abstract This article starts from the assumption, shared with historians like Nell Painter and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, that white Southern ladies had reasons to value the system of slavery —despite their own possible ambivalences. From this perspective, I want to study the problematic workings of white women’s function as the allegorical embodiment of white dominance as well as their subjective agency, their involvement in the violence and desire of the “racial divide” of slavery. While in the circulation of Southern women’s historiography taken as a whole, a confusion of simple gender-lines has become obvious, the issues of white women’s active position within antebellum society, and their subjective racialized investments, have remained strangely muted in the texts of many white authors. 132