Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race

by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks

Overview

Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually.
How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a fundamental component of our thinking.
Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134738601
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/01/2002
Series:	Opening Out: Feminism for Today
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	397 KB

About the Author

Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College, MA, USA

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments, Key to Lacan’s works, Introduction: on looking, 1 Deciphering Whiteness, 2 The object of Whiteness, 3 Whiteness and the elephant joke, 4 Looking alike: or the ethics of Suture, 5 What’s in a name? Love and knowledge beyond identity in “Recitatif”, 6 Discolorations, Notes, Bibliography, Index