Towards a Black Female Imaginary

While white psychoanalytic theorists have thoroughly engaged with psychoanalytic paradigms in order to rethink the position of the female subject, black feminist thinkers have, for the most part, steered clear of Freudian and Lacanian rhetoric (Hortense Spillers and Evelyne Hammonds are the only exceptions I have found so far). The easy answer to the question of why black female critics are uneasy with a psychoanalytic methodology is that the black female subject does not exist in classic psychoanalytic thought, which presumes a white, middle-class subject, and that psychoanalysis has a history of neglecting to historicize subjectivity which poses unique problems for black feminism. However, given the special attention that has been paid by white feminist critics to black women's literature since the nineties, given the fetishization of the black woman as Other who, in Valerie Smith's perspective, functions as a sort of "mammy" to rematerialize white women's discourse, I relate the reluctance of black feminist critics towards psychoanalysis to the skepticism of my black students in an English Composition class to the institutionalization of black English (or ebonics, a term that is preferred because it neutralizes racial connotations): a wariness of being reified, reduced to a body of knowledge that can be mastered by (predominantly white) academic critics who can further their careers though their own (mis-)interpretations. Even when the ostensible goal is to level the playing field, include the African-American subject in discourses traditionally reserved for white, middle-class subjects, what Foucault would have called "technologies of power/knowledge" are always at work.

Black women have ignored psychoanalysis not only because of their uneasy relationship with white feminists, who have neglected their work until it became politically convenient for them to "discover" it, but also because of their difference from black male critics, who have adopted a psychoanalytic corpus and made of race a metaphor: for instance, Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker. As Margaret Homans has noted in " "Black Composition'" black male critics have borrowed from the Lacanian view of the (universally male) subject who must distance himself from his mother, reduced to the body, in order to acquire a subjectivity at all. The adoption of race as metaphor, or a view of race that insists that race has nothing to do with the body, reproduces the gender bias within psychoanalytic thought: the body of the black mother is left behind so that the universal black male subject can ally himself with white male thinkers indebted to Derrida and Lacan for their "discovery" of the illusion of a stable subject. If the "black" man is an illusion, he too can occupy that neutral yet universal position of the subject of enunciation that the white man has occupied for centuries. Hence, by refusing to engage with psychoanalysis, black feminist thinkers affirm their difference both from white feminists and from black male critics who have, for the most part, ignored the intersection of race and gender in their theories of the subject that was the subject of Barbara Smith's essay "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism" (1975).

There's another possible reason for the uneasiness of black feminist critics with psychoanalysis: that it may not be possible to theorize the black female subject through the lens of much psychoanalytic feminist theory, or to revise psychoanalytic feminist theory to "fit" the black female subject. An intersectional approach, of which Valerie Smith has written about, does not work well with paradigms of sexual difference: one simply can not add "gender" to "race" in order to understand the position of the black female subject. This renders problematic a theory of the female imaginary that ontologizes and thus prioritizes the feminine, linking it with the fluid and relational. The "female" cannot act as an umbrella term to include all deviations from a heterosexual, white, class-privileged male standard. Thinking gender and race through an embodied imaginary, however, enables us to see the mutual dependency of cultural constructions of white and black femininity and to re-imagine our imaginary embodiments of each other (as monster or mammy, little girl or witch).

Should black women preside over a critical investigation of the black female imaginary? Though as a white woman I risk undermining my authority as a reader of black women's texts and open myself to the too-familiar charge of essentialism, I will say yes: theories of black female subjectivity should carry more weight when the theorists are black women who have experienced the double burdens of racism and sexism and who have acquired more than an abstract notion of what it means to "talk back," to borrow from bell hooks. If white feminists were to listen to black feminists theorize their own subjectivity instead of trying to make reparations for not listening, which is where they are at now, they would open up a playing field that, despite the twenty five-year-old trend towards a politics of inclusiveness, has never really been leveled. Even in "Female Subjects in Black and White," an anthology whose title holds out the promise of dialogue and debate between black and white psychoanalytic feminists, the dominant "voices" are those of white women who censer themselves and each other for their own misreadings of black women's literature. Such circular self-correction may function as a strategy of self-concealment, an easy way of appeasing race guilt; at any rate, it is not enough. Only if more black female critics become willing to creatively engage with psychoanalytic feminism could the potential for a cutting-edge dialogue, for a union of psychoanalysis with gender and race theory that transforms the terms of all three discourses, be actualized.

If black female critics have, for the most part, remained silent on the way race and psychoanalysis can inform each other, the works of twentieth-century African-American women novelists invite this critical re-appropriation. The novels of Hurston, Morrison and Walker anticipated the embodied imaginary of post-feminist thought, representing figural and imaginal imaginaries that connect black female subjects on an unconscious bodily level: Hurston portrays Janie's awakening to her desires through the image of the blossoming pear tree; Morrison explores the creative, erotic space between Sula and Nel through dream imagery that confounds the boundary between seer and seen. Identificatory bonds between black female subjects are forged on the basis of a shared pleasure in constructing a self that exceeds the categories of race and gender, reflecting the complex patterns of intertextuality among black female novelists as they rewrite each other's textual bodies, "play" with each other's "reality." The dialogic relationship between black women writers distinguishes them from Anglo-American counterparts, who have been more interested in revising male narratives (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary). What this suggests is a genealogy specific to the black female literary tradition: black women writing for each other, forming homosocial alliances in their mothers' gardens rather than locking themselves in their rooms to argue with their fathers' ghosts.