Female Subjects in Black and White

Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism

Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen, Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520206304
• eBook ISBN: 9780520918153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities—as well as the transformative possibilities—between white feminist and African American cultural formations.

Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism.


This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION The Dream of a Common Language
• The Occult of True Black Womanhood Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies
• Doing Justice to the Subjects Mimetic Art in a Multicultural Society: The Work of Anna Deavere Smith
• “Racial Composition” Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race
• Black Writing, White Reading Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation
• “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” Psychoanalysis and Race
• Seeing Sentiment Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye
• “Beyond Mortal Vision” Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text
• Redeeming History Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse Founding Narratives of Feminism
• The Quicksands of the Self Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut
• Passing, Queering Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
• The Stories of O (Dessa) Stories of Complicity and Resistance
• Pauline Hopkins and William James The New Psychology and the Politics of Race
• Channeling the Ancestral Muse Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick
• The Poetics of Identity Questioning Spiritualism in African American Contexts
• Fixing Methodologies Beloved
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS