Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race

Desiring Whitenessprovides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often presumed to be a social construction and we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually.Desiring Whitenessexplores this visual discrimination by asking questions in specifically psychoanalytic terms: 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, Seshadri-Crooks demonstrates that race is a system of differences organized around a privileged term: Whiteness. Contra "Whiteness Studies," she argues that Whiteness should not be understood as the bodily or material property of a particular group, but as a term that makes the logic of race thinkingpossible.

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