Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

Abstract

In Black Skin. White Masks, Frantz Fanon transposes psychoanalysis from its gender-based framework of subject formation in order to interrogate racial subjectivity in the colonial context. Though the work inaugurates a psychoanalytic discourse of racial identity, Fanon—like Freud—takes the male as the norm. Women are implicitly present, nonetheless, in Fanon's conception of colonial identity—a mirroring relationship between white men and black men that is mediated through the bodies of women. This colonial dynamic suggests a sex-gender economy circulating women among men to construct and maintain racial categories. Though Fanon's analysis of black women's sexual desire has been dismissed as obviously sexist, the terms of his critique reveal norms of gender, class, and sexuality by which black women are bound and against which he formulates black masculinity. Analyzing gender in Fanon's text works to broaden the outline of black women's subjectivity and to delineate the interdependence of race and gender.