AHRB CentreCATH Lecture Series I, 2004-5

Shadow at the Heart: America's Racial Melancholy and the Uses of Michel Foucault's 'Care of the Self' as Therapeutic Practice

Professor Jane Flax, Department of Political Science, Howard University

Text of Lecture 2

Tracking Melancholy : Monster’s Ball and The Deep End as Representations of Race and Gender in the Contemporary United States

Theorizing in the abstract about how race/gender shape political life provides limited insight into and purchase on how these interwoven social relations retain their constituting power. The project Walton (1997) urges -- investigations “in very specific and detailed ways, (of) local constructions of racialized identification and desire” (146)” is a necessary supplement. Such projects can provide rich material for investigation of the psychic and political work representations of race/gender perform in the contemporary United States. As Walton claims, they might also help dislodge normative whiteness as deeply constitutive of female (and male) subjectivity.

The local sites I discuss here are two films, Monster’s Ball and The Deep End. On the surface, these films differ greatly, yet each offers many insights into the pervasive and interacting effects of race, gender and power. In both films, racialized gender positions, patriarchal power, racialized maternity, and racially specific relations between fathers and sons are enacted as the characters and stories unfold. Monster’s Ball directly confronts the sickness of contemporary race/gender positions and the intra-and intersubjective violence required to sustain them. The Deep End reveals the work required to sustain the facade of white, heterosexual, bourgeois normalcy and domesticity and the desires that animate its perpetuation. In tracking racial melancholia I make use of ideas such as fantasy, transitional space, and internalization. These are obviously tools taken from psychoanalytic discourses. In using them, I do not mean to imply that psychoanalysis is an unproblematic discourse for analyzing race/gender. Many of its bedrock assumptions would have to be undone for it to be fully useful to such projects. Psychoanalysis still remains primarily a narrative of white Western subjectivity, and it s notions of subjectivity are still rooted in problematic notions of “sexual difference.” Gendering, divorced from race, is its privileged category of subjective development and embodiment. These narratives would look quite different if the denial and repression of racialization were undone (Brickman, 2003). As Abel and several of the other authors in Female Subjects in Black and White (1997) argue, analysts could no longer assume the priority of gender in the constitution of the subject. Subjects are inducted into the symbolic order of contemporary America, not only through the Father’s no of the incest taboo and the phallic interjection of sexual difference, but also through the Law’s demand for racial interpellation (Spillers, 1997). I was reminded of this when trying to convince my students of gender’s pervasiveness. I said, “when a baby is born, isn’t the first question asked: is it a boy or a girl?.” They replied, but also, and equally it might be asked, “how dark is it?.” Gender, too, is conventionally constructed not only in relation to genitals but also skin color. As Cheng and the authors in Female Subjects in Black and White illuminate, intra- and interracial fantasies shape each subject’s understanding of and affective relations with their socially assigned gender.

What happens when the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1937, 356-357)–sexual difference–cracks open? It turns out that, as Freud (1905) also knew, what is represented as solid rock is instead sedimented layers of unstable gravel, each filtered into the others and compressed by the force of social prohibition and power into an apparent solidity. Comprising these intermingled layers are gender, heterosexuality, racial formations, identity, and ways of reading the body. The complex, polymorphous, sensuous bodily world is disaggregated and organized into a discrete, hierarchal scheme. Gender identity is assigned by reading bodies according to cultural conventions (which are racialized and historically and geographically specific). Raced, gendered, and contextually specific demands thus generate “sexual difference.” Organs are assigned differential importance, meaning and responsibility. The privileged few are the loci of identity and identification. The signification of organs articulates racial and gender relations; for example, in the U.S. context, it is necessary to incorporate the history of lynching and rape into any thinking about the constitution of masculinity.

Psychoanalytic accounts of “sexual difference” normalize heterosexuality. In its prescriptive anticipation of future heterosexual coupling, penis/vagina are paired; vagina as the different to the penis/same. The “nature” of these privileged organs enables them to engage with their “opposites,” and fortunately they have a “innate”, if mysterious, desire to do so. The raced/gendered reading of my body thus provides a narrative of identity. It enables organs to speak and tell me who I am. My core (gender) identity is secure when I internalize and consent to these normative readings. It is confirmed by verifying one’s difference through desiring or being the desired object of a proper (gendered/ethnic/racial) other. My identity is confirmed and reinforced by the assigned race/gender of the object of my desire. I am female because a man desires or will desire me when I grow up. I am a male because I desire females, and when I grow up I will get a woman to replace Mother. If I desire a woman, I am a lesbian. Being a lesbian is my core/true/authentic identity. Race shapes the constitution of appropriate object choice and the meanings and consequences of such choices. In the contemporary United States object choices are enmeshed in race/gender power circuits. Access to women and control of sexuality have long been sites of domination and resistance. Subordinate others may signify a power move through laying claim to the same sexual access as enjoyed by a dominant group (Cleaver, 1969, part IV). Relations among dominant and subordinate others remain fraught with their historical meanings and contexts.

Whether through fantasy, emotion, countervailing meaning schemes, “inappropriate” object choices or political acts of race/gender rebellion, subjects also resist and remake the normative grids in which they find themselves. Resisting this circuit, detaching desire, organ, embodiment, identity, gender, race, and difference exposes the founding taboos structuring social relations and cultural formations. Psychoanalysis focuses on the incest taboo and its prohibitions related to kinship and desire, but in its narratives, desire is conflated with its heterosexual expression. As in its archetypical representation, the story of Oedipus, the incest taboo stipulates that desire must be turned from the “opposite sexed” kin to an exogamous opposite sexed object. However, this narrative obviously takes heterosexual desire as a given and obscures the law’s function as another taboo–a taboo on other forms of desire and, as Butler(2000) points out, as a taboo on other forms of kinship. Such kinship might include exogenous alliances between subjects socially assigned to the same gender position. As currently articulated, especially by Lacanian theory, such alliances remain outside the Law and hence are illegible as forms of kinship. As Butler puts it, when “the study of kinship was combined with the study of structural linguistics, kinship positions were elevated to the status of a certain order of linguistic positions without which no signification could proceed, no intelligibility could be possible” (20). Like all discourse, then, psychoanalysis generates its own prohibitions. If one questions the collapse of (heterosexual) kinship and signification, the response is, it is the Law. The symbolic is founded on the Father’s No. Without it, all is anarchy, the undifferentiated semiotic. In its normative accounts of subjectivity, it reinstalls the repressions and categories (race, sexual difference) of the dominant culture. Nonetheless, unlike many other discourses, psychoanalysis requires and enables systematical attention to fantasy’s power and effects. Thus, it remains a necessary, flawed tool, for those who seek to understand the pervasive hold of race/gender relations in contemporary American life.

Monster’s Ball offers an exemplary portrayal of the melancholy of race. All its characters are gripped by an aspect of melancholia that Cheng under emphasizes: a pathological combination of psychic numbness and rage. The movie begins with a shot of a dim room, flashing light, a rumbled bed and someone vomiting. That person is Hank, a guard at the local prison, who is soon to participate in another execution. Like all the major characters in the film, Hank tries to counter his numbness with some sort of oral gratification, in his case chocolate ice cream, which he can only eat with a plastic spoon. (Metal may remind him of what is put into the prisoner’s mouth in preparation for electrocution). Hank’s father, Buck, has emphysema, from smoking, and the main female character, Leticia, smokes incessantly. Her son, who is grossly overweight, sneaks candy and eats it compulsively. Hank, his father and son, are white; all these men are (or in the father’s case, were) prison guards. Leticia, her son, and her soon to be executed husband (and the son’s father ) are black. Race is registered almost immediately in the film when Hank’s father sees two young black boys in his yard and launches into a tirade about their proximity, how they used to know their place and “there was none of this mixing going on.” Hank, the good son, goes out and shoots his shotgun to scare the boys away. It turns out the boys are friends of Hank’s son, and foreshadow the mixing to come. Hank and his father are bound by racial hatred, which deflects and is fed by the hatred between them, and the father claims Hank’s mother hated “N.’s” too. Hank hates his son, Sonny, but he and Sonny are bound by the violence of the prison, as we see them practicing what will be for his son his first execution. Masculine pride is affirmed by taking on such work, and Hank is enraged when his son messes up the practice, for it will reflect on Hank and his capacity to induct his son into this world. The prison reflects the complexity of contemporary race/gender relations. Hank’s squad is integrated; it includes one white woman and a black man. Yet, we know that prisons are disproportionately populated by black men and they are more likely to receive the death penalty. Currently, “ten percent of all American black men ages 25 to 39" were in prison in 2003 (Butterfield, 2004, p. 14). Although only twelve percent of the U.S. population is black, forty-four percent of state and federal prisoners are. Later in the movie, there are several shots of a chain gang from Hank’s prison, all black men.

We first see Leticia with her son in her battered car, heading to the prison on their last visit before her husband’s execution. What can this father pass on to his son? A warning not to be him, (“I’m a bad man,” he says) and the drawings he has made in prison. His relationship with Leticia is full of hate and humiliation. He cannot play the normative male role of protector; he cannot take care of her (Young, 2003, 3-6). She is alone, lacking the protection expected by some in her gender position (particularly, white women). Located as poor, black, female resistance is difficult; she is losing her house because she can’t afford to pay for it. After a painful parting, the guards deny him his final phone call, and we see Leticia and her son desperately watching television, she smoking, he sneaking candy. Leticia turns her rage on her son, beating him for the candy and being fat; humiliating him by making him weigh himself. Her son’s fat may wound her narcissism; taken to reflect her failure as a mother, she is that much further from any fantasy of perfection. She later tries to frame her attack as a form of protection, saying that a black man can’t be fat in America. Her rage must also be fueled by a sense of powerlessness; as a subject positioned as a poor, black woman, what access could she provide to power networks of normative masculinity? At the moment of her husband’s death, Leticia is brushing her teeth, but no oral consolation is to be had.

Sonny, Hank’s son, vomits as the prisoner is walking to the electric chair. (Hank vomits most mornings at home.) Afterwards Hank turns on him and beats him for messing up the man’s last walk. Sonny’s behavior violates normative white/male practices, hence Sonny must located in another subject position. Hank tries to humiliate Sonny by calling him a “pussy,” a woman, just like his mother, who left Hank and evidently was also hated by him. When a fellow officer tries to restrain Sonny, Hank calls him a “nigger,” reminding us again of the not so repressed presence of the past. Shamed by a black/male witnessing this failure of his son (and by implication, Hank’s paternal practices) to conform to race/gender norms, Hank needs to denigrate the officer as well. He regains his dominant position by warning the officer to never again touch a superior and makes him shout “yes, sir” to signify his subordination.

At their house, Sonny points a gun at Hank, tries to humiliate him, says Hank always hated him, but Sonny loved Hank; then Sonny sits down, turns the gun on himself and kills himself. One could say his is a social suicide or a failure of interpellation. He cannot locate himself within his father and grandfather’s practices. Yet, his love for his father and wish that his father recognize him disable effective resistance or subjective remaking. Buck is sitting in the room. His interpretation of events differs; he dismisses the suicide by saying Sonny was weak, like his mother. Although Hank cleans up the blood and locks Sonny’s possessions away in his former room, something snaps. He resigns from the prison and burns his uniform; his father attacks him for letting him down, as Hank’s mother did. Buck calls her a shit; he denigrates her because she committed suicide, which Buck terms a betrayal, a failure to meet his expectations and desires. Later Buck says the same about Hank, because he leaves the prison, rejecting his father’s identity, and buys a gas station.

Meanwhile, Leticia is fired from her waitress job; she gets another one at the restaurant Hank goes to; her car dies, and as she is heading home with her son, he is hit by a car. Hank happens by and takes them to the hospital where the son dies; more blood, this time on Hank’s backseat. The hospital, too reflects the complexity of contemporary race/gender relations. It is no longer segregated , and Leticia is comforted by a white nurse who holds her, violating previous racial taboos. However, the son died because his mother, a poor, black woman could not afford to repair her car. Hank awkwardly tries to express sympathy, but Leticia says that, despite what Hank says, as a black boy, no one will try to find the killer. What follows is a painful unfolding of a relationship between Leticia and Hank, as each of them confront the death of their son and their inability to feel grief, or to feel anything at all. Each reconstructs the narrative of their parental history, resituating their children as “good” sons so as to reconcile with loss and their own failures. Hank says that since his son died, he feels like he cannot breathe; he cannot get out from inside himself. Sex is an almost brutal attempt to escape the claustrophobic imprisonment of each within their own, inarticulate worlds. Leticia repeatedly begs Hank to “make me feel, make me feel good.” They connect around loss and need, a form of the long-postponed grieving Cheng discusses. After making love, each says to the other, “I needed you.”

When Leticia goes to Hank’s house to give him a present, she and his father have an ugly conversation in which the father discusses his own taste for “N. juice,” and its connection with manhood. Leticia flees in rage and horror. Buck tries to restablish the primacy of his claim on Hank and their shared race/gender position by first asking what’s the problem and then asserting “we’re family after all.” Leticia, however, only reconciles with Hank after he puts his father in a nursing home. Doing so is another, ambivalent move toward differentiation for Hank; when the intake worker says he must love his father very much, Hank says he does not, but he’s my father and there it is. At the home Buck says he is stuck now, and Hank says he is too. Ties and histories can be reworked, but not erased.

After Leticia is evicted, she comes to live with Hank in his redecorated house; there they have a tender scene in which Hank says he wants to take care of her and Leticia says she needs it. When Hank goes to get ice cream, she finds the drawings her husband did of Sonny and Hank, and she realizes what he did (he made the connection before they first have sex). Without speaking, we watch her face as she tries to connect these parts; the man who was so tender, the executioner, the white prison guard. Hank embodies the best and worst of American race/gender relations; he has perpetuated its most hateful aspects, yet comes to hate his own complicity. She is shaking and literally speechless, gripped by emotions and desires unrepresentable in language. Hank comes back; they sit outside while he feeds her ice cream, still with a plastic spoon. Although the camera slowly pans out to the star filled sky, it first lingers on the three gravestones of Hank’s kin. No matter how large our perspective, the memories of violence cannot disappear. His last words are, “I think we are going to be alright.”

The film strikes me as both despairing and hopeful. Hopeful, because as Cheng argues, through grieving the appalling violence of the history in which they are both enmeshed and participants ,Hank and Leticia reduce the grip of melancholia. Furthermore, the relationship between them is necessary for each to tolerate their own work and attempts to change. As each says to the other, after their first lovemaking, “I needed you so much.” This intra- and intersubjective work opens new perspectives, outside the compulsive, claustrophobic repetition of the same, as Hank and Leticia contemplate the alternative universes the stars suggest. The film is also despairing, because it suggests that race and gender domination can be resisted only under extreme circumstances of loss, personal dislocation and the somewhat involuntary stripping of desires that fasten us to privilege. It graphically conveys the depths of hatred and rage; the passing on of white masculine identity through the power of life and death over others (primarily, in this case, black prisoners) and through a shared denigration of women and racialized others. The helplessness and inability of black people to protect those they love or themselves from the internalization of race/gender denigration and its concomitant self-hatred is painfully evident. Instead, that denigration, hatred and its accompanying rage is destructively expressed both inwardly and outwardly. The social compact between white fathers and sons is equally violent: hate who I hate, or I will turn my rage on you. Any reduction of privilege or racial boundary crossing is perceived as a threat to one’s property and hence the target of justifiable attack. Women are dangerous, untrustworthy creatures, for whom it is threatening to have any tenderness, and white masculinity is a fragile accomplishment, requiring constant, hateful toughening up. Femininity is constricted in its range of possibilities. Leticia’s felt choices are to be taken care of by a white male protector or to be utterly on her own and hence vulnerable to the risks of her subordinated subject positions (black female).

What makes it possible to resist these hateful bonds and reduce psychic and social violence? The film is vague on this point, as Hank’s motivation for moving away from his old practices is never clear. My ingrained analytic suspicion leads me to speculate that Leticia’s subordinated subject positions may make it easier for him to sustain a relationship with her. His dominance is not challenged and so she represents less threat to his subjective stability. Leticia’s position also remains ambiguous. She acknowledges her desire to be taken care of, and Hank promises her a “privilege” usually available to some white women: the protection and care of a white male. Yet, to what degree does her shift of position represent empowerment, or is it another ratification of white male dominance? It is not clear whether Leticia’s desire stems from awareness of her vulnerability in a largely unchanged world or an increased self-respect. Although Hank makes her partner in the gas station he purchases and names it after her, it is unclear whether her agency is significantly increased. Perhaps she takes the best deal available within the existing power relations, but it is by the grace of white/male attachment, historically a rather precarious position. What the film does make clear is the desperate circumstances of all its characters, which I take as a metaphor for our current race/gender positions. Unaltered, they poison us, imprison us, make us ill, violent, and deadly to self and others.

While The Deep End opens with its main character, Margaret, knocking on the door of a seedy bar, its primary location could not appear more different than the world of Monster’s Ball. Margaret lives with her family in a beautiful house on Lake Tahoe, a lake renown for its deep blue color (the blue of Renaissance Madonnas) and purity. Surrounded by pine trees and an intensely clear blue sky, inhabited by healthy looking, prosperous white people, here is the impossible perfection of Cheng’s racial idealization. This perfection as always requires its twin, in this case the city of Reno, the location of the bar. Reno is the abjected other to the pristine country, a common American figuration. On film it appears dirty, the air smudged. It is the mirror opposite of normalized, family centered, suburban innocence. Gambling is legal there, and it is a place people come to drink and “sin.” The bar Margaret visits is called The Deep End, and this name is meant to evoke a colloquial phrase; to go off the deep end means to go crazy. Margaret is intensely blond as are two of her three children. Her family’s name is Hall, as WASP and neutral as one can imagine. Her’s is a world of full-time domesticity, of car pools, children’s music and ballet lessons, sports, and the errands of daily life. Margaret’s husband is in the Navy, and he is frequently absent for long periods of time. Yet, Margaret does not lack for male surveillance; her husband’s father, Jack, lives with them, and her husband is very much present in his absence as armed protector of the home front and as the ultimate, intimidating sovereign. Margaret’s intense anxiety about pleasing her husband is soon quite evident; her job is to keep the home front operating smoothly. The central organizing principle of their family life is that nothing must occur that would disturb or anger her husband.

However, Margaret’s anxious efforts to maintain the placidity and respectability of the domestic surface are undermined by her oldest son, Beau, a high school senior. This position is significant, for it means that Beau is in the middle of an essential process in the replication of race/gender privilege, applying to college. The timing raises the stakes for failures to act normally and raises Margaret’s anxiety regarding her responsibility to ensure his conformity to regulatory norms. It also reminds us of the fear built in to hierarchal social relations, that without conformity, one can lose one’s place. Even for many dominant subjects no guaranteed positions exist. This anxiety translates into the expenditure of an enormous amount of resources, material and psychological, among those who have them to spend. Such work is both motivated by and expresses the fear of falling into the position of the abjected other.

Nonetheless, Beau acts out always lurking potential sources of masculine disorder that it is white women’s responsibility to domesticate: sexuality and the reckless pursuit of pleasure. First Beau has a car accident; drinking while drunk, he is accompanied by an older white man. Later, we briefly glimpse another potential symptom of resistance to expected race/gender behavior. Beau is a musician, but his chosen fields appears to be jazz (the archetypical “black” music), for he is shown recording an audition tape for his college applications. He plays a bit of Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain,” and there in this scene is the only, brief, sighting of a person of color; one of the recording engineers is a black man. The person with Beau in the car is Darby Reese, and he is the man Margaret confronts in the bar. He is obviously gay. In a disturbing foreshadowing of current American politics, in this film homosexuality occupies the place of the denigrated but dangerous other. It threatens “our way” of life, potentially undermining Beau’s ability to occupy and enact his subject positions and carry on the work of the fathers and proper (heterosexual) domesticity.

Margaret tells him to stay away from her son, but Darby does not comply. He comes at night to her house to visit Beau; they end up in a fight, and Darby dies in ambiguous circumstances. (He falls off their launch dock with a boat anchor in his chest; appropriate for someone portrayed as a sexual vampire). Beau and Darby have been having a sexual relationship; they kiss before the fight, but Beau becomes enraged when Darby says Margaret offered him money to stay away. When Beau returns to the house, Margaret sees his bruised face and asks him what happened. Their stilted conversation is interrupted by Jack, and then Margaret covers for Beau, protecting his place within the patriarchy. In the morning Margaret finds Darby’s body, puts in on their boat and dumps it in the lake. Darby has a piece of Beau’s shirt in his hand, which Margaret buries in the trash. Returning, she notices his car, has to go back to the submerged body, take his car keys and drive his car to a Reno parking lot. Even this car, an expensive racing model with a “deep end” vanity licence plate, signifies flamboyant excess. All the other characters drive that icon of American suburban domesticity, the SUV, or modest sedans. Margaret never directly questions Beau about what happens. Fearful that she could not maintain the relationship, like Leticia, she never directly confronts her son with what she thinks she knows. Margaret simply assumes he killed Darby, and she must cover up the crime. When Beau asks her not to say anything about the previous night to his father, Margaret agrees, purposely leaving ambiguous what “last night” means.

A different embodiment of deviant male danger now appears. Alex, the blackmailer. In a further foreshadowing of current American politics, Alex has a foreign accent and looks Mediterranean. He is the foreigner within, ready to wreck violence, undermine homeland security, destroy innocence, and destabilize the good and the right. His boss, Nagel, sees Beau’s affair with Darby as a business opportunity and sends Alex to demand a payoff. Alex forces Margaret to watch a video of Darby and Beau having sex. Beau is the “bottom,” clearly enthralled by erotic submission to Darby. Margaret cannot bear directly confronting her son’s position-- literally and metaphorically in the grips of a man, beyond her normalizing reach, and outside the regulative practices of domesticity and normative heterosexual white masculinity. Alex demands $50,000 to destroy the video and protect Beau from exposure, as a homosexual and by implication, killer. Their encounter is interrupted by her younger son and then Jack, complaining about his dry cleaning. She demands Alex stay away from her family and agrees to meet him the next day in town. Margaret and her sons then hurry off to her daughter’s ballet recital, a portion of Swan Lake. The blackness of blackmail starkly contrasts to the traditional connotations of ballet, that fantasy of perfection and embodiment of normative femininity: female innocence and virginity, purified romantic love, the all white swans, the idealized female form and the blue lake.

Now Margaret is confronted with the powerlessness of her protected race/gender position. Without her husband’s signature she cannot borrow money on the house, and he is unavailable at sea. Even Alex, however, is not immune from the seductions of white domesticity. He looks at her youngest son, Dylan, as he arrives home from school attired in a baseball uniform with naked and intense longing. His desire to be that son, or to have had that childhood is palpable. After Margaret misses him in town, he returns to the house. Jack has a heart attack and Alex helps Margaret perform CPR; while she accompanies Jack to the hospital, Alex looks around her house. He sees a picture of Margaret with her three children, and something shifts for him. Alex, too, however, is constrained by male power; he is working for Nagel who demands the money. He returns to tell Margaret he will give up his share, but she must get $25,000 for Nagel. Alex and Margaret have an intense scene in which she details the demands of domesticity and accuses him of being heartless for disturbing it; he asks whether she ever gets away from her family. Through the emotions her face expresses, we see a fleeting glimpse of the wishes Margaret must repress to enact her position. Alex touches a desire for pleasure and subjective practices outside the circuit of domesticity. Margaret has also projected onto Alex the submerged frustrated needs of her marriage. She uses him as an idealized object; she fantasizes him as everything her husband is not-- empathetic, tender, available, and attentive.

Margaret comes up with part of the money, but this is not enough for Nagel. In contrast to Alex, Nagel is the personification of the completely undomesticated male. Lacking any vulnerability to sentimental appeals, he is a violent monster. Nagel comes to Margaret’s house, takes her to the boat shack where Darby and Beau fought and begins to hit her. Alex shows up and confronts Nagel. Nagel tries to regain control over Alex by appealing to constitutive masculine anxieties-- that he is weak, that she is making a fool of him (she is not to be trusted), and that he must be “fucking her” (and hence in thrall to Margaret’s sexual powers). Alex resists these appeals and kills Nagel while Margaret watches. Once again protected, Margaret helps Alex with Nagel’s body. He tells her to go back to her family and forget any of this ever happened. Alex ratifies the supreme importance of sustaining the fantasy of perfection. She must keep her family together and not let them see the effort this costs. Margaret must ensure they stay in their house, their safe domestic shell, and away from its windows while Alex drives away with Nagel’s body. Even murder is not too high a price to pay to protect this illusion of perfection and thus forestall the need to abandon the wishes animating it.

Margaret decides to follow him but cannot drive Alex’s car (it has a stick shift). She asks Beau to help her. Unlike her daughter, who despite her interest in car repair, earlier in the film could not fix Margaret’s when it would not start , Beau can exercise instrumental (masculine) mastery. They find Alex in Nagel’s crashed car, dying. She does not want to leave him there, but he says she must. Alex helps her retrieve the money and video, apologizes, and then dies. The last scene is between Beau and Margaret; she is crying, he comes into comfort her; while he suspects Alex and Margaret were lovers, he says he does not need to know. Like Margaret, he would rather submerge doubts and secrets rather than confront events that might destroy the possibility of sustaining desired illusions. We see a pieta like image of Beau and Margaret on the bed, in a symbiotic embrace, holding each other as the camera pans to Margaret’s wedding ring, through the well-ordered house with its many domestic objects, out the shiny window to the starry dark outside. Then Dylan says his father is calling and can Margaret pick up the phone. We know Margaret will indeed pick up and go on. Chaos and a potential void have been contained by masculine protection and the feminine work of reknitting illusion, including the belief in its unambiguous goodness.

Margaret personifies a particular form of the subject position, white femininity. This position is generally inaccessible to women of color, for it entails fantasies of an asexual maternity which it is assumed they lack. Madonnas must be white; women of color are either Sapphires (sexy, tough, emasculating, domineering, independent, dangerous) or Jemimas (earthy, embodied, domestic servants). Lacking access to dominant masculine subjectivity, black men cannot fully enact protective practices. Hence aggression and domesticity cannot be readily split along gender positions. Insufficiently domesticated, black women cannot domestic their men, and both genders are imagined by dominant subjects as dangerously prone to transgressing regulative norms. Black women are imagined as inadequate mothers and emasculating heterosexual partners while fantasies about black men center around their alleged hypersexuality and proclivities for violence and irresponsibility.

While Margaret devotes her life to the care of others and preserving domestic order, in return, she feels entitled to male protection. However, to sustain this exchange, she must curb male violence and sexuality, submerge any desires (including her own) that exceed the regulatory practices of domesticity, and please or appease male power. As with her son, she must also maintain a willful blindness or denial about certain masculine practices and deny the violence that sustains their power, even over her. Women like Margaret are highly competent in their sphere and can muster great ingenuity when domesticity is threatened. Nonetheless, they are represented as essentially lacking. They require protection because they lack the prowess required by the larger world. Margaret cannot save Alex, although he can rescue her. This representation is reenacted and passed on to Margaret’s children as well. Her daughter Paige is much more competent performing stereotypical female roles; while she appears to break gender expectations by fixing cars, at a crucial moment, she is unable to get her mother’s started. Paige is much more in her element dressed all in white, elegantly dancing a part in Swan Lake with her white female cohort. In contrast, all the normalized males assist Margaret in restoring domestic order and proper gender hierarchies. Although Jack is older and requires more care taking, she respects him as her husband’s stand in. Beau will go to college in the Fall. Alex kills the threat to domestic normalcy and by retrieving the money and video tape enables Margaret to act as if absolutely nothing out of bounds occurred. Even Dylan helps her by calling 911 when Jack has his heart attack.

Margaret can enlist men to discipline other men, for all those who are redeemable are deeply invested in the fantasies of idealized domesticity and maternal, constrained femininity. Most people want the care taking mother, and they do not want to see the effort or costs of what is provided. The more heartless the world, the more people crave their imagined haven from it. The fantasy of a clean place, of a home front to return to, sustains men at war and cleanses white men of their violence. Despite the cost to her, Margaret remains within her normative race/gender position. Perpetuating race/gender stereotypes, unlike Leticia, she is never shown as a sexual being; she thus remains available as the object of maternal fantasies. When she strips to her underwear to retrieve Darby’s keys, it is simple, utilitarian white cotton. What she craves from Alex is empathy, not sexual pleasure. Yet, she is not a helpless victim. Eager to enable her son to benefit from white masculinity, she enacts our culture’s homophobia, and demands that he fit into the normative grids of his race/gender position. In doing so, she is not merely her husband’s agent. She is animated by her own desires as well, to exercise the passive-aggressive pleasures of care-taking while seeing herself as weak and needing protection. Enfolding Beau in her embrace at the end, she reinserts him into domesticity and ensures herself of future care and masculine protection. Representing herself as in need of care and as a care taker allows her to escape responsibility and deny her own aggression and desire. Aggression is located outside, as male prerogative and danger. Somehow her complicity in violence does not count, because her actions are in the service of preserving and protecting her family and that sphere of imagined innocence. Here, her race enables a splitting or denial that is unavailable to Leticia. Leticia knows Hank’s history is intrinsic to his character; she takes the full weight of it, and partially out of an unromanticized necessity, goes on. Margaret, as Cheng argues, projects badness outwards, and she too goes on, leaving the lovely blue surface untroubled by its deep end.

References
Abel, Elizabeth, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds. 1997. Female Subjects in Black and White. Berkeley. University of California Press.
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[Lecture Series I, 2004-5][Overview][Lecture 1][Lecture 3]