Property: White Gender and Slavery

Abstract

The article will focus on the problematic workings of white women's function as allegorical embodiment of white dominance and their subjective agency, their involvements in the violence and desire of the racial divide of slavery. Of course, this requires a theoretical grounding which the space of this article permits to sketch out only in roughest form. The first part of the article therefore means to frame what is actually an extensive project of study as a kind of opening, a suggestive plea for debate, discussion and cooperative results. Its second part engages a cross reading of Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers by way of clearing mental space for a re-reading of the complexly charged scene of race/gender and gender/race as conditioned by slavery. In its third part, I will engage a literary text by a contemporary white female writer which tries to come to terms with the legacy of an inextricable connection of white femininity to slavery.