Abstract
Frantz Fanon’s analysis of white negrophobic women’s masochistic sexuality and sexual fantasies in Black Skin, White Masks, is, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes, among his most contentious work for feminists. Susan Brownmiller, in her 1975 classic Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, charges Fanon not only with hating women but also with being personally confused and anguished, on account of this portion of the text. In this essay, I examine Fanon’s approach to theorizing white female negrophobia in light of his sociogenic project and the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition with which he was working; I also take a close look at his potentially most problematic remarks, from a feminist angle. I argue against Brownmiller's interpretation of Fanon as condoning rape or expressing personal attitudes through these lines, maintaining instead that he is ultimately calling for psycho-affective change.
Frantz Fanon’s influence on post-colonial, decolonial and anti-racist thought has been well-established, with theorists like Homi Bhabha, Lewis Gordon and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. carrying the Fanonian legacy forward into contemporary thinking about race, revolution, politics and decoloniality. The relationship of Fanon’s thought to feminist philosophy remains hotly contested, however. Some feminist theorists have offered positive appraisals of Fanon’s treatment of gender and relationship to feminism. For example, in Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting attests to the ‘feminist dimensions’ of Fanon’s ‘woman-centered analyses’, attributing to him a ‘radically humanist profeminist consciousness’;1 and Reiland Rabaka maintains, in ‘Feminist Fanonism’, that ‘Fanon’s commitment to women’s liberation was deeply connected to, and even more inextricable from, his commitments to revolutionary decolonization, democratic socialism, and human liberation’.2 Other feminist philosophers have taken up Fanon’s work in the service of feminist projects of various kinds: from Kelly Oliver’s exploration of the transfer of unwanted affects from the colonizer to the colonized,3 and Sara Ahmed’s decolonial exposition of ‘The Affective Politics of Fear’;4 to Sandra Lee Bartky’s Fanonian-inspired study of psychological oppression5 and Judith Butler’s analysis of the Fanonian ‘historico-racial schema’.6 But Fanon has also long been accused of being sexist and antifeminist, taken to task by feminists for what Chantal Kalisa refers to as his ‘unabashed patriarchal and sexist attitudes’,7 evidenced by his misogynistic conceptions of Black and white female sexuality and subjectivity. bell hooks includes Fanon on a list of male thinkers whose work is instructive about colonialism and revolutionary struggle, but who also ‘ignore issues of sexist oppression in their own writing’.8 Gwen Bergner charges Fanon with ‘remov[ing] feminine subjectivity from the center of his analysis’ of ‘colonial psychodynamics’.9 And Susan Brownmiller takes this several steps further and vilifies Fanon, in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, for being a ‘hater of women’ supposedly suffering from ‘private anguish and personal confusion’. 10
Brownmiller’s harsh critique of Fanon stands out both in the level of its rancour and its untoward personal nature, the justification for which is not immediately apparent. Nevertheless, Brownmiller’s charge that Fanon, the woman-hater, is anguished and confused – primarily on account of what she judges to be his ‘obsession’ 11 with rape – remains standing, insofar as it has never been directly addressed 12 or adequately assessed for its merits, or lack thereof. Scholars who have engaged with the part of Black Skin, White Masks on which Brownmiller’s accusations are based – Fanon’s analysis of negrophobia (a phobia of Black people, specifically Black men) as it interacts with white femininity and white female sexuality – may seem to affirm Brownmiller’s position, as several refer to his ideas as ‘disturbing’ 13 or ‘deeply troubling’. 14 This essay aims to open up a further conversation 15 about this aspect of Fanon’s work – labelled by Sharpley-Whiting the ‘thorny terrain of… [his] most contentious pronouncements’ 16 – and about hermeneutical practices relative to Fanon as a Black male theorist of race, gender, sexuality and decoloniality, working with psychoanalysis in the 1950s. 17 I begin by exploring Fanon’s critical approach to his uptake of psychoanalysis through his focus on ‘sociogeny’, and his psychoanalytically infused discussion of the hypersexual and violent colonial imago of the Black man – all of which supplies a crucial context for interpreting his remarks on white femininity and negrophobia. Next, I review Fanon’s use of Freudian theory in his effort to isolate the psychic dynamics at work in negrophobia, and how this leads him down the path of forging a connection between fear and desire. Finally, I focus on his engagement with the theory of female masochism and his analysis of rape fantasies featuring Black men, which Brownmiller finds unforgivably ‘morbid’. 18 While I acknowledge the moments in Fanon’s investigative journey through these topics that may be read as callous and offensive, I maintain that Fanon’s aim is still to understand negrophobic distortions of colonial subjectivity with the ultimate goal of liberation for all. Thus, his impassioned attempt to offer an account of white negrophobic femininity is best interpreted not as a personal criticism and attack on racist white women – nor as a justification for acts of sexual violence against them – but as an acerbic critique of the society that produces such disorders in its subjects. Contra Brownmiller, I caution against making conjectures about Fanon’s own disposition relative to his remarks on rape fantasies, and falling into the racist trap of assuming him to embody the imago of the Black man.
Psychoanalysis and Fanon’s project: Sociogeny and the colonialist imago of the negro
Fanon establishes at the outset of Black Skin, White Masks that psychoanalysis will play a central role in his diagnosis and critique of colonial society. It will be central insofar as he charges both colonized Blacks and colonizing whites with being trapped in a ‘double narcissism’ 19 that constitutes a ‘massive psycho-existential complex’, 20 and requires a specifically ‘psychoanalytic interpretation’ 21 if it is to be properly addressed. That is, in the colonial situation, Fanon surmises, people of both races have become afflicted by neuroses that prevent them from genuinely relating to one another and effectively engaging in sociality; rather, they remain stuck in closed narcissistic circuits. Fanon specifies these neurotic conditions as an inferiority complex for Blacks – into which he will delve in great detail in succeeding chapters – and a superiority complex for whites. He makes it plain, in the introduction to the text, that, by using psychoanalytical tools to help identify the causes of this neurotic mess, and to uncover how it operates on both an individual and social level, he ‘aims to destroy it’ 22 – in order, especially, to ‘liberate the black man from the arsenal of complexes that germinated in a colonial situation’. 23 Thus, Black liberation is Fanon’s primary goal; but to destroy the entire psycho-existential colonial complex surely means to liberate both Blacks and whites from their psycho-affective disorders (not to mention that a non-distorted form of interracial intersubjectivity will only be possible for Black people if whites overcome their narcissistic disturbances, as well).
As indicated by these strong pronouncements about destroying complexes whose genesis can unambiguously be traced to their colonial context, however, Fanon can only rely on traditional psychoanalytic theory and practice to get him so far with his critical project, because, as David Marriott notes, it is ‘depoliticized and desocialized’. 24 First, Freudian theory is ‘desocialized’ in that it does not acknowledge the specificity of the social context that gives rise to its conclusions. As Fanon notes, Freud emphasizes the ‘ontogenic’ level – the individual experience of traumas, real or imagined – in his effort to pinpoint the origin of symptoms, even when such symptoms appear among members of a particular social group and could reasonably be linked to social forces. 25 But, as Jock McCulloch explains, in the process of trying to apply psychoanalytical schemas to the colonial situation, Fanon is continuously ‘drive[n]… back from the individual to the nature of the neurotogenic social structure itself’. 26 This issue comes up in Chapter Four of Black Skin when Fanon flatly declares ‘Freud’s discoveries’ to be ‘of no use to us whatsoever’ 27 in accounting for the mechanism by which racial stereotypes about the Senegalese get implanted into the minds of Black people. To explain how so many of his patients are haunted by dreams featuring scary Black Senegalese people (or animals or shadows symbolizing them), Fanon concludes that personal life histories are not at issue here; instead, one must examine the broader social context in which such dreams occur, since socio-cultural forces are ultimately to blame. Sometimes, ‘the socius is more important than the individual’, 28 Fanon asserts. Hence, his own commitment to studying what he calls ‘sociogeny’ 29 – in distinction from Freud’s ontogenic approach and the previous focus, in the sciences, on ‘phylogeny’ (the species).
Second, because of Fanon’s explicit identification of colonial society as the cause of racial complexes, he harbours no illusions about the narrow promise of individually-focused treatment – even as a practicing psychiatrist. Thus, he distances himself from the ‘depoliticized’ 30 nature of psychoanalysis, as well. To effectively treat the conditions that Fanon puts under his sociogenic microscope with his work of ‘sociodiagnostics’, 31 the analyst must make their patient aware of the social causes of their distress – they must ‘facilitate processes of conscientization so that Black subjects may move toward disalienated resistance’. 32 Fanon relates, for example, that to treat a patient suffering due to culturally implanted fantasies about evil Black men, he encourages them to ‘choose action…with respect to…the social structure’. 33 It would not be adequate, in this kind of situation, to help the individual to cleanse themselves of their pernicious negative ideas about Blackness; if those associations are rampant in the culture, they will continue to be a source of affliction for oneself and others. Thus, to address the actual source of the problem, one must take social and political action aimed at changing the culture and the social structure – a tall order, perhaps, but a more honest approach to alleviating psychic illness than an individually-based, Freudian-style ‘talking cure’ 34 (and one that avoids the charge – commonly associated with Foucault – against the normalizing tendencies of psychoanalysis). 35 As Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, Shahnaaz Suffla, Mohamed Seedat and Kopano Ratele affirm, a Fanonian sociodiagnostic project necessarily ‘remain[s] incomplete without social struggle’. 36
Even as Fanon repeatedly comes up against the limitations of the psychoanalytic resources he has on hand to explain and propose remedies for the psycho-affective ills marking the colonial situation, though, he also actively puts the existing literature to work towards accomplishing his sociodiagnostic aims – often with creative applications and/or modifications involving race and coloniality. This is why Marriott remarks on the strangeness of Sylvia Wynter’s apparent aversion to psychoanalysis in her well-known uptake of Fanonian sociogeny in ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle’. 37 Endeavouring to flesh out how social and cultural forces influence human biology in the way suggested by the concept of sociogeny, Wynter develops the notion of a ‘sociogenic principle’ that corresponds to a ‘culturally prescribed sense of the self’. 38 But, as productive of an outgrowth of Fanon’s work as this may be, Wynter simply ‘does not address why Fanon turns to psychoanalysis to think sociogeny beyond the causality of the human sciences’. 39 And she commits this seemingly willful exclusion even though she refers to aspects of Fanon’s theorization of sociogeny that take him directly onto psychoanalytic terrain: most notably, the association of blackness with impurity by the colonialist ‘historico-racial schema’ (Fanon’s term), which, she says, uses racist anecdotes and stories for its elaboration; and the related notion that the Negro marks the boundary of ‘normal’ being by symbolizing savagery and aggressive instincts. For Marriott, the centrality of racist phobic fantasies to sociogeny is evidence of Fanon’s ‘nonpositive affirmation (of psychoanalysis)’. 40 In this, he follows Alice Cherki, whose depiction of Fanon’s close – if critical – relationship to psychoanalytic theory and practice 41 points to the absurdity of conceiving of sociogeny as ‘antipsychoanalytic’, 42 especially since it highlights the unconscious dimension of racism. ‘With its phobias, fantasies, distortions, and affects’, Marriott observes, ‘Fanon’s “negrophobogenesis positively adds to the psychoanalytic project of interpretation that nominally guides it’. 43
To be sure, as Marriott indicates, a key feature of Fanon’s colonial racist sociogeny is the notion that a damaging ‘imago’ of the Negro haunts the colonial imaginary, which helps to explain why colonial subjects can’t shake their negrophobia. In other words, racist stereotypes so deeply pervade the colonial collective unconscious – stereotypes, incidentally, that represent parts of the self that have been disavowed and bracketed off due to cultural demands for morality and purity – that the colonizing European subject inevitably suffers from neurotic antiblackness as they take cover behind their white mask. These stereotypes afflict Black colonized subjects and make them neurotic, too. Pointing to the centrality of the collective unconscious to his understanding of the psychic structures that perpetuate colonial racism, Fanon overtly declares in Chapter Four of Black Skin, White Masks that France is categorically ‘a racist country, for the myth of the bad n***** is part of the collective unconscious’. 44 Returning to this concept, as promised, in Chapter Six, ‘The Black Man and Psychopathology’ (where he focuses on psychoanalysis most intensively), Fanon attests that Jung’s theorization of the collective unconscious is crucial for understanding how an Erlebnis is repressed in the average Black subject’s unconscious – leading them to be neurotically ‘on guard’ upon arrival in Europe, for example – even though they have had no individual experience of a ‘real traumatism’. 45 In explication, he describes how children of both races in the colonies are socialized, through cultural products (songs, comic books, etc.), to associate blackness with evil, savagery and wickedness – and, furthermore, to identify with the civilized white colonizer (again, regardless of their race), learning to achieve ‘collective catharsis’ of repressed aggression by way of these stories. Fanon ‘believe[s] that if there is a traumatism it occurs here’. 46
With his concept of the collective unconscious, Jung aimed to move beyond the personal unconscious of Freudian theory – with its stock of images and fantasies originating in one’s own life experiences – and to develop Freud’s suggestion that certain ‘archaic remnants’ 47 found in the unconscious are actually inherited, as they cannot be traced back to an individual’s life history. For Jung, the collective unconscious comprises ‘a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature’, 48 the contents of which ‘have never been individually acquired’. 49 This is instructive for Fanon, then, and useful for his sociogenic endeavour, because it provides a possible explanation for the way that both Black and white people acquire anti-black stereotypes without actually having had any personal traumas featuring Black people who were violent or malefic. Even in the absence of a racially charged individual traumatism, children – Antilleans as well as Europeans 50 – ‘inherit’ the construct of the savage Negro. However, unlike Freud and Jung, who posited that the contents of the collective unconscious are identical among all humans, Fanon crucially takes the collective unconscious to be contextually specific – ‘cultural’ and ‘acquired’, 51 ‘the consequence of… [a] cultural imposition’. 52 Whereas the distinct set of archetypes that Jung identifies are supposedly ‘permanent engrams of the species’, 53 then, Fanon contradictorily maintains that the malevolent imago of the Negro is particular to a French colonial setting, rather than necessarily affecting all of humanity. He thus redefines the collective unconscious, in Black Skin, as ‘the repository of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group’. 54
Fanon gains greater purchase on the symbolic associations of blackness that crystallize in this imago of the Negro as he develops his argument about negrophobogenesis throughout Chapter Six. 55 Whereas stereotypes about Jewish people target their relationship to money, Fanon observes, stereotypes about Black men focus on their bodies – particularly their sexuality and ‘hallucinating sexual power’. 56 ‘Regarding the black man, we think of sex’, 57 he proclaims. Having interviewed five hundred white Europeans over the course of several years, Fanon reports, nearly sixty percent associated the Negro with terms like ‘biological, sex, strong, athletic, powerful’. 58 Elaborating on this, he suggests that everyone imagines Black men to be ‘sexually promiscuous’, 59 ‘running around… in the bush’ with no control over their sexual urges, fornicating wherever and whenever they please – real ‘sexual beasts’. 60 Going hand-in-hand with this is the myth that the Black man has a huge penis. In spite of statistical evidence to the contrary, the Black penis is represented in popular culture as impressive to the point of inspiring awe and fear. It is a veritable ‘sword’ that, when ‘thrust… into your wife’, really makes her ‘fee[l] something’, 61 according to an award-winning French journalist and screenwriter whom Fanon cites. If the Jew has been fixated at the intellectual level, then, the Black man, Fanon says, has been ‘fixated at the genital level’ – he ‘represents the biological danger’. 62
Toward the end of his investigation into stereotypes about Black men’s sexual prowess – for it is a journey – Fanon eventually ‘plant[s] a milestone’: ‘[f]or the majority of Whites the black man represents the (uneducated) sexual instinct. He embodies genital power out of reach of morals and taboos’. 63 To say this is to employ Freud’s theory of the instincts to begin to try to grasp why this sensationalized imago of the Negro maintains such a powerful hold over the colonial psyche, for it may not be immediately obvious why the exorbitance of its representation of the Black man’s physicality, sexuality and immorality would be so effective in capturing the white imagination. Freud famously argued that civilized society demands of humans that we suppress and moderate our instinctual urges in order to live in relative peace with one another; this includes both the urge to procreate and combine with others (the life instincts, which, for the later Freud, include the sexual instinct), and the urge to destroy and aggress against others (the death drive). Because of this necessary imposition of repression, Freud thought, ‘civilized’ humans are destined to be unhappy. 64 If the Black man represents the unrestrained sexual instinct, then – in a way that evidently includes some ‘uneducated’ aggression, as well, in his expression of his sexuality – this means that he stands for something to which ‘civilized’ white people don’t have easy access, as they have been trained to channel their sexual impulses and longings, as well as their aggression, into socially sanctioned outlets. Because they retain an ‘irrational nostalgia for the extraordinary times of sexual licentiousness, orgies, unpunished rapes, and unrepressed incest’, 65 though, the Black man becomes a point of fixation for them. Their unconscious yearning for the pre-civilized state that he represents compels them to project onto him their fantasies about a life of indulgence in instinctual gratification. Even as he is a source of fear, then, he is also an object of desire. 66
Negrophobogenesis and masochistic white female sexuality
This does not yet fully capture the specifically phobic dimension of (some) white people’s relationship to Black men, though. Based on what I have already outlined so far with respect to the colonial imago of the Negro and civilized Europeans’ complex and conflictual relationship to their libidinal urges (their unconscious longing for a terrifying state of uninhibited aggression and sexuality), Fanon has already established a tentative basis for white ambivalence toward Black men, insofar as white people are unable to move beyond their projection of racialized fantasies onto Black men. 67 In the text, though, Fanon’s account of the imago becomes interwoven with his effort to more precisely pinpoint how negrophobogenesis works – a phenomenon in which the imago of the Negro becomes deeply enough ingrained in the psyche as to cause a pronounced aversion to Black men, at least on the surface. Fanon again uses various Freudian-inspired psychoanalytic sources from the early- and mid-twentieth century to take a stab at this; this is one of the influences that leads him into an exploration of rape fantasies and female masochism, which, as we will see, Brownmiller finds objectionable. Also, very much in the style of the rest of the book, Fanon offers up an amalgam of personal and professional experience that comes together in his ability to isolate a certain social problem – in this case, the interaction of racial neuroses (negrophobia) with gender-based and sexual neuroses (masochism and beating fantasies). So, for example, he briefly remarks on seemingly contradictory behaviours that he has noted among white women he has encountered, both as a psychiatrist and in his own life: on the one hand, European white women making demonstratively ‘evasive, shrinking gestures, their faces expressing a genuine fear’, 68 when Black men would simply ask them to dance; on the other hand, a prostitute reporting that she could achieve orgasm just from thinking about having sex with a Black man, after hearing lurid stories attesting to Black men’s otherworldly sexual abilities. 69
It is partway through Chapter Six that Fanon introduces the idea that ‘[t]he black man is a “phobogenic” object, provoking anxiety’. 70 He points out here, at the outset of his investigation into negrophobogenesis, that neither Freud, Adler, nor even Jung 71 attempted to include an account of Black subjectivity in their research – as if to indicate, once again, that their ideas will be useless to the aspect of his project that consists in understanding the experience of Black people, but also that they fail to sociogenically consider the influence of racial difference on the construction of the (European colonial) psyche. Indeed, Oliver notes that Fanon’s diagnosis of negrophobia ‘not only complicates Freud’s focus, which is more often than not on individual traumatic experiences rather than on social institutions, but also interrogates what Freud considered “common” phobic objects, such as animals’, since a phobia of Black men is clearly ‘social… in nature’. 72 Negrophobia, on Fanon’s account, is not only a common phobia, in Freudian terms, as it is ‘accepted by dominant society’; but it also exceeds Freud in that it is ‘socially prescribed’. 73 Still, when Fanon starts to formally deconstruct what phobogenesis entails, he turns to the work of white European psychoanalysts Angelo Hesnard and Charles Odier for some of the basics. According to Hesnard, Fanon reports, phobia is a neurosis that features anxiety about an object (typically another person) or situation that ‘arouse[s] fear and revulsion’. 74 This is a promising start, as the colonialist imago of the Negro is certainly fearsome, and blackness generally symbolizes impurity (worthy of revulsion). However, Fanon takes issue with Hesnard’s further assertion that all anxiety – regardless of object – originates in insecurity related to maternal absence in early childhood. For Fanon, this claim represents a ‘problem’, since it assumes that phobias can be traced back to events in a person’s life history; he is convinced, to the contrary, that any ‘traumas’ leading to negrophobia are culturally imported, and not rooted in actual experiences with Black men. But Fanon does think that Odier accurately identifies the inverted relationship between affectivity and rationality that obtains in the phobic: the destabilizing negative emotions evoked by their feared object somehow retain power over their ability to reason, as a persisting infantile psychic structure.
But the negrophobe’s anxiety and fear of the (imaginary) Black man are, for Fanon, only the beginning of the story in terms of the underlying psychic mechanisms at work in this type of neurosis; they unlock the door to hidden contradictions. Hesnardian theory supplies a link between anxiety about physical contact and sexual anxiety, as Hesnard notes that ‘[c]ontact alone is enough to arouse anxiety’, but ‘contact is at the same time the typical schema at the start of the sexual act (touching, fondling, sexuality)’. 75 Thus, if the prospect of contact with a Black man evokes intense anxiety, Fanon proposes, this indicates that the anxious person is actually worried about a potential sexual encounter with him. If any imaginary object (such as the imago of the Negro) inspires terror, Fanon says, this is usually ‘fear mixed with sexual revulsion’. 76 In the case of a negrophobic white woman, then, Fanon interprets the fear of Black men as, more precisely, a sexual fear that they will do all sorts of ‘immoral and shameful’ things to her – actions that he designates under the heading of ‘sexual abuses’. 77 This fear of the Black man’s sexuality obviously employs the imago of the Black man as exemplifying sexuality beyond the limits of social norms and mores. Fanon takes this one step further, though, and applies another – if hugely problematic, in its potential implications to this topic – basic Freudian principle to this whole situation: that ‘we should avoid taking [the ego’s] denials literally’, 78 or, to put it crudely, that for the ego, ‘no means yes’. He wagers that we are ‘in presence of a complete transitiveness’ 79 when it comes to the negrophobe’s anxiety about sexual contact with Black men: in other words, that what appears, on the surface, to be a fear of their imagined virility and unrestrained sexuality is actually just a ‘tric[k] the ego uses to defend itself’ 80 – to mask an underlying desire to have sex with them. 81 Fanon then bluntly carries out this logic out to a crude conclusion: ‘Basically, isn’t this fear of rape precisely a call for rape? Just as there are faces that just ask to be slapped, couldn’t we speak of women who just ask to be raped?’ 82 He immediately supports this idea by reference to the novel If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes (who ‘describes this mechanism very well’, 83 he says): its negrophobic ‘big blonde’ 84 character obviously only wanted to sleep with the Black male character all along, he suggests, since (a) the context of her negrophobic behaviours made it plain that she had no reason to actually fear him and (b) she ends up sleeping with him at the end of the book. 85
Let me, first, be clear that there is no way to justify the logic expressed in these two lines if we interpret them to mean that the negrophobic woman who is afraid of being raped is actually asking to be – as in, really wants to be and therefore should be – raped. No woman should ever be raped, under any circumstances – regardless of whether they may have conscious or unconscious racialized fantasies about rape. Even if we were to accept Fanon’s proposal that a fearing/desiring mechanism lies at the heart of negrophobia, this would not translate into interpreting any expression of fear about Black male rape as merely cover for an illicit racialized sexual desire, and condoning violent actions aimed at fulfilling that desire; it would not turn a negrophobe’s outward, conscious expression of ‘no’ into an actionable ‘yes’. Our contemporary perspective on the politics of sexual consent – informed by second-wave feminism – does not allow much room for a ‘no’ to mean anything other than ‘no’. This reflects a troubled history of the ‘no means yes’ logic being employed as a defense by men accused of acts of sexual violence – men who made the mistake of taking it upon themselves to judge a woman’s desires to be contrary to what she reported to them in an intimate encounter, as though they somehow knew better than she did what she wanted, and thought it was okay to act on this. Now, Fanon should not be expected to share our historically informed sensitivity to this particular language as it bears on the important feminist issue of sexual violence. Still, perhaps we might reasonably expect him to be especially clear about the implications of his conjectures about neurotic mechanisms because he is so strongly invested in developing a praxis out of his theory – and, furthermore, because rape has been used, throughout history, as a political tactic against women of all races. The Black liberation movement of Fanon’s own time did not escape this tendency; Brownmiller is quick to raise the spectre of Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther leader whose 1968 biography, Soul on Ice, describes his serial rape of white women – after having ‘practiced’ on Black women – in a supposedly insurrectionary move against the long history of anti-black violence and discrimination in the U.S.
However, acknowledging that these lines are quite likely to come across as insensitive and careless, if not dangerous, to the contemporary reader, the first thing we should notice is that, because of their context, the meaning of ‘rape’ here is ambiguous. One of the key takeaways from Fanon’s discussion of the colonialist imago of the Negro is that Black men symbolize completely unrepressed sexual impulses – that is, a form of sexuality that is beyond the control of moral codes, social norms and expectations, and rationalization of motives. What this means is that, in this fantasmatic rendering of encounters with Black male sexuality, sex with Black men will always have the quality of ‘rape’. It will always be akin to sex with an animal, ‘savage’, or beast. That, again, is precisely why this imago is so powerful and what explains its unconscious appeal, on Fanon’s account. Thus, what Fanon seems to actually mean when he writes that negrophobic white women want to be ‘raped’ by Black men is simply that they desperately want to have sex with them – and they want to have sex with them because they imagine them all to be ‘rapists’. They want to be led, by Black men, through ‘the intangible gate leading to the realm of mystic rites and orgies, bacchanals and hallucinating sexual sensations’, 86 as Fanon suggests several pages later (when he plants his milestone about the Black man representing the uneducated sexual instinct). This is supported by the way that Fanon follows up his remark on ‘asking for rape’ with a nod to Chester Himes; the point is not that the Black male character, Bob, ends up raping the white female negrophobe, Madge, and that they both feel good about it because it was what she really wanted; rather, it is that they have consensual sexual relations that Madge had been interested in all along, in spite of her demonstrations of phobic aversion to Bob. (Elsewhere in Black Skin, Fanon writes that Madge ‘becomes [Bob’s] mistress’. 87 This word is not normally used to describe the relationship between a perpetrator of rape and their victim. 88 )
Even if we were to take Fanon’s rhetorical question about a ‘call for rape’ at face value to be referring to actual rape, though, and want to hold him responsible for not being more careful and aware – before his time – of the potentially harmful way that he is working out the theoretical implications of a Freudian tenet about the ego’s defenses (‘no means yes’), there is still solid reason to doubt that this represents anything like his final position on the solution to white negrophobic femininity. These lines are situated in the midst of a complex chapter consisting of a prolonged endeavour to grapple with and to better understand the imago of the Negro and negrophobia, especially as it manifests in white women and thus creates challenges for Black men (and I don’t just mean psychological and emotional challenges, as the imaginary threat of Black male sexual aggression, especially against white women, has been leveraged as justification for brutal racial violence for decades, especially in the U.S.). 89 Fanon’s investigation into the psychic dynamics that might be driving the complex array of distorted affects and attitudes that he has observed, in his socio-cultural milieu, among racist white women towards Black men has a hypothetical tenor and a spirit of the exploration of possibility, in spite of its intense content. In other words, Fanon is testing out different potential psychoanalytic explanations for the weird symptoms of racial neuroses that he has identified, and not presenting any of them as definitively correct. Regardless of the explanatory mechanisms upon which he provisionally settles, what he is ultimately trying to demonstrate is that colonial society is ‘sick’ and in need of restructuring – important work that he is trying to help set in motion. This is evidenced by the fact that Chapter Six, with all of its analytic meanderings, concludes with a case study of a young woman for whom ‘the myth of the black man… cause[s] genuine insanity’; 90 Fanon is clear in his conviction that her issues are a result of an irrational fear of Black men – an intrusion of the colonial imago of the Negro upon the deepest reaches of her psyche. And he is equally clearly invested in her recovery, assuming an attitude of care and concern that is indicative of the way that he understands his own role, as psychiatrist and social theorist, in relation to negrophobia – a neurotic disorder with complex symptomatology. Thus, to take Fanon’s conjectural link, earlier in the chapter, between negrophobic fear and desire as a call to action – to put it plainly, to interpret his line about ‘asking to be raped’ as an endorsement of actually going out and raping racist white women – would be to miss the overall movement of the chapter and the text. Fanon’s point is that these twisted constellations of desires and aversions make it very difficult for white women and Black men to relate to one another in a sane, human fashion, which is exactly why we need to break the vicious narcissistic cycle, undo our complexes and reimagine sociality in a way that is inclusive of racial difference. Committing acts of sexual violence against negrophobic white women would not solve anything; it would neither address the root cause of their affliction, nor alleviate their suffering.
Fanon’s next theoretical move, in his study of white negrophobic femininity in interaction with colonial racism, is to connect the Freudian theory of female masochism, and beating fantasies, with the colonial construction of Black male sexuality and negrophobes’ fantasies about rape by a Black man. Supporting my argument that Fanon is testing out different explanations for symptoms of negrophobia – with the help of mainstream psychoanalytic theories from his time – he follows his discussion of Hesnard by indicating that he will now try ‘another solution’ to the conundrum of white females’ apparently masochistic fixation on Black men (as submitting willfully, on some level, to the fantasized bestiality of the Black man would entail a kind of masochistic surrender). Freud’s theory of female masochism, especially as it was ‘carried to [its] ultimate conclusion’ 91 by Marie Bonaparte and Helene Deutsch, is the obvious place to turn, as it explains the origin of female aggression and its masochistic turn. On the classic Freudian model of ‘normal’ female sexual development, girls must shift their primary erotogenic zone from their clitoris to their vagina in order to assume their expected position relative to men in heterosexual relationships. Because this entails a repudiation of the more active, ‘masculine’ sexuality they enjoyed in their childhood, girls retain more instinctual aggression in a sexualized form than boys do 92 – what Fanon refers to as one of the ‘failures’ of this process (a ‘normal’ process of adjustment to patriarchal norms). To be sure, Bonaparte, following Freud, argues that the aggression of a boy ‘succeeds in desexualizing itself better than’ 93 that of a girl, who ‘remains, throughout life, more subject to her infantile libidinal urges’; 94 and this aggression tends to get directed back onto the self, because in girls, the libido ‘is far more preponderantly turned back upon the subject’ with the result that ‘[m]asochism in woman is far stronger than in man’. 95
Fanon also follows the Freudian example quite closely – again, as developed by Bonaparte – in attempting to make sense of rape fantasies about Black men. For Bonaparte, ‘flagellation phantasies’ such as that explored by Freud in his 1919 essay A Child is Being Beaten are crucial to female sexual development because they enable an effective transition from clitorality to vaginality. As Bonaparte puts it, the fantasy of being beaten is ‘the psychosexual connecting link by which the clitoridal libido of the girl… by passive and masochistic regression evolves into full vaginality’. 96 Indeed, she believes that only by having ‘more or less unconscious[ly] accept[ed]… immense masochistic beating phantasies’ 97 can females achieve vaginal sensitivity, and abandon the clitoris. This is also why, according to Bonaparte in 1953, it is ‘popular wisdom that women like “being beaten”’ – for the normal woman necessarily adjusts (through her masochistic turn) to the fact that, in normal sex, she ‘is subjected to a sort of beating by the man’s penis’, and even comes to ‘lov[e] their violence’. 98 Following this model of female masochism and the Freudian template of a beating fantasy, Fanon simply edits the Black man into the story with the caveat that, in the colonial version of this fantasy, ‘the black man becomes the predestined depositary of this aggressiveness’ because of the way that the girl is steeped in the culture’s ‘stories and legends’. 99 (‘The Negro can occupy this place’, Vergès reminds us, ‘because culture has constructed him as violent and murderous’. 100 ) Sounding a lot like Bonaparte, Fanon notes that ‘it is not unusual for women to cry to their partner during coitus: “Hurt me!” 101 but what this translates to in the case of a negrophobe is, “I want the black man to rip me open as I would do to a woman.”’ 102 Thus, he suggests, when a woman ‘lives the fantasy of rape by a black man’, she ‘[a]ccomplish[es] the phenomenon of turning around upon the subject’s own self’, so that ‘it is the woman who rapes herself’. 103
It is worth noting, first, that what Fanon means when he refers to ‘living the fantasy of rape by a black man’, here, is likely not actually being raped by a Black man (as a ‘kind of fulfilment of a personal dream or an intimate wish’ 104 ), but simply having sex with a Black man 105 in order to indulge one’s fantasies about it. This is suggested by his subsequent reference to crying out ‘Hurt me!’ during coitus with one’s partner; needless to say, an actual rape victim would not be engaging in sex with someone who counts as a ‘partner’, 106 nor would they be likely to cry out ‘Hurt me!’ Still, the claim that negrophobic white female sexuality is constructed in such a masochistic and racist fashion in a colonial setting as to make these women want to use Black men as a vehicle for ‘raping themselves’ is certainly disturbing. Luz Calvo also argues that it is unnecessary – and perhaps misleading – for Fanon to present such a story about the genesis of this fantasy in the psyche of an individual woman, because the fantasy of the Black male rapist is a ‘public fantasy’ – it is ‘so prevalent’, Calvo maintains, ‘that any explication of it must consider its very public circulation and dissemination’. 107 Because the Black male rapist fantasy is readily available to everyone in Western culture, regardless of how successfully one navigates patriarchal expectations surrounding their sexual development, it is not as if white women who transition to normal vaginality become authors of this fantasy, given the ingredients of female masochism, the beating fantasy, and the sexualized Negro imago. (Though Fanon does at least say that the imago enters into the fantasy by way of the culture.)
However, at risk of stating the obvious, it is also important to be clear that just as white women are not the authors of this fantasy, as Calvo reminds us, neither did Fanon come up with this fantasy on his own. 108 The very public nature of the Black male rapist fantasy is evidenced by historical accounts, such as Angela Davis’s, of the deployment of the myth of the Black male rapist as an ideological political weapon, 109 and also by sources such as Nancy Friday’s bestselling 1973 book My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, which testifies to the ubiquity of white female fantasies about Black men’s violent hypersexuality at the same historical moment as Brownmiller took Fanon’s attention to this issue to be such an outrage. Featuring ‘Big Black Men’ in her ‘Room Number Twelve’, Friday reports that ‘[t]he black man is cut out for sexual fantasy’ 110 (echoing Fanon’s description of the colonial imago), ‘promis[ing] to take us to that final exploration of sex, the most absolute orgasmic time it is humanly possible to experience’; 111 and the woman entertaining such a fantasy, Friday further stipulates, usually ‘mak[es] it into a rape’ to ‘remove the guilt’ 112 (another possible solution to how this works, as Fanon might say) – and to enable her to ‘throw [herself] more wholeheartedly into the act, so that every determined thrust can be read as one of struggling protest’. 113 Fanon invented very little of the content that he presents relative to female masochism and racist rape fantasies; rather, he is a critical social theorist trying to make sense of these phenomena. To do that, he is applying European theories about female subjectivity in a relatively straightforward, if somewhat innovative way, to account for the factor of race – as Calvo asserts, ‘tak[ing] seriously what Freud does not: a social context fraught with anxiety about racial and other difference’. 114 We might object that the Freudian theories on which he draws are themselves misogynistic; the theory of female masochism has long been controversial, 115 and as Mari Ruti puts it, ‘Freud wasn’t always able to transcend the blatant sexism of his nineteenth-century cultural context’. 116 Yet, as Ruti avers, it is also ‘possible to read [Freud’s] arguments’ 117 differently: not so much as essentialist, sexist and therefore flawed, as offering insights into a sexist social context – that is, in a way that puts the emphasis back on the social, cultural and historical conditions that shape his conceptions of subjectivity. From this perspective, the fact that a Freudian model of female sexual development is bound to produce so many ‘failures’ – as Fanon recognizes, in the case of girls’ expected progression to vaginality – exposes the flaws in the society that produces its unrealistic expectations. Thus, Freud supplies critical theorists, like Fanon, with a valuable resource for diagnosing and critiquing a ‘sick’ modern European society, even if – unlike Fanon – Freud, himself, never makes a project out of sociodiagnostics.
But for Brownmiller, Fanon’s uptake of the Freudian theory of female masochism is a ‘morbid rehash’; 118 she definitively puts the onus on him for choosing to re-engage with this psychoanalytic resource, rather than sociogenically seeing that the ‘morbid’ quality of these theories may be more of an indictment of a troubled society than a problem with the theories themselves. Shoving together, in rapid succession, Fanon’s lines about a ‘call for rape’ with the punchline of his newly racialized version of the Freudian beating fantasy – about the woman ‘raping herself’ and ripping herself open – Brownmiller sensationalizes Fanon’s exploration of these topics, and, furthermore, makes this critique personal by claiming that it is simply not possible to read the former lines, in particular, without being ‘affected’ by Fanon’s ‘private anguish and personal confusion’. 119 This is odd, given that – in spite of a few references to personal experience throughout the chapter (none of which seem to directly involve his own history of sexual encounters, desires or wishes), Fanon’s investigation into white femininity, sexuality and race is largely academic, if inspired. Thus, it is entirely unnecessary to make conjectures about his own feelings about Black male rapist fantasies, and whatever ‘anguish’ and ‘confusion’ it may have caused him to personally have been the object of negrophobic attitudes and behaviours. If we insist on getting ‘personal’ about it, Fanon likely first delivered the lines on rape fantasies, and ‘asking for it’, to his wife, Josie – who transcribed the first draft of Black Skin, White Masks as he dictated it to her. While it is true that Josie was a white European, it is still strange for Brownmiller to imagine Fanon giving voice to such pained emotions – as she implies, reflecting his own investment in a Freudian logic that justifies rape – directly in the presence of his life partner.
According to Brownmiller, the further issue with Fanon is not only that Black Skin, White Masks shows him to be especially obsessed with the topic of the rape of white women by ‘native’ 120 men, but also that ‘[r]ape runs as a curious subtheme in all of Fanon’s writings’ 121 – a claim that she does not even attempt to justify by reference to any of his other works. She says this in spite of the fact that the complex psychoanalytic territory that Fanon traverses is perfectly logical terrain given his sociogenic aim of diagnosing and addressing colonial neuroses – a context which Brownmiller completely fails to take into account, as though she did not even read and consider the rest of the book (or the extent of its sixth chapter). Brownmiller seems intent on calling out Fanon for essentially just being another Black male rapist at heart, ironically falling victim to the racist stereotypes about Black men that Fanon himself catalogues throughout Black Skin. This makes sense on the level that, as Fanon observes, ‘whoever says rape says black man’; 122 but Brownmiller, theorist of rape and critic of psychoanalysis as she is, seems to have no self-awareness whatsoever of her own (apparently unconscious) imbrication in the damaging interracial dynamics that Fanon quite effectively identifies in his work. Indeed, Davis writes in Women, Race, & Class of other aspects of Brownmiller’s book that contributed to a dangerous ‘resuscitation of the old racist myth of the Black rapist’. 123 Although she acknowledges that Against Our Will was ‘a pioneering scholarly contribution to the contemporary literature on rape’, she also points out that ‘many of [Brownmiller’s] arguments are unfortunately pervaded with racist ideas’. 124 Brownmiller’s attack on Fanon demonstrates this tendency, as it is no less overblown to read him as genuinely calling for the rape of white women than it is ridiculous to put a gloss on him as being a ‘hater of women’, 125 as she does. If Fanon’s adapted theories about masochistic female sexuality and racialized rape fantasies strike us as morbid and make us uncomfortable, this is likely because we know, as well as he did, that insofar as they accurately capture some small sliver of a very distorted social reality, the onus is on us to do something to change it.
An intersectional feminist approach to Fanon: A call for psycho-affective change
As a feminist philosopher, it can be painful to confront the overt and implicit sexism of many canonical philosophers and classic philosophical texts. I was mortified when I first came across Freud’s theory of female sexual development, with his insistence on a progression from clitorality to vaginality; my response, in fact, mimicked that of Ruti to penis envy, as she recalls ‘thr[owing] Freud’s book across [her] dorm room’ in college. 126 But I was not personally offended when I read Fanon’s take on white female negrophobia, even for the first time. Maybe I had read enough of Freud by then to not be fazed by intense scenes of violence, incest and twists in the story, such as the self turning back on itself in an act of masochism. I took the Freudian theory of female masochism to be more of an indictment of a sexist society than a sexist thinker. 127 It is also easy to retain this focus on a ‘neurotic society’, 128 as McCulloch puts it, when reading Fanon, since Fanon makes it exceedingly clear, from the outset of Black Skin, that he holds European colonial society itself to account for the neurotic disorders that it produces in its subjects, including white female negrophobes. Fanon’s description of stereotypes about Black male sexuality, and white women’s racist rape fantasies, hardly shocked me because much of it is cultural content that I absorbed from my upbringing. Fanon may be quite blunt and direct at times, but I will be honest that I have never seen his bluntness in an entirely negative light. Rather, I imagine him ‘pacing back and forth in the manner of an orator’ as he dictates the first draft of the text, giving it life and energy, and ‘the rhythm of a body in motion’. 129
This is not to let Fanon completely off the hook for the abrasiveness of some of his rhetoric, nor to shy away from acknowledging that potentially alienating a portion of his readers – even momentarily – may work at odds with his aim of liberating women, along with Black men, from racialized complexes. Feminists who have taken issue with Fanon’s discussion of negrophobic white femininity and Black male rape fantasies, such as Mary Anne Doane, have also pointed out the ‘structural difficulty’ 130 of the fact that there is a complete absence of Black women from Fanon’s treatment of the topic of rape. By theorizing rape exclusively in the context of his analysis of white female sexuality, Fanon arguably ‘neglects its status as the historical relation between the white male and the black female’, 131 effectively committing an erasure of Black women at this point in the text. It is not clear to me that it was Fanon’s intention to produce a comprehensive analysis of colonial neuroses or even an overarching psychoanalytic conception of racism, but it is still extremely disappointing, to say the least, that his autotheoretical testimony to the ills of colonial racism does not include even a reference to the long history of sexual violence against Black women. It is undoubtedly crucial for intersectional feminists to be vigilant about historically rooted and ongoing forms of misogynoir perpetuated through the erasure of Black women’s lives, experiences and voices from psychoanalytic schemas specifically, and mainstream academia and feminism more broadly. It is incumbent upon us to fight the persistence of these histories into the present.
Engaging with Fanon as contemporary intersectional feminist theorists and practitioners, however, means properly acknowledging his ‘failures’ without overreacting and senselessly declaring him to be antifeminist – in contrast to Brownmiller’s obstinately reductive, one-dimensional approach to interpreting Fanon, which evinces some of the problematic tendencies of second-wave white feminism to produce an oversimplified critique of systems of oppression. To do justice to the richness and aptness of Fanon’s hard-earned insights into racialized psycho-affective complexes, we must have the maturity and patience to journey with him through all of the nuances of his passionate, rigorous sociogenic analysis – exploring, in detail, the disturbing imagos, fantasies, phobias, fears and desires through which colonial racism comes to life in colonized subjects and interracial relationships. We must not be scared away by the seemingly outdated psychoanalytic theories of which Fanon makes such lively creative use, even if these may no longer be the best theories we have today for explaining the psycho-affective dimensions of persistent distortions in interracial dynamics. And we must not be afraid – in spite of the gap that separates us from Fanon’s time and social context – of, perhaps shockingly, still recognizing ourselves in his diagnoses; Fanon himself notes that the ability to do so is ‘a step in the right direction’. 132 The reward for bringing honesty, courage and the power of self-reflection to this arduous work is to be able to hear the voice that comes through most clearly in Fanon’s text: a voice that calls for psycho-affective change. Because this call has not yet been adequately answered – because we are still likely to see ourselves, if we can bear it, in Fanon’s sociodiagnostic efforts – it is a call that we would do well by him, and ourselves, to heed.
ORCID iD
Nicole Yokum https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2479-3925