Published in Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays, Editor John C. Hawley. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

RACIAL AND EROTIC ANXIETIES:
AMBIVALENT FETISHIZATION, FROM FANON TO MERCER

Introduction
Frantz Fanon raised critical issues which continue to influence questions surrounding postcolonial identity and its location in cultural practices which resist white supremacist hegemony. The contemporary relevance of Fanon's work is a result of his dialectic writing ability in which he engaged his political times with a language through which the future would be created. His status as an intellectual native in colonial Martinique, as well as his efforts in the decolonization of Algeria, provided him with the tools to examine the status of the colonial subject in relation to a variety of issues, ranging from interracial desire to Third World revolution (throughout this paper, I will most likely refer to the colonial subject in masculine form in order to remain consistent with what appears to be, in my opinion, a masculinist basis in the majority of Fanon's work) [1]. The focus of this paper will be the applicability of interracial desire and Third World Revolution to colonial desire which can be framed in the context of identification and imitation as utilized by cultural theorists who have written on Fanon.

I have chosen a variety of works that can be classified as cultural theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and film criticism, yet many resist classification due to the hybrid status of their authors. I am conscious of the broad use of the term hybridity in circles of cultural studies; my own interpretation of hybridity for the purposes of this paper is the multiplicity or intersection of identity; for instance, the deviant postcolonial who upholds diasporic consciousness as a potential catalyst in instigating Third World revolution. Stuart Hall describes the diaspora experience as a set of hybrid identities which live with and through, not despite difference. "Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.[2]" He ends this article with a quote from Fanon's Wretched of the Earth where he insists on perceiving national culture as "a whole body of efforts of a culture that keeps itself in existence" as opposed to a national culture which "delves into the past of a people in order to find coherent elements" (WE, 188). Hybridity creates possibilities for identifications which can lead to cross-race-class-gender-sexuality coalitions in the perpetual struggle against an imperialist system which maintains multiple structures of oppression in place.

Homi Bhabha's work on Fanon includes a densely packed, though useful theoretical interpretation of hybridity similar to Hall's. Commenting on the eyes of the postcolonial woman who writes a history of the poetics of postcolonial diaspora and who resists analogies in relation to sexual difference, Bhabha describes her condition as a "missing person whose structure of difference produces the hybridity of race and sexuality in the postcolonial discourse.[3]" It is this hybridity which initiates a process of political thinking that is aware of its own strategy and contingency. In this process, one must be aware of the "priority of the place from which it begins, if its authority is not to become autocratic" (65). This may be quite ironic for Bhabha to state, considering his own status as a postcolonial elite, but by bringing this up, he implicates his own subject position as well as that of the reader. As Hall writes, "The practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write -- the position of enunciation" (220).

Here, I would like to implicate my own socio-geo-racial-sexual-political location in this discourse. I am writing as a queer postcolonial female subject who does not separate sexual politics from racial politics. I advocate Cornel West's "new cultural politics of difference" which resists processes of decolonization that abide by essentialist identity politics at the expense of incorporating heterogeneity along the lines of gender, sexuality, class, and age [4]. Though he may sound as if he were merely naming these categories for the sake of doing justice to the sacred mantra of inclusive identity politics, his arguments remain valid in the context of Third World activism which continues to be perceived as incommensurate with sexual politics. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien articulate their demand for a "radical equality that rests on a precondition of diversity and difference [5]. Given their enunciation of gay black male authorship, their statement can be applied to both the queer community and the black community. This will become more clear in my incorporation of their work in this paper.

One might wonder why most of the authors with whom I am engaging in relation to Fanon are male, despite the fact that some of them may be queer. But the truth is, even if a gay man may seem to do more justice to gender because of his own disruption of gender codes, gaps still exist between the queer male and the queer female; however, with respect to queer men and women of color (even though the category of transgender disrupts this organization), a common space can be shared in which both understand the simultaneous experiences of racial and sexual oppression. For this reason, I have chosen to work primarily with texts by Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien whose work is inspired by Fanon. Furthermore, I want to explore the ways in which Fanon's masculinist tradition remains consistent with contemporary gay male discourse. Given my own disidentification with Fanon on issues of gender and sexuality, my identification with queer men of color becomes ambiguous. Do I look to white and colored queer women to fill this "lack"? Will I then be perceived as inauthentic and white-washed by my heterosexist communities of color? In this paper, I hope to raise more questions than answer questions regarding the relationship between hybridity and the ways in which identification and imitation, as possibilities for attaining "radical equality", are taken up by authors writing in the tradition of Fanon.

Paradoxes of Cultural Consumption

Fanon's essay titled "Racism and Culture" from Toward the African Revolution reveals what contemporary cultural critics may name as anti-essentialist politics. He writes about this at a time when racism seems to have disappeared, yet "the unreal impression was simply the consequence of the evolution of forms of exploitation" (37). Paul Gilroy talks about this newer, more subtle form of racism in the context of England, where citizenship is defined by cultural homogeneity rather than by race and obscures the more obvious forms of exploitation based on race [6]. Fanon's insight into this matter seems to have paved the way for yet another form of racism which is manifest in practices of cultural appropriation that rely on essentialism, or the idea that there is something inherent about social identities: "Exoticism is one of the forms of this simplification [the determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison, to harden]. It allows no cultural confrontation. There is on the one hand a culture in which qualities of dynamism, of growth, of depth can be recognized" (35). Both the colonizer and the colonized can fall into the trap of relying on "exoticism" which precludes the shifting nature of identity. For instance, he describes the blues as "the modicum of stylized oppression as the exploiter's and the racist's rightful due" (37). I read this statement to be a description of the ways in which the colonizer will always try to access the world of the colonized. Trinh Minh-Ha describes this "tolerance" for an-Other's language as a "reputable form of colonial discrimination, one in which difference can only be admitted once it is appropriated, that is, when it operates within the Master's sphere of having. [7]"

The colonizer wants ownership of the blues, to the Negro's world of misery, and will defend nativism so that his perception of the Negro remains undisturbed, as Fanon states in Wretched of the Earth (243). His views on exoticism, in relation to the tendency of the native to look to a distant exoticized past Africa, are enforced effectively through his own poetics in "On National Culture": "It is not enough to try to get back to the people the past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are giving shape to... Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come" (227). It is in this zone of occult instability where the narcissism on which the colonial relationship is based must be destabilized [8]. In the introduction to Black Skin White Masks, Fanon constantly lays out the colonial operation of identification, in terms of how the black wants to be white and how the white man "slaves to reach a human level". On the previous page, he asserts that there are two camps, one black and one white, but that "these metaphysics are often quite fluid" (8-9). This fluidity of the metaphysical nature of black and white camps can be examined in the appropriation of cultural styles and their implications in a neocolonial context.

In "Black Hair/Style Politics" Kobena Mercer provides a clever metaphor for cultural identity in terms of hair style and its politics [9]. Throughout the article, Mercer lists examples of appropriation and commodification of black styles by the dominant culture. For instance, the popularity of dread locks or the dashiki can be seen as forms of commodity fetishism in which portions of the dominant culture adopt those styles in order to show their disaffection from Western norms. He lists other examples which have more to do with musical styles, an ironic example of which is the popularity of ska and be-bop (in a addition to the shaved soul boy look) among white skinheads in 70's Britain. In a brief history of black hair styles which he describes as a crucial "art form articulating a variety of aesthetic 'solutions' to a range of 'problems' created by ideologies of race and racism" (248), Mercer criticizes the exoticism based on an idealized notion of a pure Africa which inspired the Afro and 'locks; furthermore, this form of nativism led to the denunciation of the supposed "artifice" of other hairstyles such as hair straightening or lightening, which were considered to be rejections of natural black beauty. While the former are considered to be more "natural", Mercer argues that this assertion of difference in comparison to the "artificial" is "contradictory because the difference hinges on the inversion of the same". The basis for his argument lies in the fact that all hair styles are artificial to some extent since each requires careful and conscious cultivation. He prefers the conk because its ambiguity and artifice reflect the contradictions of interculturation from which the more "natural" styles are exempt.

This reading is relevant in light of Fanon's deconstruction of the white artifice inscribed onto the black body, and which ultimately leads to colonial alienation. Mercer's metaphor of hair style as identity is an illustration of the detrimental uses of essentialism and/or authenticity in which some cultural subjects are privileged over others because of their adherence to a fixed notion of identity, thus he contests the artifice of the construction of those notions. The contradictions of interculturation clearly mark a type of hybridization which has resulted from histories of migration and displacement. The fact that his metaphor is actually a body part creates a dialectic with Fanon's analysis of the reduction of the Negro to the biological realm. Mercer articulates the complexity of the "semiotic guerrilla warfare" and the lawlessness of the chaos of commodity fetishism in which white imitations of black styles reveal an appropriation of what I would call an idealized racial physicality that imitates surface reality rather than identifies with the historical reality commodified and fetishized racial subject. In reference to skinhead appropriations of black style, he asks "what are the bases for the post-imperial mode of mimicry, this ghost dance of white ethnicity?". In the more contemporary and popular context of pervasive Hip-Hop appropriation, he asks "who, in this postmodern melee of semiotic appropriation and counter-creolization, is imitating whom?" (281). I include these questions here because they are crucial interrogations into the forms of neocolonialism that reveal the paradoxical relationships that constitute contemporary race relations. Furthermore, they shed light on the potential problems which arise in "hybrid practices" governed by privileged positions that have been shaped by history (i.e., white middle class hippie-crits, or yippies as others may refer to them, hip-hopsters, and so on).

Fanon's Manichaean concept of the world in which white has been constructed as beauty and virtue with black as its Other in the form of negation (BSWM, 45) sheds light on the irony of cultural appropriation as exemplified by neo-nazi skinheads, whose ideology maintains the Manichaean divide, and who paradoxically consume black styles. One of the major recurring themes in Black Skin White Masks and Wretched of the Earth is the racial anxiety which simultaneously masks both desire and fear of the black body and manifests itself in violence toward that body, as illustrated by the history of lynching; hence, the simultaneous violence of neo-nazism and the love of be-pob, ska, and the bald head look. I don't want to suggest that all practices of cultural "exchange" operate in such a neocolonial racist way. This would rely on essentialist claims which would only permit Cubans to dance salsa, or African-Americans to dance Hip-Hop, or Chinese people to eat Chinese food etc. etc.. There is a difference between exploitation and appreciation; nonetheless, various forms of cultural exchange suggest that identification via colonial desire is at work. Bhabha argues that three conditions underlie the process of identification: "to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness, its locus, its look....; the very place of identification is a place of splitting...; identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity -- it is always the transformation of the subject in assuming that identity" (LC, 44-45). Several pages later he arrives at the following conclusion: "By following the trajectory of colonial desire... it becomes possible to cross, even to shift the Manichaean boundaries" (62). In the midst of his highly theoretical language, Bhabha fails to provide concrete examples of how this potential can affect change. I myself recognize this potential for what I interpret to be a hybridity arrived at through colonial desire, but I am wary of my own problematic participation in this elite-cultural studies discourse which risks remaining abstract and useless in relation to economic realities and the cultural productions which sustain oppressive hierarchies. Nonetheless, Bhabha's statements lead to us to question the internal dynamics of racial identification within each subject who allows the Other(s) within to emerge.

Exoticism in Gay Culture

Placing colonial desire in the context of gay subculture, Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien explore issues of identification or lack thereof among men of different ethnicities in the gay community. The analysis of cultural appropriation which in many cases relies on exoticizing notions of Other cultures in a queer context can reveal the complexity of the implications which arise from multiple border-crossings as they are experienced on the margins of the margins of racial and sexual politics. In some articles that Mercer and Julien wrote together, they argue that the politics of representation in the sex-cultural production of pornography, which to some degree has been colonized by white feminists and white gay men in the era of increasing political importance of this issue, are critical in understanding how "ethnicity is a crucial factor in the social construction of manliness, suggesting the racial dialectic of projection and internalization through which white and black men have shaped their masks of masculinity is a key point at which race, gender, and the politics of sexuality intersect. [10]" Furthermore, whiteness' ethnic location remains invisible in the gay community just as it does in the mainstream, and despite the influences of the black liberation movement on the gay and lesbian liberation movement in the sixties where Black Pride was translated into (appropriated by?) Gay Pride, contemporary mutual reciprocity between the two does not exist [11]. In terms of possibilities for Black Gay Pride , it is unfortunate that the negelct of queers of color by dominant cultures of the gay community and communities of color has continually persisted. Significantly enough, it was the Black and Puerto Rican drag queens who led Stonewall, the historical moment at which queers rebelled against the customary practices of police raids into gay and lesbian bars which were often accompanied by severe police brutality. Though organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis existed, organizations with predominantly white middle-class memberships, and other privileged members of society that looked down on bar culture, which primarily consisted of working class queers and/or queers of color (D'Emilio, 1993), I would argue that most people today associate gay and lesbian liberation with Stonewall rather than with these organizations. Unfortunately, there is little mention of the fact that the leaders of this revolutionary moment were queers of color, and that their activism probably had a great deal to with the likelihood that they were already involved in anti-racist struggles which served as a catalyst to instigate change in other areas of their lives.

The role that ethnicity plays in queer relations can be better understood vis-a-vis Lewis Gordon's treatment of the racial and sexual matrices of desire and his insistence on their significance for a better understanding of social roles which are informed by "bad faith" forms in which groups are structured in the overdetermined Manichaean structure such that one groups is hot/masculine/active/white and the other is cold/passive/feminine/black [12]. Mercer and Julien argue that the new "macho" styles which have been appropriated by gay white men to challenge stereotypes of the effeminate weak queer carry racist and fascist connotations of white masculinity that maintain this overdetermined racial structure in place, regardless of whether or not those styles merely serve to eroticize masculinity (TC, 192). Mercer and Julien also offer a critique of the masculinist form of the 60's black liberation movement that was exclusive of women and gays and lesbians, and which ultimately led to the autonomous organization of black feminists in the 70's. In contradistinction to the machismo that is prevalent among a large number of black male youth and contemporary rap artists, Mercer and Julien favor alternative constructions of black masculinity as exemplified by the styles of figures such as Little Richard, Prince, and George Clinton who "play with stereotypical codes to 'theatricalize' and send up the whole masquerade of masculinity itself" (TC, 200). Even though their study is on masculinity, I would also add a figure such as M'shell Ndegeocello, a black bisexual r&b artist, who disrupts gender codes, specifically those of straight black femininity, in songs in which she is explicit about female to female desire or which include a subversive treatment of biblical passages; for instance, in "Leviticus" from Peace Beyond Passion (this is a reference to the passage in the bible which considers it an abomination for men to lie with other men) she tells a story of a gay black man whose mother would always pray for him and who eventually gets beaten to death. Later on in this chapter, I will explore issues surrounding homophobic violence and issues of anxiety via Fanon within racial communities that cause this violence.

Returning to the issue of colonizing agendas in relation to the politics of representation in pornography, I would like to comment on an article by Richard Dyer titled "Coming to Terms" in which he articulates -- as a gay white male -- the political importance and defense of pornography as a genre, specifically gay male porn, due to its roots in bodily effects which can give us knowledge that other genres cannot [13]. He argues that gay male porn is structured around a linear narrative which culminates in visual coming. Though gay male porn is marginal to the mainstream, he maintains that this desire to come which is placed in a narrative structure, in which gay male desire to be penetrated is sidelined, does not disturb the status quo. I am tempted to describe this statement as Fanonian in the sense that substitution rather than transformation takes place, as is the case with the national bourgeoisie who merely replace rather than transform the colonial power structure during the moment of decolonization [14]. Dyer claims that a common feature of gay male porn is to include another porn within the porn which collapses the distinction between representation and that which it is a representation of. Furthermore, "Porn is... part of how we live our sexuality; how we represent sexuality to ourselves is how we live it... Gay porn seems to make that all clearer, because there is greater equality between the participants which permits a fuller exploration of the education of desire that is going on" (296). In conclusion, he calls for more criticism of porn which addresses the educational function of porn.

One author who might beg to differ with Dyer's claims about the "greater equality between the participants" in gay porn is Richard Fung who examines the educational function of porn in "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn" in which he criticizes the racist representation of Asians in mainstream gay male porn [15]. While he acknowledges Dyer's assumption that more equality among participants exists in a gay context than it does in a straight context, for Fung this is only true when all of the participants are white. Fung addresses the role of colonial discourse which has placed Asians on the desexualized end of the sexual spectrum and Africans on the hypersexualized end of the spectrum while whites fall neatly in the middle. He also makes an important point regarding the contradiction of the simultaneous coexistence of Orientalist stereotypes relating to specific groups based on nationality (i.e., the Japanese as kinky, Filipinos as available) and the more general Orientalist stereotype that lumps all Asians into one group, thus perpetuating the notion that all Asians are the same. Responding to Fanon's quote regarding the eclipse of the Negro by his penis, he asks whether or not homoerotic desire is possible for the Asian male because of his apparent lack of a penis. He provides examples of gay porn that privilege gay white male desire in which Orientalist stereotypes of Asian passivity are reinscribed. In the same way that two women are often used in heterosexual male porn, not for the purpose of illustrating female to female desire, but for satisfying the straight male ego and gaze, Asians have occupied a similar subordinate role in gay male porn.

One interesting example is a porn which takes place in a dojo (that also suggests a gay white male appropriation of a suitable "exotic" setting for bondage and discipline) where a dream sequence allows one of the white characters to fulfill his fantasy of submission and passivity by occupying the role of an Asian; hence, Fung sees this as an equation of Asian with anus. Furthermore, racial stereotypes often go with classist stereotypes which portray the Asian as the lower class houseboy or servant, thus playing on the material conditions of Asian immigrants (165-168). Fung is concerned with these issues because as Dyer has noted, porn teaches us about how we act out our sexuality; in Fung's examples, porn does exactly that: it reveals the racist and classist nature of the gay mainstream where negative or absent representations of Asians have skewed sexual relations among Asian men. Fung makes an important point about the effects that this has on gay Asian immigrants whose initial contact with gay culture occurs in a racist context. These representations provide an interesting comparison and extension of Mercer's and Julien's work on the different dynamics of representation of racial Others in the gay mainstream. They also complicate issues around identification and appropriation in gay culture which appear to allow for more gender flux and equality at the expense of creating positive images of queers of color.

"Ambivalent Racial Fetishization"

In an article titled "Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary", Mercer reveals the shifting nature of his multiply constituted subject position in his reflexive and reflective revision of an earlier reading of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of black male nudes which may be read as pornographic by some, but have been appropriated into the world of art photographyn [16]. Inspired by Michel Foucault's anti-naturalist account of the "distinction between author-function and ideological subject position", he justifies his more recent ambivalent relationship to the photographs by contesting the inherent meaning of cultural texts. Mercer treats the cultural text as something that is experienced "across the relations between, authors, texts, and readers, relations that are always contingent, context bound, and historically specific". Consequently, different kinds of readers and contexts have the potential to create a variety of meanings of the same text. In his initial reading of Mapplethorpe's work, specifically a piece called "Man in Polyester Suit" in which the viewer only sees black hands and a black penis (as the indicator of the model's race) coming out of a tacky polyester suit, Mercer interprets this to be an inscription of the Manichaean oppositions of nature/culture, savage/civilized where the significance of the tacky suit is proof of the black man's failure to access "culture" (170-179).

What appeared to Mercer to be a reduction of black bodies to sexual objects echoes Fanon when he writes: "One is no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis. The Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis, he is a penis" (BSWM, 170). Furthermore, Mercer adds that the two dimensionality of the text which allows for "a cool detached gaze (on the part of the white male spectator) that erases the historical context and enables the projection of fantasy which saturates the black male body in sexual predicates", points to the fears and anxieties around the black penis as a threat to white male power. He specifically refers to what Bhabha calls a "colonial fantasy" which articulates power and mastery over the racial Other [17]. His reactions to such texts have been ambivalent because he is angry about the negative/colonial images, but he also feels a desire to look. While his earlier reading was guided by feminist critiques of the objectifying male gaze, in his revision, he is less sure about the effects of the photographs because he considers major factors, such as Mapplethorpe's status as a gay white man who died of AIDS as well as the hybridized aesthetic practices of black queers which has led to more critical dialogues, readings and multiple positions from which to enunciate.

It is especially significant to consider the fact that Mapplethorpe acknowledged the historical absence of the black nude from the Western aesthetic nude canon. Mercer argues that Mapplethorpe doubles the text by imposing what is considered to be the "polluted world of racist image" onto the "'purified' realm of the aestheticized ideal". Hence, the presence of the black male subverts the normative aesthetic, which leads to the potential reversibility of the gaze. It appears to be the case that in the actual act of writing, Mercer reveals the process of continual transformation in his own analyses. While making a clear distinction between Mapplethorpe as a gay white male and the straight white male spectator, Mercer also recognizes this as the point at which he departs from his previous alignment with feminist theory. While not completely divorcing himself from feminist theory, he enunciates his privileged position as a phallocentric gay male who is able to assert more agency in his own consumption of the text because of his access to the gay male gaze, but which still remains ambiguous and contradictory in light of the racial component... hence, his interpretation of Mapplethorpe's "ambivalent racial fetishization" -- where ambivalence is defined as the moment at which politics and the contestation of power are most intense -- in which he (Mercer) acknowledges his dual location as object and subject (187-190).

Towards the end of this article, he seems to show appreciation for Mapplethorpe's photographs of the black nude because of its decoding of the aesthetic ideal, but he does not return to the famous photograph which initially inspired his criticisms -- "Man in Polyester Suit" in which elements of the Manichaean divide manifest themselves in a very obvious manner. In the discussion which follows the article, Mercer reveals the danger of the "doubling" in Mapplethorpe's work in the sense that it can either result in identification -- on the part of the black male -- with the master/slave narrative in which machismo results as a reaction to the narrative and is then displaced onto others, or in internalization in which stereotypes are played out in gay relationships; however, Mercer resists internalization per se because of its anti-Fanonian rejection of sociogenesis in which the colonized is always constituted objectively and subjectively (219).

On the one hand, I agree with Mercer's claims to the "subversive potential" of the photographs, but I question the large numbers of economically disadvantaged black queer males who have absolutely no access to elite cultural studies discourse around artistic and sexual practices (i.e., how would the African-American 16 year-old male transvestite prostitute who lives on the street as his/her only means for survival respond to terms such as "ambivalent racial fetishization"?). After all, he acknowledges that these kinds of readings are available only to those "in the know". Throughout this text, Mercer stresses the importance of the role of the reader which highlights the possibility that the same signs in cultural texts, such as Mapplethorpe's photographs, can produce different readings (i.e., their potential to be read as homoerotic or homophobic texts).

It is useful to place Mercer's shifts in political identification in the context of Gordon's paradigm of the antiblack world as an "ideal type" in which the highest nonmixture is white and masculine and the lowest nonmixture is black and feminine [18]. In his analysis, Gordon makes the connection between the black man and the (white?) lesbian, because while both are feminized in an antiblack world, they pose a similar threat in demanding power which has been constructed as white-masculine-phallus; however, there would seem to be a dis-connection between the black man and the black lesbian considering that she, by virtue of her location in an antiblack world, does not have whiteness (as does the white lesbian) or a physical phallus (as does the black man) that places them in a position to demand white phallic power. It seems that within this configuration in which there exists an inherent gender inequality among black men and black women and white men and white women, the black lesbian only poses a potential threat to the black man, rather than to the white man, due to the feminization of black women and men which places them on a more equal playing field in relation to each other as opposed to the black lesbian's relationship to the white man.

Gordon stresses that the antiblack world as an ideal type is a subjunctive reality, in which the triple task of the critic includes "interpreting the two poles as perspectives and interpreting her or his own relation as a critical relation to such a world" (84). Hence, my own interpretation of what appears to be a shift in Mercer's politics to a simultaneous identification with white-masculine-phallus-power and disidentification with feminist politics where he previously made the connections between the objectified female body and the fetishized/feminized black body [19]. I think it is important here to take into consideration Gordon's statement that "For although our antiblack world is also a misogynist world, a misogynist world is not necessarily an antiblack one" (76). This seems to point to the relative autonomy of misogyny from racism in contrast to the dependence of racism on misogyny. Furthermore, Mercer's initial association of racism with misogyny and later identification with Mapplethorpe reveals the primacy of cross-race phallic camaraderie, which is heightened in the context of a male homoerotic and potentially misogynistic realm. I don't mean to essentialize Mercer, I am only using the paradigm of an anti-black world as an ideal type to articulate the potential for hybrid spaces to break down the Manichaean divide as well as the potential danger of discursive inaccessibility that arises from the more privileged spaces of hybridity.

As a multiply constituted subject, Mercer enunciates from various interlocking positions in which he provides us with a piece of writing which is an excellent example of precisely what he argues for: the fact that a text can produce multiple meanings. Depending on the reader's position, this article can be read as either a phallocentric text as evidenced by the implications of his revision, or as an "ambivalent" text which maintains allegiances to the various political positions which he embraced throughout this process. Taking into consideration my own subject position as a queer woman of color and my identification with other queer women of color, one might be tempted to reduce my reaction to a rejection of what would be considered a phallocentric text given the dis-identification between the black man and the queer woman of color in the context of an anti-black world, though there is still a part of me that identifies with Mercer's text. My own "ambivalence" to the text rejects an essentialist reading of a text by a queer man of color who acts as a possible bridge between the queer white man and the woman of color, who might normally resist any sort of allegiance with the gay white male world given their respective locations in an anti-black world. Furthermore, I am also aware of my own privileged status as a queer woman who grew up during the early years of the AIDS pandemic and consequently did not experience the deaths of loved ones as a powerful vehicle for cross-race identification which Mercer's text also seems to imply.

Ambivalent Readings of Fanon

Applying Mercer's ideas on ambivalence as a result of the various meanings which a single text can produce, I find myself questioning the limits of Fanon's discourse and the extent to which I am invited into his text. While there are points at which I agree with Fanon, specifically his pieces on national culture and consciousness in Wretched of the Earth (even though I question these to some extent, given Fanon's critique of the national bourgeois elite who more often than not were male) or the piece on racism and culture in Toward the African Revolution, the sections in Black Skin White Masks which attempt to explore neurotic interracial dynamics (i.e., those relationships inspired by "bad faith" in the sense that they are based on racist assumptions) or the psychopathology of the black are points at which I depart. For instance, I felt as though the chapter on the woman of color and the white man did not do justice to the multiple spaces in which women of color find themselves in relation to both society and to men of color. The chapter could have provided a more in depth analysis of the subjectivity of the woman of color in order to reveal the struggles within the community of color rather than the primacy of the psychopathology of the black man. As Hazel Carby has written in her criticism of white Western feminist hegemony, despite the fact that patriarchy is a system that exploits women and men of color, women of color are oppressed differently by men of different colors [20].

When writing about the man of color and the white woman, Fanon illustrates the ways in which manhood, black or white, is a symbol of patriarchy and can override race: "Once this ritual of initiation into 'authentic' manhood (sleeping with a white woman) takes place, they took the train for Paris" (BSWM, 72). By placing authentic (read: white) in quotation marks, Fanon suggests that black men strive for white manhood... hence, white patriarchy. This seems like a crucial point at which Fanon could have elaborated upon different systems of patriarchy to illustrate the complex multiple spaces in which the woman of color must wage her wars. In the same way that he draws conclusions about the man of color in the previous chapter, the same could have been done in relation to the woman of color. Though these are chapters in which gender neutral language is clearly not utilized (despite the argument that in the French translation, he did use gender neutral language in the rest of his text), the ways in which they are presented privilege male subjectivity over female subjectivity, which is the natural outcome of gender neutral language... in the same way that race neutral language can privilege white subjectivity over colored subjectivity.

Another point at which Fanon could have engaged more with internal struggles among the colonized is in his treatment of the veil. In "Algeria Unveiled" from A Dying Colonialism, Fanon writes about the transformation of the Algerian woman as an integral part of the revolution. "The Algerian woman is at the heart of the combat. Arrested, tortured, raped, shot down, she testifies to the violence of the occupier and to his inhumanity" (DC, 66). I interpreted this statement to be an illustration of the ultimate form of colonial degradation which only the woman can experience due to her status as the gendered colonized being. Unlike the man, she can be sexually exploited and raped in the most humiliating manner. She is the concrete manifestation of what happens to a culture that is penetrated by outside forces. Men suffered beatings, torture and possibly rape at times, but women also experienced torture, beatings, and rape, while the latter occurred much more frequently.

At the beginning of this chapter, Fanon equates rejected veils with the acceptance of rape by the colonizer, as it is viewed by the Algerian public. He writes quite matter of factly about this, almost to the extent that he denies any agency to Algerian women who may have rejected the veil for subversive purposes within their community other than for the acceptance of rape by the colonizer. Later on in the chapter, he writes, as though with full authority on the subject, that "the veil protects, reassures, isolates. One must have had heard the confessions of the Algerian women or have analyzed the dream content of certain recently unveiled women to appreciate the importance of the veil for the body of the women" (DC, 59). As I was reading this, I felt as though I were reading Freud again or scientific material written by white men on women and/or people of color. It also reminded me of the anthropologist or cultural critic that takes up issues in relation to "others" in a totalizing manner, as if they can understand them better than they can understand themselves. While taking into consideration the fact that this was written at the time of the Algerian war when national unity was a necessary tool in gaining independence, and also a time when Algerian women may not have been in a position to write about these issues, I also see this type of work as a reflection of the pervasive silence about brown on brown, or black on black, or yellow on yellow violence in relation to domestic violence committed by men on to women (I am not denying that the reverse occurs or that it occurs in a same sex relationships, but more often than not, the woman in a heterosexual relationship is the victim). This leads to contemporary trends which equate feminism or any other ideology that challenges the patriarchy on which racial solidarity is justified, as something that is foreign, something that is "white", or Western and which ultimately relies on essentialist notions of culture.

In "Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification", Diana Fuss makes the argument that the Algerian woman comes to bear the burden of representing national culture in the absence of nation [21]. She argues that there is a "fetishistic logic of displacement" on the part of Fanon. In this chapter of her book, she describes the colonial history of identification by exploring "Algeria Unveiled" and the importance of making the distinction between identification and imitation. Fuss argues that this was crucial for Fanon because it is in the dialectic space between the two that politics emerge. Analyzing the role of mimesis, as a form of mimicry which is the deliberate performance of a role, in the psychopathology of colonial relations in the context of "Algeria Unveiled", Fuss considers Bhabha's definition of mimesis in which the "mimicry of colonial others can be disruptive in ways which colonial discourse doesn't intend and cannot control". Furthermore, Bhabha sees that there is a slippage between mimicry and mockery, and peformativity and parody such that the mimicry of subjugation can provide opportunities for resistance and subversion. Hence, the Algerian woman's imitation of the European woman for the purpose of acting as a secret agent in the revolution as an example of mimesis -- or imitation -- and a refusal to identify with the colonial forces (i.e., defying the Algerian view that the lifted veil signaled the rape of the colonizer), as well as the colonizer's inability to distinguish between imitation and identification (IP, 147).
Fuss criticizes Fanon for essentializing black women in his conclusions about the "continuum between the revolutionary and the Algerian woman" -- as opposed to "that coefficient of play, of imitation, almost always present in this form of action when we are dealing with the Western woman" -- in which the Algerian woman learns her role "instinctively" (DC, 50) because it suggests that masquerade is a natural function of femininity. I interpret her criticism to suggest that global politics of gender emerge in that dialectic space between identification and imitation, which is not understood by the colonist nor by the man of color: she asks, "Did the opportunity to dress in European clothes permit some Algerian women to engage in cross-national, cross-racial, cross-class, and cross-cultural identifications with white bourgeois European women?" (IP, 150-152). Given the fact that Jean Paul Sartre wrote the preface for Wretched of the Earth which suggests that Fanon considered the possibilities for people of color to work with progressive whites, it might have been the case that progressive white women played an even more specific role with women of color in this process; however, it seems as though the masculinist basis that is apparent in Fanon's work on gender (as described above) precludes any analysis of the sort.

By comparing the Algerian woman's "instinctive" imitation to the Algerian man who, under torture is forced to imitate the colonist for purposes of colonial identification such that imitation for Algerian men is perceived to be depersonalizing and alienating, Fuss claims that there is a "gender incongruity structuring Fanon's theory of colonial mimicry" because black women are described as essential mimics while black men are not (IP, 154). I would argue that this masculinist perspective, like the colonial perspective, cannot adequately distinguish between identification and imitation as it is experienced by women of color who may find white female allies in their own struggles. While I don't want to suggest that privileged white Western women's struggles for equal pay are commensurate with Third World Women's struggles against such atrocities as the business of mail-order brides, or female genital mutilation to name a few, it seems as though Fanon is too quick to dismiss possibilities for the transnational politics of gender, sexuality, and class.

I am including Fuss' work here to explore alternatives for reading gender and sexuality in Fanon vis-a-vis other work by gay black male theorists. In discussing "The Negro and Psychopathology" from Black Skin White Masks, she makes interesting criticisms which seem to work against and with Fanon. For instance, Fanon's treatment of the white woman's desire for rape, masked by anxiety, for the black man is questionable for Fuss because he does not problematize the associations of white femininity with the pathology of masochism. This pathology is present in the violent lesbianism and self-mutilation -- both of which become blurred in the racist narcissism of the white woman -- which are prerequisites for this anxious desire. In Gordon's illustration of the antiblack world where there is a divide between good/white/masculine and evil/black/feminine, the white woman has masculine power due to her whiteness and is both a lesbian by virtue of her desire for the feminized black man as well as a masochist because she is not supposed to desire what is evil/black/feminine [22]; hence this desire is masked by a constructed anxiety of being raped. Despite the discrepancies of the problematic association between pathology and white femininity, Fuss considers the fact that Fanon was very much aware and concerned about the stereotype of the black man as rapist, and that by writing this material, he was providing a counternarrative. By focusing on the white woman as a comparison to the black man, the black woman is rendered invisible once again. In fact, it is in this chapter that Fanon says "I know nothing of her [the black woman]" (BSWM, 180). Fuss makes an important point about the absence of a thorough analysis, on Fanon's part, of the ways in which violent colonial masculinity maintained the economic and political system by the systematic rape of black women (IP, 156). Regardless of whether or not clinical documentation about women of color was available as some might argue, this does not justify the glaring absence of this crucial analysis. It is clear that the Negro in "The Negro and Psychopathology" is the Negro man since the white man and the white woman are used as comparisons to the black man. The fact that so much of the psychoanalysis in this chapter occurs on the level of fantasy gives Fanon even more of an opportunity to engage with the woman of color. The obvious danger of gender neutral language reveals itself most clearly in this chapter.

In connecting gender and sexuality, Fuss extends her critique to the implications of what she considers to be a homophobic Fanon. While the anxiety of the white woman can be seen as a masked desire for rape contextualized in an antiblack world, the anxiety of the white man masks a homoerotic desire since the black man is feminized in this world -- hence the homosexual moment of colonization that is framed and legitimized within a homophobic society [23]. Fuss interprets a particular footnote in "The Negro and Psychopathology" to be a sign of his homophobia. Fanon argues that because the Oedipal complex is foreign to the Antilles, there are no homosexuals; however he acknowledges the presence of men who dress like women, who date other men (but who cannot resist other women), and who can "take a punch like any he-man" as a contrast to the more neurotic cases of homosexuality in France where black men, many of whom survive economically by prostitution, are in a subordinate position to white men (BSWM, 180). Going back to the neurosis of the anxious homosexual white man, Fuss concludes that this is an indication that Fanon equated homosexuality with white racism. Working from this premise, she suggests that Fanon's disidentification with homosexuality is positive in the sense that it was an attempt to deconstruct anthropological associations between "primitive" and "invert"; it also reveals the Eurocentricity of the construction of sexuality. Again, she considers his "homophobia" in its historical context as Fanon's impassioned response to the pathologization of the sexuality of people of color; however, she also claims that Fanon offers little if any room for queers of color who are both antihomophobic and anti-imperialist.

Fuss' reading of Fanon points to various issues, one of which carries deep implications for queers of color. Furthermore, she provides more proof of the ambivalence that should accompany any reader of Fanon who respects him enough to criticize the limits of his discourse. The footnote concerning the men who dress like women in Martinique who are not labeled as "homosexuals" is significant because on the one hand, one could accepts Fuss' reading which leads her to believe that it exposes the Eurocentric nature of the ways in which "homosexuality" is conceptualized. One could also read it as Fanon's essentialist account of Martinician queerness [24]. Here, it is significant to point out that Fanon primarily spoke about interracial homosexual relationships which are neurotic in an antiblack world just as interracial heterosexual relationships are in this world. By stating that the men who dress up as women in Martinique, who are also vulnerable to the advances of women, lead "normal sex lives", Fanon legitimizes this essentialist Martinician queerness by virtue of the fact that it operates in a heterosexual paradigm. This footnote, which refers to what appears to be healthy black male homoerotic desire (among other gay black men), seems to suggest that Fanon conceptualized relationships in a framework in which gender hierarchy exists. I'm not sure if Fanon would appreciate this kind of speculation, since it is only a footnote, but it seems like a crucial point to bring up considering the amount of attention it has received by other cultural critics as well the extensive work that black gay male theorists have written about Fanon. These writers also suggest that Fanon's text could be read as either homophobic or homoerotic. Could it be a narcissistic celebration on the part of the gay black man, by someone like Mercer who might be perceived to identify with the privileged gay white male world? On the other hand, if one accepts it as a homophobic text, can we speculate that this textual violence masks an anxiety, on Fanon's part, around issues of homosexuality as something which is both desirable and threatening to the straight black mind/body? It seems ironic that Fanon's disidentification with homosexuality has created spaces for queers of color to interrogate a variety of issues (despite the fact that he may not have intended this), such as the Eurocentrism of gay culture. By bringing this up, I hope to expose potential parallels between Fanon's work on the relationship between the black man and the white man and the internal struggles within communities of color around issues of gender and sexuality. In the next section, I will engage with Isaac Julien's work, whom I consider to be an interesting example of a figure who has incorporated Fanonian thought into racialized queer discourse.

Contesting the Black Essential (Het) Subject

Isaac Julien's films address the invisibility of black queer subjects in the mainstream queer and black communities. Young Soul Rebels is one example of Julien's treatment of hybridity in terms of the space in which multiple identities interact. In an interview titled "Performing Sexualities", he talks about the hybridity which can be experienced in various sites of pleasure and desire, such as music, clubs, and film [25]. Julien considers film to be one of the few domains in which spectators can occupy and identify with various subject positions since the role of fantasy in film allows this to happen. He argues that "this hybridity in the field of vision of cinema is disturbing and makes people feel very uncomfortable... there is a certain amount of incommensurability between different identities" (PS, 134). For instance, he refers to the fact that when Young Soul Rebels came out, which was marketed as a black film, many gay white men who saw the film had to confront some of the violence and verbal homophobia of straight black audiences while watching it.

In an article titled "Black is Black Ain't", Julien questions the implications of the rise of rap as the signifier of hetero black masculinity in black studio films which has made it difficult for hybrid representations of blackness to emerge in the mainstream. He sees this as a reflection of the Afrocentrism which permeates rap culture and large constituencies of the Nation of Islam which espouse narrow versions of masculinity. In Julien's opinion, homophobic black culture is reproduced in two of the major black institutions, namely the family and the church. In an article titled "True Confessions" which was written with Kobena Mercer, they refer to the disavowal of AIDS and homosexuality in the black community in terms of the popular belief that these are a "white man's disease" (TC, 199). Julien partly traces this disavowal to the influence that some of the major black leaders had on black popular consciousness such as W.E.B. Du Bois who wrote homophobically about Claude McKay's novel on gay and lesbian nightlife in Harlem. Another piece of evidence he provides is the fact that George Bass, the executor of the Langston Hughes estate, continuously tried to prevent discussion of Hughes' sexuality; in particular, Looking for Langston (another film by Julien), was censored by the Hughes estate when it arrived in the United States for a film festival.

Young Soul Rebels exposes the dialectic between homophobia and racism as products of the anxieties which are based on the consistent denial of the Others within each subject. In the opening scene, a gay black man is murdered as he cruises (looks for anonymous public sex) in a park. This is significant because the viewer does not know if the murder was based on homophobia or racism. Later on in the film, we find out that the murderer was a gay white man . It seems as though Julien establishes the Fanonian concept of colonial violence in terms of the homosexual encounter between the white man and the feminized black man in order to deconstruct the binaries that make up an antiblack world. Music plays an important role throughout the rest of the film, specifically in the presence of disco clubs in the late 70's and early 80's which Julien describes as hybrid spaces in which people across class, race, gender, and sexuality would meet (PS, 125). In one of the club scenes, the gay black character meets the gay white character who is very active in Left Socialist politics of Britain. The working class status of both of these characters is significant because it reiterates the point which Mercer and Julien have made in their articles concerning their disidentification with the white working class Left as well as with gay and lesbian politics which were racist in their own right.

Julien's treatment of working class culture in the film also addresses the "ambivalent attraction and disavowal around the desires and fears of black sexuality" (PS, 128). Julien was inspired by his exposure to the East End of London where black and white working class youth simultaneously experienced intimacy and violence towards each other. He refers to the white skinheads, who were envious of black styles and who were trying to negotiate this in their dress and music, as an example of the intimacy which manifests itself in the performances and masquerades of the racial constructions of masculinities which Mercer and Julien write about in "True Confessions. [26]" As a critical response to other popular black films such as Jungle Fever which portrays black middle class culture's narrow views on pathological interracial relationships, Julien intends Young Soul Rebels to paint a picture of the transgressions that occur on the margins of society [27]. The gay characters meet at night time spaces, such as the disco and in outdoor cruising areas, where pleasures and transgressions of racial and sexual boundaries merge.

Looking For Langston serves a similar function, in terms of addressing desire across racial and sexual lines which undermines dualistic notions that keep them exclusive of each other, however, it is articulated from a diasporic perspective, in the sense that Julien is a British film maker who is commenting on a major figure from the Harlem Renaissance. Julien refers to Hall's notion concerning the importance of imaginary reconstruction and the partnership between one's present and one's past. Hall discusses the emergence of young black cultural practitioners whose work comes from a "diaspora aesthetic" in which given meanings are disarticulated and rearticulated symbolically [28]. Given the importance for all colonized cultures to reclaim and reconstruct the past, the responsibility for queer postcolonial subjects is heightened by their multiply constituted subject positions. Looking for Langston combines archival footage of the Harlem Renaissance with poetry by gay black male poets from the past and present, music, and artistic montage. Issues of colonial desire are present in late night bar scenes where black and white queers meet. Throughout the film, these men are always in tuxedos, which implies that class privilege facilitated these encounters. Towards the end of the film, there is a scene in which the police and a gang of black and white men attempt to break into the underground bar in order to raid the bar and bash the queers. This scene reveals the way in which homophobic oppressors can unite across race just as oppressed queers can unite across race.

Julien's representation of homophobic violence in black communities seems to be one of the ways in which machismo justifies itself. Mercer describes this phenomenon as such: "In order to gain some degree of power within the conditions of powerlessness that slavery entailed, black men 'internalized' aspects of white patriarchy, such as the attempt to master and control others as indicative of one's masculinity... Black macho reproduces oppression by displacing it onto others. [29]" With regard to Fanon's questions concerning anxiety and violence, it seems logical to interpret Julien's films as a rearticulation of Fanon's ideas in the context of homophobia in the black community which masks the anxiety that depends on the denial of (racialized? queer?) Others within. One can also read the machismo that permeates various communities of color as a response to white masculine supremacist power, as interpreted by Mercer [30]. Working from this premise, it seems likely that those who have internalized the myth of black phallic and physical superiority over whites reject their queer brothers of color who, in a sense, have given up their phallic privilege -- their most powerful defense against racism -- by assuming a passive, "feminine" role. Of course, one only needs to go to a gay club to see that the stereotype of the "feminine" faggot falls apart with the presence of excessively muscular gay men who eroticize their masculinity to the point of exaggerating a kind of hypermasculinity which, in a queer context, reinforces Fanon's views on racist narcissism. This is apparent in the exoticism of macho gay black men and Latinos who capitalize on society's images of them as the slick, exotic lovers or in the white supremacism of buff gay white men who appear to be quite fascist in appearance. I base these criticisms on my extensive exposure to gay male culture in cities where queer visibility is very high, such as in New York, Miami, San Francisco, and London.

Colonial Desire and Sadomasochism

Julien's film, "The Attendant" places colonial desire in the context of queer s/m practices. The film is less than ten minutes long, but it is filled with images that reinscribe the Manichaean divide for the purpose of subverting the binaries that constitute it. It is significant that the film takes place in a museum space in which the black attendant reminds us of the absence or subordinate role of the person of color in predominantly white museum/gallery spaces [31]. The spectator enters the museum space and encounters paintings that depict images of the slaves on the Gold Coast of Africa. Julien intends the viewer to follow the gaze of the black attendant who is tormented by his closeted queer desire as he encounters gay white leathermen who enter the museum. Closing time approaches, and the attendant is left alone in the museum as the paintings come to life and become images of contemporary representations of gay s/m scenarios. Throughout the rest of the film, tableaus appear in which white and black gay men are engaged in bondage and discipline scenes. At one point, the viewer sees a frozen image of the attendant being dominated by one of the gay white leather men who entered the museum (the attendant is in his security uniform and the white man is dressed as an aestheticized leatherman-slave); moments later, the roles are reversed, but they remain in the same clothing. While this is happening, the attendant's wife, who also works at the museum, hears whip noises and groans that resemble sounds from gay male porn, but she does not say anything. Her function is to act as the heterosexual alibi which legitimizes her husband's closeted desire. In addition to her presence, there are angels that appear in the film. There is usually a group of five gay white angels and one black angel at the center who appear at different points throughout the film. In the midst of the kinky sex, I interpreted these images to be a reminder of the AIDS pandemic which initially, predominantly affected black communities and gay male communities throughout the world. The central presence of the black diva challenges the myth of AIDS and homosexuality as the "white man's diseases".

In "Confessions from a Snow Queen", Julien refers to the slave iconography which is "borrowed" for the purpose of s/m practices, suggesting an ironic critique of the privileged status of gay white male culture that allows itself to appropriate this iconography; however, he does not fully engage with this particular issue which seems to be a significant theme in gay male sexual practices [32]. In Richard Fung's analysis of queer Asian male representation, he suggests that the dojo scene in one of his examples of racist gay porn is an appropriation of a suitable "exotic" setting in which bondage and discipline can take place [33]. In Julien's case, it seems as though his own appropriation of gay white males' aesthetic appropriation of slave iconography in leather gear which is used for s/m scenarios, reclaims a space in which black queer subjects can articulate their "unspeakable masochistic desires for sexual domination". He criticizes potential responses by both the black community and the queer community to the participation of black queers in s/m. On the one hand, he sees politically correct straight black readings of the film as being devoid of fantasy and as an attempt to fix and reduce the film to a simplistic version of racist/sexist white domination. On the other hand, he argues that black queers continue to remain invisible subjects in the creation of (white) discourses around queer s/m.

Quoting Pat Califa who claims that in s/m "the uniforms and roles and dialogue become a parody of authority, a challenge to it, a recognition of its secret sexual nature, [34]" Julien insists that black queer subjects should have a choice in acting out their pleasures in the realm of desire and fantasy rather than be inhibited by assumptions of pathological black self hate. He asks, "Could not the representation of interracial s/m be read as a practice of a racial and sexual dynamic which, in displaying the codes of a (Fanonian) master/slave dialectic, presents a transgressive simulacrum, one which both parodies and disrupts the codes of societal and racial power? [35]" The title of this article suggests that Julien has reclaimed his own title as a "Snow Queen" (a queer who is in love with the [white] image) who challenges the black essential subject's avoidance of the psychic reality of black/white desire. If I hadn't been exposed to Julien's other works, such as Looking for Langston in which black male on black male desire is positively affirmed, I might question Julien's primary attention to black /white desire as well as his statement about black queers' masochistic tendencies to be dominated (by whites?). His take on interracial s/m seems to suggest that the further one travels into the margins, more possibilities emerge in which one can act out their colonial desires in the process of decolonizing sexuality and destabilizing the Manichaean divide. I don't mean to suggest that everyone should put on leather gear and go around engaging in interracial s/m practices (although, you never know, the possibilities here could be endless), but I do think that it is significant for Julien to carry on the tradition of Fanon in the sense that he explores the dynamics of desire on the margins just as Fanon wrote about interracial desire (as well as in the context of male homoerotica) at a time when it was considered much more taboo than it is now. It is also important to look at Julien's work in light of the work that has been done by gay white male theorists, some of whose work reveals their privileged status in writing about s/m.

In the chapter, "The Gay Daddy" in his book titled Homos, Leo Bersani prefaces his views on queer s/m in a Fanonian style by attributing the intolerance of gayness to the political anxiety about the ways in which gays play with revolutionary and subversive social arrangements. Julien and Mercer imply a similar anxiety at work, but they do so within the context of the black community. S/M is an example of a revolutionary social arrangement. He quotes Michel Foucault who wrote about s/m as a creative enterprise of the desexualization of pleasure, in the sense that pleasure was not limited to genital stimulation in these practices. The references to AIDS in "The Attendant" serve the same function of imagining newer and safer forms of pleasure in the era of the pandemic. Bersani acknowledges Pat Califa's view concerning the parodic and subversive nature of s/m practices and claims that the reversibility of roles in s/m questions assumptions about power that naturally inhere in one sex or race; however, he adds that this kind of parody presupposes an acceptance of those power structures and that rather than parody the structures, s/m practices parody the exclusion of those structures. For instance, many gay men have responded to stereotypical images of effeminate gay men by appropriating masculinity as a challenge to homophobic and heterosexist assumptions about the weak faggot.

Going back to Foucault, he works from his (Foucault's) premise that the pleasure of s/m is derived from the insertion of depoliticized master/slave relations such that the model of dominance and submission becomes a source of pleasure when it is aestheticized. He concludes that the "removal" of the masters and slaves from the economic and racial superstructures which are being parodied in s/m confirms the eroticism of the master/slave configuration. "It is a power's body, a laboratory testing of the erotic potential in the most oppressive social structures... S/M profoundly -- and in spite of itself -- argues for the continuity between political structures of oppression and the body's erotic economy" (H, 89-90). Furthermore the pain that goes with s/m allows the ego to self-shatter and to renounce it's power to the world. These arguments are very problematic in the context of racial politics precisely because they seek to remove the material basis of oppression for the purpose of gay white male pleasure. They reinscribe the all-powerful white male gaze which objectifies, appropriates, and fetishizes without any respect or acknowledgment of the actual histories and current oppressive conditions of its object of desire. In contrast to Julien's work which seems to be reflective of a double appropriation, in the sense that he is appropriating the slave iconography of leather gear which was initially appropriated by white hypermasculine leather men who eroticized their masculinity in their challenges to homophobia, Bersani has made a completely ahistorical argument which fails to engage the subject positions of queers of color, many of whom are in a constant process of decolonizing sexuality. The purpose of advancing Foucault's romanticized views about s/m as an aestheticized practice which is divorced from the historical and contemporary materialist conditions of people of color perpetuates the privileged status of gay white men.

By acknowledging the continuity between the political structures of oppression and the body's erotic economy as well as the inherent eroticism of the master/slave narrative, it seems as though Bersani admits to his own location as a white man. His position as a gay white man in an antiblack world who celebrates queer hypermasculinity and by doing so reveals a segment of gay male culture's fascist tendencies, allows him to view s/m as a "laboratory" in which the ego can self shatter and renounce its power to the world. Whose ego and whose power is he referring to? Could it be the white male subject who has never had to question his ego and power? The limits of Bersani's discourse are obvious when it is applied to a person of color who has been denied power in an antiblack world and who is already in a process of reconstructing an ego which has been shattered by persistent hegemonies. Is Bersani's insistence on the inherent eroticism of dominance and submission his own articulation of the white man's inherent inclination to exert power over others? Placed side by side with Julien's analysis, one might question the difference between the two texts considering the privilege of the authors which manifest themselves in their idealization of s/m. Furthermore, one might ask if both merely reproduce the binaries that constitute the Manichaean divide in the sense that Bersani implies the white man's inherent erotic aggression and Julien implies the queer black subject's inclination to be dominated; however, I am inclined to differentiate Julien from Bersani since the former destabilizes queer theory and race theory by expanding on the influence of Fanonian discourse with a critical queer eye.

Conclusion: Desexualizing the Violence

What are the origins of violence in the colonial encounter? Throughout this paper, I have explored the violent uses of exoticism in the context of practices of cultural appropriation and have extended it to the male erotic domain. By taking up Julien and Mercer, I have done justice to Fanon by remaining faithful to the masculinist discourse which persist in many analyses of race and sexuality. While I am appreciative of Julien's and Mercer's work and their critiques of the essential black (het) subject which in itself disturbs the Manichaean divide, I am well aware of the privilege that informs their hybrid positionalities, one of the consequences of which paves the way for identification with (queer) white-masculine-phallus power. Nonetheless, thanks to them and other queers of color, we can talk about sex and race in transgressive ways rather than be subject to older prohibitions (though still in place) which precluded the simultaneous theoretical exploration of sex and race due to the stigma of their coexistence which can be traced to the historical objectification and spectacular use of the colonial Other's body [36]. In particular, I find Julien's work on interracial s/m quite remarkable considering the multiple borders which must be radically transgressed in such an enterprise.

Mercer's and Julien's work remains consistent with Fanon's preoccupation with the colonial, violent, homosexual relationship between the white man and the black man; however, their gay male discourse, which should be read as texts whose meanings constantly shift according to each specific context as Mercer suggests, runs the risk of transforming race/queer discourse in such a way that further excludes women. While transformative in some ways, they merely substitute the privileged heterosexual position with a queer position and maintain the status of the all knowing male subject. I wasn't necessarily expecting to find the woman (queer or straight) in their discourse, but it leads me to question the extent to which violence can be maintained as the basis for analysis of the colonial situation. In an antiblack world, the white man rapes the black man and the black woman because both are feminized in this world. But what happens if difference had encountered difference before the master created difference in the first place, such as possible coalitions across gender among women, or coalitions across race among non-whites? Would we still talk about colonial violence today in the same way that we speak of race relations in the context of either white police brutality of black male youth or of interracial queer male s/m? Given the glaring absence of an analysis of the relationship between violent masculinity and the woman of color in Fanon's work, as discussed by Fuss, we must constantly ask ourselves where to locate the woman of color in race discourse. This absence is dangerously ironic because her rape (is) was real and physical rather than symbolic. I do not intend to undermine the atrocities of the lynchings of black men and women, I am only pointing to the irony of the lack of attention given to the physical rape of the woman of color since so much emphasis has been placed on the symbolic sexual moment of colonization. Her absence in Fanonian discourse is a huge gap that cannot be ignored. She is the lack of the black man. Her absence is her desexualization, since the Negro that Fanon predominantly writes about is the Negro who is eclipsed by the penis. As black male queers pick up where Fanon leaves off, cross-race phallic comradery runs the risk of subordinating racial solidarity to male homoerotic solidarity which potentially borders on misogyny. When half of the race has been desexualized through its absence, how will it be possible for the entire race to decolonize its sexuality?

As a person who identifies as a hybrid subject, I recognize the need to constantly question positionalities which privilege themselves over other hybrid positionalities. I realize that it is utopian to think of a world in which privileging subjectivities over others ceases to exist. There will be limits to every "hybrid" text. Looking at race and sexuality in an antiblack world is especially problematic because the antiblack world is structured around "binary systems of thought" as Trinh Minh-Ha would describe them. This is the source of popular conceptions of race which do not account for the color relationality along the racial spectrum. Furthermore, the dualistic nature of the analysis of an antiblack world leads to the reproduction of dichotomous ways of analyzing other structures of oppression which interact with race. When queerness is placed in the context race, one might be tempted to turn to the black gay male subject because in an antiblack, both the racial subject and the queer subject are constructed as male It is important to continue the work that Fanon started, because the limits of his discourse are potential sites in which queers who are both anti-imperialistic and antihomophobic can create discourses that are more inclusive. In this paper, I have explored the black/white Manichaean divide as a point of departure for what I hope to be an analysis of a transnational politics based on race, class, gender, and sexuality, where the woman of color is the locus of the feminization of global poverty. The woman of color is at once desexualized and sexualized. Can she end the violence? In putting a twist on Gayatri Spivak's question, I ask can brown women save brown men from white men?

NOTES

1. The issue of gender neutral language will be raised in later sections of this paper.
2. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Edited by Mbye Cham. New Jersey: African World Press, 1992, p. 234.
3. Homi Bhabha, "Interrogating Identity." Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 53.
4. Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Editors Russel Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West. New York: The New Museum, 1995, pp.19-38.
5. Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, "Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity: A Dossier." Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, Editors Chapman and Rutherford. London, 1988, p.102.
6. Paul Gilroy, "The End of Antiracism." "Race," Culture and Difference, Editors J. Donald and A. Rattansi, 1992.
7. Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red. New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 84.
8. Here I refer to narcissism in the Fanonian sense in which the native turns to an exoticism which precludes the dynamism of culture and the white upholds white supremacist beliefs (Black Skin White Masks).
9. Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics" from Out There, pp. 247-264.
10. Julien and Mercer, "Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity," p. 99.
11. Julien and Mercer, "True Confessions." Black Male, Editor Thelma Golden. New York: Whitney Museum, 1994, p. 192.
12. Lewis Gordon, "Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World." Her Majesty's Children. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997, pp. 74-75.
13. Richard Dyer, "Coming to Terms," from Out There, pp. 289-298.
14. See Frantz Fanon, "The Pitfalls of National Culture," from Wretched of the Earth, pp. 148-205.
15. From How Do I Look?, Editors Bad Object-Choices. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991, pp. 145-168.
16. From How Do I Look?, pp. 169-222.
17. See Bhabha, "The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse," Screen 24, no. 6, (Nov-Dec 1983), pp. 18-36.
18. Gordon, "Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire," p. 78.
19. Mercer, "Skin Head Sex Thing," p. 174.
20. Hazael Carby, "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood." The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70's Britain. University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982.
21. From Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995.
22. Gordon, "Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire," p. 81.
23. Lewis Gordon, professor of Philosophy, African American Studies, and Religious Studies, commented on this in his lectures throughout the course of a graduate seminar in Religious Studies on Franz Fanon during the fall semester of 1997 at Brown University.
24. Here, I use a definition of queerness that describe lifestyles in which people engage in same sex practices and/or do not subscribe to heteronormativity.
25. From Pleasure Principles: Politics, Sexuality, Ethics, Editors Harwood and Oswell. London, 1993, pp. 124-135.
26. See "Exoticism in Gay Culture" in this chapter.
27. Julien, "Black is, Black Ain't: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities," from Black Popular Culture, Editor Dent, Dia Foundation Monograph, no. 8 1992, pp. 255-263.
28. Hall, "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation," p. 235.
29. Mercer, "Skin Head Sex Thing," p. 220.
30. In "Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior" from The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, p. 258 (listed in bibliography), Tomas Amalguer provides an account of similar dynamics in the colonial constructions of Chicano masculinity in which the aggressive, masculine, Spanish conquistador contrasts the passive, feminine, Indian. He argues that this has a profound effect on the perception of Chicano gay men such that those who assume the active role are accepted by society while those who assume the passive role are not, because they (the passive) supposedly give up the privilege to which they have access in a highly gender stratified society.
31. For an aesthetic representation of this issue, see Fred Wilson's "Guarded View", an instillation which consisted of four black mannequins (with missing heads) dressed in the security guard uniforms of the most prestigious museums in New York City (the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Met). This was part of the "Black Male" Exhibition which took place at the Whitney in 1994. Pictures of this instillation can be found in the Black Male catalogue listed in the bibliography at the end of the chapter.
32. From Critical Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 121-126.
33. See "Exoticism in Gay Culture" in this chapter.
34. See Pat Califa, "Unravelling the Sexual Fringe, a Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality," The Advocate, 27 December 1979.
35. Julien, "Confessions," p. 123.
36. See "The Other History of Intercultural Performance" from Coco Fusco's English is Broken Here for an account of the historical roots of the inscription of the "primitive" in the Western practices of creating a spectacle of the racialized Other.

Bibliography
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York/ London: Routledge, 1994.
D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the U.S. 1940-1970. Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Fusco, Coco. English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Gilroy, Paul. "The End of Antiracism". Race Culture and Difference, Editors J. Donald and A Rattansi, 1992.
Gordon, Lewis. Her Majesty's Children. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997.
Minh-ha Trinh. When the Moon Waxes Red. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Anthologies
Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Editor Thelma Golden. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994.
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Editors Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993.
How Do I Look? Editors Bad Object-Choices. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991.
Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Editors Russel Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West. New York: The New Museum, 1995.

Films
Julien, Isaac. The Attendant, Normal Films 1992; Looking for Langston, Normal Films 1992; Young Soul Rebels, BFI 1991.