Melancholy Bodies: Racial Subjectivity and Whiteness in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones

Abstract

In the opening pages of White, Richard Dyer relates an embarrassing episode from his early adulthood. Recognizing the problems in drawing analogies between racial and sexual oppression, he tries to explain his persistent feelings of both kinship with and distance from the experience of black men. As an example, he offers his encounter as a white gay man dancing at a mixed-race social event organized by a multicultural gay rights group in the early 1980s, and describes one particular dance, copied from Soul Train, in which the dancers formed two lines facing each other and individuals took turns dancing down between the lines from one end to the other. For Dyer, his turn down the aisle was excruciating:

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