Failing "White Woman": Interrogating the Performance of Respectability

Abstract

David Roediger has identified a central problem in the reception of "Whiteness Studies," finding that such studies are "often read as if they derived from a tame multiculturalist interest in difference rather than from analysis of power and exploitation." 3 My essay on "failing" white womanhood sets itself the task of producing and imagining "genuinely" antiracist performances of whiteness through the bodies of white women. Because this project is located within "whiteness studies" and because it utilizes the structuring methodology and findings of those studies, Roediger's caveat serves appropriate notice about the continuing dangers attendant to the reception (and, sometimes, the production) of such work. Indeed, that danger is real and pervasive enough, I believe, to warrant a discussion of both the essay's methodology and its larger social and political goals. As in race studies generally, the central methodological imperative driving whiteness studies is to interrogate and, as this essay will investigate, to re/perform race (especially, in this instance, whiteness) as a social construction. Whatever the reception, at the level of production the best of whiteness studies does demand that any exploration of the possibility of "genuinely antiracist white people" begins precisely in the foregrounding of "power and exploitation." As Jon Panish explains, a social constructionist approach illuminates "the shifting historical relations" between peoples of color and whites, as well as within what Richard Dyer calls the "internal hierarchies of whiteness." 4 By focusing specifically [End Page 183] on "racial difference as a relational entity," this approach necessarily "makes power relations a central feature of its analysis." 5 Most important to my purpose here is that this relational approach affords us a view of what Ruth Frankenberg terms "whiteness unfrozen." 6 That is, when viewed as constructed, as relational, as "ensembles of local phenomena complexly embedded in socioeconomic, sociocultural, and psychic interrelations," whiteness productively emerges "as a process, not a 'thing,' as plural rather than singular in nature." 7 Produced, then, through a methodology that knows whiteness to be both relational and overvalued within hierarchies of power and exploitation, the goal of this study--the imagining and the performing of an antiracist white womanhood--really can have virtually no shelf-life, and even less consumer appeal, as a "tame multiculturalist interest in difference."

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