Appendx 1 : The Places of Feminist Criticism : Kim Anne Savelson

The Places of
Feminist Criticism :
Kim Anne Savelson
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Only a few months after the Central Park crime, another case of racial violence occurred, garnering considerable media attention. In August 1989, Yusuf Hawkins was brutally murdered by a gang of white men in Bensonhurst, New York. As the story broke, it became clear that in no singular way, Hawkins’s murder was the result of his being “out of place” or in the “wrong” place. In the mostly white neighborhood of Bensonhurst, the gang had apparently attacked Hawkins not only for occupying their (white) space by walking down the street (as was the case in Howard Beach), but for trespassing in another sense: According to the gang, they assumed he was there to see a white woman. Like the other cases I have discussed, the murder of Yusuf Hawkins was framed by a construction of space that violently maps itself according to a double standard; a construction of space that, developed from a racist-sexist blueprint, means or becomes violence in the streets, neighborhoods, and places mapped by it.

Here I want to digress momentarily to elaborate one way of thinking about how racial and sexual domination converge. In the same sense that none of the cases I have raised is solely informed by race, neither is the case of Yusuf Hawkins. His murder was a crime about the deployment of sexuality and gender as much as it was a crime about the deployment of race. Concepts of gender and (hetero)sexuality are always at play in racial domination; this much can be established by any of the cases I have mentioned. By the same token, concepts of race are always at play in sexual and/or gender domination, even when that domination is not cross-racial.⁹ Rather than read this assertion into both black and white intraracial violence and rape, I feel it is more useful and more appropriate to consider how race and racism are at play in white-on-white sexual violence and/or gender domination.

An example of this can be found in the last incident I will use to register the racial/spatial unrest characterizing the end of the decade: the Boston murder of Carol Stuart in October 1989. This is the widely publicized story of a white man who murdered his pregnant white wife and then implicated a black man in the killing. Independent of any analysis, this case plainly illustrates how constructions of blackness are centrally located in white-white relations; how intraracial gender domination can become racial domination, and in some sense, remain racial domination. In terms of space, it is worthwhile to note that Carol Stuart’s husband drove her to a black neighborhood before shooting her to validate his story; it was then the spatial location of her murder, which took place outside of a black housing project, that ultimately produced a door-to-door search of this neighborhood in order to find the black man who supposedly committed the crime. Some relevant questions raised by the Stuart murder are: How much did the politics of space, in relation to dominant constructions of race, gender, and sexuality, produce the racism necessary to render white male criminality invisible? How much does space, as constructed and maintained, help to project onto blacks all criminality and all of society’s ills? Or, how much do the politics of space account for the means by which society keeps white criminality invisible in general?

In a basic way, the Stuart murder refers to the intersection of racial and sexual domination by exemplifying how racial otherness is housed in white gender relations. As a way of fleshing out the implications of this intersection, it might be helpful to briefly consider a short story by James Baldwin entitled “Going to Meet the Man.” In this story, a Southern white man (Jesse) tries to engage in sexual activity with his white wife, yet he is unable to become sufficiently aroused. As he lies awake in bed, cursing his lack of erection, he contemplates his sexual frustration:

Sometimes, sure, like any other man, he knew that he wanted a little more spice than Grace could give him and he would drive over yonder and pick up a black piece or arrest her, it came to the same thing, but he couldn’t do that now, no more. (Baldwin, 199)

Because the black men and women in his town have recently engaged in political protests and civil rights struggles, Jesse no longer feels “safe” in his community. Unable to sleep, he thinks of the black boy he brutalized that day in the jail cell; recalling the sexual excitement he felt from this act, his mind wanders to the time when, as a little boy, his parents took him to see the lynching of a black man. A group of white people gathered to eat after watching the black man be strung up, castrated with a knife, brutalized by the crowd, and then burned with kerosene. Remembering this incident makes Jesse feel “an overwhelming fear, which yet contained a curious and dreadful pleasure” (Baldwin, 208).

As Baldwin describes in detail the utter horror and brutality of this scene (from the little boy’s point of view), he establishes it as the pivotal event in Jesse’s sexual awakening as a white man. Jesse’s memory of this event, in conjunction with the beating he inflicted that day, finally arouses him to the point of erection:

He thought of the boy in the cell; he thought of the man in the fire; he thought of the knife and grabbed himself and stroked himself. . .and he whispered. . .as he took [his wife], “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a nigger.” (218)

In portraying racial/homophobic violence as an aphrodisiac, Baldwin suggests how constructions of race and homosexuality are centrally located in white male–white female relations, how the concept of racial otherness functions, or is put to use by/in, these (sexualized) relations. In the story, racial domination is thus profoundly linked to the overall eroticization of dominance. In turn, this seems to suggest a premise disruptive to heterosexuality. If, as Jesse indicates, racial domination is sexual and sexual domination is racial, dominant sexual ideology—heterosexuality —is challenged by itself (white men cannot dominate black men, and white women cannot dominate black women, without there being a sexual element to the domination). Clearly enough, then, Baldwin is implying that racial domination lives in the same (white) house as heterosexuality and gender.