Introduction: Racialized lesbian desire on the transnational scene

College Literature, Feb 1997 by Jean Walton

Somerson maintains a critical distance from psychoanalysis in her reading of Red Azalea, arguing that it is "queer theory's reliance on a 'Western' psychoanalytic framework" that in part "discourages studies of sexuality in relation to transnational imperialism." Selena Whang, however, brings the sexual phantasmatic formed in and by transnational imperialism into a direct collision with psychoanalysis, thus exposing the ethnocentrism of the discourse while recasting its central Oedipal narrative in specifically colonialized and racialized terms.

Playing with the persona of the "lesbian" constructed within psychoanalytic theory, particularly as it has featured in (white) lesbian/feminist projects, Whang inhabits the subject position that seems to emerge from the interstices between the scripted roles of a familiar (White) Father-MotherDaughter scenario. As a second generation Korean-American who has inherited a history of sexuality as a third-world site of trauma, Whang points out that her relation to the White Father (in imperialist as well as psychoanalytic discourse) must be different from that of her white lesbian counterpart, who has the luxury of accepting or rejecting her putative role of protected daughter. Whang's strategy takes risks: it is as though by insinuating herself into psychoanalysis, by forcing it to integrate her into its system, she makes it reveal the ways in which its internal coherence has relied on the insistent exclusion of "third world" women of color. She animates the discourse with an unsettling deadpan seriousness, making its whiteness (and the whiteness of the lesbian theories that rely on it) starkly evident. Since "the perlocutionary nature of naming oneself a lesbian [is] arguably a distinctly Western modernist tradition," then for Whang, the "act of naming myself a lesbian always foregrounds a white female body." Yet, her gender identity derives in part from an identification with the degraded masculinity of the (Korean) father, whose sexuality has been routed through the "field of deformation" effected by the White father's "unvarnished sadism," a sadism unleashed in "sites of racialized historical trauma, such as war, genocide, rape, colonization."