“Self-Slaughter”: Gary Fisher’s Racialized Fantasies Bridge Black Studies And Psychoanalysis

Black Studies and psychoanalysis both consider how socio-sexual dynamics contour the skin. Black Studies scholar Hortense Spillers (1987) alongside psychoanalytic theorist Didier Anzieu (1985) trace the skin as a porous enclosure, albeit in different discursive environments. Also a scholar of psychoanalysis, Spillers’s work emphasizes the intersubjective nature of embodiment: history carries notions of race, which frames interactions between desiring subjects. As a case study, the journals of writer and English doctoral student Gary Fisher (1961-1994) provide a narrative surface to place both traditions in conversation. This article investigates the fraught relationship between the imagined and historical in the psyche’s processing of racial trauma. Fisher’s exploration of his racialized fantasies and sexuality unfurls across his writing at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an epidemic which continues today. Fisher’s prose reveals that abject sexual practices, those which rely on racial tropes to efface and excite the desiring subject, can inspire meaningful self-actualization and broaden understandings of race and sexuality.