The Sexuality Revolt in Black and White1

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.

Theorists who write and speak about homosexuality seem to want to say: ‘We heterosexuals don't think about sex all the time, aren't driven to repeat it all the time, like you. Our sexuality doesn't contain destructive components and defenses against it, … we don't identify with men if we're women, or women if we're men, and if our sexuality contains elements of perversion, they're only momentary, en route to procreative sex.’ Such rigid dichotomization is a symptom of a sexuality that needs to bolster its identity by comparing itself to what it is not, because it is afraid of all that it, in fact, is. While psychoanalysts are familiar with this type of defensive strategy, termed projective identification, they are not familiar with the extent to which they themselves utilize it in both building theory and thinking about their patients. (Lesser 92)

These words come from two locations of marginalization in US society. They are linked through the speakers' references to the ways in which the “nature” of groups is constructed and naturalized in and through the discourses of more powerful others. In the first quote, an African-American woman author and literary theorist notes the ways in which the “Africanist persona” is created and deployed by white American writers and readers as a constitutive element of the meanings and anxieties of white identity. In the second, a white woman psychoanalyst argues that psychoanalytic representations of homosexuality reflect the disclaimed meanings and anxieties of heterosexual identity. These insights are us