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Bergner's task in Taboo Subjects is to urge a “political” reading of psychoanalysis in the wake of race and to show how race and gender/sex intersect. In this strategic enterprise elaborated, for the most part, through a thematic (and not a particularly formal) approach to African-American literary texts, there is often an uneasy struggle between models and history, between theoretical speculation and textual analysis, and this struggle is never quite resolved.
Her first chapter, which locates a gender bias in Fanon's reading of Mayotte Cápecia's Je suis Martiniquaise, is typical of this unease. Instead of addressing how race complicates Fanon's psychoanalysis of female sexuality, Bergner's reading turns to history and Cápecia's socio-economic position - as if her work as a laundress was any kind of answer to what Fanon sees as the troubling connection between “lactification” and negrophobia in her work. This reading, in my view, fails to address Fanon's reading of phobia as a structure of racist society, one that returns as a symptom marking Cápecia's aggression towards black men (and women) and her own sexual and symbolic investiture in whiteness. What is most troubling is the absence of any consideration of Cápecia's own affective ambivalence to black women: that ambivalence suggests a relation between sexuality and phobia in which the “epidermalization” of inferiority is used to mark lighter from darker subjects regardless of gender. Such a reading would have rendered Bergner's accusation of a gender bias in Fanon more dialectical and just.
The strategy adopted in other chapters also involves the use of analogical methods that are never openly addressed as such. The strategy might be described as one of implication, but the homologies are often too hasty, at least methodologically. For example, Douglass’ witnessing of his aunt being whipped in the 1845 Narrative is like the boy's oedipal witnessing of a primal scene. Here, at the level of perception, what tends to