Gender, race, sexuality and class: these are the familiar figures of much contemporary talk of equality and anti-discriminatory practice. They feature in the equal opportunity statements of many organisations, including The Site. Each of these terms requires its own theoretical field in which it can be understood and analysed, the nature of an oppression revealed and opposed: to gender, feminist analysis and politics; race, historicist discourses of anti-racism and anti-imperialism; sexuality, and the rigours of queer theory.
In order to become intelligible, class should presuppose an analysis of economic structure and relations of production. Yet an analysis based in economics is what class rarely receives in these circumstances. Class is not understood in terms of conflict inherent to our systems of production, but is increasingly abstracted and viewed as simply another form of ‘difference’ to be respected alongside others. Its historical formation and production is marginalized. Class is figured largely in terms of personal narrative and history, privatised and occluded. It is about origins, family history, and a historical past.
The disappearance of a form of political and economic analysis specific to class has many consequences. One might think of the way recent concerns about the emergence of an ‘under class’ in popular discourse figures this projected group in terms of the quasi-naturalised return of a feral group, uncivilised and alien. It also has consequences in the clinic. My feeling is that when our clients speak of class it is often to figure some unlocalisable failure. To be reminded of class is to be brought to trial, before an obscure court, for an unspecified crime. All that is apparent is a failure to fully embody and substantify some ideal or norm. I would also suggest that its lack of a specific mode of analysis and interrogation makes it possible for class to figure as a site of displacement for other personally unspeakable anxieties and traumas. I would like to illustrate this idea with some fragments drawn from the therapy of a
young man in which unspeakable anxieties about race and masculinity could be displaced onto talk of class and so enter into the discourse of the treatment.
Giles was twenty-four when he came to see me. He complained of mood-swings and violent outbursts of anger. He had aspirations to become a football coach but was trapped in a semi-skilled manual job, which he disliked. He had a difficult relationship with his girlfriend; they would get into stereotyped arguments, making each other jealous then denouncing the other's infidelities. Elsewhere, he felt the need to humiliate and ingratiate himself with his superiors at work, soliciting praise and approval which he would then disregard because of this solicitation.
In the first sessions, I began to learn something of his family background, His parents had started a family quite late having originally got together in the late 1960s, part of a social scene in which the aristocracy, the arts and rock'n'roll could freely mingle. His father came from an established white, factory-owning family in Scotland. He had launched: himself in the emerging industries of PR and marketing during the 70s but made the mistake of selling off his business when the recession of the early 90s hit. He had hoped to retire but after a year or so found he had to take a kitchen porter's job in one of the more nefarious parts of South London. His mother grew up in the late 40s, isolated as part of one of the few black families in the area back then. She later grew up to become a recognised figure in music and show-business before giving this up to start her family.
In the first session I learnt of the death of Giles's father, when he was 13. It was from inoperable multiple cancers, diagnosed too late. He died at home in some pain. It was hard to speak of this; he believed that his mother held a policy of keeping silent for the children's sake, and in turn the children kept silent for their mother. The result was a permanent tension and Giles said he was relieved when he was sent away to boarding school. His two older sisters had gone to an expensive co-educational public boarding school and he had hoped to follow. They had gone as scholarship pupils since the family would have been unable to afford full fees. Giles had failed the scholarship and was initially separated from his sisters. It was only after the death of his father and some string-pulling from a family friend that he was awarded a scholarship and allowed to take up a place.
It was his mother's wish that he should be privately educated, and Giles suggested that this was not of real importance to his father. After the initial failure in the scholarship, he could have gone to the local comprehensive. Instead, he was sent to a single-sex, private day-school in Highgate. He was unhappy there, bullied and isolated. He says this was because there were no other children like him there, ‘You know: lower middle class’.
It was I who broke the ice and first mentioned race. In response to his stories about school, I remarked that the class system was operative, but what about race? Giles seemed thrown and alarmed by this, not knowing whether I was asking a general question or touching on something of his own personal experience. It was only then that he had to explain what was obvious: that he was mixed-race. He had to be pushed into racially self-identifying, saying he felt neither one thing nor another that he had not been aware of race until he went to school where it was remarked upon. He reported difficulties outside school when other black kids would try to make friends, identified by them as being alike in a way which he found difficult to understand and return. Although race was difficult to address directly, he still produced a racial, even racist, version of his Other. He identified the kids at the day school not as white, but as Jewish and this labelling was insistent.
I felt that there were displacements of anxiety about race onto class. In the first session he talked about fears that men would view him as arrogant and a threat. ‘What's wrong with arrogant?’ I asked.
In attempting to respond, his speech broke down. He stammered and lost coherence, ‘I don't know, it's like … I mean … I can't find the words … classless … not classless … like classless …’
‘Vulgar?’ I suggested, proffering that great signifier of middle class fear and loathing. Visibly relieved, he accepted the word.
I believed that race functioned as a trauma for Giles, though one that could be barely acknowledged, its legacy being a fundamental alienation that robbed him of agency and freedom. His experience evoked in me resonance with that iconic moment in Fanon's account of racism and its legacy in Black Skin, White Masks:
‘Look a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
‘Look a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me.
‘Look a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made not a secret of my amusement.
‘Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but it had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew there were legends, stories, histories … then, assailed at various points, the corporal schema crumpled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. … On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed and made myself an object. (Fanon 1986: 111-112)
The other's gaze is experienced as violent, wounding, a weapon and agent of trauma. Fanon is alienated from his own experience, made to exemplify the racist unconscious of those stories, histories and legends. As lived body he is reduced to a two-dimensional skin-surface. Alienated from his experience and body, he becomes for himself what he is for others: object.
The comparison between Fanon's politically charged writing and Giles's schoolboy experience might seem over the top. I'm not so sure: this is Giles's account of the only other black child at his day-school, a child he found it difficult to relate to and be with because of this child's colour:
Everyone thought he was the school bully. But he so wasn't. He was just a gentle kid. It was because he was competitive. He was there on a free scholarship, from the estates around Kentish Town which is a really rough area, you know. He was competitive; he played street football like the kids do round there. Pushing and shoving, wanting to win.
This was a clear contrast with Giles's own blunting of his competitiveness and potency. He was able to give a long and very technical
account of how he accidentally fouled another player in a game of football, a unique foul after years of playing at a high level. He was still haunted by it and remembered it with shame and embarrassment. His school days seemed to be a lesson in learning self-control, turning himself into an object by controlling his body's responses to bullying and ridicule.
I should mention his love of football. It had been a constant throughout his life and he always wanted to get into the professional game at some level. This love was clearly something to do with his own autonomy and individuation; his father disliked the sport and his mother ‘wasn't bothered’. It was not an interest that he felt was sufficiently encouraged during his education. He repeatedly said he wanted to play professionally until he realised he wasn't good enough. Eventually, I asked when he realised this.
‘It was my first day in the school in Highgate. We had this English teacher. I hated her. She went round the class asking all the kids what they wanted to be, and they were coming out with all the usual stuff. Eventually, she asked me what I wanted to be. So I said, ‘A footballer.’ She gave me this look, you know? And all the kids laughed. So I just added on ‘Or a vet.’ But it was too late. I knew I wasn't supposed to give that answer at that school.’
I pointed out the obvious fact that he had not found out he wasn't good enough, but more painfully perhaps, had given that dream up prematurely on account of this perceived disapproval and ridicule. We explored some of the reasons for this disapproval and its impact on him. Giles felt it was to do with class, the other kids were expecting to go into professions. I suggested it might be something to do with race too; becoming a footballer might be a black kid's ambition.
On moving to the boarding school, the bullying intensified and continued on a new level. He remembered being made to walk up and down the dormitory endlessly as they laughed and criticised his movement, correcting a supposed ‘strut’.
‘Do you think I have a strut?’ he asked me, demonstrating a characteristic ability to turn his insecurities into a seduction.
‘So a strut is meant to be a bad thing, right?’ I replied.
He accepted this bullying with equanimity and still maintained that the other boys were sensitive to something in him that needed correction,
an arrogance or ‘cockiness’ that he was blind to in himself but painfully apparent to others. This ‘cockiness’ and its correction further connected racial anxieties and scapegoating with related concerns of masculinity and sexuality, resulting in a further self-limitation of his own potential, his own potency.
I began to learn more of Giles's family and its way of operating. There seemed to be a common perception in its members that there was ‘something’ wrong, and so there were frequent attempts to do ‘something’ about this, sending round e-mails and organising gatherings of the clan where ‘something’ might be said or left unsaid. Struck by this profusion of ‘somethings’, I began to wonder if this functioned as a way of gesturing to something that could not be spoken but functioned as a self-perpetuating activity, inserting the unsaid into the heart of the family. This unsaid was clearly important. Giles's youngest sister was a hard drug user, and he gave vivid descriptions of her gouching out at the family table and no one being able to acknowledge what was patently obvious. Was this another way of concretising the unsaid? I developed a conviction that trauma was used as a kind of possession by the family, a possession that established a kind of power or status. The other sister was following her mother into show-business before the trauma of being sexually assaulted on a holiday to the Caribbean caused a paralysis and intense stage-fright, which she was still struggling to reverse.
What was this ‘trauma envy’ about? Did it stand for the trauma that could not be spoken in the family, the death of the father? Was it a way of staking a claim to the right to grieve and for open acknowledgement of that loss? Or could this claim too be chimerical, standing behind it another trauma unspeakable within the family, the historical trauma of slavery and racism?
Giles's attitude to his mother was ambivalent. On a good day he was warm and loving; on others he was angry, critical and irritated with her because of the way she seemed to encapsulate what he felt as the family's real shame: its willingness to prostrate and humiliate itself. When angry, he was able to suggest that she dealt with the trauma of her own experience of racism by ‘becoming’ white and hiding her own identity.
There was not an extended family of relatives around the basic family unit who could have provided different perspectives on race and identity. Instead, a big part was played by a network of god-parents and
family friends, frequently wealthy, even aristocratic figures, who had been on the scene since the 1960s. They were always white. Giles was particularly scornful of his mother's attitude to them:
He'll phone up from abroad and say to my mum, because he has a big house in West London, ‘Can you go and check my post?’ and she'll go. Or, ‘Can you pick up a prescription from the doctor in Notting Hill?’ and she'll go all over London for him. She's always been like that. We're all like that. We'll just behave like that because we're frightened of anyone thinking anything bad of us. Terrified we won't be liked. He has this big house in Trinidad and we used to be invited out to it. But he'd ask us to sweep up the leaves or tidy round the house. He wouldn't treat his other guests like that because most of them are upper class. They'd all be laughing at us. But he used to ask us and we used to do it. He used to treat us like slaves.
For him to invoke slavery in this way felt unexpected and shattering. But even in that moment, he demonstrated a characteristic displacement from race to class. The family friend won't ask his friends because they are upper class not, as I would suggest, because they are white.
Starting therapy with me enabled Giles to make some important changes in his life; most notably within six weeks he had quit his job and started FA coaching qualifications, quickly landing work as coach at a comprehensive school. The warmth of his relationships with the boys was both enriching and surprising to him. At home, his relationship to his mother came under closer examination and a dynamic crystallised we christened, ‘too close, not close enough’. He would complain that she related to him in ways that were fake and false, she was too good an actress and he could never trust her. Despite this he longed for a closeness unclouded by distrust, but if she came near it was always too near; he felt engulfed and swallowed up. His parents' relationship also came up for reinscription. What had initially been seen as a perfect and untroubled marriage, he now acknowledged, had some cracks. He remembered arguments that erupted towards the end of his father's life about money and a pervasive feeling of uncertainty about the family's
position. He felt a sense of responsibility about this; his school fees had been a major concern. More positively, he could wonder about his parent's and their life before he was born; his mothers career and the 60s milieu they moved in. But this would be followed by a sadness and perplexity that all this could have ended in a struggle for security in the 90s.
Giles remained hypersensitive to signifiers of race. During a family argument, one of his sisters kissed her teeth at their mother. Enraged by this display of blackness, Giles flew into a temper and caused significant damage to property in the house. All he could say by way of explanation was, ‘It's rude, disrespectful. And she just isn't the type of person who kisses her teeth.’
During this period, Giles was able to produce signifiers of racial difference of his own. Coinciding with quitting his old job, he stopped cutting his hair and over the months that followed what had always been a severe 0 crop began to turn into a tight afro. He never mentioned this change of style but it was also a source of concern for him, witnessed by his reaction to an incident in the schoolyard. Giles has been larking with the boys he was coaching when one of the kids made reference to Giles's ‘crappy hair.’ Giles lost it again.
‘At least I don't wear fucking glasses!’ he shouted at the doubtless somewhat startled eleven year old.
What held him in therapy was the possibility of being close and intimate with another man, and the possibility of intimacy and relatedness between two men was a frequent feature of our conversations. There would be something strangely innocent about his lamentations about the loss of intimacy with male friends as they paired off and got girlfriends, or complaints about how ‘bars’ were displacing his preferred ‘pubs’, traditional bastions of homosocial intimacy and exchange in which piss-taking and banter could disguise levels of affection.
A preoccupation emerged with one friend in particular about whom Giles expressed increasing concern. He was withdrawing from their mutual circle of friends, and Giles felt there might be emergent psychological problems as the friend spent time alone, disappearing in clouds of cannabis smoke and hunting internet porn. Giles's relationship had initially been competitive and rivalrous, unusually so for him. He resented his friend's prowess as a pool player and asserted his own superiority as a footballer. But behind this was a deep compassion and concern.
I suggested that there was a troubling level of identification at play: the friend represented what Giles could have become or feared becoming. Giles was able to suggest some points of contact before saying something remarkable, ‘He's black, like me’. This was striking because it was the first time in months of work together that he had used the word ‘black’ to describe himself and implicitly to locate racial difference between himself and me. I think it was an anxious and alarming moment for him since it brought up aspects of his relationship to his father and the difficulty of being a black son born to a white father, a problematic that could not be raised in his father's lifetime and could not be raised at all with a mother whose own black identity was conflicted and confused.
The theme of race and racial difference now became speakable. Giles was able to reveal his difficulty with the very word ‘black’ and its unspeakability. Until very recently, Giles preferred the word ‘coloured’ until black colleagues had grown angry with this and pointed out its unacceptability. ‘Black’ still felt new and difficult, but he gradually became able to acknowledge race and others' perception of his race in playful—if rueful—ways. He had attended a wedding at which he was the only black guest. Going into the reception the white groom dutifully shook the hand of every guest, until Giles came along and the groom felt obliged to give him an uncomfortable, nervous approximation of a high-five. Giles's response was nicely understated, ‘I just looked at him and thought, “You twat!’”
At other times, he was able to disavow his blackness and seek to form a racist complicity with me, his white therapist, to deny denigrated aspects of his own identity. For example, he described seeing the startled performance of a black friend caught on a TV vox-pop programme, ‘I mean, you should have heard the shit he was coming out with. These big eyes and this stupid grin! He looked like some kind of golliwog.’
Race continued to inhibit him in other areas of his life. It began to dawn on Giles that he was really rather lovely and that he should have more confidence with girls. He reported enjoyable and successful flirtation but always backed away from going further, as if he was again backing away from his own seductiveness and potency. To go further, to capitalise on the flirtation, would somehow be ‘vulgar’ he said. I suggested
that there were fears around conforming to stereotypes of black male sexuality; that Giles was afraid to confirm the stereotype of the black male ‘player’. He confirmed this and spoke of his own horrified fascination with two black friends and their relationship to women that seemed to constantly touch on the exploitative and abusive.
A dream Giles reported at this period brought together a number of these emergent themes:
Giles is in a school playground, not a playground from his own schooldays or one familiar from his work, but generic, unlocatable. He is to fight a friend, he cannot identify whom. A crowd gathers round and Giles attempts to pummel his opponent but the blows fail to connect. He is trying to rain down blows but they never reach this friend/foe who remains standing. Instead, he ‘collapses and goes to pieces’, and is led away by people in the crowd.
Clearly it is not hard to see something of Lacan's mirror stage in this. Although he could say nothing about the friend he must fight, I suggested that it could be the black friend about whom he worried and with whom he competed and identified. Yet the identification remained mired in an unstable aggressivity, tied to the alienation of the mirror stage which reveals the primordial fragmentation of the body in Giles's collapse, the ‘going to pieces’ as he battles the imaginary foe, his alter-ego, his mirror image.
My interpretation of the dream to Giles was deliberately open-ended and inconclusive; it did not touch explicitly on the theme of specular alienation. Instead, I connected the blows that failed to land with Giles's difficulty in acknowledging open competitiveness and aggression, the familiar backing-away from his own edge and potency.
In my view there was a rivalry and aggression connected with his father that somehow never arrived. For Lacan, the heir to the mirror stage is a secondary identification with the parent of the same sex; this ambivalent identification, based upon Oedipal rivalry, captures, sublates and finally stabilises the alienation of capture by the mirror. The identification arises from hostility, aggression and competition of the Oedipal situation, developing a wider perceptual and social field and channels
the drive-ridden aggressivity of the capture before the mirror (See Lacan, 1949: 95-96). Giles's sudden collapse in the dream and his sudden bursts of unfocused aggressivity when confronted by signifiers of race suggested that this secondary identification had not been achieved with sufficient stability.
There may be a number of reasons for this. His father's death occurred when Giles was thirteen, the end of the latency period when the Oedipal battle could be entered again, resolved and identification renewed, in Giles's memory his father was always weakened physically, an ageing man, unable to play or engage with a young son, and finally bedridden and in agony. Would such a father have been able to withstand his son's rivalry and aggression? Had Giles held back his aggression in order to save his father and at what cost to his emergent self? I would also speculate that Giles was unable to fully constitute his father as someone who could offer a stabilising identification and identity upon him, because the problematic of being a black son to a white father could never be addressed. In ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’, Lacan offers a deconstruction of the assertion, ‘I am a man’. For him, it resolves into this formulation: ‘I'm like the person who in recognizing him to be a man, I constitute as someone who can recognize me as a man’ (Lacan 1949: 96). For Giles I would construe this as, ‘I'm like the person who in recognising him to be my father, I constitute as someone who can recognise me as his son’, but with the proviso that this recognition was never secure because the dynamics of identification across race could never be spoken of. Neither father nor son fully recognised the other in their role.
Giles left therapy prematurely and abruptly before I could develop these speculations with him. The last session we shared together continued these emerging themes. He spoke of his father in his last years, worn down in his dead-end job. He remembered the thin face, the tiredness, the sense that it was too much, and then the discovery of the cancers. He thought that his father gave up too easily; he should have fought the cancer more but was too exhausted.
‘If he had fought the cancer, it would have been a sign he recognised and loved you. He deprived you by giving up so easily’, was my suggestion. In my mind was the thought that the death deprived Giles not just
of simple filial love, but also the opportunity in fantasy to kill him, a ‘killing’ that might have stabilised his alienated identity.
Giles answered with a simple ‘Yes’. He continued with his associations, mentioning his own insecurities about money, his lack of finances, before touching on something he had mentioned in the very first session but had not alluded to since. He recounted a sense of failure because he never learnt to drive; he felt less of a man as a result. I now suggested that masculinity seemed a place of constraint and limit. To be a man might be to be like his father, worn and tied down.
Giles's response was, ‘I just want to enjoy more’.
That was our last meeting. He missed several sessions and stopped returning my phone calls. After a gap of several months, he called me again and arranged new sessions but failed to attend. What was happening?
Perhaps we were coming close to a place in which he could arrive at anger and aggression towards his father. We had also reached a place where we could see a difficulty with assuming a male identity and were starting to examine some of the strategies he had taken. In his fear of, and flirtation with, a black identity, he was risking the assumption of a position experienced as threatening and rejecting of his white father, an identity with a dangerous potency—uncastrated even. Yet to identify with his father, a place longed for in its expected intimacy and closeness, took him to a position where masculinity was constrained, impotent and castrated: two impossible positions.
It saddens me that Giles did not stay and begin working through these concerns. I hope he is alright, and that if he is not, that he will find his way to therapy, with another therapist, if not me.
It could be argued that Giles presented a fairly straightforward picture of a male hysteria in which terms of gender and sex become displaced onto race and class. Indeed, it could be said that this is how hysteria operates; anxieties about male/female identities are shifted onto available pairings like black/white, lower-middle class/upper-middle class whilst the initial anxiety about gender continues to structure and order the displaced pairings. Whilst acknowledging that there is indeed something of primary importance in the hysterical problemitising of masculinity and male identity (indeed it's importance is indicated by Giles breaking off his therapy at precisely the point at which this problematic
became transparent and dominant), something is lost in reducing his story in this way. In the way in which these terms were played out, lived and experienced by my patient, the relationship between race and gender is so close and complex that I would not wish to effect a separation (except, perhaps, logically) and to grant gender a priority. I would also ask what it is about class in our culture that makes it available for these displacements and slippages, as demonstrated in this case.
Giles seems like a figure out of time, a throwback to an earlier era, a different generation in which race could not be articulated. Perhaps he suffered for the taboos and anxieties of his parents' generation and class positions, a generation in which to be mixed race was to be less than white and not yet black. Curiously, it may have been the specific generational context that made their relationship socially viable: the music business and related social scene in the late 60s offering his mother in particular a space for personal re-definition and social mobility that other milieus could not allow. But what happened to that relationship outside of the aspirational 60s? Did race and class return as the repressed for both parents in the climate of the 80s? Perhaps both returned as newly remade vulnerabilities for them and difficulties in acknowledging this further enhanced the possibility of slippage between race and class in Giles's discourse.
More could be said about the dissymmetry of his parent's class positions, its impact on their marriage and how this was communicated to Giles. Perhaps class is increasingly empty as a concept, as a signifier in our culture functioning merely as ‘difference’ divorced from analysis or political contexts, privatised as ‘heritage’. Once emptied in this way, politically neutralised, is it used to signify other unspeakables, the unsayable of who we are and where we come from?