I . . . now see that our society does not often produce or
even imagine genuinely antiracist white people.²

Alvin and Heidi Toffler write that when struggling to wage peace, "Anti-wars must match the wars they are intended to prevent."⁸ Translating the Tofflers in the present context, I would argue that the revolution in racial warfare in the United States since the New Deal requires a matching revolution in racial "peacefare."⁹ If racist whiteness is a process, then the goal of antiracist whiteness is most productively understood to be "a process, not a 'thing,' as plural rather than singular in nature," as well. Specifically, if racist whiteness is understood as constructed through the shifting historical relations between peoples of color and whites, as well as within "the internal hierarchies of whiteness," then it is crucial to develop understandings of antiracist whiteness that match the performances of those historical relations with corresponding performances of contemporary resistance. In short, antiracist whiteness must perform new relations with the subjectivities, the ideologies, and the material legacies of those historical relations. Towards unpacking the idea of antiracist performance as process, as ongoing negotiations in time and space of historically specific relations, this essay is organized around one vastly complex, multivalent relation that cuts across both the internal and external borders of whiteness. This is the relation of white woman to "the family." Four performances of that relation structure the essay: first, my own performance of professor-as-antiracist-white-woman in the classroom; second, the performance of "the wife" in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998); third, the performance of the sole white woman of the "LA Riots" in Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1993); and, fourth, an antecedent to "genuinely" antiracist performances of white womanhood, the one-woman show of stand-up comic Kate Clinton. 

Before turning to these performances, I need to expand upon the historical relations they engage. All serious scholarship on whiteness comes to understand, in Roediger's words, that "the central political implication arising from the insight that race is [End Page 184] socially constructed is the specific need to attack whiteness as a destructive ideology."¹⁰ George Lipsitz offers an eloquent rationale for this understanding when he works through his enormously generative phrase "the possessive investment in whiteness." He writes that "whiteness is, of course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid foundation in biology or anthropology."¹¹ At the same time, however, he determines that whiteness is "a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity."¹² Explaining one of his keywords, Lipsitz remarks that he uses the adjective "possessive" in an attempt to 

stress the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our society, to connect attitudes to interests, to demonstrate that white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility. Whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others. While one can possess one's investments, one can also be possessed by them. I contend that the artificial construction of whiteness almost always comes to possess white people themselves unless they develop antiracist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investment in white supremacy.¹³

Frankenberg composes a family picture, a "simple quartet"--White Man, White Woman, Man of Color, Woman of Color--to suggest that these tropes have been and are "coconstructed, and always hierarchically so." Demonstrating the "complementarities" that give meaning to the tropes of White Man and White Woman, Frankenberg observes: 

White Man as Savior would founder without White-Woman-who-must-be-saved. Similarly, without Man of Color as predator, White Man loses much of his sense of worth and purpose. . . . White Woman's ambiguous and ambivalent status in this family of tropes is striking: she is, on the one hand, accorded privileges and status by this race/gender positioning, and, on the other hand, confined by it. In any case she is advantaged only conditionally on her acceptance of the terms of the contract. This includes especially her [End Page 185] sexual practices, for the trope-ical family is strictly heterosexual and monoracial in its coupling.¹⁶

As Frankenberg's "complementarities" suggest, however, within a social constructionist approach even that "essence" is understood to be formed relationally. It is formed through explicit opposition to the indecorous excesses of Woman of Color's "essence," in resistance to the predatory appetites of Man of Color's "essence," and in hopes of the safe judgments and protections of White Man's "essence." These relations produce White Woman's meaning, and her "power" to either invest or disinvest in white supremacy. Turning, then, to the four performances, I will examine the performative trope that most forcefully carries, or embodies, White Woman's "essence": the trope of "respectability." For each performance is structured through this trope and its functioning in the dynamics of white supremacy. Moreover, two of the performances, my own and stand-up comic Kate Clinton's, interrogate two self-styled attempts at refusing White Woman's respectability and the familial relations sedimented in it. 

During the ensuing three-month investigation, I was told by administrative allies and skeptics alike that it was the "sexuality" of the class and, perhaps, of the professor herself, an out queer on campus, that was under scrutiny. The Vice President called me at home to say that whatever I had done in the classroom I "shouldn't have done" because whether it wound up being criminal or not, it was, at the very least, "inappropriate." I was reminded to keep my office door open when students came by, and not to touch or look at them inappropriately, and, of course, never to socialize with them. This series of commands conflates, of course, academic freedom and intellectual property with sexualized predation, yet this is how a public contest over meanings and methodologies--an ideological, epistemological conflict--is shrunk to an institutionally manageable (read: winnable) size: it is declared a matter of private shame. 

I have chosen the sexual harassment case against me, including the "act" that resulted in the charge, as the performance with which to inaugurate this discussion of White Woman, her respectability, and its centrality to White Woman's place within the family because the case so fully gives shape to what Kate Davy calls the "dynamics of the politics of respectability." As she puts it, an "analysis that employs, as a tool, the dynamics of the politics of respectability assists in the project of making visible the politics of race and opens spaces for further exploration and intervention."²⁰ I hope to use, then, this analysis of my own performance, this public announcement of private shame, as a means both of explicating and of asking for sustained critical attention to Davy's focus on those dynamics, especially as they secure the racial as well as sexual compliance of white womanhood in the service and institutions of white supremacy. What I mean to emphasize here is that for three months I believed that the issue in this sexual harassment case was "sex," whether queer sex, public sex, sexually explicit sex, or some combination of the above. And because I, like everyone I've ever known who has come anywhere near such a charge, did take it quite seriously, I thought hard about whether or not I had unwittingly and inappropriately sexualized the classroom. But I now believe that I was wrong at the time in the very premise of my thinking about the sexual harassment case against me as primarily "sexual." Or, at the very least, I believe that premise to be wildly incomplete in its understandings of sexuality and race as truly interwoven, interdependent discourses: I was not only a queer woman in class; I was a queer white woman. The class was not only engaging sexually explicit images, but it was engaging the racially specific imperatives structuring those sexually explicit images, their production and reception. One would be hard-pressed, I had to admit, to call the class--or my performance in it--"respectable." [End Page 188]

After the investigation, my assistant professorship--whether the action of "demotion or dismissal" was to be taken against it--was a final agenda item at the next Board of Governors meeting. The student who had filed the complaint was given the floor and introduced herself as a returning student, a mother, a self-employed businesswoman, a member of church and community. She spoke of how sexually explicit images degrade women. She spoke of her plans for her future education as a mental health professional. Finally, though, she found and gave voice to what I believe was the core of her complaint with the class and my performance in it. She explained that she was forced to read writers she had "never heard of" and "couldn't understand," writers who urged her to critique whiteness, to become a "traitor" to its codes, practices, and ideologies. The student then announced that her great-grandfather was black and that even so she had never suffered discrimination of any sort. She reiterated that she has a place within the community, a respectable position within civil society, and sat down. I had been counseled to wear a dress and hold my silence, to perform, in other words, a femininity whose unimpeachable respectability was equal to that of my student. 

Due to the efforts of my department, my dean, the academic senate, the other students in the class--in addition to the determination made by the school's attorneys that my pedagogy simply did not, in jurisprudential terms, constitute sexual harassment--I was exonerated of the charge. But the specificity of the charge continues to challenge my thinking today because it was, after all, a "sexual" charge. And I don't think it was "sexual" just because there is no "the-professor-is-a-traitor-to-whiteness" charge (well, not currently in the state of California). I believe the student chose a "sexual" charge because that description was as nearly accurate of the site of my transgression as the student could locate within current discursive regimes. The transgression was "sexual" because I had profoundly betrayed that student on both a personal and cultural level, and I had betrayed her precisely by refusing to seduce her, by refusing to reproduce through and with her willing, desiring self the canons and codes of educated, polite, successful, bourgeois society--the very society, that is, of my student's imaginary--the respectable society in which she could be recognized as a respectable woman, or, perhaps, simply as Woman. 

The canons and codes I call forth here comprise what Dreama Moon terms "Whitespeak."²¹ Whitespeak is framed within the "discursive repertoire" of "color- and power-evasiveness" identified by Frankenberg in her groundbreaking study of "actual" white women."Color- and power-evasiveness" is a 

repertoire that attempts to abolish race difference by means of evading the naming of differences of power organized by racial category and simultaneously evading acknowledgment of individual complicity with those very same differences of power or privilege.²²[End Page 189]

I can make no claims, finally, about the racial identification of the student who lodged a sexual harassment complaint against me. But I will advance the suggestion that whatever her racial self-identification (or identifications) may be, her response to both me and the "discursive repertoires" that were critiqued through the syllabus had to do with my specific and explicit performance of professorial white womanhood. I failed in my performance of White Woman, especially in her reproductive capacity, at least to some extent, by actively, willfully, and, yes, joyfully transgressing the borders of her historical relations. Neither the syllabus nor the professor's engagement with its many voices, its urgent voices speaking "race" and "sexuality" could ever be counted as money in the bank by my student. To participate in the syllabus's breakdown, its realigning of the "trope-ical" family's historical relations was a profound embarrassment, not an asset, to my student. To develop the languages of antiracist cultural [End Page 190] critique was not the cultural capital that she expected and demanded to purchase at an English department in an institution of "higher learning," a cultural site that most any student in the U.S. could rightly anticipate to be the very repository, as Toni Morrison has so eloquently shown, of Whitespeak and its corollary, the white imagination.²⁷ While I have to acknowledge that my student did not get what she bargained for (although I have to hope that had she stayed in the class, perhaps she would have gotten more), I still do mark some small satisfaction in this particular performance of failure. I mark it as a measure of some success in my own rapidly accelerating coming to consciousness about the "dynamics of the politics of respectability" in my own life (including its role in my ability to earn a wage), and in my ability to make visible those dynamics through performing and privileging new relations within the "trope-ical family." 

In this context, it becomes clear that to envision antiracist whiteness as a process of performing new relations is to envision a radically new public body for white women. Michael Warner writes that the historic and hegemonic public sphere has been occupied by a public body that, while mythologized as "abstract," is in fact "the male, the white, the middle-class, the normal."²⁸ This exclusion from ever "being" the public body does not mean, of course, that White Woman has no privileged relation to it. While White Man may stand firmly entrenched at the apex of the network along which the assets of whiteness are unevenly distributed, White Woman's very "conditional" and "ambiguous" status demands that she maintains not only her own vested interest in the flow of traffic on that network but her own vehicle through which she negotiates it. In my discussion of the next two performances, I will explore how White Woman secures her place in the family and its network of assets through the vehicle of heterosexuality. It is worth noting, then, that my own performance could be similarly explored. Although White Woman has been excluded from the hegemonic and bourgeois public body, that exclusion has produced its own form of participation in the public sphere, even though that participation is not so much one of occupying the public body as it is one of being occupied by that body, a relationship that can best be described in terms of historic and hegemonic heterosexuality.²⁹ Through my performance of respectability (complete with skin color, silence, and a dress) before a Whitespeaking (and -hearing) Board, I was allowed to buy this queer white woman her next paycheck, and (so far) the ones after that. My multiply articulated respectability, my demure respectfulness for the proceedings, all signaled my "attachment," in Marilyn Frye's words, to the ways and means of White Man, to the system of rewards and punishments, the asset distribution, of the "trope-ical family."³⁰ In short, I, a queer [End Page 191] woman, performed a truly convincing heterosexuality. I performed White Woman's historical and heterosexual relation to White Man much as it was satirized quite succinctly by Virginia Woolf in 1929. With withering irony, Woolf lauds women's "magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" and, with quiet precision, she connects woman's need or desire to do so with her constant threat of an empty purse.³¹ Frye brings a racialized specificity to these twinned aspects of White Woman's heterosexual commitment when she writes that White Woman's "attachments" to White Man have "a great deal to do with our race privilege"--the tangible and intangible rewards of white supremacy--as well as with racism.³²

Through the following two performances, I hope to further track these "attachments" toward a map of their exchanges. If White Woman reflects White Man at twice his natural size, what in the way of "race privilege" has she purchased? And, to invert the question, if White Woman secures her own "race privilege" through her heterosexual attachment to White Man, what does her "attention," her reflection secure him? 

Saving Private Ryan stands as Steven Spielberg's vaunted contribution to fin de siècle meditations on "the greatest generation."³⁷ For while it is the story of the guts and dogged tenacity of the everyman soldier, it is likewise the story of arguably the most revered public body of the twentieth century, or, at least the public body most immune to critical historical revision, the American GI of World War II.³⁸ It is quite remarkable, then, that virtually no synopsis of the movie's plot would even recall the character on whom this discussion now focuses, the GI's wife. Of course, that oversight would seem to be duly warranted by the film's narrative--after surviving D-Day, a group of ragtag soldiers led by Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) is ordered to search out another soldier, a stranger to all of them, in order to bring him out of battle. The soldier, young Private Ryan (Matt Damon), is being sent home because the Army realizes that his family has already lost three sons in the war. Tragically, in successfully completing its mission, the squad is decimated and Captain Miller is killed in battle. But the film doesn't end in World War II. After Miller's death it cuts to contemporary time in the cemetery at Normandy. And importantly it is there, in that time and space, that the film constructs the rhetoric of its two final moments. 

There are really two endings to Saving Private Ryan. The first ending is a scene that mirrors the film's opening scene in which an anonymous, white family silently follows its patriarch to a grave marked with a Christian cross. When the father crumples in grief before the tombstone, the story of saving Private Ryan begins in flashback. Echoing that opening, the final scene shows the labored self-reflection of the father, whom we now know to be the former private, some fifty years later, at the grave of Captain Miller. Likewise, the film's second ending is an image that also mirrors the very opening image of the film, an American flag. In the film's final shot, the flag emerges through a dissolve from the captain's white cross to a brilliantly backlit vision of a wind-stirred Stars and Stripes. Combined, the two endings take less than four minutes of an almost three hour film. Their centrality to the film's meanings, then, is a [End Page 193] testament to the compression and reliability of their symbols, not the least of which is White Woman. 

The first scene is framed, in several shots, by Ryan's family. For while the family is always in the background, it is nonetheless in motion--one member moving from left to right, a child being picked up--so that the spectator's eye is constantly drawn to it. This is the white patriarchal family, that bedrock of respectable society, which functions as an authorizing and seemingly "necessary" discourse, across various media, in representations of American cultural, economic, political, and military supremacy. Yet while "the family" in this film may be monoracial and the very image of authorized society, its symbolic value is mobilized only through the figure of White Woman and her various refusals within the explicitly racialized "trope-ical family." White Woman literally embodies both a meditation on and a mediation between the white patriarch and his life's meanings, as those meanings are stored in the family he was apparently saved to reproduce. One of the ways White Woman fulfills this function is through the film's positioning of the white actress (Kathleen Byron) within the depth of field--White Woman occupies middle ground between the family and the patriarch, thereby making visible and simply "making" the relationships between the two, a task she accomplishes by being the only body that actually moves between the family and Ryan. In other words, it is White Woman who enacts the real "saving" of Private Ryan. For it is she who embodies and articulates White Man's symbolic worth in Spielberg's (re)vision of the twentieth century. 

As with other of Hollywood's culturally sensitive historical revisions of the 1990s (Unforgiven, Heaven and Earth, among others), the narrative space and filmic trope of White Woman in Saving Private Ryan remain startlingly unrevised: 

Scene: The Allied Forces cemetery at Normandy, fifty years later. Wife joins husband at the graveside of his fallen commander.

Wife: (addressing her husband) James. (Following his eyeline to the tombstone, she reads the name) Captain John H. Miller.

Private Ryan: (looking into wife's eyes) Tell me I've led a good life.

Wife: (incredulously) What?

Private Ryan: Tell me I'm a good man.

Wife: (looking first at the grave, then at her husband) You are.

By placing the two lines of dialogue ("James" and "Captain John H. Miller") in the mouth of White Woman, the scene provides the context for an evolutionary, teleologic reading of the film's temporalities--the historical time of WWII with its sacrifices and obligations, the vaguely contemporary time of the grave scene with its assessments of a life's worth, and the abstracted patriotic time of the final image of the American flag, with its powerful suggestion of the "American Century." White Man himself is uncertain whether the relations among these temporalities are teleologic. He is unsure whether he has indeed "earned" this life purchased by the deaths of so many, as his dying captain's final words exhort him to do. Only White Woman brooks no doubt that the history of the twentieth century has led inevitably and correctly to this present moment in her family's life and to their future moments as imagined in the brilliantly lit emblem of the American Century. White Woman is absolutely central to the meaning-making apparatus of the film, then, when she affirms to White Man and to the spectator that it is indefensible even to question this singular truth: the individualized American white patriarch--as well as his reproduction--is the deserved beneficiary of the combined sacrifices of lives, materials, and nations as represented by the cemetery at Normandy. It bears remarking that White Woman reflects the size of White Man's contributions at some aggrandizing level of magnification not only within the film's diegesis, but for the spectator as well. White Woman sets the measure of White Man's very considerable value in this film, and she does so not by virtue of particularly clever dialogue or a deus ex machina, but by virtue only of the sheer workhorse serviceability of White Woman as a barometer of White Man's worth. Within the heterosexual economy of white supremacy, White Woman would seem to be a bargain for White Man at twice the price. 

In her final two lines of dialogue, White Woman addresses the questions posed to her by White Man. While the history of bildungsroman in U.S. literature, among other genres, might seem to suggest otherwise, I believe one might argue persuasively that [End Page 195] Ryan represents the first generation of American White Man that has had to ask these questions (Have I led a good life? Am I a good man?) against such a vast cacophony of possible challenges to a self-affirming answer. For the "trope-ical family" has a sizable population of survivors living in the diaspora, and they have been serious about answering the Man's questions, whether or not he can hear them. But discounting--or, more accurately, simply preempting--such challenges is White Woman's incredulity that the White Man could even have such doubts. The film utilizes, in other words, the historic and hegemonic sociosymbolic weight of White Woman's moral--her racial and heterosexual--imperative to refuse any interrogation whatsoever of the rights and responsibilities of White Man. White Woman rescues--or "saves"--the sociosymbolic positionings embodied by Ryan from the last forty years of multiple cultural critiques. These are critiques, it goes without saying, that might not arrive at the same conclusions White Woman does about the cultural position of White Man or the global position of the America for which he served and in which they both entrust their grandchildren's futures. 

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson writes that having "to 'have already forgotten' tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be 'reminded' turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies."⁴¹ This paradox of "memory and forgetting," he notes, can be accomplished through "the reassurance of fratricide." As an example, he writes: 

A vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861-65 as a great 'civil' war between 'brothers' rather than between--as they briefly were--two sovereign nation-states. (We can be sure, however, that if the Confederacy had succeeded in maintaining its independence, this 'civil war' would have been replaced in memory by something quite unbrotherly.)⁴²

What women of color have revealed, of course, about white feminist memory is that it too forgets as much as it remembers. It too understands the history between White Man and White Woman as (sadly) fratricidal but nonetheless familial, and in doing so, [End Page 196] it remains committed to the ongoing family project of whiteness: to reproduce itself, to reproduce whiteness, especially in the form of its public body, White Man. To remember or to produce White Man as (war) hero of the twentieth century, the unnamed white wife of Saving Private Ryan must enact multiple moments of "memory and forgetting." She remembers that he is a hero but forgets that he went to war where others died so that he might survive. She remembers that he is a "family man" but forgets that the term is an honorific maintained by police actions where most bodies (her own included) are marked for exclusion, sometimes extinction. It is central to the possibility of a genuinely antiracist white womanhood to recognize, therefore, that what the unnamed White Woman produces through this "memory and forgetting" is not only White Man's position but her own relative "mobility" within the hierarchical relations she shares with him. She righteously strides toward a place--her rightful place--of proximity to the public body of White Man. For, really, we do know her name, don't we? She is Mrs. James Ryan, U.S. Army, Ret. White Woman has claimed for herself a body with both a name and a place (albeit once removed) in the public history of the twentieth century.⁴⁴

In an interview conducted a few months after the opening, Smith sifted through the issues raised by that sole representation of white womanhood: 

[T]he one white woman who is represented . . . shows the Denny beating when she talks about it, and she's really, really disgusted by it, and very disillusioned, and basically says, "As far [as] I'm concerned they can all go out and work for a living now." And many people applauded after her speech where she says, you know, white people are getting really, really angry. She speaks of a white rage which I think is a real rage, but I think probably what I have to do is go back into the field and try to find out a little bit more about white women's fear. What I'm curious about is, whenever I hear something, I just wonder how much--this is all conjecture; it's probably dangerous to talk about on tape--but I wonder how much white women feel empowered to talk about black men in particular, and there's no way you can really talk about this story without talking about black men.

What I'm learning is there's different ways that I would like to understand more what the protocol is in the white community. When the white man speaks, to what extent does he protect the white woman from speech, even?⁴⁶

Listed in the preview program as "Ground reporter, LA News Service," Judith Tur appears midway through the show, one character after the white Hollywood agent who is listed as "Anonymous Man #2." Although the man's race is nowhere marked in the program, it is "readable" as white, however, through Smith's physical vocabulary in imaging his voice, his taking up of all available space (even while seated), his ease with success. More importantly, though, the man's race is marked by the man himself--he has not simply sequestered himself behind a barrier of racial fear. Rather he has ventured out into the various images and experiences of the rebellion to learn something. He has learned to see whiteness. White Man himself ponders the threat of the violence spreading to his neighborhood and asks, "Do I deserve this? I mean me personally? No. Me generically? Maybe." And White Man himself complicates the conundrum of why "they" are destroying their own neighborhoods and not "ours." He reaches this epiphany: "I began to absorb a little guilt. And I deserve this." 

Against this theatrically and socially powerful moment in which White Man takes a first step toward becoming "a white man" (a "genuinely" antiracist white person), the next white person, the only white female, enters the conversation. In direct contrast to White Man's coming to terms with his racial specificity, arrogance, and privilege, Judith Tur frames her experience by pronouncing, "People are people." White Woman thus mobilizes the bourgeois myth of the public body as an unembodied body, the myth that says, as Warner puts it, the "white male qua public person [is] only abstract rather than white and male."⁴⁷ Tur mobilizes this myth in an attempt to disarm the political rhetoric and cultural context of the rebellion in which the fact that some bodies are racially marked for policing actions is held up for public scrutiny. Yet as we learn that she once had to work at a grocery store after being saddled with the debts of a husband who died before she could divorce him, Tur's own racially specific understandings, her racially specific habits of "memory and forgetting" begin to emerge. For as she rewinds and plays, over and over, the beating of Denny (by "real brave men, right?"), Tur presents herself as someone who has endured the indignities of menial labor, who has persevered against great emotional and material odds in order, finally, to earn a hard-won voice in the public sphere as a professional news reporter. Tur presents herself, in other words, as someone whose experience is similar to that of the folks participating in the rebellion, similar with one glaring difference: she actually worked hard and got ahead. It is this similarity/difference that provokes White Woman to say, "Let them go out and work for a living. I'm sick of it." 

I attended the opening run of Twilight twice. The first time was the preview show when Smith was still "on book," reading directly from the script for much of the show, as well as choreographing the show's blocking. The second time was six weeks later. Much had changed in the interim: the video montage of the beating, verdicts, and rebellion was not only shortened but moved from a position as prologue to a sort of brief intermission; some characters were either dropped or abridged, and others were added. White Woman's segment was itself abbreviated, not only in the text but also in [End Page 199] a more economical blocking of the stage business with the Denny video. One of the few things that remained absolutely constant, then, was the meaning of white womanhood in the rebellion. Like Smith, I too remember scattered but significant pockets of spectatorial agreement when Judith Tur proclaims white rage. What I also remember, though, in both performances, is the almost virtual silence that greeted the end of White Woman's segment. After having wildly applauded "Anonymous [White] Man #2," his racial redemption, no one in the diverse audiences could seem to find redemptive value in the show's, or the rebellion's, White Woman. By the end of her segment, White Woman had been marked (had, in fact, marked herself) as the show's, and the rebellion's, one completely unredeemable racist. Why? 

Even given the differences in "the content of their character," Mrs. James Ryan and Judith Tur have much in common as narrative spaces. While medium, genre, and spectatorial communities may make the two performances "play" in radically different ways, each does figure White Woman in an important revision of U.S. history. Each functions within a war genre (Spielberg's 1940s Hollywood war movie with 1990s hand-held technologies and Smith's documentary, journalistic assemblage of interviews and battle footage), and each thus carries the diegetic weight of White Woman within narratives that are self-consciously revisionist and conflictual. Within this context, the figure of White Woman embodies what Smith provocatively calls the "protocol" for speaking whiteness. Yet while Mrs. Ryan effectively remembers to forget whatever won't advance the status of her man, her family, her nation, or herself, Judith Tur unforgivably forgets her place. Mrs. James Ryan may not be loved, or even remembered, after one has viewed Spielberg's film, but the object of her speaking--the aging veteran, the White Man of America's century--is both remembered and revered (according to box office receipts, popular reviews, and even Tom Hanks' campaign to fund a WWII memorial). Judith Tur, on the other hand, is reviled as a racist. That is because Tur's White Woman misspeaks. She uses a now-unspeakable form of Whitespeak: overt racialization.⁴⁸ Tur may begin in "people are people" but she cannot sustain the myth of that abstraction in the face of the material fact that Smith's story, unlike Spielberg's, actually has black folks in it. As Smith says, "there's no way you can really talk about this story without talking about black men." Presented with the concrete fact of the racially marked body (angry bodies, at that), White Woman's Whitespeak cannot maintain the contradiction of its structuring ideologies in bourgeois decorum--White Woman cannot maintain the contradiction that demands that she speak a polite "color- and power-evasiveness" in the literally racialized face of the rebellion. Because she is able to read the historical and ongoing economic disenfranchisement of the peoples of color who are committing acts of violence against people and property on her television screen only through her own past experience of economic vulnerability, Smith's White Woman reaches the conclusion about those people that generations of whites have before her. The difference is that Judith Tur [End Page 200] breaches the protocol of respectable white society by actually speaking the (thinkable but publicly) unspeakable: Let them go out and work for a living. I'm sick of it.

Ultimately, Whitespeak fails both white women as autonomous subjects, for the narrative task of each White Woman's voice is to shore up White Man. Mrs. Ryan accomplishes this in obvious fashion. Judith Tur accomplishes this as much through her voice's placement within Smith's performance as through her Whitespeaking itself. Placing a Whitespeaking White Woman directly after the plain speaking white man (no caps--he's transforming from a racist trope to a thinking man) serves to mark her racially as the carrier of the white disease, a disease which only white man is capable of both diagnosing and curing in himself. It is remarkable, to be sure, that one performance is necessary to tell White Woman's story of the LA rebellion when it requires eight white men, nearly a third of the show's characters, to represent the vast range of White Man's participation in and responses to the rebellion. Of course, each White Man has a separate story to tell, a story of individual action, or self-discovery or racial revelation. In marked contrast, it takes only one White Woman (whether revising the history of WWII or the LA rebellion) to tell the story of what, in effect, is a relationship to subjectivity. With neither the narrative nor the performative mobility of Subject, White Woman is left to patrol the definitional boundaries of Subject, policing its exclusions, mimicking its practices, and "being" its excess. As singly represented by Tur, White Woman's only source of social conflict or consciousness is gender, not race. Even gender manifests as a source of oppression, rather than power, only upon the disruption of White Woman's familial relation to White Man, only when the white wife has to get a job upon the death of the white husband. Indeed, as long as White Woman remains in relation to White Man (like Mrs. Ryan), her heterosexualized gender is actually the locus of her power. Tur is racist, then, because her one defining social relation is to White Man. And when White Man appears under siege in a racial context (symbolically through the video of Reginald Denny's beating, the countrapuntal video to King's beating), when White Woman's source of social, sexual, symbolic, and economic identity is threatened, White Woman's singular reaction is racialized fear and loathing: racism. 

Nancy Fraser speaks of the sociopolitical histories of "women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians" as more or less successful examples of what she calls "subaltern counterpublics."⁴⁹ These are alternative discursive arenas, or oppositional public spheres, where "members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs."⁵⁰ Certainly, queer performance has been one such discursive sphere. As David Román suggests: 

Queer people know well that identities are dynamic and contingent--and queer solo artists perform this fact and do so generously. Queer solo performance comes out of a sense of community and thus helps inform and shape our understanding of identity and community. Queer solo performers trouble the comfort of community even as they invest in it . . . . One could even argue that queer solo performers are often at the frontiers of new social identities and more inclusive community formations.⁵¹

The work of stand-up comic Kate Clinton is particularly germane to this discussion. Clinton's career has been among the most long-lived (since 1981) and high-profile careers of any "out" performer, especially a performer whose material is, and always has been, both explicitly queer and explicitly political.⁵⁴ Equally relevant here, though, is Clinton's stage persona itself--a Los Angeles Times reviewer once said, "Kate Clinton is the lesbian you want to take home to meet your parents."⁵⁵ In The New York Times review of Clinton's off-Broadway one-woman show, Out Is In, Ben Brantley declares Clinton to be "accessible to most audiences this side of Jesse Helms" and, undoubtedly, the title of his review says it best: "Lesbian Humor, Sunny and Sharp."⁵⁶ "Sunny" would not pass a Rorschach test for its associations with "in your face tactics" and there is something about Clinton's stage persona that is just so very good (white) girl, so very respectable that not "liking" her would be "impossible."⁵⁷ Clinton is obviously not "the menopausal gentleman" or "the lady dick"--the "killer lesbians" of queer performance.⁵⁸ Unlike other queer white women such as Peggy Shaw and Holly [End Page 203] Hughes who perform consistently and distinctly disreputable "femininities," Clinton's stock in trade is precisely her "respectability." But to overlook her work in searching for antiracist performance because the comic trades in the cultural currency of respectability is to miss the double meaning of the pun. To say that Clinton "trades in" respectability is to say not only that she cashes in on its drawing power to attract audiences but that she literally trades in her respectability, she exchanges it, for something else altogether. And that "something else" is not, I will argue, the "racial privilege" of hegemonic white femininity. 

Over its nearly twenty year span, Clinton's work has engaged in its own historical revisions, the most noticeable of which are the comic's two versions of that venerable queer chestnut, the coming out story. For Jill Dolan, the lesbian coming out story has played only too well in the bourgeois realist traditions of theatre because "the focus on such a transitional moment within the realist text traps the lesbian in a negative relation to heterosexual culture and disallows a full exploration of alternative lifestyles and sexuality."⁵⁹ In the "classic" texts of lesbian coming out that Dolan reviews, bourgeois realism performs at least two acts of violence against the lesbian. First, it "reinstates" the lesbian in its own terms of subjecthood as "unitary" and "transcendent," and, second, it locates that subject in a "binary opposition with heterosexuality."⁶⁰ Further, Dolan finds that coming out, like all crises within bourgeois realism, must become a "fait accompli, the problem resolved, the deed completed by the narrative's end."⁶¹ This imperative to resolution elides the material reality of most lesbian lives where "coming out narratives lack closure, since the dominant culture operates under a heterosexual assumption that forces lesbians to continually reassert their resistant identities."⁶² The title of Clinton's 1985 coming out story, "Straightening Up," refers, of course, to the process some lesbians go through to "de-dyke" their homes when "the folks" come to visit. The title of this performance alone would seem, then, to textualize Dolan's findings, for it would seem to trap the lesbian in a "negative relation to heterosexual culture" and to preempt a "full exploration of alternative lifestyles and sexuality." At the same time, however, "straightening up" qua queer process does hint at the unresolvability of the coming out "crisis," its resistance to closure, and the unavailability of "lesbian" to re-casting as the universal subject within the heteronormative narrative of bourgeois realism. [End Page 204]

Clinton begins the bit with an exhortation to her audience: "You know. You gotta look at your place with new eyes. You gotta check it out!":⁶³

You go through your bookshelves. You take all of the books out that say "lesbian" on them. You take them out and put them in backwards. Right? You step back, you feel like you're on the wrong side of a trick bookshelf. And then there is: "What to do with the fake bedroom?" You've got to go into that bedroom and make it look like somebody has been in there in the last two years. You know? "Yes, Mom, I know the entire bed is made of cinderblocks, but that's just the way I like it" . . . . You go through the place and you think you've got it covered and there's stuff you don't even see anymore. You've left the feminist tarot deck out, and your little four-year old niece who loves to play old maid makes a bee-line for the cards and you've got to get those cards out of her hands before she gets to the card of the lovers with the three women making love. . . . The bathroom? You don't see any stuff in the bathroom. You have an inflatable pillow in the bathtub. Oh, come on. There're candles in the bathroom. It's wet in there. A little wind-up toy in the soapdish? You don't even see it.

Clinton continues--telling of inviting friends over, "the mysterious friends," to meet the folks: 

Friends come in and, oh god, you're so proud of them. They are trying to be so discreet and so wonderful. And first of all, you notice that they're all women. Uh-oh. And a lot of them come by twos. And you introduce them like it's one word: bonnieanddeidre, susieandkathy . . . . They come in and they look great. They've worked on this. You didn't know that so many of your friends still owned skirts . . . . They come in and first of all they see each other and give each other little kisses and hugs, totally un-self-conscious. Un-believable. They come in, they sit down on the couch, too close . . . . And they're talking and they give each other little conversational squeezes on the arms. An impromptu neck massage. Don't do that. Don't! But you could just die with pride, though, because they're being so smug and so proud of themselves that not once has one of them said that she's a lesbian.

Clinton does not at this point restructure or reclaim the heteronormative narrative itself. While she does resists its closure, its re-casting of lesbian as more universal and less different, she does not yet mark this resistance as a failure on the part of the colonizing heteronarrative to remake the queer woman in its own image. Instead the lesbian's resistance to universal subjecthood and narrative closure remains a failure, a "lack" (however celebrated), on the part of the lesbian; it is not a problem with the bourgeois realist narrative itself. Thus positioned in subject/object binary opposition to heterosexuality, Clinton's work in a bourgeois realist narrative can (at best) only posit lesbian as a site of refusal (as resisting object); it cannot offer lesbian as a site of heterocritique (as agentive subject). 

Almost a decade later, however, "the folks" pay another visit in "A Family Outing" (1992):⁶⁶

When I first came out to them they shunned me, which, when I think about, I kind of enjoyed. I mean, I had more time then. Now they want to come and visit. Now we're getting to be friends. I'm not sure if I like this. When they first would come and visit I would go through that whole thing where you go around and you de-dyke the apartment. We call it "straightening up." Yes, homophobia does begin at home. I used to go through that whole thing and friends would come over and they would want to give a good impression to Mom and Dad. They would be like Eddie Haskell lesbians . . . . My family had a great time. Now I get calls from them: [Mom's voice:] "Well, honey, we got the super saver ticket and we're going to be there from Tuesday to Tuesday next." Two weeks? I don't think so. Now I notice that instead of de-dyking the apartment, I crank it up. Leave out old copies of On Our Backs . . . open, around the house. It begins dialogue. [Deepens voice:] "Well, Mom, I don't know how anybody could get their legs behind their ears like that. She is clean, you're absolutely right. No, I've never done anything like that . . . well, not kneeling."

And then you leave out a big 10-speed variable vibrator by the bed, invite Dad in: [Deeper still:] "Yeah, Dad, give it a whirl. It's a Black & Decker. Go ahead big fella. Come on, get your safety glasses on, things are gonna fly . . . ." Then you bring him into the bedroom and there's a huge leather harness over the bed. "Yeah, Dad, I rigged it up by myself, it's a beauty, isn't it? I did not do the leather work, no, but I did put all the electrical in. It's a beautiful thing. It goes back and forth. It's on that track up there. It operates on this little box right here. Watch. I can go in the other room. Pick mom right out of a chair." And, suddenly, you've got a mom piñata.

This part of the show gets so hostile I can't even stand it. And then I picture hitting the mom piñata. And the child within falls out.

Look at all the therapists here. They're goin' [Therapist's voice: deeper, aroused in its disapproval:] "Ooeeeee, have we got one here! We could put a porch on the house with this stuff." But it works. It does work. They came on Tuesday, they were gone on Friday. My mother said, "Um, honey, I've got a sweater soaking at home. We'd better go."[End Page 206]

One of the things I find most valuable in thinking through the three minutes and forty-five seconds of this neo-coming out performance is the complexity of the human relations represented. There is no simple and binaristic opposition between White Man and White Woman, with bad and good, powerfulness and powerlessness, guilt and innocence lining up in easy-to-surveil couplets like schoolchildren returning from recess. Rather, I believe this sketch serves to make visible to the critical eye, rather than merely to reinscribe, the historical relations of "complementarity" between man and woman, or between queer white woman (daughter) and straight white woman (mother). And by doing so, by critiquing those relations rather than reinscribing them, this sketch gets in the face of queer white woman by refusing to save face for her when it comes to revealing her complicity in the dynamics of the politics of respectability within the white bourgeois family. 

In examining White Woman's role in colonialist narratives, Richard Dyer concludes that "[d]oing nothing, nothing" provides "the basis for the complex construction of a particular white femininity," for the White Woman of such narratives comes face-to-face with the material, ideological and affective legacies of institutional racism only to pronounce herself helpless in the grip of such tenacious historical relations.⁶⁷ Clinton's performance, in contrast, offers a queer white woman taking the first step toward becoming an active agent of antiracist practice. Most importantly to this exploration of the possibility of "genuinely antiracist white people," Clinton explores the "roots of oppression" by examining her own position as "the child within" both respectable white femininity and the family it (re)produces. For the comic may shatter the image of White Woman in the form of the mom piñata, but what emerges is not the daughter's absolution from the mother's historical burdens; instead, what emerges is her very own "self." Clinton borrows the pop cultural metaphor of "the inner child" and demonstrates what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds as its meaning: to speak of one's "inner child" is to present "one's relation to one's own past as a relationship, intersubjective as it is intergenerational."⁶⁸ As Sedgwick suggests and Clinton enacts, queer white woman's relation to her bourgeois family of origins is not only a relationship to that family, a relationship from which the child could simply "fall out," but that relationship is also to one's self, to the subject that was constructed through that family. Most significantly, by virtue of Clinton's image of "the child within," the pre-coming out past is not declared dead for queer white woman. "Coming out" cannot be misconstrued as an event, finite in time and space, through which emerges a privileged and brand new--or ahistorical--subject of radical alterity. Instead "coming [End Page 207] out" is an ongoing process of realigning historical relations. For queer white woman, "coming out" comes with and through a past in the "trope-ical family's" bourgeois ideology that requires attention and negotiation in the present. 

Of the four performances of white womanhood discussed in this essay, only Clinton's succeeds in utterly failing to reproduce. Quite literally, the comic frees the queer white woman from the image of white motherhood by smashing the "mom piñata." Of course, the comic effects this refusal to reproduce the "trope-ical family" by using White Man's own tools--Clinton's performance of queer white woman mimics white father in a "representation of difference," to employ Bhabha's formulation, "that is itself a process of disavowal."⁶⁹ Clinton appropriates White Man's epistemologies and apparatuses of power and control, yet when the daughter drops her voice to a masculine register, it is not to become White Man but to seduce him (via Bhabha's sense of mimicry as reassuring to the colonizer in its promise that queer white woman will almost be White Man, but not quite). And what Clinton seduces the White Man into is the role of spectator to her performance. She forces the white family to look at queer white woman's re-valuing of its most powerful tools. And what they see is those tools being used to dismantle, not consolidate, the no longer stable edifices of gender, sexuality, and class--the foundational discourses of respectability that authorize the white family's primacy in the cultural imaginary. Admittedly, the family sees all of this in a relatively small window of opportunity before they retreat to the more pressing business of hand washables. Still, in Clinton's imaginary, at least, when the queer white woman uses her cultural currency to buy her own set of daddy's power/tools--and uses them against the family not in alliance with its subject-building codes--"things are gonna fly." 

Ultimately, Kate Davy may well be quite correct when she writes: 

Performative strategies that challenge the institution of white womanhood are not inherently anti-racist. In order to function in ways productive to an anti-racist project, challenges to white womanhood must be foregrounded as such; that is, they must be marked in such a way that the institutional apparatus of white womanhood in its effacing, obliterating mode is, at the very least, exhumed from its status as unremarkable to be re-marked.⁷⁰

Hilary Harris is Assistant Professor of English at Palomar College.

2. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), xiv. 

3. David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 188. 

4. Jon Parish, The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), xii; Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 19. 

5. Panish, xii. 

6. Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1. 

7. Ibid. 

8. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 5. 

9. Ibid. For a discussion of the white supremacist racism of U.S. public policy during this period, especially in matters concerning education, housing, access to federal monies and legal remedies, as well as concerning the status and function of the category "immigrant" in racially coded political rhetoric, see Lipsitz. 

10. Roediger, 3. 

11. Lipsitz, vii. 

12. Ibid. 

13. Ibid. 

14. Ibid., vii-viii. 

15. Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness, 11. 

16. Ibid., 12. 

17. I hesitate to attempt a brief accounting here of such a vast body work, or of its enormous impact. Perhaps it would be truer in tracing the structuring contributions of that work to my own thinking in this essay to suggest instead an outline, an admittedly elliptical, incomplete, and idiosyncratic outline of this body of work's meanings to one white reader. As an example, I would begin by acknowledging Toni Morrison's inestimable contribution through her profoundly generative articulation of the white imagination's reliance on "tropes of darkness" to effect a "meditation" on, and a construction of, the white self, as well as her postcolonial insistence on the importance of analyzing the object/s of that construction: white ways of knowing, seeing, being, and desiring. At the same time that this essay responds to the "white imagination" articulated by Morrison, it is also engaged in a conversation with various white subjects as they are known by peoples of color, including, among so many others, the once-kind white mistress who succumbed to "the fatal poison of irresponsible power" in Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973); and "the white witch" who sees in Man of Color "the last besieged retreat / Of love relentless, lusty, fierce, / Love pain-ecstatic, cruel-sweet" of James Weldon Johnson's Harlem Renaissance verse (see Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology, eds. Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972], 487); and the "dead drunk" Mary whose lazy racial ignorance places Bigger Thomas in her white girl's bedroom while the white family lies sleeping, a family from which the "native son" is tragically excluded, in Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), and the white woman with her "kitchen in Connecticut," a kitchen "all tricks and white enamel," that depends for its meaning on the acquiescent presence of Lutie Johnson in Ann Petry's 1946 indictment of institutionalized racism (The Street [Boston: Beacon Press, 1974], 56). For a theoretical understanding of the economic dependency of White Woman on the "fact" of Woman of Color in the U.S. context, this essay also draws on studies such as Lisa Lowe's exploration of Asian American working women (see her chapter on "Work, Immigration, Gender" in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics [Durham: Duke University Press, 1996]). As an excellent "local" exploration of the social, political, and economic dependence of "white" on "non-white" (as well as on the shifting internal hierarchies within whiteness), Rodolfo Acuna's Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (London and New York: Verso, 1996) also brings real weight to bear on the methodologies and findings and motivations of this essay. And, of course, bell hooks' work continues to challenge and educate white women specifically to examine our methodologies and motivations at every turn in order not to replace, as she wrote nearly two decades ago, "white male supremacist rule with white female supremacist rule" (see hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center [Boston: South End Press, 1984], 70). Undoubtedly, in this current era, when "whiteness studies" is becoming a consolidated, recognizable field with its own canons, this call for responsibility is more important than ever. 

18. As Richard Dyer details most thoroughly in a section of White entitled "The Embodiment of Whiteness," white racial ideology provokes "special anxieties surrounding the whiteness of white women vis-à-vis sexuality" (29). On the one hand, it is white woman's "duty" to reproduce the race. On the other, to have the sexual relations that reproduction, generally speaking, still demands (or . . . allows) among heterosexuals is to do what white woman is "least able to do and still be white" because her "very whiteness," her very "refinement," renders "sexuality a disturbance" to white woman's "racial purity" (ibid.). 

19. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993). Douglas Crimp's essay "The Boys in my Bedroom" (344-49) and Kobena Mercer's "Looking for Trouble" (350-59) are both in this anthology. 

20. Kate Davy, "Outing Whiteness: A Feminist/Lesbian Project," Theatre Journal 47.3 (1995): 204. 

21. Dreama Moon, "White Enculturation and Bourgeois Ideology: The Discursive Production of 'Good (White) Girls,'" Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, eds. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1999), 188. 

22. Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 189. 

23. Moon, 188. 

24. Ibid. 

25. Ibid., 191. 

26. Ibid, 189. 

27. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 

28. Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject" in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 240. 

29. In this instance, "heterosexuality" signifies not only, or not even, sexual acts and practices, but institutional, personal, and community affiliations, historical relations of power, expectations of gendered subjectivities, and so on. 

30. See "On Being White," in Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), or for her related use of the term "affiliation," see "White Woman Feminist: 1983-1992," in Frye's Willful Virgin: Essays In Feminism 1976-92 (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1992). 

31. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 35, 37. 

32. Frye, The Politics of Reality, 121. 

33. Hilary Harris, "Queer White Woman as Spectator," Media International Australia 78 (1995): 39. 

34. Ibid. 

35. Ibid., 45. 

36. See also, of course, Dyer's discussion of white femininity and white masculinity in film and for a critique of hegemonic whiteness that is contextualized explicitly and importantly within an analysis of the global functioning of whiteness (and its interface with "Eurocentrism"), see Ella Shohat's and Robert Stam's Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1997). 

37. In 1994, when NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw was sent to Normandy to cover the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landing of allied troops, he was so moved by the stories he encountered there, that he solicited them for publication as The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998). 

38. My use of the terms "America" and "American" throughout this discussion of Saving Private Ryan is not done unconsciously as part of the ongoing inscription of the United States as the geocultural center of all of the Americas and, thus, as the rightful (and sole) heir to the name. Rather I use these terms in this section precisely to play on the swollen connotative power they continue to exert in the U.S. cultural imaginary concerning WWII and its "generation." 

39. Dyer, 17. 

40. While Dyer expressly does not argue that "Christianity is of its essence white," he does argue that "not only did Christianity become the religion, and religious export, of Europe, indelibly marking its culture and consciousness, it has also been thought and felt in distinctly white ways for most of its history, seen in relation to, for instance, the following: the persistence of the Manichean dualism of black:white that could be mapped on to skin color difference; the role of the Crusades in racialising the idea of Christendom (making national/geographic others into enemies of Christ); the gentilising and whitening of the image of Christ and the Virgin in painting; [and] the ready appeal to the God of Christianity in the prosecution of doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism" (17). 

41. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 201. 

42. Ibid. 

43. Ibid. 

44. In a coda to this discussion of White Woman's function in saving Private Ryan, I have to mark the stunning similarities between this scene in Spielberg's film and the following, singularly representative "scene" from the Reagan presidency. As Lipsitz notes, when the president participated in the ceremonies marking the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion in 1984, the "imagery created by Reagan and his media strategists . . . encapsulates the conflation of whiteness, masculinity, patriarchy, and heterosexuality immanent in the patriotic renewal that revolved around the Reagan presidency" (74). As he so often did, Reagan employed a personal anecdote of an American citizen to give shape to that patriotism. He read a letter from the daughter of a veteran who died shortly before the anniversary and, hence, was unable to attend and place flowers at the grave of fallen comrades. In her letter, the white daughter promised the white father that she would "never forget" and that she would "always be proud" (cited in Lipsitz 74). Lipsitz comments: 

In an image broadcast on network newscasts (and featured repeatedly in an advertisement for the president's reelection campaign that year), tears filled her eyes as the president read her words, his voice quivering with emotion.

45. While Smith's technique is not the focus of this discussion, I bring attention here to what has been called the "mimicry" quality of the actor's work. Both the performer and most critics have understood her method to be that of a "repeater," "an empty vessel." I, though, am challenged by Monica Munoz Cortes' provocative analysis: "While Smith speaks the actual words of her characters, her performance is still her perception of these people. I would argue that her characters are also fictional because they are projections of her vision. Smith still needs a technique to help her embody these characters--a technique which can incorporate her artistic insights and the reality of who these characters are . . . . The notion of the 'empty vessel' appears inconsistent with the basis of Smith's technique. It is an aspect of her method which I feel is overstated and perhaps implausible (http://www-mcnair.berkeley.edu /95Journal/MonicaCortes.html). 

46. "Media Killers: An Interview with Anna Deavere Smith." (http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/~appendix/issue2/smith/index8.htm) 

47. Warner, 239. 

48. I do not mean to confuse Tur's form of overtly racialized seeing and speaking with what Frankenberg privileges as "race cognizance." For that "discursive repertoire" signals the white subject's understanding that "race makes a difference in people's lives and second, that racism is a significant factor in shaping contemporary U.S. society" (Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, 157). While Tur's language certainly demonstrates those structuring attributes of racial experience, it does not demonstrate, however, that Tur understands those attributes or the experience they engender. 

49. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14. 

50. Ibid. 

51. Introduction to O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, eds. Holly Hughes and David Román (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 5-6. 

52. Barbara Smith, "Queer Politics: Where's the Revolution?" The Nation 257.1 (1993): 13. 

53. Ibid., 13-14. 

54. According to CSTAR, Creative Stage Artists Management, in the last decade, Clinton's one-woman shows have included Out Is In (1993), which debuted at Highways in Santa Monica and moved to New York for a three-month, held-over run at the Perry Street Theatre, an off-Broadway house; also All Het Up (1996), which toured nationally; and Correct Me If I'm Right, which recently premiered off-Broadway (http://www.cstartists.com/Pages/kate.html). According to Comedians USA, an "entertainment broker/producer," in addition to touring with her one-woman shows, Kate Clinton has appeared on Arsenio Hall, Comedy Central, Good Morning, America, Nightline, CNN, C-Span, Entertainment Tonight, TV Food Network, FX and PBS (http://www.comedianusa.com/female/clinton_kate.html). She has also hosted In the Life, the gay news/variety show, collaborated on WGBH's summer series, The World According to Us, and participated in a staged reading of Tony Award-winner Tony Kushner's play, SLAVS! with Olympia Dukakis, Tracey Ullman, and Madeline Kahn at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. Clinton is also a featured columnist for The Progressive and The Advocate, and she is the author of Don't Get Me Started (Random House 1998). Clinton served as a writer on The Rosie O'Donnell Show during its roll-out period in 1996, and she has four comedy albums to her credit, all on Whyscrack Records. 

55. Cited in biography of Clinton at http://www.comediansusa.com. 

56. Ben Brantley, "Lesbian Humor, Sunny and Sharp," The New York Times, 16 December 1993: C14. 

57. See The Los Angeles Times review cited at http://www.comediansusa.com. 

58. Lynda Hart's evocative term "killer lesbian" derives from her analysis of the ways in which "the woman of color, the prostitute, and the lesbian have been intimately connected with each other, sometimes nearly conflated in the imagination of the white hetero-patriarchy," because each exists in an "ideological web" in which "all three, separately and therefore together," do not "facilitate the reproduction of white man" (see Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 120). The white lesbian, in particular, is the "secret" within whiteness itself, the threat from within. Citing the killer white women of Hollywood movies, women such as Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct, Hart finds that because white lesbians are the threat harbored within whiteness itself, the figure of the "killer" white woman enters representation as a white lesbian, or through white lesbian performative codes. As Davy notes, white lesbian performance (such as Shaw's and Hughes's) has often worked (or re-worked) this deep mine of pop cultural anxiety about lesbians in order to enact "disreputable" femininities, or, in a word, "killer lesbians." Davy's own work, of course, questions whether a "disreputable" femininity is, by definition, an antiracist femininity in specifically white performance. My analysis of the work of Kate Clinton takes up Davy's question and, I hope, helps to expand its set of possible answers. 

59. Jill Dolan, "'Lesbian' Subjectivity in Realism: Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology," in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 49, n.24. 

60. Ibid., 44. 

61. Ibid., 49, n.24. 

62. Ibid. 

63. Adapted from Making Waves (1985), recorded live at Mt. Holyoke College. Produced by Kate Clinton and Trudy Wood on Whyscrack Records, Provincetown, MA. 

64. See Lillian Faderman's Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991). 

65. Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (1984): 126. 

66. Adapted from Babes in Joyland (1992), recorded live at Club Cabaret, Boston, MA. Produced by Kate Clinton and Trudy Woods on Whyscrack Records, Provincetown, MA. 

67. Dyer, 187. 

68. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1.1 (1993): 8. 

69. Bhabha, 126. 

70. Davy, 200.

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