Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2006
Abstract
"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. Dangerously generative, queer interracial fatherhood is made to seem doubly impossible.
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons
Comments
This is the author's manuscript of a work originally published in Journal of Modern Literature.