Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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      The masochism that Fanon describes is a complex psychic formulation. In accounting for it, he argues that it is born from white America’s initial “sadistic” aggression toward the black man, which is swiftly “followed by a guilt complex because of the sanction against such behavior by the democratic culture of the country in question,” given that overt discrimination is recognized to be incoherent with the ideals of democracy.⁴⁷ Additionally, Fanon argues that this aggression is “tolerated by the Negro,” which is to say that he lacks the ability to combat it, and that in the white man it results in masochism (and produces guilt and shame at his behavior).⁴⁸ Though Fanon uses the term masochism, it differs from the moral masochism that Freud describes, which involves the reactivation of the Oedipus complex and guilt by potentially provoking parental (but now subsumed by the superego) ire. The initial violation committed by the white (American) man was that of wanting to unnecessarily punish the black man. This desire, which Fanon terms sadistic, thereby coding it as erotic, violates the white familial credo of democracy and equality. The result is guilt, which he terms masochism because of the pleasure this narrative of personal suffering evokes for the white man.

      Fanon’s equation of the superego with a national character, democracy, is strikingly different from Freud’s description of the superego as a punishing parent. It raises the question—How, indeed, can democracy punish? The answer to this lies with understanding Fanon’s radical break from a family-centered psychology toward one centered on nationality and race. Democracy punishes the white man, Fanon seems to argue, by revealing him to be perverse and making him feel guilty. The white man’s desire to hurt the black man shows that he has failed to absorb the lessons of the family/nation while simultaneously revealing these goals to be impossible. There is a break in the system; but unlike Freud’s concept of moral masochism, this does not result in punishment from the superego. As a concept, democracy cannot act in this way; it becomes nothing more than an ideal that is not reached, and that becomes the new familial reality. Unlike Freud’s moral masochist, who becomes paralyzed by his inability to resolve his or her new Oedipal crisis and continually seeks punishment, Fanon’s white masochist is not particularly impeded by this guilt. Though he seeks to self-punish, this punishment does not occur at any actual social cost to the white man; the actual burden is felt by the black man through the production of various sensations of distance.⁴⁹

      A Negro Is Raping Me: Fear, Masochism, and the Black Man

      One of the tangible ways that the white man’s guilt manifests itself as a problem for the black man is through the creation and perpetuation of the myth of the dominating, threatening black man. Fanon analyzes this specter in his “explanation of the fantasy: A Negro is raping me [un nègre me viole].”⁵⁰ Fanon offers this as a twist on Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” In Freud’s narrative, a child fantasizes about another child being beaten because he or she wants paternal affection. Freud suggests that this fantasy about another child is actually a fantasy about the child’s masochistic desire to be beaten by his or her father as punishment for his or her Oedipal desires. Fanon replaces the child with an adult woman and argues that her fantasy of punishment is to be raped by a black man: “I wish the Negro would rip me open as I would have ripped a woman open” (Je souhaite que le nègre m’éventre comme moi je l’aurais fait d’une femme).⁵¹

      Immediately it is clear that this fantasy is embedded within a discourse of naturalized female masochism. The woman does not just want to be raped but wishes violence upon her body. This voiced desire for evisceration defines the white woman in terms of her predisposition for pain. She is presented as voraciously sexual with an appetite for destruction. In addition to this characterization of her desires, Fanon’s analysis of this fantasy further naturalizes white femininity’s relationship to pain by making a link to the work of Hélène Deutsch and Marie Bonaparte, “both of whom took up and in a way carried to their ultimate conclusions Freud’s ideas on female sexuality,” which is to say, they argued for an innately female biological desire for pain.⁵² Fanon argues that this fantasy was “the fulfillment of a private dream, of an inner wish,” and that consequently “it is the woman who rapes herself.”⁵³ With these words, Fanon indicates that the fantasy is not about a fear of the black man but about the white woman’s subconscious desire to hurt herself. Fanon argues that she does this by imagining herself as a Negro and endowing that imagined man with violent, carnal desires, which she then imagines being turned on herself or any other woman. Noticeably absent from Fanon’s analysis is any suggestion of homosexual desire, despite the familiar transpositions of lesbianism onto blackness and masculinity. Fanon, here and elsewhere, places the possibility of lesbianism, as Ann Pellegrini writes, “beyond all imagining.”⁵⁴

      As presented, “A Negro Is Raping Me” complicates our understanding of female masochism as described in “A Child Is Being Beaten.” The beloved father is no longer the locus of agency and desire; narratively, he has been replaced by the Negro. What does the white woman’s submission mean in this context? It is difficult to see this substitution of Negro for father as neutral. Though it is tempting to read it as a way to recuperate black agency, the narrative elides this possibility by reducing Fanon’s narrator to an always-willing, always-desiring, always-sexual body. In this situation, the Negro is equated with his penis, which looms larger than life in the racist imaginary. Fanon argues that this conflation of the black man with his penis is one of the main qualities of Negrophobia, which manifests as sexual panic that takes the form of fear and desire. The myth of the large black penis only serves to emasculate the black man.⁵⁵