"Tiedän millainen värillinen mies on"

rodun ja seksuaalisuuden diskurssit Joyce Carol Oatesin novellissa "Ahdistelijat"

• Lotta Kähkönen Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74664

Abstract

"l know what a colored man is like" - discourses of race and sexuality in Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Molesters"

In her fiction Joyce Carol Oates sporadically represents a white woman's racial fantasy about a black man. The fantasy has different variations and functions in her fiction. One of the earliest versions of this fantasy appears in Oates' story "The Molesters" (1968), which narrates a memory recalled by an unnamed white girl. In her recollection the girl goes down to a creek where she meets a stranger, who is, according to her description, a "colored" man. She recalls the same memory about the encounter three times. Each recollection adds new significations to her memory.

This article explores the representation of the black man in "The Molesters". Following Sara Ahmed’s account of the recognition of stranger, I analyse how the girl recognises the black man as a stranger and as a threat to herself. I concentrate, in particular, on how she racialises the man and what significance his racial difference gets in the context of her story. Furthermore, I consider how her way of seeing him stems from racial stereotypes that are specifically North-American and reflects fears typical of the white Americans,

In the girl's memory or fantasy the black man is persistently represented as a sexual threat to the white girl. Hence it is reminiscent of white women's racial fantasies familiar from psychoanalytical discussions. Psychoanalytical interpretations of the white women's fantasies about black men have, however, not paid an adequate amount of attention to the significance of race and cultural context in the fantasy. As a final point, I examine how the function of race in Oatesian racial fantasy concerns the construction of a white woman’s identity, and how this fantasy is connected particular to the North-American cultural context.