Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, each year Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) recognizes an outstanding essay that speaks to the intersections of psychoanalysis and cultural theories of gender and sexuality. The editors are delighted to award the 2019 Symonds Prize to Daniel Butler for his paper ““Racialized Bodies and the Violence of the Setting.” Butler is a doctoral student in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality is concerned with the interactions of the psyche and the social and with how psychoanalytic thinking can be employed to deepen a critical exploration of the workings of power, helping to break up stagnations and create openings for new forms of relational dynamics, but also with its ability to obscure, normalize, and reify violent structurings against individual bodies or at the collective level. In this prize-winning essay Butler brings together psychoanalytic theories of the clinical setting and Black critical theories of racialization to reveal how racist fantasy—“specifically the phantasied conflation of Blackness with impotence” and Whiteness with dominance—is inscribed in setting, in iterations that range from the national to the clinical.
When White phantasy is infused into the creation of place and setting, he writes, the setting exudes a racialized violence that then “racializes like a mirror of that phantasy itself,” which is registered in and on the Black body in any number of ways. “A place can be totally unpeopled, but its racializing effect might still be felt. Rather than a person’s words or gaze, place itself racializes in an uncanny, phantom process.” The effects of this may range from a sense of “visceral nonbelonging” to, as he describes in his harrowing personal account of a homophobic attack, a demand for petrified paralysis, compliance with erasure, apathy, resignation, psychic death.
Butler writes, “The White imaginary deposits its phantom world (i.e., the violence of slavery and settler colonialism) into the setting, and this deposit is further entrenched by projecting racist phantasies onto Black bodies. Deeply rooted, this deposit is still never total; phantoms haunt social and psychic space, dwelling in complex psychic and national topographies.” It is these phantoms that he would have us work with, collectively and privately, and in our sessions with patients, to bring to awareness and to voice. Butler’s remarkable work guides us to become attuned to this phantom register of Black experience that may encounter a “soundscape of domination” in Charlottesville or in our neighborhoods, or something quieter but just as petrifying embedded in the very fibers of our imaginary about the therapy setting. It is time, therefore, to problematize “the purchase of visceral belonging for object-relational theories that celebrate going-on-being without taking stock of the beings who get to go on.”
Together with his thoughtful discussants, Francisco Gonzalez, M.D., and Sally Swartz, Ph.D., Butler’s call is for us to bring awareness to the ways in which the settings we inhabit, whether as citizens, clinicians, academics, or patients, are embedded with the violences and demands of racialized phantasy, gender, and sexuality, and to think together about what is required from us to enable “the phantomatic to reanimate from the deadness to which it is psychopolitically consigned.”
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Maura Sheehy
Maura Sheehy, L.C.S.W., practices in Brooklyn, NY. She is the editor of Women, Mothers, Subjects: New Explorations of the Maternal and is a contributing editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality.