Fabricating Subjectivity: Monster’s Ball, The Deep End, and Crash as Enactments of Race/Gender in the Contemporary United States

In the first chapter, I argue that contemporary American subjects suffer from untreated race/gender melancholia. Unable or unwilling to confront the gaps between an idealized view of our history, culture, and subjective organizations and the more complex realities of our wounded present, dominant and subordinate groups remain imprisoned within this affective state and its pathological dynamics. We have yet to learn and put into practice the crucial difference between “burying the dead” (mourning) and “burying the past” (melancholia).1 Burying the past does not obliterate the dead; they return to haunt us. Without properly mourning the dead, we cannot make productive use of the past. In chapter 2, I claim that race/ gender is a social, not a natural, fact, and that it is fabricated and sustained through a wide variety of political, cultural, economic, and unconscious processes.