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- Title
Re-Inscribing Racial Hierarchy: White Racial Anxiety, Interracial Sexuality, and Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby".
- Authors
Stowell, Olivia
- Abstract
This paper explores how Kate Chopin's short story, "Désirée's Baby" reflects the racial anxieties of white people in the 1890s as they attempted to suppress racial equality and entrench white racial supremacy through the legalization of segregation, literary arguments against interracial sexuality, lynchings, and symbolic violence. White racial anxiety often manifested at the level of sexuality and resulted in the policing of bodies and spaces in order to prevent miscegenation. By contextualizing "Désirée's Baby" in the physical, legal, and symbolic racial violence of the 1890s, "Re-Inscribing Racial Hierarchy" investigates how white racial anxiety manifested across a variety of spheres and led to multilateral efforts to maintain and re-inscribe White racial power and hegemony. This essay examines how racial lineage and anxiety operate in the text, reflecting the period's fear around interracial sexuality, multiracial individuals, and the "purity" of bodies and bloodlines.
- Subjects
DESIREE'S Baby (Short story); CHOPIN, Kate, 1850-1904; RACISM in literature; HUMAN sexuality in literature; RACE relations; WHITE supremacy
- Publication
Liberated Arts, 2019, Vol 6, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2369-1573
- Publication type
Short Story Review