Bonds of representation: Race, law, and the feminine in post-civil rights America

This dissertation is an examination of the current political culture of post-civil rights America. Characterized by the convergence of a law-and-order aesthetic and the catch-22 of racial jurisprudence, the colorblindness of post-civil rights America presents a troubling but rich field of cultural study wherein it becomes possible to challenge the ubiquity of punitive laws, policies, and institutions that have given way to the mass incarceration of millions of people in the United States. To this end, I ask how focusing on the representational bonds between race, law, and the feminine illuminates the historicity of the moment.; While the primary text under examination is American racial jurisprudence, I juxtapose it along side literature, film, and mass media representations. In order to read these various forms of texts together, the dissertation's interdisciplinary methodology is constructed from critical legal race theory, black feminist literary criticism, and psychoanalytic theory. These fields provide a critical foundation for theorizing the cultural structures of racial inequality by approaching racial jurisprudence as an archive of national memory, the American canon as a literary imagination haunted by the nation's Africanist presence, and fantasy as evidence of the feminine in culture, respectively. Together, they provide a method of reading what I call the ideological grammar of punishment underwriting post-civil rights America.; Through the readings of race, law, and the feminine herein, the dissertation finds that the literary imagination of constitutional law reproduces harrowing images of blackness---the racial profile---which it constantly contains and punishes by its various reforms of word into law. At the same time, because this racial profile operates in the law much like the way the feminine operates symptomatically at the level of fantasy, it radically opens up the potential to arrest the hermeneutics of legal adjudication. As the disavowed feminine figure of constitutional law, the racial profile directs colorblind vision towards the force of desire in legal judgment. Thus does this dissertation write the desire of the feminine out of the bonds of representation.