Frantz Fanon. Black skin white mask - ACE311.4

Chapter three of the book, "The Man of Color and the White Woman". Vergès suggests that alienation is not caused so much by the desire of the black man for the white woman, but actually the reverse: the white woman desires the black man, as does the homosexual white man, while black women are alienated and desire the white man. The black man is therefore desired by people he doesn’t want and he needs to rid himself of his own desire. Fanon actor watching two black men kissing. Fanon’s words over on lack of proof of existence of homosexuality in Martinique, thus the absence of the Œdipus complex in the Antilles. Photograph of a black transvestite: Fanon’s words says he believes such "godmothers" lead normal sex lives. Hall on "the problematic status of masculinity", and the possibility to understand Fanon’s ideas of master and slave as a rereading of the Œdipus complex, the struggle between the black son and the colonising father, and suggests that this lies at the root of Fanon’s ambiguity about women and homosexuality. Chapter two of the book, "The Woman of Color and the White Man". Fanon’s description of Mayotte Capécia’s novel Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), in which the black heroine submits to her white lover in everything, heard over footage of people dancing. Vergès on the context of the novel (partly over photographs of Capécia), commenting on later feminist arguments that he didn’t take this into consideration in his critique. She says Fanon’s argument about who he chooses as his object of desire is that it is no-one’s business but his own. Joby Fanon on being asked why he and Fanon married white women: he also quotes Fanon who is says that, if his children are looked down on, it will be because the world has not changed its ideas. Vergès asks why Fanon should be free to choose but Capécia is not. Joby Fanon on Fanon wanting to leave his work at Pontorson hospital (on the Normandy-Brittany border) in order to work in a country under colonial domination; he went to Blida-Joinville, Algeria, in 1954. Scenes in Algeria. Fanon actor with patients. VO Alice Cherki, psychoanalyst, talking about Pinel freeing patients from their chains in the Salpétrière hospital, and how some people regarded Fanon at Blida as a second Pinel. Jacques Azoulay, psychoanalyst, says there were no chains at Blida anyway; Fanon’s transformation was in freeing the patients from "an ethnographic gaze". Cherki describes the situation in Fanon’s ward when he arrived at Blida, and how he transformed it by encouraging participation from both the nurses and the patients themselves.