WHITE GIRL WATCHING: READING EYE TO EYE

by Gail B. Griffin

The politics of reading is multilayered: the text and the reader are mutually constructed, we know; the text jerks the reader around, and vice versa. The book is part of the "subject" we study, yet we are also subject to the book. This basic engagement takes place in a context that has its own politics--for instance, students and teacher reading together, separated by lines of power and authority. Surrounding and informing the entire process are the social politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and other salient categories of difference. Yet at the heart of it is a subject with eyes, ears, or fingers on an object-the text. At the heart of it is the politics of the gaze. By exploring the racial politics of the gaze in the interaction of white female student readers and texts by African American women writers, I will argue that cross-racial reading, like other human encounters across lines of race, demands a kind of double-consciousness: white self-awareness within a radical destabilizing of whiteness as a category.