Fair Sex, Savage Dreams

"By uncovering the racial unconscious of psychoanalytic texts that have been seminal for contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory, Walton's lucid study opens up psychoanalytic discourse to fruitful new lines of inquiry." - Jean Wyatt, Signs

"Walton executes thoughtful close readings of a wide range of relevant, but previously underscrutinized, materials. Her claims are often persuasive, and are likely to have far-reaching impact on the field of feminist and queer studies." - Susan Edmunds , Modern Fiction Studies

“In this groundbreaking book Jean Walton subjects psychoanalysis to a sustained and highly illuminating ethnographic critique. She has isolated a period—the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the great debates about femininity—in which there is a critical confrontation between questions of gender/sexuality and questions of race. Her incisive analyses of five women writers of this period are often fascinating, always provocative, and she demonstrates persuasively the inextricability of sexuality and race in their attempts to negotiate a ‘speaking position’ for themselves within a masculine domain.” - Mary Anne Doane, author of Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis

“This intelligent and clear-thinking book provides a fascinating look into the racial fantasies of five modernist women. Focussing our attention on the evasions and displacements of both psychoanalysis and feminism, Walton demonstrates that race is never very far from twentieth-century culture’s founding narratives of sexual difference. A welcome and important investigation of white women’s racial imaginaries, a study as intellectually subtle as it is boldly original.” - Diana Fuss, author of Identification Papers