When Difference Becomes Dangerous: Intersectional Identity Formation and the Protective Cover of Whiteness in Faulkner's Light in August

Abstract

In the last thirty years, scholars have productively explored Faulkner’s oeuvre through identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationhood. A simple perusal of back issues of The Faulkner Journal demonstrates this point: Faulkner’s Indians, Faulkner and Sexuality, Faulkner and Whiteness, Faulkner and Feminisms, Faulkner and Masculinity. Foundational to the field are book-length studies such as Thadious Davis’s Faulkner’s Negro, Minrose Gwin’s The Feminine and Faulkner, etc. As these titles suggest, our scholarship tends to privilege single lenses of inquiry. And yet, a multiplicity of readings is possible precisely because Faulkner’s work demonstrates a fact fundamental to the theory of intersectionality: “the greater the number of marginal categories to which one belongs, the greater the number of disadvantages one will experience” (Carbado 813). Years before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term, Faulkner implicitly understood how “intersectionality” worked. Indeed, his distinct layering of identity categories and explorations of difference is what makes it possible to read Faulkner’s work through so many different lenses in the first place. In literary studies, we have amassed an extraordinarily diverse body of scholarship that treats identity categories as if they operate in parallel to each other, rather than in conversation with one another. In Faulkner studies, we have tended to articulate one identity category by mediating it through the lens of others. For example, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman explores the interconnections between racial identity and homoeroticism in “White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in Light in August,” but her reading ultimately posits racial ambiguity as defining Faulkner Journal The