decolonIzIng mAstery 33that most national liberation movements and thought tend to be mascu-
linist in their orientation and rhetoric” (2002, 93). I will trace some of these
critiques here both because they bear repeating and because they are re-
lated to the other figures of alterity that remain outside Fanon’s political
purview and to which I turn later in this chapter. Feminist scholarship has
aptly pointed to the crucial fact that liberation was mobilized in these dis-
courses through practices of control over female bodies in the remaking
and restaging of specifically masculine ones. Women often emerge in the
discourses of liberation as self- masters par excellence, subjects that without
pause remain steadfast in the face of danger. Yet they are also the weak
links in the trajectories of national freedom—freedom that remains bound
to new visions, performances, and embodiments of masculinity. If women
are both instrumental and sacrificial in the creation of anticolonial mas-
culinities, this does not mark a paradox but signals instead a logic of an-
ticolonialism. Within this logic, bodies marked as feminine are abjured
in the recuperation and transformation of masculine bodies in the act of
liberation.
Fanon, whose anticolonial politics were shaped by and through psycho-
analysis, insisted on the primacy of race in the processes of identification.
In Identification Papers, Diana Fuss locates identification within a particu-
larly colonial history (1995, 141). She explains that identification “is itself
an imperial process, a form of violent appropriation in which the Other
is deposed and assimilated into the lordly domain of Self. Through a psy-
chical process of colonization, the imperial subject builds an Empire of
the Same and installs at its center a tyrannical dictator, ‘His Majesty the
Ego’ ” (145). As Fuss and feminist scholars after her have argued, however,
the woman of color in particular disappears in Fanon’s framing of identi-
fication.^1 For Fuss, identification has a genealogy that is rooted in colonial
history. Yet she argues that while Fanon situates race as central to identifica-
tion, he “does not think beyond the presuppositions of colonial discourse to
examine how colonial domination itself works partially through the social
institutionalization of misogyny and homophobia” (160). In effect, Fanon
races identification while he erases the woman of color from its purview.
Fanon could write of the psychosexual lives of white women (1967e) and
dwell at length on Algerian women’s heroic psychic and bodily sacrifices
toward the revolution (1965), but on the psychosexuality of the woman of
color, he declared outright (in an echo of Freud): “I know nothing about