Examines the work of early feminist psychoanalytic writing to decipher it in the role of race. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, this title rereads the writing's of British analysts Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein, modernist poet HD, the eccentric French analyst Marie Bonaparte, and anthropologist Margaret Mead.

"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"