Sensation as Civilization: Reading/Riding the Taxicab

The status of the body figures paradoxically in the interrelated discourses of whiteness, aesthetic taste, and hipness. While Richard Dyerʹs analysis of whiteness argues that white identity is "in but not of the body," Carolyn Korsmeyerʹs and Julia Kristevaʹs feminist analyses of aesthetic "taste" demonstrate that this faculty is traditionally conceived as something "of" but not "in" the body. While taste directly distances whiteness from embodiment, hipness negatively affirms this same distance: the hipster proves his elite status within white culture by positioning himself as, in the words of James Chanceʹs song title, "Almost Black." The notion of hip contributes to my analysis of taste by focusing on both the gender politics of white embodiment, and how, by taking the social body as object of the prepositions "in" and "of," these discourses of taste and hipness produce individual bodies as white, and maintain Whiteness as a socio-political norm.