ABSTRACT
The perversion of white masculinity in the postcolonial scene of race takes its particular enjoyment in an Aboriginal woman who is not protected by law from these men's gaze but very precisely made its object. As readers of race in a colonial and postcolonial setting, subjects who desire whiteness imagine a scene in which they are the viewing subjects, seers of an unseeing other. In reading and writing an Indigenous woman, these men aimed at making themselves white. To write the life of this Indigenous woman is an autobiographical act: it is a moment in the formation of a white that turns out not to be a thing in itself either but something produced in the very reading and writing practices in which it is engaged. They read and write Rita Huggins in order to make themselves appear as white masculine and heterosexual desiring subjects. Their production of an archive is an act of self-formation.
