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5. Dyer's recognition of the impossibility of pure whiteness not
  only unveils its mythic quality, but also emphasizes the
  paradoxical struggle between body and spirit which, for him, is
  central to the history of white representation. Dyer argues that
  Europeans constructed whiteness via Christianity, racial
  discourse, and imperialism as a spirit "that is in but not of the
  body" (14). While Christianity struggles to deny the body's
  urges, for example, it emphasizes "the spirit that is 'in' the
  body" (16). Mary's immaculate conception and Christ's
  transcendence of his human appetites both reflect the Christian
  ideal of attaining the spirit by denying the body in which the
  spirit resides. As the dominant religion of Europe,
  Christianity's ideal of bodily transcendence became synonymous
  with the ideal of whiteness itself, in turn shaping the European
  discourse on race throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
  centuries. Dyer argues that by applying both genealogical
  accounts of lineage and biological analyses of individual bodies
  to the study of other races, whites largely avoided biological
  self-analysis which might have rendered them, "like non-whites,
  no more than their bodies" (23). Only in the late nineteenth and
  twentieth centuries did whites attempt to justify their
  biological superiority--and then by recourse to blood and genes,
  which like spirit were hidden from plain sight.
 6. As in Christianity, then, the European discourse on race imagined
  the invisible spirit which defined whiteness--its virtue,
  aspiration, intelligence, refinement--as something that "could
  both master and transcend the white body" even while inside it
  (23). This paradox of white embodiment is also evident among
  European and American imperialists who set out to remake the
  world in their own image, but passed themselves off as "subjects
  without properties," making their own interests seem the natural
  order of things. Where others were "particular, marked, raced,"
  the white man was "without properties, unmarked, universal, just
  human" (38). Dyer contends that this position of apparent
  disinterest ("abstraction, distance, separation, objectivity")
  has been more important to the construction of whiteness than
  racial distinctions themselves (38-39). Thus, like Christianity
  and the discourse of race, imperialism offered a terrain upon
  which to negotiate the contradictory character of white
  embodiment--that is, its drive to be truly disembodied.
 7. While emphasizing race, Dyer's genealogy of whiteness frequently
  turns to gender. Dyer argues, for example, that in epitomizing
  the ideal of bodily transcendence, Christ and Mary provide
  gendered models of white behavior. White women are held to Mary's
  "passivity, expectancy, receptivity... [and] sacred readiness" in
  regard to motherhood, while Christ's struggle between body and
  spirit projects suffering on white men "as the supreme expression
  of both spiritual and physical striving" (17). This ideal of
  transcendence is challenged, however, by the need to reproduce
  white bodies. As such, race and heterosexuality are
  inextricable--but sex itself, the very means of reproducing
  whiteness, involves a carnality associated with darkness, and
  hence with non-white others. European sexual roles thus projected
  racial difference upon the Christian contrast between body and
  spirit for both white males (who struggle like Christ to overcome
  their dark bodily urges) and white females (who, like Mary, are
  supposed to be pure white and without such urges in the first
  place).
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-onl....1.r_kuchta.txt<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
5. Dyer's recognition of the impossibility of pure whiteness not
  only unveils its mythic quality, but also emphasizes the
  paradoxical struggle between body and spirit which, for him, is
  central to the history of white representation. Dyer argues that
  Europeans constructed whiteness via Christianity, racial
  discourse, and imperialism as a spirit "that is in but not of the
  body" (14). While Christianity struggles to deny the body's
  urges, for example, it emphasizes "the spirit that is 'in' the
  body" (16). Mary's immaculate conception and Christ's
  transcendence of his human appetites both reflect the Christian
  ideal of attaining the spirit by denying the body in which the
  spirit resides. As the dominant religion of Europe,
  Christianity's ideal of bodily transcendence became synonymous
  with the ideal of whiteness itself, in turn shaping the European
  discourse on race throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
  centuries. Dyer argues that by applying both genealogical
  accounts of lineage and biological analyses of individual bodies
  to the study of other races, whites largely avoided biological
  self-analysis which might have rendered them, "like non-whites,
  no more than their bodies" (23). Only in the late nineteenth and
  twentieth centuries did whites attempt to justify their
  biological superiority--and then by recourse to blood and genes,
  which like spirit were hidden from plain sight.
 6. As in Christianity, then, the European discourse on race imagined
  the invisible spirit which defined whiteness--its virtue,
  aspiration, intelligence, refinement--as something that "could
  both master and transcend the white body" even while inside it
  (23). This paradox of white embodiment is also evident among
  European and American imperialists who set out to remake the
  world in their own image, but passed themselves off as "subjects
  without properties," making their own interests seem the natural
  order of things. Where others were "particular, marked, raced,"
  the white man was "without properties, unmarked, universal, just
  human" (38). Dyer contends that this position of apparent
  disinterest ("abstraction, distance, separation, objectivity")
  has been more important to the construction of whiteness than
  racial distinctions themselves (38-39). Thus, like Christianity
  and the discourse of race, imperialism offered a terrain upon
  which to negotiate the contradictory character of white
  embodiment--that is, its drive to be truly disembodied.
 7. While emphasizing race, Dyer's genealogy of whiteness frequently
  turns to gender. Dyer argues, for example, that in epitomizing
  the ideal of bodily transcendence, Christ and Mary provide
  gendered models of white behavior. White women are held to Mary's
  "passivity, expectancy, receptivity... [and] sacred readiness" in
  regard to motherhood, while Christ's struggle between body and
  spirit projects suffering on white men "as the supreme expression
  of both spiritual and physical striving" (17). This ideal of
  transcendence is challenged, however, by the need to reproduce
  white bodies. As such, race and heterosexuality are
  inextricable--but sex itself, the very means of reproducing
  whiteness, involves a carnality associated with darkness, and
  hence with non-white others. European sexual roles thus projected
  racial difference upon the Christian contrast between body and
  spirit for both white males (who struggle like Christ to overcome
  their dark bodily urges) and white females (who, like Mary, are
  supposed to be pure white and without such urges in the first
  place).
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-onl....1.r_kuchta.txt<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->