Katerina Deliovsky Analysis

I said “Ma, I saw the most beautiful boy in art class today. He has a skin like chocolate butter” … Later that evening my father sat me down and commanded that I never bring “one of those people “home. We Macedonians do not associate with those people… (Deliovsky, 1) wrote Katerina Deliovsky about her families reaction to her first crush on a boy. When Katerina Deliovsky married and had children with a Canadian man of Jamaican decent, her family rejected her, which later caused her periods of homelessness and financial deprivation. This was the time Deliovsky first experienced her “realization of whiteness”, that her racial position in society, meant more than only her physical features. By marrying a man of colour, Deliovsky personally

Deliovsky adopts the stance from “whiteness” studies, which claim that historical legacies have placed “white’s” as the possessor of a positional superiority. (p. 19) However, only limited number of whites enjoy this positional superiority and that can only be understood by exploring interactions of other power regimes such as; gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity amongst white people. Deliovsky claims that gender plays an important role in maintaining these racial power structures. The normative white femininity is a politically and culturally constructed system which requires white women to obey to certain social scripts of performativity and behaviour that define the ought white femininity. Including, rituals of white unity and racial sexual loyalty which ensures the reproduction of the white superiority. These structures are maintained through social institutions and governance, as they are kept in place by discursive practices and historical legacies. If white women resist and refuse to comply with these constructions, they can experience social punishments of marginalization and loss of their material and social privileges. (p. 7-10,

In the second chapter, “Behind the white curtain”, she explores elements in Canadian history that contributed the legitimization of the white superiority and elaborates on her own position of whiteness as a racial category. Chapter three, four and five examine some defining characteristics of white femininity and its intersectionality. The third chapter, “Compulsory white heterosexuality” argues that whiteness is sexualized and that heteronormativity has become a compulsory condition of the white patriarchy, in order for the continuous reproduction of white supremacy. The fourth chapter, “Rituals of Unity and Exclusion” describes and gives examples the behavioural rituals that white women are ought to perform to express white unity and the exclusion from the racialized “other”. Lastly, the firth chapter, Normative `White' Femininity, elaborates on how white femininity is further disciplined by the patriarchal ideas of beauty, which create normative beauty standards which are racialized.Deliovsky book provides an incredible innovative theoretical contribution to the “white studies” literature in North America. The books title “White femininity, race, gender and power” already implies that the content presents an original and provocative context to the complex dimensions of “whiteness”