At the Intersection of Gender, Race, and White Privilege: A Case of Three Desdemona Plays

Desdemona as a character functions as the focus of Chapter 5’s comparative analysis of three Desdemona plays: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1988, Canada); Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief (1994); and, most centrally, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona (2011). MacDonald’s and Vogel’s respective plays provide an important site for comparison that exhibits the significance of an intersectional perspective for reinterpreting Othello by considering race alongside gender. These feminist reinterpretations of Othello powerfully reimagine the play’s gender dynamics, yet in ways that manifest white feminism’s marginalization of persons of color. Conversely, Morrison’s Desdemona launches a feminist critique of Othello’s toxic masculinity but avoids antiblackness by taking what Kimberlé Crenshaw terms an intersectional approach, a view examining multiple dimensions of oppression. Desdemona thus posits that recuperating Othello’s broken relationships entails honest reconciliation, one that only occurs when Desdemona confronts her white privilege and complicit subordination of both Barbary and Othello. Desdemona’s uneasy conclusion therefore reveals how feminist appropriations of Othello do not necessitate racial misrepresentation even as it raises questions about audience reach and access.