Taboo SubjectsIn American literature, a traumatic scene of racial and sexual awakening frequently involving photographs, mirrors, or acts of witnessing often precipitates a character's "discovery" of racial identity. Similarly, in the annals of psychoanalysis, notions of self and sexual identity often arise from visual trauma such as the mirror stage and primal scene. Noting this parallel between specular births of racial and sexual subjectivity, Gwen Bergner uses