In her dissertation, The White Imaginary, the Black Breast, and the Silver Screen: Hollywood’s Mammy Fantasy, Maria St. John, a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric, interrogates the representation and repression in Hollywood films of what she sees as a tenacious and influential dominant cultural fantasy: the literal image of a black woman suckling a white child and its derivative iterations in images of black maternal nurture and self-sacrifice. Echoing writer Toni Morrison, St. John asks, “How is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction?” With a background in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, St. John seeks to explore questions of representation not only at the level of the individual psyche but also at that of the broader cultural order, examining the rhetorics of psychoanalysis in the context of other discourses that have influenced and been informed by it.