Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (review)

Abstract

The drag queen "she is multiply determined, regulated, and excluded by differences of race, class, sexuality, and gender." the embodying of the interesections of formations thought to be discrete, transnarpsaten(1) disciplined by those within outside African American communities "reviled by leftist-radicals, conservatives, heterosexuals, mainstream queers" (2) her estrangements are those of African american culture. . . "in its distance from the ideals upheld by epistemology, nationalism, and capital, that culture activates forms of critique" (2) "racist practice articulates itself generally to gener and sexual regulation, and that gener and sexual difference variegate racial formations" (3) national culture constitutes itself against subjects of color (3) Alternatively, culture produces houses peopled by ueers of color, subjects who have been expelled from home. These subjects in turn remember home asd a site of contradictory demands and conditions that foster both identifications and antagonisms, and thus culture becomes a site of struggle. "Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, respectively, have often figured nation and property as the transparent outcome of class and racial exclusions. Relatedly, liberal pluralism has traditionally constructed the home as the obvious site of accomodation and confirmation. Queer of color analysis. . .eschews the transparency of all these formulations and opts instead for an understanind of antiona and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contract the ideal of the liberal nation-state and capital as site of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation. Indeed, liberal capitalism works to suppress the diverse componente of state and capitalist formations. To the extent that Marxism and revolutionary natioanlist diavow race, gender, and sexuality's mutually fomrative role in political and economci relations is the extent to which liberal ideology captiavates revolutionary nationalism and marxim. To restate, queer of color analysis presume that liberal ideology occules the intersecting saliency of race, gender, sexuality, and class in forming soical practices. Approaches ideologies of transparency as formaitons that have worked to conceal those intersections means that queer of color analysis has to debunk the idea that race, lcass, gender, and sexuality are discrete formations, apparently insulated form one another (3-4)." If the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class constitute social fomraiotns within liberal capitalism, the que of color analysis obtains its genealogy within a variety of locations. . .Queer of clor analuysis extends women of color feminism by invetigating how intersecting raial, gender, and sexualpractices, antagonize and/or conspire with nomrative investments of nation-states and capital (4) Since historical materialism ahs traditionally privileged class over other social relaitons, queer of oclor critque cannot take it up withiout revision, must not employ it without disidentificaiton. "'to disidentify means to "recycle and rethink encoded meaning" and "to use the code of the majority as raw amterial for representing a sidempowerd politics of positionality that has been renderd unthinakble by the dominant culture.' Queer of color ananalysis disidentifies with historical mateiralism to rethink its categories and how they might conceal the materiality of race, gender, and sexuality" (5) "As empiricism grants authority to representation, empiricism functions hegemonically, making representations seem natural and objective. To assumme that categories conforom to reality is to think withi, instead of against, hegemony. As he uncritically appropiated the conceptions of political economy formulated by bourgeois economists, Marx abetted liberal ideology. He identified witht aht ideology instaed of disidentifying with it. Disidentifying with historical materialism means determining the silences and ideologies that reside within criticla terrains, silences and ideologies that equate representations with reality. Queer of color analysis accounts for the ways in which Marxi's critique of capitalist property relationsis haunted by silcnes that make racial, gender, and sexual idoelgoies and discourses commensurate with reaity and suitable for universal ideals." (5) think of anthropology: "the distinction between normative heterosexuality (as evidence of progress and development) and non-normative gender and sexual practices and identities (as the woeful signs of social lag and dysfunction) has emerged histoircally from the field of racialized discourse. Put plainly, racializaiton has helped t arituclate heteropatriarchy as universal" (6) "For Marx, tribal ownership preusmed a natural divisinof labor symboled by the heterosexual and patriarchal family (6) "The property relaiotns presumed whtin tribal communities suggested a racialize essence garnedered thiorugh heterosexual and patriarchal familial arrangements. . . .Marxi imagined social relations and agency. . .through heteropatriarchy and racial difference simultaneously. Explicating this assumption aobut osical relations and agency, marx aruges in the German Ideology, aman who 'daily remakes his life. . .enters into historical development' by 'making other men' and 'propagating their kind.' Even earlier , in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx stated, "This direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this naturla species man's relaitons to natrue is immdeiatley his relation to man, juast as his relation to man is his relation to nature--hi own natural destination. For Marx, heteropatriarchy was the racialized essence of Man and hte standard of socialiety and agency" (7) Pundits understood the gendered and racial chaos that is embodied in the prostitute to be an explicitly racial phenomenon (9) as industrial capital devleoped and provided working-class white women a limited income and mobility the prostitute became the racialized figure that could enunciate such anxieites (9) this installed alleged sexual savagery of black women and nonwhite sexuality as the axis which various notions of womanhood turned "As the state justifies property through this presumed universality of citizenship, through claims about access, equivalence, rights, and humanity, capital contradicts that universality by enabling soical formatons marked by intersecting particularities of race, gender, class, sexuality." (12) "The migrations of Asians, Europeans, Mexicans, and African Americans generated anxietites about how emering racial formatons were violating gender and sexual norms. As racialized ethnic minorties became the producers of capitaleist surplus value, the American political economy was transformed into an apparatus that implanted and multiplied intersecting racial, gender, and sexual perversions. . .The entrance of Mexican immigrant labor into the U.S. workforce occasioned the rise of Americanizaiton programs designed to inculcate American ideals into the Mexican household. These programs were prmised on the racialized construction of the Mexican immigrant in terms of sexuality, and premodern in terms of conjugal rites and domestic habits" (13) "As capital produced surplus populations, it provided the contexts out of which nonheteronormative racial formations emerged. As U.S. capital had to constantly look oustide local and national boundaries for labor, it often violated ideals of racial homogeneity hled by lcoal communtieis and the United States at large. As it violated those ideals, capital also inspired worries that such violations would lead to the disruption of gender and sexual proprieties." (15) "American sociology has historically understood civilization as the produciton of wealth and order and as the spread of disorder and dehumnization. American sociology, like historical materialism, has proffered heteronormativity