BLACK QUEER STUDIES - WordPress

voice is louder than my own. We have a script that colleagues expect us to deliver, and when we donot the damage is twofold: “How dare you not live up to my expectations” couples with the kind ofshame that colleagues manifest when they realize that in order to argue with you, they would have hadto listen to you in the first place. Since the latter is an embarrassing moment for speaker and audience,the deadlock is dead space.I traveled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, knowing that I would share space—at least for threedays—with scholars who know that moment, who’ve felt its force. I wasn’t expecting “home” and asthe weekend progressed, so many of us testified to the bittersweet affect of that remedy. For me inparticular, it was more bitter than sweet because the conference would return me to my family seat, asnearby Durham was “home” for my mother’s people. My estrangement from my biological family hadendured for thirteen years, so that when my plane landed at Raleigh-Durham airport, I felt like a thiefin the night. As I trespassed upon a place that was no longer “home” for me, I walked into anintellectual space that was also a fraught location for my own “identity politics.” The queer pleasurewas overwhelming—that weekend, I loved Durham with a vengeance.What I found at the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium conference was a group of colleaguesinterested in the “messiness” of it all. Each panel presented questions and challenges for thediscipline(s) and for “blackness.” Moreover, it taught us how to talk to one another—how to disagreein public, even though the stakes of that disagreement were and are so high. For us, blackness had alimit and a shape, shortcomings and advantages. As E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson note,“we want[ed] to quare queer, throw shade on its meanings.” And throw shade we did—it was abeautiful thing.With the memory of that particular moment in mind, the editors of this volume, wittingly orunwittingly, group the essays in each section around an important intellectual moment in theconference. In this sense, this collection is a gift, a re-memory, for those of us who witnessed itspower: the good, the bad, and at times, the ugly. For scholars new to the field, it provides aninvaluable chronicle of an emerging field of inquiry—one that has its shape as the new queer of colorcritique, pace José Muñoz and Roderick Ferguson, to name only two. As scholars move everincreasingly toward issues of globalization and U.S. imperialism, the essays collected hereunabashedly focus on the Americas as a specific site—as a place where black peoples have and stillexperience the force of this country’s perpetual attempt to increase its borders and its reach.Because hindsight is always dangerous, I will not critique what is missing from this collection, butrather only describe its missed opportunities as a kind of melancholia—the symptom always in searchof dis-ease. What the collection does not and cannot articulate is the tension that arose between thosewho produce “culture” and those who consider themselves the arbiters of its critical reception. Whilemany of us have considered the line between critic and culture to be porous, we quickly learned thatthere are important and salient differences between the two. Ironically enough, this tension alsohelped to obfuscate another typical division—that is, it failed to reproduce a now-familiar conferencescene where “activists” and “academics” square off like gangstas in a B movie. Instead, the frictionbetween critics and filmmakers, journalists and theorists, was focused on the intellectual endeavorbefore us—simultaneously demonstrating the importance of our efforts and the necessity for theconference itself. Black Queer Studies in the Millennium still remains one of the only conferences Ihave attended where activists and academics weren’t encouraged to rip each other to shreds. It wasobvious in the conference auditorium—at least for that weekend—that we needed one another tocomplete the discourse, to do the work.E. Patrick Johnson’s solo performance at the end of a long Saturday articulated the drama of that

weekend and the necessity of cultural production. It brought many of us back to the beginning—at onepoint we were all little black boys and girls who knew that we were “quare” and that we couldn’thide it. Like Morrison’s classic line “eruptions of funk”—our quareness exploded upon the ordinarylife of childhood and made family and friendship all the more difficult, morphing them into thebittersweet tonic that many of us now refer to as “home”—a place of refuge and escape. Ourquareness also brought many of us to the public library and ultimately to the university as wesearched for reflections of ourselves and began to find them tucked away in the Harlem Renaissance,embedded in second-wave feminism, and nestled at the heart of the civil rights struggle. The more wesaw, the more we understood ourselves as backbone rather than anomaly; as producing the veryfriction necessary for “culture” to survive. And somewhere in there we learned to be quare, black,and proud. The scholars in this collection and at the conference struggled with the impossibility ofrepresenting blackness while simultaneously critiquing its adequacy as a signifier of a people andtheir cultural productions. This collection reminds those of us still working in and around theboundaries of quare studies of the necessity for our work. Home is a four-letter word and the practiceof black queer/quare studies embodies all of its double meanings.On the way to the airport, I took a detour past my grandmother’s house with its magical grove ofpine trees on one side and its ornery crabapple tree in the backyard. The tree was both lookout post(from its branches we could see the Q-Dogs stepping on the field of the local high school) andmenace, as over the course of a decade each cousin fell from it, ran into it, or punctured himself orherself on one of its tree house nails, put there by one of our parents in their youth, no doubt. I rodepast North Carolina Central University, where my grandfather once was an English and LatinProfessor, and then traveled toward the A.M.E. Zion Church and remembered the uncomfortabledresses and the itchy stockings, along with the black women with perfumed bodies and plenty of juicyfruit gum in their purses in case you started “acting up.” Quare even then, I never got the spiriteveryone around me so passionately possessed, and when I turned twelve I told my mother that Icouldn’t go to church any longer. After we struck some kind of bargain, she let me spend my Sundaymornings with Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Hara, Abbott and Costello, Bette Davis, and JoanCrawford; she left me to my queer pleasures. As I continued my trek out of Durham I stoppeddowntown at the Mutual Life Insurance building, a company my grandfather had helped to “raise up.”Although I had been a vegetarian for some years, I pulled into the Winn-Dixie parking lot and headedfor the breakfast meat aisle. God, I missed liver pudding. I fingered the plastic wrapping and thoughtabout my first lesson in how to cook the mystery meat.I must have been in a trance, because a woman behind me said, “Are you going to buy that meat,sugar, or are you going to look at it all afternoon instead?” I turned around and we laughed together asshe patted my arm sympathetically and reached for a package. On the plane I finally understood thelast line of Absalom, Absalom!, and I muttered “I don’t hate it, I don’t hate it” as we cut throughcumulus clouds climbing to twenty-six thousand feet.

INTRODUCTION:QUEERING BLACKSTUDIES/ “QUARING” QUEER STUDIESE. PATRICK JOHNSON AND M AE G. HENDERSONBlack Queer Studies serves as a critical intervention in the discourses of black studies and queerstudies. In seeking to interanimate both black studies and queer studies, this volume stages a dialogicand dialectic encounter between these two liberatory and interrogatory discourses. Our objectivehere is to build a bridge and negotiate a space of inquiry between these two fields of study whilesabotaging neither and enabling both. To this end, we have put into dialogue a group of critics,writers, scholars, and cultural producers whose work links the twentieth-century achievements ofblack studies—a field that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s—with that of the still-emergent fieldof queer studies. The essays collected here reflect the scholarship of a broad range of theorists andcultural workers who principally engage black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. Manyof these essays were first presented at the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium conference held atthe University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on April 4–6, 2000. But for the sake of inclusiveness,some essays not presented at the conference but representing the work of the attendees have beenincorporated; and still others have been added to broaden and complement the disciplinary andmethodological range and scope of the collection.Although these essays span diverse disciplines and deploy multiple methodologies, they only beginto mine the rich theoretical terrain of black studies as it intersects with queer studies. Notably, manyof the authors included in this volume are in the humanities as opposed to the social sciences, a biasthat is a reflection of the background of the editors rather than a deliberate omission. Our goal,however, is to make disciplinary boundaries more permeable and thereby encourage border crossingsbetween the humanities and social sciences. As such, the focus of inquiry here tends to be less on theformal disciplinary training of our contributors and more on the interdisciplinary intellectual contentof their scholarship. Nevertheless, while some authors write from paradigms reflecting a perspectiveand training in the social sciences and/or the humanities, others deploy social science methodologiesdespite their affiliation with the humanities. Moreover, much of the interventionist work in the areasof race and sexuality has come out of the humanities and not the social sciences. Indeed, socialscience fields such as sociology have often been antagonistic toward African American culture andnonnormative sexualities in ways that have, according to Roderick Ferguson, “excluded anddisciplined those formations that deviate from the racial ideal of heteropatriarchy.”1This collection of essays, then, represents a diverse range of critical and theoretical postures aswell as a cross-section of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including Englishliterature, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural

studies, performance studies, creative writing, and pedagogical studies. More specifically, thisvolume is intended to provide students, scholars, and teachers with critical insight into the variousand multiple intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality as each section addresses issues ofinstitutional, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary formations, including public policy, performancestudies, pedagogical praxis, literary studies, and cultural studies. In addition, we hope that thesedialogues will provide insight into the category of “queer” in raced communities outside the academy.In its current configuration, the volume’s content is clearly centered within the regional context ofthe United States. Nonetheless, we are aware of the very important implications of diaspora andpostcolonial studies relative to black American sexuality. We are also conscious of the sometimesnarcissistic and insular theorizing of U.S.-based academics who do not thoroughly engage the impactof globalization and U.S. imperialism on the transnational flows of racialized sexuality. Indeed, in hisessay in this volume Rinaldo Walcott advocates a “diaspora reading practice” that would push theblack studies project beyond a “ ‘neat’ national project” and suggests that black diaspora queers havealready begun to push some of those boundaries. Mindful of Walcott’s critique of black studies’nationalism, our focus here primarily on U.S. racialized sexual politics is not meant to be totalizing orpolemic but rather strategic. Black queer studies is a nascent field and we feel compelled to prioritizea concomitant embryonic theoretical discussion within U.S. borders in order to make an intervention“at home,” as it were. What follows, then, is a brief history aimed at exposing the ways in whichblack studies and queer studies have heretofore eclipsed each other. The ultimate goal here is todemonstrate how both might be pressed into the service of a larger project—one imbricating race,class, gender, and sexuality.Variously named “black studies,” “Afro-American studies,” “Africana studies” and “AfricanAmerican studies,” programs and departments demarcating this disciplinary formation emerged in thelate 1960s and early 1970s, due largely to the efforts of black students and faculty who petitioned, satin, protested, and otherwise brought pressure to bear on white administrators at predominately whiteinstitutions of higher learning around the United States. After marking over thirty years of academicinstitutionalization, many of these departments and programs now assume leading roles in shapingcanons and intellectual currents, as well as the main corpus of research on race in the United Statesand the diaspora. Not coincidentally, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of this periodprovided the historical backdrop and social street scene fueling the interventions staged on themanicured lawns of the ivory tower. Nor was it a coincidence that the political and rhetoricalstrategies of the larger race and rights movement were deployed by intellectual and cultural activistsdemanding institutional support for the formation of black studies. Unfortunately, it was precisely thisdiscursive maneuvering—largely formulated by the dominant black male leadership—that providedthe anchor for an exclusionary agenda that effectively cordoned off all identity categories that werenot primarily based on race.Most conspicuous in these race-based arrangements, perhaps, was the manifestation of a distinctgender-sex hierarchy. Black heterosexual male leadership in the black studies movement eitherignored or relegated to secondary status the experiences and contributions of black women who mostoften were expected to “stand by their men” in the academic struggle for race rights. Such blatantsexism and, in some cases, downright misogyny in the academy occluded the specificity of blackwomen’s experiences and contributions to and within black studies, at the level of both departmentalformations and programs of study. Black women’s institutional work as well as intellectualinterventions in black studies departments remained understudied, devalued, or marginalized by thereigning black male theorists who deemed “race” to be the proper sphere of study.

Black feminist theorists, including Alice Walker, Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, BarbaraSmith, Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis, among others, worked tofill in the lacunae created by the omission of black women from the historical narrative of blackstudies. Notably, more than a few of these early interventionists were lesbians who sought not only tocombat the sexism and homophobia within the Civil Rights and black studies movements, but also theracism and sexism within emergent women’s rights and feminist studies movements. Gloria T. Hull,Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s anthology, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks AreMen, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), captures the status of black women within black studies andwomen’s studies in the early days of their disciplinary formations.Given the status of women (and class not lagging too far behind) within black studies, it is notsurprising that sexuality, and especially homosexuality, became not only a repressed site of studywithin the field, but also one with which the discourse was paradoxically preoccupied, if only todeny and disavow its place in the discursive sphere of black studies. On the one hand, the category of(homo)sexuality, like those of gender and class, remained necessarily subordinated to that of race inthe discourse of black studies, due principally to an identitarian politics aimed at forging a unifiedfront under racialized blackness. On the other hand, the privileging of a racialist discourse demandedthe deployment of a sexist and homophobic rhetoric in order to mark, by contrast, the priority of race.While black (heterosexual) women’s intellectual and community work were marginalized, if noterased, homosexuality was effectively “theorized” as a “white disease” that had “infected” the blackcommunity.2 In fact, sexuality as an object of discourse circulated mainly by way of defensivedisavowals of “sexual deviance,” frequently framed by outspoken heterosexual black maleintellectuals theorizing the “black male phallus” in relation to “the black (w)hole” and other priapicriffs sounding the legendary potency of the heterosexual black man or, alternatively, bewailing hishistorical emasculation at the hands of overbearing and domineering black women.3 It would be sometime, as Audre Lorde discovered in the bars of New York during her sexual awakening, before blackstudies would come “to realize that [its] place was the very house of difference rather than thesecurity of any one particular difference.”4Codified as a disciplinary discourse some twenty years later than black studies, queer studies—like black studies and feminist studies—emerged in the academy as the intellectual counterpart andcomponent of another activist movement, namely that of ACT-UP, an AIDS activist group, and itsoffshoot group Queer Nation. The political strategies of Queer Nation were strikingly similar to thoseemployed in the Civil Rights movement, in that in its aim to speak to and on behalf of the oppressionof sexual dissidents, other identity markers remained subordinated, if not erased. And, like theessentially identitarian politics propelling its political counterpart, queer studies/ theory tendedtoward totalization and homogenization as well. Again, however, interventions by feminist theoristslike Eve Sedgwick, Sue-Ellen Case, Diana Fuss, Teresa de Lauretis, and Judith Butler, to name a few,sought to correct queer theory’s myopia by broadening its analytic lens to include a focus on gender.5Whether queer theory “engenders” difference (gay vs. lesbian) or “ungenders” (“queers”) difference,it is not assured, according to social theorist Scott Bravmann, “that we will see the multiple socialdifferences which are always there right alongside of gender and which are themselves integral tosexual identities and the performativity of gender.”6 Further, as Lisa Duggan reminds us, “any gaypolitics based on the primacy of sexual identity defined as unitary and ‘essential,’ residing clearly,intelligibly and unalterably in the body or psyche, and fixing desire in a gendered direction, ultimatelyrepresents the view from the subject position ‘20th-century Western white gay male.’ “7 In other

words, essentialist identity politics often reinforces hegemonic power structures rather thandismantling them.Despite its theoretical and political shortcomings, queer studies, like black studies, disruptsdominant and hegemonic discourses by consistently destabilizing fixed notions of identity bydeconstructing binaries such as heterosexual/homosexual, gay/lesbian, and masculine/feminine aswell as the concept of heteronormativity in general. Given its currency in the academic marketplace,then, queer studies has the potential to transform how we theorize sexuality in conjunction with otheridentity formations.8 Yet, as some theorists have noted, the deconstruction of binaries and the explicit“unmarking” of difference (e.g., gender, race, class, region, able-bodiedness, etc.) have seriousimplications for those for whom these other differences “matter.”9 Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, andtransgendered people of color who are committed to the demise of oppression in its various forms,cannot afford to theorize their lives based on “single-variable” politics. As many of the essays in thisvolume demonstrate, to ignore the multiple subjectivities of the minoritarian subject within andwithout political movements and theoretical paradigms is not only theoretically and politically naive,but also potentially dangerous. In the context of an expansive American imperialism in which theseparation of church and state (if they ever really were separate) remains so only by the most tenuousmembrane and in which a sitting president homophobically refers to as “sinners” certain U.S. citizensseeking the protection of marriage, the so-called axis of evil is likely to cut across every identitycategory that is not marked white, Anglo-Saxon

outside in black studies: reading from a queer place in the diaspora notes the evidence of felt intuition: minority experience, everyday life, and critical speculative knowledge notes "quare" studies, or (almost) everything i know: about queer studies i learned from my grandmother "race trouble": queer studies or the study of white queers