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George Lipsitz, University of California-San Diego, series editor Toward a 0ueer of Color Gritique
Roderick A. Ferguson
vil
PREFACT:: ix
VIII:: PRTFACI
determination of blacks, Iaced with adverse circumstances, who overcame I come to this picture awâfe of the epistemological and official renderings
immense odds to fully participate in all aspects of American society.l of racial exclusion and the need to hold those renderings under inspection. I
am principally interested in what the sociological and national depictions of
The archive solemnizes the image according to the same motivations that that history leave our. My inspection is informed by a single assumption-
lead sociologists to approach racial discrimination-to mark the iniustices that epistemology is an economy of information privileged and information
of racial exclusion and to promote the state's ability to assimilate that which excluded, and that subject formations arise out of this economy. I also know
it formerly rejected. Like the introduction to the exhibit, canonical soci- that canonical and national formations rarely disclose what they have re-
ology has historically organized the meaning of African American history jected. Such disclosures require alternatives to those formations, alternatives
in terms of the nomenclature of liberal capital-"equalit¡ full citizenship, expressed in those sites excluded from the so-called rigors and official im-
full participation," the rewards subdued after "immense odds" have been peratives of canons and archives. As the picture symbolizes the sociological
"overcome." But what is the normative infrastructure of that language and and national depictions of racial exclusion, my personal encounter with it
its practices? also symbolizes an epistemological engagement with what those depictions
The picture itself suggests answers to this question. Behind the men clad leave out.
in overalls-in the background-is a white woman. One can imagine that This book tells a story of canonical sociology's regulation of people like
the words "Colored Men" not only identify the gender and racial speci- the transgendered man, the siss¡ and the bulldagger as Part of its general
ficities of the bathroom, but they announce an in'r'isible line that seParates regulation of African American culture. This book places that story within
her from the four African American men. The picture dramatizes what has orher stories-the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the his-
become an established insight-that is, the ways in which a discourse of tories of marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict
sexuality was inscribed into racial exclusion. As several authors have noted, the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture. In turn'
racial segregation ostensibly worked to ensure the sexual purity of white this book tries to present another story----one in which the people that pre-
women and the sexual mobility of white men. Assigning racial segregation sumably evince the dysfunctions of capitalism are revised as sites that possi-
the task of protecting gender and sexual norms, of course, made miscegena- bly critique state, capital, and social science. In this book, I wish to connect
tion one of segregation's signal anxieties. The danger of using this image to American cultural studies to questions from sociology, queer studies, post-
think about the intersections of race and sexuality is that miscegenation has colonial studies, African American studies, and ethnic studies. I do so for
often been interpreted separately from other transgressive sexual formations two reasons. I want to suggest that contrary to canonical claims, intellectual
obtained in the context of racial exclusion. How might we see this picture inquiry is always shaped out of heterogeneit¡ never neatly contained within
in relation to other racial subjects? In other words, how do we speak of the rhe presumed homogeneous boundaries of a discipline. I would also like
picture as part of a dialogical and polymorphous network of perversions to point to the productive nature of that heterogeneity-that is, its ability
that contradicted notions of decency and American citizenship? to inspire new horizons for thought and action. I do not mean to establish
I am pulled to this picture for reasons that straddle distinctions between some intellectual or political protocol with this book. I merely wish to offer
the epistemological and the personal. I know this railroad station. It is a ten- a work whose insights and failures might incite other ways to be.
minute walk from the house I grew up in. I know as well that there are sub-
jects missing who should be accounted for-the transgendered man who wore This book began in the restlessness of graduate school, and because of the
Levi's and a baseball cap and chewed tobacco; the men with long permed hair support and intelligence of friends, colleagues, and teachers' I can now put
who tickled piano keys; the sissies and bulldaggers who taught the neighbor- this project to rest. I want to thank Ivan Evans, Harvey Goldman, Gershon
hood children to say their speeches on Easter Sunday morning. Is there a way Shafir, and Jonathan Holloway for their support as committee members. I
in which their emergence can be located within the social formations that the thank my friends in sociology-Joann Ball, Doug Hartmann, Jeanne Powers,
picture represents? And might their presence cause us to reconsider political Jennifer Jordan, Jonathan Markovitz, and Beth Jennings-for
knowing what
I meant when I uttered our discipline's name. I thank AIex Halkias for being
economy and racial formation as they are normally pursued?
there when I first conceived of this project and for encouraging me with
I offer this bit of personal detail not for purposes of autobiograph¡ but
to demonstrate the ways in which epistemology is encountered personally. mentorship that was always gentle. I thank Susan Fitzpatrick for her interest
X:: PRTFACE
reviled by leftist-radicals, conservatives, heterosexuals, and mainstream queers home to interrogate processes of group formation and self-formation from
alike, erased by those who wish ro present or make African American culture the experience of being expelled from their own dwellings and families for
the embodiment of all that she is not-respectability, domesticity, heterosexu- not conforming to the dictation of and demand for uniform gendered and
aliry normativiry nationaliry universality, andprogress. But her estrangemenrs sexual types.2
are not hers to own. They are, in fact, the general estrangements of African
American culture. In its disrance from the ideals upheld by epistemology, rra- By identifying the nation as the domain determined by racial difference and
tionalisms, and capital, that culture activares forms of critique. gender and sexual conformit¡ Reddy suggests that the decisive intervention
The scene, thus, represents the social heterogeneity that characterizes Af- of queer of color analysis is that racist Practice articulates itself generally as
rican American culrure. To make sense of that culture as the site of gender gender and sexual regulation, and that gender and sexual differences varie-
and sexual formations that have historically deviated from national ideals, we gate racial formations. This articulation, moreover' accounts for the social
must situate that culture within the genealogy of liberal capitalist economic formations that compose liberal capitalism.
and social formations. That genealogy caÍ, in turn, help us perceive how the In doing so, queer of color critique approaches culture as one site that
ncialízed gender and sexual diversity pertaining to African American cultural compels identifications with and antagonisms to the normative ideals promot-
formations is part of the secular trends of capitalist modes of production. ed by state and capital. For Redd¡ national culture constitutes itself against
These are trends that manifest themselves globall¡ linking terrains separared subjects of color. Alternativel¡ culture produces houses peopled by queers of
by time and space. color, subjects who have been expelled from home. These subjects in turn
"collectively remember home as a site of contradictory demands and condi-
tions."3 As it fosters both identifications and antagonisms, culture becomes
0ueer of Color and the Critique of liberal Capitalism
a site of material struggle. As the site of identification, culture becomes the
The preceding paragraphs suggest that African American culture indexes a
terrain in which formations seemingly antagonistic to liberalism, like marx-
social heterogeneity that oversteps the boundaries of gender propriety and
ism and revolutionary nationalism, converge with liberal ideology, precisely
sexual normativity. That social heterogeneity also indexes formations that
through their identification with gender and sexual norms and ideals. Queer
are seemingly outside the spatial and temporal bounds of African American
of color analysis must examine how culture as a site of identification produces
culture. These arguments oblige us to ask what mode of analysis would be
such odd bedfellows and how it-as the location of antagonisms-fosters
appropriate for interpreting the drag-queen prostiture as an image that alle-
unimagined alliances.
gorizes and symbolizes thar social heterogeneiry a heterogeneity that associ-
As an epistemological inrervention, queer of color analysis denotes an
ates African American culture with gender and sexual variation and critically
interest in materialiry but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection,
locates that culture within the genealogy of the 'west. To assemble such a
ideologies that have helped to constitute marxism, revolutionary national-
mode of interpretation, r'e may begin with the nascent and emergent forma-
ism, and liberal pluralism. Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, respec-
tion known as queer of color analysis.l
tivêl¡ have often figured nation and property as the transparent outcome
In "Home, Houses, Nonidentity: 'Paris Is Burning,,,' Chandan Reddy
of class and racial exclusions. Relatedl¡ liberal pluralism has traditionally
discusses the expulsion of queers of color from literal homes and from the
constructed the home as the obvious site of accommodation and confirma-
privileges bestowed by the nation as "home." Reddy's essay begins with the
tion. Queer of color analysis, on the other hand, eschews the transparency
silences that both marxism and liberal pluralism share, silences about the in-
tersections ofgender, sexual, and racial exclusions. Reddy states,
of all these formulations and opts instead for an understanding of nation
and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the
Unaccounted for within both Marxist and liberal pluralist discussions idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection,
of the home and the nation, queers of color as people of color . . . take progress, and confirmation. Indeed, liberal capitalist ideology works to sup-
up the critical task of both remembering and rejecting the model of the press the diverse components of state and capitalist formations. To the ex-
"home" offered in the United States in rwo ways: first, by artending ro tent that marxism and revolutionary nationalism disavow race, gender, and
the ways in which it was deÊned over and against people of color, and sexuality's mutually formative role in political and economic relations is the
second, by expanding the locations and moments of that critique of the extent to which liberal ideology caPtivates revolutionary nationalism and
4 t, tl'tlRoouctloru lntnoouctlon::5
marxism. To umes that liberal ideology resembles Louis Althusser's rereading of historical materialism. Queer of
occludes the er, sexualiry and class in color analysis disidentifies with historical materialism to rethinþ its catego-
forming socia of transparency as forma- ries and how they might conceal the materiality of race, gender, and sexu-
ality. In this instance, to disidentify in no way means to discard'
Addressing the silences within Marx's writings that enable rather than
disturb bourgeois ideolog¡ silences produced by Marx's failure to theorize
received abstractions like "division of labor, money, value, etc.," Althusser
idea that racial and narional formations are obviously disconnected.
As an writes in Reading Ca7ital,
intervention into queer of color analysis, this text attempts to locate African
American racial formations alongside other racial formations and within This silence is only "heard" at one precise point, just where it goes un-
epistemological procedures believed to be unrelated or tangential to African perceived: when Marx speaks of the initial abstractions on which the work
For Marx, tribal ownership presumed a naturar division form, Marx argues that
of labor symborized
by the heterosexual and patriarchal family. This definition human
of the ..tribe,, as [p]roduction does not simply produce man as a commodity, the
a signifier of natural divisions cohered with the use
of that category in the commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with
nineteenth cenrury. "Tribe" described a ..loose
family o, collecti-on headed this role as a mentally and physically dehumanized being'-Immoraliry
not by a 'king' but by a 'chief' and denoted a cotnmon essence
associated deformiry and dulling of the workers and the capitalists.-Its product is
with the premodern."ro "Tribe" was a racialized category the self-conscious anð self-acting commodity . . . the human commodity'
emerging out of
the history of colonial expansion from the seventeenth
to the nineteerrrh ...rrrr- Great advance of Ricardo, Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the exis-
ries. Tribes marked racial difference, securing and
transmitting that difference tence of the human being-the greater or lesser human productivity of the
from one person to the next through heteropatriarchal exchange commodity-t o be indifferen¡! and even h armful't+
and repro-
duction. As a racial category, "tribe" illusrrares the ways
in which racial The commodity disrupts the moral paramerers of subiectivity and agency. As
discourses recruited gender and sexual difference to
establish racial identity Marx states, the commodification produces man as a "mentally and physi-
and essence.
cally dehumanized being," deforming agency and distorting subiectivity.ls
In addition, Marx characterized communal essence and
identity as a found- For Marx, the symbol of that dehumanization could be found in none
ing prerequisite for property relations. As he states,
other than the prostitute. He writes,
The spontaneously evolved tribal communiry or, if you
will, the herd_the prostitution is only a sþecifrc expression oÍthe general prostitution of
common ties of blood, language, custom, etc._is
the first precondition of the laborer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute
8 't ll'tTRoDUcTloN
INTRODUCTION::
For Marx, the state establishes its universality in opposition to the particulari- to himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phenomenon."32
ties of education, properry, religion, and occupation. For our own purposes, Man, the subiect of civil re' As an illusory
we may add that this universality exists in opposition to racial, gender, class, phenomenon, Man is co he British prosti-
and sexual particularities as well. As heteropatriarchy was universalized, it iot. the race of tub a simultaneously
".rd The growth of capital implies the proliferation
helped to constitute the state and the cirizen's universality. Lisa Lowe,s argu- discursive and material site.
ments about the abstract citizen's relationship to particularity and difference of discourses.
prove instructive here. She writes, The gendered and eroticized history of U'S' tacialization compels us to
address both these versions of multiplication. Indeed, my use of nonhetero-
[The] abstraction of the citizen is always in distinction to the particularity
of man's material condition. In this context, for Marx, ..political eman_
cipation" of the citizen is the process of relegating to the domain of the
private all "nonpolitical" particulars ofreligion, social rank, educarion,
occupation, and so on in exchange for representation on the political
African Americans generated anxieties about how emerging racial forma-
terrain of the state where "man is the imaginary member of an imaginary
sovereignry divested ofhis real, individual life, and infused with an unreal
universality. "zr
nonnormative practices of African Americans and Asian Americans. industries. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the
Despite his naturalization of gender, sexualit¡ and race, Marx is useful point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on
for thinking about how capital fundamentally disrupts social hierarchies. the lookout for opportunities to complete this transformation. . . . There is
Those disruprions account for the polymorphous perversions that arise out thus a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population.a2
of the production of labor. Marx defines surplus labor as that labor that capi-
Moreover, as capital produced certain working populations as redundant, it
talist accumulation "constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct re- inspired rural populations to migrate in search of employment, a move that
ensured greater and greater heterogeneity in urban areas. The constant flow
lation with its own energy and exrent." Surplus populations are populations
¡
l6:: ¡¡T¡¡¡¡gt'ot tt'tlRooucttoll :
' 17
;
normative prescriptions, especially in those moments in which it
of surplus popularions from ihe rural ro the urban caprures the diverse his- wants to
tories of nonwhite migrations within and to the united states. For insrance, f,
placate the interests of the state. ,1,'
this movement from the rural to the urban denotes the history of African \lhile capital can only reproduce itself by ultimately transgressing the
American migration. positions itself as
boundaries àf neighborhood, home, and region, the state
As well as exceeding local and regional boundaries, surplus populations
disrupt social hierarchies of race, gender, age, and sexuality. As it produces
surplus, capital compels the transgression of previously established hierar-
chies and provides the context for the emergence of new social arrange-
ments, identities, and practices. As Marx states,
!7e have further seen that the capitalist buys with rhe same capital agrearer
mass of labour-power, as he progressively replaces skilled workers
by less
skilled, marure labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults
by that of young persons or children. (788)
The expansion by fits and starts of the scare of production is the precondi-
tion for its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former,
but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without aries of race, gender, class' and sexuality into confusion'
an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently NonheterÃormative racial formations represent the historic accumula-
of variety
the absolute growtb of the population. (7g5-g6) tion of contradictionsa3 around race, gender, sexualit¡ and class. The
Native
of such racial formations (Asian, Asian American, Mexican, Chicano'
Continuing with this argumenr, he states
tions, but also through the racialized body. sociology helped to establish Af-
sociology imagined African American culture as the site of polymorphous
gender and sexual perversions and associated those perversions
with moral rican American corporeal difference as the sign of a nonheteronormativify
failings typically. During this period, sociologists broke with prior formula- presumed to be fundamental to African American culture.sT Marking African
tions of African American racial difference by eschewing explanations
of Americans as such was a way of disenfranchising them politically and eco-
biological inferiority but revised those formulations by offering the cultural
nomically. In sum, the material and discursive production of African Ameri-
inferiority of African Americans as an explanation for urban poverty and can nonheteronormativity provided the interface between the gendered
and
social upheaval. often sociologists explained African American poverty
and eroticized properties of African American racial formation and the material
upheaval through what was considered African American gender,
sexual, practices of state and civil society-
and familial eccentricity. sociological arguments about African American I theorize African American nonheteronormative difference as a way of
cultural inferiority were racialized discourses of gender and sexuality. As
Kobena Mercer argues, "[A]ssumptions about black sexuality lie at the
heart of the ideological view that black households consrirure deviant, dis-
organized and even pathological familial forms that fail to socialize their
members into societal norms."52
the age of repression within the development of capitalism and bourgeois
At the base of sociological arguments about African American cultural order.s8
'Sle may extend and revise Foucault's argument by addressing the
inferiority lay questions about how well African Americans approximated ways in which sociological discourse produced multiple sexual and gender
heteronormative ideals and practices embodied in whiteness and ennobled in perversions coded as nonwhite racial difference and as the study of African
American citizenship. For insrance, African Americans'fitness for citizenship
American culture. By engaging capital as a site of contradictions that com-
was measured in terms of how much their sexual, familial, and gender
rela- pels racial formations that are eccentric to gender and sexual normativiry
tions deviated from a bourgeois nuclear family model historically embodied
i h"u. also attempted to revise the presumption that capital is the site of
by whites.s3 The sexualized construction of African Americans was both gender and sexual uniformitY.
a
way of grounding African American racial difference within the so-called Bur canonical sociology has produced that heterogeneity to discipline it. In
vagaries of the sexual and a way of locating African Americans within liberal
Tbe Dialogic lmagination, Mikhail Bakhtin defines canonization as a process
capitalism. Liberal ideology has rypically understood the family as that insti-
that attempts to suppress the heterogeneiry of meaning. For Bakhtin, the het-
tution that provides stability and civiliry against the instability and ruthless-
erogeneity refers to the multiplicity that characterizes a given social context'
ness of civil sociery.sa rhat ideology has historically constructed
the African sociolog¡ when incarnated canonicall¡ attempts to discursively supPress an
American family as an insufÊcient tether against the chaos of civil society.
The actual material heterogeneity. The material heterogeneity that I've been dis-
advancement of capitalism, therefore, has occasioned the state's efforts ra-
to dis- cussing is one that critically exPoses the gender and sexual diversity within
place the social burdens of that advancemenr onto relations points to the illusions of universal claims as
within the private cial formations. That multiplicity
sphere, making the African American family the bearer of those As canoni-
b,r.d..rr. they are taken up by canonical sociology and the American state.
Liberal ideology has recommended conforming to the heterosexual nuclear
cal sociology suppresses heterogeneity in the name of universaliry it becomes
family model as the appropriate way to bear such burdens.ss canonicar an epistemological counterpart to the state's enforcement of universality as
sociology has consistently abutted that ideology by demanding the hetero-
the state suppresses nonheteronormative racial difference. Pathologizing the
normalization of African Americans as the primary resolution to economic material heterogeneity embodied in African American nonheteronormative
devastation. By " [naturalizing] heterosexuality as the only possible,
sensible, formations disciplines its critical possibilities. As a site that arches toward uni-
and desirable organizing principle by which society and social relations
can versaliry canonical sociology can only obscure the ways that nonheteronor-
mative racial formations point to the contradictions between the promise of
function,"5ø canonical sociology aligned itself with the regulatory impera-
tives of the state against African Americans.
equality and the practice of exclusions based on a tacializeð gender and sexu-
African American culture has historically been deemed contrary to the al eccentriciry an eccentricity produced through discourse and articulated in
norms of heterosexuality and patriarchy. As its embodiment in whiteness
practice. As the universal has been the justification for political and economic
attests' heteronormativity is not simply articulated through intergender
rela- regulations of those formations deemed antithetical to it, canonical sociology
22,'¡¡1pg¡rrt,ot
INTRODUCTION : 23
has intersected with forms öf narion rlism and capitar over the gendered
and not referring to black sociologists. !ühile these authors may be canonical
sexual regulation of nonwhite populations.
to African American studies, they are part of the unseen and subterranean
As canonical formations suppress the multipric ity
of a social conrext, layers of American sociology. \7hile seemingly a progressive and democratic
they also regulate the diversity that constitutes
a disciprine. As canonical move, including African American sociologists within the definition of ca-
formations are constituted through craims to universalit
y, they oblige them- nonical sociology actually denies the regulatory and exclusionary practices
selves ro the regulatory and exclusionary imperatives
of those claims. They of canonical formations and suggests the perfection of the discipline. This
must present their own histories as ones emptied
of formations that contra_ sort of move is really liberal ideology applied to epistemology. Rather than
dict universality. In the context of canonical sociolog¡
black sociologists reifying the suppression of African American sociologists by not addressing
occupy such a position. During periods of segregation
and indus triariza- them at all, I attempt to demonstrate the ways in which canonical sociology
tion, African American sociologists were incapable
of claiming the illusory has usurped their intellectual work and banished them from the taken-for-
universality fostered by canonicar sociology. Black
sociologistl such as st. granted and lived history of American sociology.
claire Drake, Horace cayton, and E. Franklin Frazier
op-.."t.d within a As it has imputed African American culture with hegemonic meanings,
historical moment rhar consrructed the black body
as the antithesis of the ra_
tionaliry and universality of western epistemolo gy canonical sociology is part of the genealogy of African American nonhetero-
and.American citizenship. normativity. It has constructed African American racial difference as the
\Øhereas the bodies of canonical (i.e., "white")
sociorogists were unmarked exemplar of social pathologies that suggest gender and sexual disorders.
by particularities of gender, sexualit¡ class, and race,
the bodies of black Moreover, it has affixed that meaning to African American culture and to Af-
sociologists were the signs of racial differences
rhat praced the rationarity rican American bodies. Canonical sociology has consistently said that these
of African American sociologists into question. The
nonheteronormarive hegemonic formulations are appropriate to understanding the upheavals
racial difference associated with brack bodies prevented
them from claiming formed by industriali zation.
canonical sratus. For instance, during the 1930s
the carnegie corporation
asked a "neurral" and "objective" Swedish
sociologist-G.,*", vtyrd"t-to
head the major study of race relations within Culture, Heterogeneity, and Rupture
the united States rather than
E. Franklin Frazier, despite Frazier's srarus as In their introduction to Tbe Politics of Cuhure in the Shadow of Capital,
the authority on race within
the srates.se canonical sociology excluded brack Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd make the following argument:
sociologists as subjects
who could not claim the universal properties of the
ration"isubje.t of epis- 'We
"culture" obtains a political force when a cultural formation
suggest
temology and the citizen-subject of the United
'without States.
a doubt, black sociologists from the thirties ro rhe comes into contradiction with economic or political logics that try to
sevenries refunction it for exploìtation or domination. Rather than adopting the
contributed to the body of sociological knowledge. 's'e
need only think of
how influential charles Johnson's work was ro understanding of culture as one sphere in a set of differentiated spheres
Gunnar Myrdal,s American
Dilemma or ro how E. Franklin Frazier's theories and practices, we discuss "culture" as a terrain in which politics, culture,
about the black family
laid the groundwork for Daniel patrick Moynihan's and the economic form an inseparable dynamic.60
Tbe Negro Famiry. As a
regulatory and exclusionary formation, canonical
sociology-has subjígated I have been implying throughout this chapter that epistemolog¡ along with
the history of African American sociolog¡
making ,.r,lio.. like Myrdal, politics and economics, composes the cultural terrain as well. Indeed, Af-
Moynihan, Park, and Burgess the spectacular representatives
of American rican American culture obtains a political force as American sociology has
sociology's interest in social relations during periods
of industrial ization. attempted to retool African American nonheteronormative difference for
In turn, canonical sociology has made blacksociologists
such as Du Bois, state and economic exploitation and domination. As the site of nonhetero-
Horace Cayron, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier,
Charles Johnson, normative difference, African American culture materially and discursively
Kelly Miller, and Monroe work part of the unread
genearogy of Ãmerican registers the gender and sexual heterogeneity of African American racial for-
sociology. canonical sociology expresses
an ideorogical impelrative, one that mations as critiques of the contradictions of state and capital and the regula-
calls for the subjugation of the historicar roles
of African American soci- tions of canonical sociology.
ologists. Hence as I address canonical sociology
throughout this text, I am This book critiques canonical sociology by concentrating on a cultural
I
24:: t¡T¡¡¡¡6r,ot
INTRODUCTION:: 25
26,,¡¡1p6¡rt,,nt
lrurRooucrlon,,27
approach these subjects as sites of knowledge' 15. The modern conception of subjectivity and agency
(libe¡al and revolutionary)
are thoroughlyno¡malized. David Theo Goldberg, for example, makes the following
149
150 ', rorrs To lNTRoDUcTtoN NOTIS TO INTRODUCTION :: 151
argument: "Moral notions tend to be basic to each sociodiscursive order, for they are 32. Marx, "On the Jewish Question," 34.
key in defining the interactive ways social subiects see others and conceive (of) them- 33. George Sanchez, "Go after the Women," in Unequal Sisters: A Mubicultural
selves. Social relations are constitutive of personal and social identiry and a central Reader in U.S.'Women's H¡story, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Du Bois (New
part of the o¡der of such relations is the perceived need, the requirement for subiects York: Routled ge, 799 41, 28 5.
to give an accoun! of their actions. These acounts may assume the ba¡e form of ex- 34. Ibid, 291.-92. Gloria Anzaldúa writes that the borderland is the place for the
planation, but they usually tend more imperatively to legitimate or to justìfy acts (to "squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the
ourselves and others). Morality is the scene of this legitimation and justification" half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through
(Racist Culture, 1.41. the confines of the "normal" (Borderlands: The Neu Mestiza-La Frontera [San Fran-
Indeed the modern conception of agency has historically and consequentially un- cisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999),25).
derstood formations that fall out of the normative boundaries of morality as incapable 35. See Nayan Shah, "Perversit¡ Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Do-
of agency and therefore worthy of exclusion and regulation. One of the principal mesticity," in Contagious Diuides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatoun
tasks of antiracist queer critique must be to account for those formations expelled (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
from normarive calculations of agency and subiectivity. Accounting for those forma- 36. Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Blacþ/Vhite Sex Districts in Chicago and
tions means that we must ask what modes of engagement and awareness they enact, New Yorþ in the Early Tuentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
modes that normarive conceptions of agency and subiectivity can never acknowledge 7997), xvfit.
or apprehend. 37. Sanchez, "Go after the Women," 289.
16. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, I33. 38. Marx, Capital,782.
17. rbid.,71.4. 39. tbid.,784.
18. Karl Marx,Capital,vol. 1,4 Critiqueof PoliticalEconotny,fiaîs. BenFowkes 40. By arguing thât capital produces gender and sexual heterogeneities as part
(London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 482. of its racialized contradiction, I wish neithe¡ to privilege a discourse of repression,
19. Thomas Laquer, "sexual Desire and the Ma¡ket Economy during the Indus- nor to assume a corollary formulation-that capital is the site of equivalences or
trial Revolution," ín Discourses of Sexuality: Frotn Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Donna uniformities. Indeed, this material and discursive production of surplus is che ¡acial-
Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992),185-215. ized production of nonheteronormative-and therefore racially differentiated and
20. Ibid., 208. nonequivalent-sexualities.
2l.rbid. 41. Lowe, Immigrant Acts,23.
22.lbid., 189, quoting Flora Tristan, London Journal, trans. Denis Palme¡ and
42. Marx, Capital, 79 5-96.
Giselle Pincetl (1840; reprint, London: George Prior, 19801,79. 43. Althusser defines contradiction as "the articulation of a practice . . . into the
2J.[bid.,208. complex whole of the social formation" (For Marx,250). Althusse¡ goes on to state
'Working
24.Lbid.,190, quoting Frede¡ick Engels, The Condition of the Class in
that the accumulation of cont¡adictions may produce the "weakest link" in a system:
England: Karl Marx and Fredericþ Engels on Br¡ta¡n (Moscow: Foreign Languages "If this contradiction is to become 'active' in the strongest sense, to become a ¡uptur-
Publishing House, 1962), 61. al principle, there must be an accumulation of 'circumstances' and 'currents' so that
25. Anne McClintock, "screwing the System: Sexwork, Race, and the Law," Bound- whatever their origin and sense . . . they 'fuse into a ruptural unity"' (For Marx,99l.
ary 2 79, no.2 (7992): 80-82. 44. For the theory of overdetermination, see ibid.
26. Evelyn Brooks Hammonds, "Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: 45. I thank Grace Hong for making this implication clear to me. Robert Pa¡k
The Problematic of Silence," in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic cites Ma¡x as the theorist who inspired an engagement with social t¡ansfo¡mation.
Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York and As Park states in "Race Ideologies," "S7hat students of society and politics know
London: Routledge, 7997), 172. about ideologies and about revolutions seems to have its source, for the most part, in
27. Laquer, "Sexual Desire and the Market Econom¡" 210-11' the literature inspired by Karl Marx and by the writers who inhe¡ited the Marxian
28. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," inThe Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Rob- tradition." Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contem-
ert C. Tucker (New York: SL $L Norton and Compan¡ 19781,33. porary Man (New York: Free Press, 1950), 303.
29. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asìan American Cuhural Politics (Durham: 46. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Duke University Press, 1996\,25. Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),2.
30. Michel Foucault, The Hìstory of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Rob- 47. Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of
ert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 37. Difference (Oxfo¡d: Blackwell, 199 5), 43.
31. Marx, Capìta\,763. 48. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 1.50.
152 ,, ruorrs To tNTRoDUcTtoN
NoTES T0 Ctnpr¡R I :: 153
49. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 14. 63. Goldberg, Racist Cuhure,30.
50. Thomas Pettigrew, The sociology of Race Relations: Reflection and Reform 64. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Gar-
(New York: The Free Press, 1980), xxi.
den Cit¡ N.Y.: Doubleday, 19661,17.
51. James McKee, sociology and the Race problen: The Fairure of a perspectiue 65. My distinction befween the "rational citizen" and the "irrational other" is
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois press, 1993), 128. analogous to Immanuel rùTallerstein's use of the "citizen" and the "ba¡barian" in ..The
52. Kobena Mercer, 'welcome to the Jungle: Neu,, positions in Bracþ cultural stud- Insurmountable contradictions of Liberalism: Human Rights and the Rights of peoples
les (New York: Routledge, 79941, 150-51. in the Geocultures of the Modern world-system " (The south Atrantic euarterly 94,
53. As Rose M. Brewer argues in "Black women in poverty: some comments on no. 4 [fall 7995]:7761-78).
Female-Headed Families," "Most analyses of the underlying causes have been filled 66. Gates, Figures in BIacþ, 8.
with normative assumprions about what is proper and improper familial behavior, 67.My use of "ambivalence" is bor¡owed from Zygmunt Bauman, who in his
and, consequentl¡ social scientists often have labeled the family formation practices chapter "Philosophy and Sociology" argues that establishing discursive authoriry means
of the black population 'inappropriate"' (Signs: Journal of 'women in culture and making the boundary of the "organic strucure" sharp and clearly marked, which
society 13 [1988]:331). See also Angela Davis and Fania Davis, "The Black Family means "excluding the middle," suppressing or exterminaring everlrhing ambiguous,
and the crisis of capitalism," Black scholar 17, no. 5 (september/october 19g6): everything that sits astride the ba¡ricade and thus compromises the vital distinction
33-40. The work of black queer intellectuals extends this discussion to show how between inside and outside. Building and keeping order means making friends and
the labeling of black familiaì forms as inappropriate denies families fo¡med out of fighting enemies. First and foremost, however, ir means purging ambivalence (Bau-
same-sex unions any positive regard, labeling them "immo¡al" and ..threatening." man, Intimations of Postmodernity [Lond.on: Routledge, 7992],720).
See especially cheryl clarke's "The Failure ro Transfo¡m: Homophobia in the Black 68. See Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the sociological Imagina-
communit¡" ín Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New tion (Minneapolis: university of Minnesota press, L997l, and pettigreq The soci-
York: Kitchen Table-'slomen of color press, 1983). See also Isaac Julian and Kobena ology of Race Relations.
Mercer's "True confessions: A Discou¡se on Images of Black Mare sexualit¡,' in 69. See "Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the U.S.A.," in
Brother to Brother: New writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill (Boston: Lowe and Lloyd,, Tbe Politics of Culture.
Alyson Publications, 1991).
54. For a discussion of the family's place within liberal ideorog¡ see wendy Brown,
1. The Knee-pants of Servility
"Liberalism's Family Values," in states of Injury: pouter and Freedom in Late Moder-
1. Robert E. Park, Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary
zi4r (Princeton: P¡inceton University Press, 1995), 135-65.
Man (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1950), 138-51.
55. As Sheila Rowbotham noted, "The family under capitalism carries an intoler-
2.Ibid.,36-51.
able weight: all the rags and bones and bits of old iron the capitalist commodity sys-
3. Stow Persons, Etbnic studies at cbicago: 1905-1945 (urbana and chicago:
tem can't use. '!íithin the family women are carrying the preposterous cont¡adiction
University of Illinois Press, 1987), 68.
of love in a loveless world. They are providing capitalism with the human relations it 4. tbid.,63.
cannot maintain" ('woman's consciousness, Man's world lHarmondsworth, Middle-
5. Ibid.
sex: Penguin, 1973),77), quoted in Brown, "Liberalism's Family Values,,, 151.
6. Robert E. Park, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man,,' in Race and Cul-
56. David L Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., e 6 A: eueer in Asian America (ph1la- ture,354.
delphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5. 7. James Barreft and David Roediger, "Inbetween peoples: Race, Nationaliry and
57. I thank Judith Halberstam for helping me arrive at rhis argumenr. the 'New Immigrant' '$Torking cIass," in lournal of American Etbnic History gpring
58. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 5. 1.997):1.7.
59. Steinberg, Turning B acþ, 26-29. 8. Ibid., g.
60. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The politics of cuhure in the Shadou of 9.tbid., t2.
Capital (Durham: Duke University Press, 19971,7. 10. Ibid., 14.
.Vlords,
61. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures ìn Blacþ: Signs, and the ,,Racial" Self 11. rbid.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxiv. 1.2. Lowe, Immigrant Acts,73-14.
62. Morroe Berger, ed. and trans., Madame De staël: on politics, Literature, 13. During the eras of Prohibition and vice reform, prostitution and alcohol con-
and National character (Garden cit¡ N.y.: Doubleday and compan¡ \nc.,79641, sumption were thought to be in tandem with each other. The association was made,
14245. in large part, because the saloon was the location for the purchase of both alcohol