Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuzhen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Queer Of Color

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

Power, Agency and Resistance in Public Relations: A Queer of Color Critique of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Ciszek ◽  
Nathian Shae Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Political Campaign ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Queer Of Color

Abstract This article employs a queer of color critique as a theoretical lens to analyze the experiences of queer activists of color involved in mobilizing against oppressive laws in Texas. Through a queer of color critique, this interview-based study analyzes the internal power dynamics within a political campaign to uncover how they shaped the possibilities afforded to queer persons of color, what strategies queer people of color developed for resisting power and asserting agency, and how queer of color critique informs public relations theory. The purpose of this article is to advance critical work in public relations research, a commitment that is significant for critical and cultural communication studies.

Queer

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Octavio González ◽  
Todd G. Nordgren
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Coalitional Politics

The definitional limits of the term queer have been under conceptual, political, and ethical dispute since its reclamation from its pejorative meaning during the early AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. Reflecting activist recuperation, queer became a means to inspire and propel a coalitional politics oriented toward nonconformity and anti-normativity among diverse sexualities and across divisions of gender. Concomitantly, queer theory arose in academia as a way to expand upon and break what some scholars saw as the restrictive disciplinary boundaries of gay and lesbian studies, which were explicitly grounded in post–Stonewall identity politics. The term’s radical potential derives in part from its grammatical fluidity, as it operates as noun, adjective, and verb—combining action, identification, and effect into a single word. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, queer of color critique drew upon a different genealogy, beyond the postmodern rupture inaugurated by Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality and “biopower,” by foregrounding black and women of color feminisms, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies in order to analyze the intersections of race, nationality, coloniality, class, sex, and gender with a Foucauldian understanding of sexuality as a privileged mode of modern power– knowledge. Queer of color critique inspired and was mirrored in investigations of the analytic boundaries of the term, often defined as a binary distinction between a minoritizing and universalizing definition of queer.

Branded Beautiful

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Lia T. Bascomb
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Queer People ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Amnesia ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 926-950
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN KAHAN ◽  
MADOKA KISHI
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

Race and Sexuality

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghassan Moussawi ◽  
Vrushali Patil
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Race And Sexuality

Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has become crucial to any exploration of sexuality. In addition, studies of race and sexuality look at how they have historically informed and continue to inform one another, in ways that include thinking about empire, Racisms, carcerality, surveillance, criminology, deviance, desire, and changing understanding of the erotic. Both intersectional and transnational work consider multiple racial formations and take into account the multiple genealogies of sexuality studies, centralizing work that is informed by women of color feminisms, transnational feminisms, queer theory, and black feminist thought. To best understand racial and sexual formations, race and sexuality studies allow us to think of the two as always informing one another. Thus it shifts our attention from primarily thinking about stable identity categories and culture to centralizing people’s relations to power.

scholarly journals A Critical Review of Bilingual Education in the United States: From Basements and Pride to Boutiques and Profit

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 14-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Flores ◽  
Ofelia García
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Bilingual Education ◽  
Low Income ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Immersion Programs ◽  
Middle Class Families

ABSTRACTIn this article we connect the institutionalization of bilingual education to a post–Civil Rights racial formation that located the root of educational inequalities in the psychological condition of people of color in ways that obscured the structural barriers confronting communities of color. Within this context, bilingual education was institutionalized with the goal of instilling cultural pride in Latinx students in ways that would remediate their perceived linguistic deficiencies. This left bilingual educators struggling to develop affirmative spaces for Latinx children within a context where these students continued to be devalued by the broader school and societal context. More recent years have witnessed the dismantling of these affirmative spaces and their replacement with two-way immersion programs that seek to cater to White middle-class families. While these programs have offered new spaces for the affirmation of the bilingualism of Latinx children, they do little to address the power hierarchies between the low-income Latinx communities and White middle-class communities that are being served by these programs. We end with a call to situate struggles for bilingual education within broader efforts to combat the racialization of Latinx and other minoritized communities.

scholarly journals Information Communication Technologies as Tools to Cope with Stigma: An Exploration of Coping in College-Aged Queer People of Color

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice H. Fadrigon ◽  
Courtney E. Smith ◽  
Chantelle A Roulston ◽  
Juan F. Maestre
Keyword(s):  
Communication Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Information Communication Technologies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Discrimination And Oppression ◽  
Societal Stigma

Within the United States, Queer People of Color (QPoC) experience high levels of societal discrimination and oppression as a result of having both a stigmatized racial identity and a stigmatized sexual orientation/gender identity. Despite this, QPoC have been the focus of very few studies, and little is known about how to effectively support this marginalized group. Research shows that QPoC utilize Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) to cope with societal stigma, however few studies have addressed exactly what ICTs QPoC are using and how they are using them. This qualitative study explores common themes in the experiences of stigma for QPoC, what ICTs QPoC are using to cope with this stigma, and how they are using these ICTs. The authors conducted 12 semi-structured interviews followed by a thematic analysis. The main ICTs that participants discussed using include: Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Tinder, Grindr, GroupMe, Tumblr, Reddit, Netflix, YouTube, Video Games, and Texting. These tools were primarily used for distracting and escaping from stigma, communicating and connecting with others, seeking QPoC media, exploring one’s identity, seeking a community, and finding emotional support. Participants reported that these ICTs are effective coping mechanisms, however stigma permeates these online spaces as well, making it difficult for QPoC to feel safe from the stigma they face offline. To address this, the authors put forth several suggestions.

Queer of Color Critique

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick A. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Gender Minorities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
And Gender

Queer of color critique is a critical discourse that began within the U.S. academy in response to the social processes of migration, neoliberal state and economic formations, and the developments of racial knowledges and subjectivities about sexual and gender minorities within the United States. It was an attempt to maneuver analyses of sexuality toward critiques of race and political economy. As such, the formation was an address to Marxism, ethnic studies, queer studies, postcolonial and feminist studies. Queer of color critique also provided a method for analyzing cultural formations as registries of the intersections of race, political economy, gender, and sexuality. In this way, queer of color critique attempted to wrest cultural and aesthetic formations away from interpretations that neglected to situate those formations within analyses of racial capitalism and the racial state.

Cracking Up Time

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katelyn Hale Wood
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
White House ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
Color Experience ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
Black Queer

This essay theorizes how black feminist comedic performance queers white supremacist and heteronormative notions of time by centering Wanda Sykes's performance in her comedy special I'ma Be Me and her performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner—both in 2009. Sykes's jokes articulate how queer bodies of color experience temporalities that are in constant tension with dominant narrations of “coming out,” national heritage, and white nostalgia. I argue that Sykes uses comedic performance to: (1) reveal the limits of “progressive” coming out narratives for black queer women, (2) reinstate black subjectivity into US collective memory, (3) debunk myths of the United States as “post-” identity politics, and (4) challenge broader publics to think beyond linear and binary constructions of identity/ies, space, and time.

scholarly journals Where Does Diversity Go Straight? Biopolitics, Queer of Color Critique, and Music Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-162
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gould
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Kinship Relations

AbstractDiversity discourses in music education have evolved from (white) liberalism of the 1990s that conceived difference in terms of dualisms such as insider/outsider to global neoliberalism currently in which sources of difference are interchangeable as long as the historicity of each remains occluded. In this way, so-called “diversity-relevant” groups, such as white queer people are positioned against non-white groups, straight or otherwise, in ways that support neoliberalism and contribute to violence against the latter. To ask where diversity goes straight assumes a place where it is not straight—if not exactly queer, with queer understood (in the context of race) as a “refusal to inherit” kinship relations in which queer(s) disappear(s). Whether conceived in terms of culture, race, (dis)ability, gender, and/or sexuality, diversity has become “all the rage” in music education and academic research generally. Theorizing diversity discourses in music education at their discursive limits, I argue that those limits are also where they also may be exceeded and demonstrate this through an example using queer of color critique to analyze interactions of sources of difference as a way to historicize and racialize “diversity” in music education.

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