Queering Protest

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
Jodi Rios
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Life ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.

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.

Poetic Operations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
micha cárdenas
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Decolonial Theory ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Algorithmic Analysis ◽  
And Gender

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monáe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

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.

Thinking with Trans Now

Social Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 125-147
Author(s):  
Aren Z. Aizura ◽  
Marquis Bey ◽  
Toby Beauchamp ◽  
Treva Ellison ◽  
Jules Gill-Peterson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The World ◽  
A Site

This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materialism premised on thinking about trans embodiment outside of trans as subject position, the materialism of objects and commodities, and a historical materialism shaped by queer of color critique.

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.

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.

Race and Gender Intersectionality and Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venus E. Evans-Winters
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Personal Community

When recognizing the cultural political agency of Black women and girls from diverse racial and ethnic, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic backgrounds and geographical locations, it is argued that intersectionality is a contributing factor in the mitigation of educational inequality. Intersectionality as an analytical framework helps education researchers, policymakers, and practitioners better understand how race and gender intersect to derive varying amounts of penalty and privilege. Race, class, and gender are emblematic of the three systems of oppression that most profoundly shape Black girls at the personal, community, and social structural levels of institutions. These three systems interlock to penalize some students in schools while privileging other students. The intent of theoretically framing and analyzing educational problems and issues from an intersectional perspective is to better comprehend how race and gender overlap to shape (a) educational policy and discourse, (b) relationships in schools, and (c) students’ identities and experiences in educational contexts. With Black girls at the center of analysis, educational theorists and activists may be able to better understand how politics of domination are organized along other axes such as ethnicity, language, sexuality, age, citizenship status, and religion within and across school sites. Intersectionality as a theoretical framework is informed by a variety of standpoint theories and emancipatory projects, including Afrocentrism, Black feminism and womanism, critical race theory, queer theory, radical Marxism, critical pedagogy, and grassroots’ organizing efforts led by Black, Indigenous, and other women of color throughout US history and across the diaspora.

Barriers and Facilitators to Participation in Long-Acting Injectable PrEP Research Trials for MSM, Transgender Women, and Gender-Nonconforming People of Color

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 465-482
Author(s):  
Sameena Azhar ◽  
Xiangyu Tao ◽  
Vaidehi Jokhakar ◽  
Celia B. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Research Participation ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Hiv Research ◽  
Facilitators And Barriers ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Long Acting

We collected 216 responses from sexually active MSM, transgender women, and gender-nonconforming (GNC) people of color through a web-based survey to understand the facilitators and barriers to research participation in a hypothetical LAI PrEP trial. In adjusted models, these items were found to be significantly associated with research participation likelihood: ever participated in HIV research study; comfort with taking daily pill; comfort with providing urine sample; and concerns over potential side effects of shot. Asian participants were more concerned about others knowing they were being recruited than were Black and Latinx respondents F(2, 216) = 3.98; p < .05. Asian respondents were also less comfortable with being recruited at organizations serving communities of color than Black and Latinx respondents, F(2, 216) = 5.10; p < .05. Cisgender respondents were more comfortable with being recruited by a friend or colleague than were transgender/GNC respondents, F(1, 215) = 4.8; p < .05.

Remaking Black Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Political Essays ◽  
The Third World

Complicating the common assumption that sexism relegated women to the margins of the movement, Remaking Black Power demonstrates how black women activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This book illustrates how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the “Militant Black Domestic,” the “Revolutionary Black Woman,” and the “Third World Woman,” for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era’s organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality. Using a vast array of black women’s artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, the book reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life.

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