Abstract
Contemporary queer studies remain susceptible to the very racial unconsciousness it purports to critique. As such, by reading queer theory against the grain, we gesture toward a necessary self-reflexive inquiry into what Hiram Pérez calls a “racialized erotics of modernity” (p. 1). In A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire, winner of the 2015 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies, Pérez positions the brown body as the locus for the formation of cosmopolitan gay male identity. In doing so, he diplomatically yet fiercely argues, “Queer critique must investigate the circulation of homosexual desire within the erotic economies of both capitalism and the nation in order to guard against its cooptation into neoliberal and colonial projects” (p. 3). Over and against recent dominant readings of queer subjectivity, Pérez problematizes and extends the audacious theory that queer studies and queer activism continue to have a critical stake in identity politics through their affective relationship to brown bodies: a relationship that, he convincingly demonstrates, “stages quotidian racist practices” (p. 10).
The book is divided into five chapters, each of which conceptualizes new methods of addressing the trace of the brown body in “gay male modernity” (p. 15). One of the strengths of Pérez’s book is the mixed case studies, which bring literary analysis into conversation with film, political affairs, and a reflection on an experience at a past queer studies conference. Each chapter skillfully elaborates upon the thesis outlined in the introduction to address the relationship between race, gender, sexuality, and politics. On one level, Pérez raises questions about how to account for race in the construction of the modern gay subject. On another, and more interestingly, he reads the brown body as the site for political discourse through its position to US imperialism and the nation-state, of which establishmentarian queer studies have perpetuated.
Parting the intersections of queer studies and critical race theory, the theoretical praxis of A Taste for Brown Bodies departs from the idea that mainstream queer critique has a stake in the instrumentalization of racialized desire in the nation-building project, in which the brown male body is positioned as the instrumental figure par excellence. To demonstrate this, the arch of Pérez’s inquiries traces these formations from the nineteenth century to present neoliberal, gay, and queer assimilationist projects. Pérez’s chapters explore the ways in which brown fantasy is reflected in white fantasy, the inherent brown homoeroticism overlooked in homophobic images of violence, the interdependent relationship between racialized homosociality and nationalism, the primal brown body, and a pastoral nostalgia for brown bodies.
Pérez’s timely work addresses the imperative blind spots and misreadings within not just mainstream queer studies but more broadly within the overarching categories of queer of color cultural critique. At the heart of his readings is the implicit argument that we remain confronted by the impasse of identity politics in our reading of race, gender, and sexuality in relation to notions of modernity. Within these pages, Pérez develops a critical space in which to question queer theory’s ideological fascination with race in terms of these very identity politics. He suggests that not only has the brown male body become an object of obsession but within queer studies, we have not yet moved beyond the sexualization, eroticization—exoticization even—of brown bodies as some ostentatious object of desire for discursive consumption. The brown male body has thus moved about queer studies as a wandering signifier to deploy a “rhetoric of difference” with several shortcomings (p. 118). Pérez, however, pushes back on uses and references to brownness to interrogate the ways in which queer studies have profited at the expense of brown bodies coded in the unintelligibility of notions of “queer” that remain unscathed.
A Taste for Brown Bodies is provocative and, at times, polemical. Pérez’s arguments call for a redefinition of queer hermeneutics that provides insight into the affective responsibility among scholars to offer historical and cultural perspectives on the racialized constitution of queer intellectual production. The greatest asset of Pérez’s book is how it thinks through the productiveness of reading the brown body as the site for working against, with, and through the “politics of the difference” in queer studies (p. 99). Pérez rightfully resists antiidentitarian queer methods in favor of the messiness inherent in the study of gender, sexuality, and race. He strategically brings together seemingly disparate texts to destabilize the erotics of power associated with the body and queer theory and lend themselves to reading the performance of race and sex within these discourses as political acts that can be conceived from and through the brown body. Pérez’s highly sophisticated study gives nuance not only to queer studies but also to critical race theory and American studies. Surely, A Taste for Brown Bodies will transform our reading methods to redefine future scholarship in our field.