Abstract
In the early years of the 21st century, a body of works emerged that encompassed a capacious vision that Roderick Ferguson (2003) called ‘queer of color’ critique. This category and set of works can be characterized as interdisciplinary even though some of these works hail from such traditional fields as anthropology, sociology and English literature as well as those works spun from the institutionally recognized ‘inter-disciplines’ such as women’s studies, cultural studies, and ethnic studies. Queer of color critique has been variously described as a methodology, a theoretical position and a political stance. Ferguson (2003: 149) defines it further as: [an] interroga(tion) of social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique.
While queer of color critique has gained an institutionalized existence, it has also been subject to several negative appraisals. Where is the sex? What has happened to the sex? Has queer of color critique messed up and eviscerated sex from the queer equation? Queer of color critique has been subject to the typical assessment of desexualizing queer and subsuming it under class, gender, race and ethnicity. Clearly, that is not the case. Sex is not just the series of fleshy sensorial encounters and practices. Sex is more than that.
One of the major tenets of queer of color critique has been the co-constitutive nature of social life and cultural categories. ‘Ideologies of discreetness’ as Ferguson argues is part of a neoliberal tendency to posit finely circumscribed ‘orientations’ and identities. Race, sex, gender and class do not have fully independent existence from each other. They are, as legal scholar Kimberley Crenshaw (1989) astutely submits, meeting points and nodes of convergences. Political scientist Cathy Cohen (1997) trenchantly offers the example of ‘welfare mothers’ who are racialized and classed in intertwined ways. Popular conservative views construct these women as always already predisposed to the domain of the unmarried, the sexually promiscuous, the lazy, the delinquent, and the unwanted. Welfare mothers in America then are always already ‘queer’ in that their alleged social existence and personhood are marked by social recalcitrance and an innate inability to subscribe and submit to accepted norms and structured roles.
My current work (2003, 2014) as part of queer of color critique reminds us of the necessary position of the queer of color as a figure that messes up the pristine homo/hetero normative social order of things. Queerness and queer are not about the heroic and triumphant distancing from the normative but rather how queerness and queers are awash in the flow of the everyday – where norm and queer are not easily indexed or separable but are constantly colliding, clashing, intersecting and reconstituting. Therefore, queerness and the normative are really about mess – its violence, ambivalence, and its productive possibilities.
Queer of color critique offers a different perspective on mess. It proposes not so much a way out, but rather a survival guide in wading through the neoliberal mess. Queers and queers of color are not distant figures looking from afar or from above, rather they are entrenched in the morass that structural inequalities cause. Queers of color wade through this, soaked in the shifting pathos and exuberance that permeate lives, bodies, and institutions. Queer of color critique then recognizes the messiness of marginalized lives that are always positioned askew, co-existing if not blending incompletely with what we call the normative. Such positionalities are never static, they are always shifting with possible detours to either further queering or to normalization. There are no preset itineraries or maps in which one can find one’s way, queer of critique scholars have to deploy creative means to carve out new possible paths, not to a triumphant cleaning up but to gritty survival.
It is said that the current US president thrives on the chaos of his policies, but the mess that pundits suggest that he deploys is really a violent imposition of a largely well-orchestrated set of neoliberal ideas that advocates for a cleaning up of the ‘swamp’ to come up with bordered, walled-in and policed indices of difference. Mess under this regime is a veneer, a smoke-screen, on what is largely an extreme reordering and calcification of structural inequalities. Mess through this conservative lens is a required pre-condition that will rationalize autocratic schemes such as austerity, privatization and dramatic social marginalization.
Queer of color critique offers not so much a way out, but rather a survival guide in wading through this neoliberal mess. Confronting (or wading through) mess from a queer of color perspective involves intense attentiveness to the non-pristine ways in which structural inequalities emerge and exist and how queers by virtue of their own positionalities can find their way through the muck for possible survival and justice.
The architecture of social injustice is always about deciphering and confronting the vexed meeting points of various axes of difference. Today, we live in a world of loud populists, autocrats, white supremacists, misogynists, and homophobes. We need a frame of reference that will expose the muck and filth of social injustice and inequality and at the same time, enable us to meet the challenges of living with the contradictions and possibly transforming them. Today, we live in a world that will not change with mere compromises. Queer of color critique may not be the ultimate antidote or promise of salvation. Rather, queer of color critique will help in re-vitalizing social energies in forging coalitions that will orient us to multiple future prospects and destinations.