Abstract
We stumble, gracefully, out of the blue-black club light. Walls painted with black acoustic tile and heavy velvet blackout curtains have cocooned our nascent comings, goings, and carryings on. “We are exhausted. [And] afraid of the passion that briefly consoles us.”1 Much has happened as time stood still—while we conjured moments of rapturous faggotry. In the harsh glare of leaving and forgetting, we get distorted glimpses of our present. And I wonder about this current moment—half-past, or thirty ’til. This time 10, 15, 25 years too late? And I wonder. I want to look for what we have forgotten, inside. J. Halberstam writes, “I am in a drag king club at 2:00 a.m. … and the people in the club recognize why they are here, in this place at this time, engaged in activities that probably seem pointless to people stranded in hetero temporalities. Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away … a theory of queerness as a way of being in the world and a critique of the careful social scripts that usher even the most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into normativity.”2 But as Halberstam demonstrates elsewhere,3 turning away from the “the careful social scripts” have wildly disparate meanings and consequences for subjects for whom access to the scripts—and to status as subject, citizen, person, or any normativity whatsoever—is always already troubled.4 Indeed, the iconic sexualized black body is “so boundlessly imagined” that the black person discursively “loses meaning.”5 Some are multiply vulnerable, in a land with no people, “cut off from among their people,” and in graves unmarked.
seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths
—Audre Lorde
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Notes
Essex Hemphill, “Tomb of Sorrow,” in Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (New York: Plume, 1992).
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 7.
R. L. Caserio et al., “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–28.
Hortense J. Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 152–75.
Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for African American Studies,” DuBois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 29.
Hortense J. Spillers, “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 376–427.
See Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Edelman writes, “Since spatial limitations preclude my rehearsing and responding to each of the papers, I’ll dispense with the queer utopians at once … not to dismiss their position but simply to suggest that I’ve already addressed that position.” Lee Edelman, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” (paper presented at the MLA Annual Convention, Washington, DC, December 2005).
José Esteban Muñoz, “Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 353–67.
Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5.
See M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any)Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad, Tobago, and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review: Sex and the State 48 (1994): 5–23.
Audre Lorde, “School Note,” in Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 16–18.
Samuel Delany, “Coming/Out,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 67.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 88.
Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2007): 177–95.
E. Patrick Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998): 399–416.
Alexandra Juhasz, “Video Remains: Nostalgia, Technology, and Queer Archive Activism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 319–28.
José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 6. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Muñoz critically takes up the work of the cadre of cultural workers of the late 1980s and 1990s who, he reminds us, retold “elided histories that need both to be excavated and (re)imagined” through “powerful and calculated set of deployments of ephemeral witnessing to Black queer identity” (57).
Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 51–63.
Thomas Glave, “Fire and Ink: Toward a Quest for Language, History, and a Moral Imagination,” Callaloo 26, no. 3 (2003): 215.
Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 76.
Marvin K. White, “A Letter that Looks Like a Poem for a Dance Floor that Feels Like an Altar,” in Last Rights (Washington, DC: RedBone, 2002), 69–72.
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© 2012 Shaka McGlotten and Dána-Ain Davis
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McGlotten, S., Davis, DA. (2012). For “the Children” Dancing the Beloved Community. In: McGlotten, S., Davis, DA. (eds) Black Genders and Sexualities. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_17
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