Abstract
Global appropriations of US-derived understandings of how gender and sexuality operate as categories of human experience have acquired a special resonance these days. The revelation in May 2004 that US military personnel brutally tortured Iraqi male prisoners of war by employing antihomosexual taunts has placed our country’s gender and sexual norms at the center of contemporary discourse. Moreover, these revelations appear to implicate contemporary gay men’s own marginalization as persecuted sexual minorities in ways that, to one scholar in particular, “reads as an orientalist projection that conveys much more about the constraints and imaginaries of identity in the ‘West’ than anything else.”2 Indeed, as we will see shortly, not only have some gay male commentators argued that the armed forces’ use of simulated forms of male-male sexuality as a method of torture strategically plays upon US gay men’s (especially white gay men’s) own identifications and desires in the service of a broad policy of national defense, but such views have sometimes also been held by those who are not gay men, and who are in fact hostile to homosexuality altogether.3
What kinds of violences are necessary to consolidate the constituency designated by the pronoun “we”?1
—Hiram Perez
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Notes
Hiram Perez, “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!,” Social Text 84–85 (2005): 178.
Jasbir K. Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Social Text 84–85 (2005): 125.
According to Marlon Ross, “[I]n what academics call ‘queer theory,’ the closet has become ground zero in the project of articulating an ‘epistemology’ of sexuality. Beyond political strategy and polemical tactics, the closet has become a philosophical concept grounding both lesbian-gay history and queer theory by joining them at the hips as a legitimate academic discipline. Significantly, historians and theorists of queerness stake their claims to academic centrality largely through the concept of the closet, as they argue with great rigor and sophistication that the binary between closeted and uncloseted sexual desire is a primary determinant of modernity and modernism.” See Ross’s essay, “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 161.
Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 149n1.
Ibid., 4. Also see Kara Keeling on the inside/outside status of black lesbian and gay subjects. In an essay on black lesbian cinema, Keeling writes that lesbian and gay cultural production and scholarship “demonstrate that the category ‘black lesbian and gay’ is wholly inside the construction of both ‘blackness’ and ‘lesbian and gay.’ But, it also is part of what needs to be expunged vigilantly and repeatedly from ‘black’ and from ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ in order to render each category artificially coherent and discrete. Yet, any separation of ‘black lesbian and gay’ into two categories (‘black’ and ‘lesbian and/or gay’) presumed to be autonomous can be effected only violently.” From Keeling’s “‘Joining the Lesbians’: Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 216–17.
Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98.
Julio Ortega, “Transatlantic Translations,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 118, no.1 (2003): 26.
Joshua Gamson, “The Organizational Shaping of Collective Identity: The Case of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals in New York,” Sociological Forum 11, no. 2 (1996): 238 (original emphasis).
Bravmann, Queer Fictions, 99–100. The compound neologism “queer heterosociality” represents Bravmann’s playful effort to capture the wide diversity that makes up many lesbian and gay male communities, including differences in class, race, ethnicity, and even sexual practices, among others. The prefix “hetero,” in this instance, which means “difference,” is not reducible to the sexual. For a closer look at how white gay communities have participated in “othering” black gay men in particular, see Charles Nero’s “Why Are the Gay Ghettoes White?” Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005): 228–45.
Jeffrey Weeks, preface to Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Danielle Dangoor (London: Allison & Busby, 1993), 22.
See Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), especially chapter 5, “The Fact of Blackness.” Here Fanon writes, “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’” (112).
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1952]), 3.
Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism From a Neocolonial Age (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 37.
Timothy S. Chin, “‘Bullers’ and ‘Battymen’: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary Caribbean Literature.” Callaloo 20, no. 1 (1997): 129–30.
Jenny Sharpe and Samantha Pinto, “The Sweetest Taboo: Studies of Caribbean Sexualities; a Review Essay,” Signs: Journal of Woman in Culture and Society 32, no.1 (2006): 247.
Rhoda Reddock, Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities (University of West Indies Press, 2004).
Linden Lewis, The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean (University Press of Florida, 2003).
See Isaac Julian’s documentary The Darker Side of Black (1994)
and Rikki Beadle Blair’s stage play Bashment (2005). Both works explore dancehall reggae music and its reputation for homophobic lyrics, which are believed by many to fuel antigay violence in Britain and the Caribbean.
See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004);
Ann du Cille “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–3; and Jackie Goldsby’s “What It Means to be Colored Me,” Out/Look (1990): 8–17.
Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, Language and Sexuality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.
Ross, Marlon, “Race, Rape, Castration: Feminist Theories of Sexual Violence and Masculine Strategies of Black Protest,” Masculinity Studies & Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 306.
See Michael Awkward’s Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
as well as Robyn Wiegman’s American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Steve A. White and Ruth B. White, Life Through the Eyes of an Interracial Couple: And Their Dreams of a Colorblind America (Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2004), 586. While the couple often alternates in their narration, this particular homophobic passage is narrated by Ruth White alone.
Jasbir K. Puar, “Abu Ghraib: Arguing Against Exceptionalism.” Feminist Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 523; emphasis added.
Roberto Strongman, “Syncretic Religion and Dissident Sexualities,” Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. ed. Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 187.
James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 819; emphasis added.
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© 2012 Shaka McGlotten and Dána-Ain Davis
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Foster, G.M. (2012). Translating (Black) Queerness. 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_9
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