Critical American Studies Series Aberrations in Black

George Lipsitz, University of California—San Diego, series editor Toward a Queer of Color Critique

Roderick A. Ferguson

Critical American Studies

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis:: London
An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as "The Nightmares of the
Heteronormative," Cultural Values 4, no. 4 (October 2000).
Contents
Copyright 2004 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Preface
All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, Introduction: Queer of Color Critique, Historical Materialism,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without 1
and Canonical Sociology
the prior written permission of the publisher.

1. The Knee-pants of Servility: American Modernity,

Published by the University of Minnesota Press 31
the Chicago School, and Native Son
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
2. The Specter of Woodridge: Canonical Formations and
http://www.upress.umn.edu 54
the Anticanonical in Invisible Man

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

3. Nightmares of the Heteronormative: Go Tel//ton the Mountain
Ferguson, Roderick A. versus An American Dilemma 82
Aberrations in black : toward a queer of color critique / Roderick A. Ferguson.
p. em. — (Critical American Studies series)
4. Something Else to Be: So/a, The Moynihan Report and
Includes bibliographical references and index. 110
the Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism
ISBN 978-0-81664128-4 (HC : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-8166-4129-1 (PB : alk.
paper)
Conclusion: Toward the End of Normativity 138
1. American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism.
2. Homosexuality and literature— United States —History-20th century.
Notes 149
3. American fiction-20th century—History and criticism. 4. Baldwin,
James, 1924— Go tell it on the mountain. 5. Gays' writings, American—
Index 167
History and criticism . 6. Wright, Richard, 1908-1960. Native son.
7. African American gays—Intellectual life. 8. Ellison, Ralph. Iπvisible
man. 9. African Americans in literature . 10. Morrison, Toni. Sula,
11. Gays in literature. 12. Canon (Literature) I. Title. II. Series.
PS374.14 F47 2003
813'.509896073008664—dc21
2003012779

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

18 17 16 15 14 13 1098765
χ :: PREFAC

in my work and her patience as an interlocutor. I thank Chanta Haywood

for lovingly prodding me to keep writing. I thank Hassan Dhouti, John
Berteaux, Jerry "Rafiki" Jenkins, Ann DuCille, Andrew Zimmerman, Janet
Roberts, and Diane Bartlow for their generosity as readers. I thank Ruby's
Reading Group (Ruby Tapia, Chandan Reddy, Victor Viesca, Maurice Stevens, Introduction
Danny Widener, Gayatri Gopinath, Victor Bascara, and Kyungwon Grace Queer of Color Critique, Historical Materialism,
Hong) for their rigor and their vision for contemporary scholarship in race, and Canonical Sociology
gender, sexuality, and political economy. ply project is all the better because
of the brilliance of their insights and the steadfastness of their rigor. It's been
a few years since we were graduate students, but in many ways I still write n Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, a black drag-queen prostitute sashays
for them. I thank Avery Gordon for spending time with me and helping me to along a waterfront. She has decked herself in a faux leather bomber and a
think of ways to turn a dissertation into a book. I thank Judith Halberstam white tiger-striped dress that stops just below her knees. Her face is heavy
for clarification and for encouraging me to think of queer studies as a site with foundation as she ponders into the distance. She holds a cigarette between
of intervention. I thank Stephanie Smallwood for constant encouragement fingers studded with cheap press-on nails, dragging on it with lips painted red.
and conversation and for insisting that I keep African American studies A poem by Essex Hemphill and a ballad by Nina Simone drum in the back-
on my mind. I thank Kulvinder Arora, Kara Keeling, Jodi Melamed, and ground. It is difficult to discern whether she is melancholic about her life or
Cynthia Tolentino for their enthusiasm and insight as listeners and readers. simply satisfied. This uncertainty, this hint of pleasure and alrightness, flies
I thank Chandan Reddy for brilliance and friendship unparalleled, for mak- in the face of those who say that her life is nothing more than a tangle of
ing this project and my life all the sweeter. Finally, I thank George Lipsitz pathologies and misfortunes. In the pleasure of her existence lies a critique
and Lisa Lowe for being the best mentors I could ever have: George—for of commonplace interpretations of her life. Doubtless, she knows that her
abiding mentorship and for showing me that the creation of an alternative living is not easy. But that's a long way from reducing the components of
university is accomplished through work rather than personality; Lisa—for her identity to the conditions of her labor. Conceding to the meanness of
quietly and unconsciously insisting that our work live up to the difficulty life, probably for her, is a far cry from assuming that her gender and sexual
and complexity of the formations that we address. I thank them for teaching difference are the reason for her poverty and that who she is attests to the
me—as they did countless others—to see the complex and the difficult as my absence of agency.
project's task, rather than its obstruction, and to regard the state of emer- This scene captures the defining elements of this book. In the film, the'
gency as the moment of emergence. To them, I am forever grateful. drag-queen prostitute is a fixture of urban capitalism. Figures like he, ones
Since arriving at Minnesota, I have been fortunate to work in an envi- that allegedly represent the socially disorganizing effects of capital, play a
ronment that is both stimulating and democratic. My colleagues Jennifer powerful part in past and contemporary interpretations of political economy.
Pierce, David Noble, and Jean O'Brien, especially, have made the Depart- In those narratives, she stands for a larger black culture as it has engaged
ment of American Studies a welcoming place, going out of their way to make various economic and social formations. That engagement has borne a range
sure that a newcomer felt like an agent. In addition to the Department of of alienations, each estrangement securing another: her racial difference is
American Studies, I have been deeply moved, informed, and inspired by col- inseparable from her sexual incongruity, her gender eccentricity, and her class
leagues outside of that department: Ananya Chatterjea, Anna Clark, Maria marginality. Moreover, the country of her birth will call out to "the American
Damon, Qadri Ismail, Leola Johnson, Hiromi Mizuno, Gwendolyn Pough, people" and never mean her or others like her. She is multiply determined,
Paula Rabinowitz (and the students in her seminar "Girls Read Marx"), and regulated, and excluded by differences of race, class, sexuality, and gender. As
Michelle Wright. My friend Richard Morrison has been an attentive and un- drag-queen prostitute, she embodies the intersections of formations thought
obtrusive editor. This text is all the better because of his talents and expertise, to be discrete and transparent, a confusion of that which distinguishes the
and because of the craftsmanship of the University of Minnesota Press staff. heterosexual (i.e., "prostitute") from the homosexual (i.e., "drag queen").
These are the people who labored with me, and to them I owe my all. She is disciplined by those within and outside African American communities,

I.
 2 :: INTaooucTIox IRTRODUCTION :: 3

reviled by leftist-radicals, conservatives, heterosexuals, and mainstream queers home to interrogate processes of group formation and self-formation from
alike, erased by those who wish to present or make African American culture the experience of being expelled from their own dwellings and families for
the embodiment of all that she is not—respectability, domesticity, heterosexu- not conforming to the dictation of and demand for uniform gendered and
ality, normativity, nationality, universality, and progress. But her estrangements sexual types.z
are not hers to own. They are, in fact, the general estrangements of African
By identifying the nation as the domain determined by racial difference and
American culture. In its distance from the ideals upheld by epistemology, na-
gender and sexual conformity, Reddy suggests that the decisive intervention
tionalisms, and capital, that culture activates forms of critique.
of queer of color analysis is that racist practice articulates itself generally as
The scene, thus, represents the social heterogeneity that characterizes Af-
gender and sexual regulation, and that gender and sexual differences varie-
rican American culture. To make sense of that culture as the site of gender
gate racial formations. This articulation, moreover, accounts for the social
and sexual formations that have historically deviated from national ideals, we
formations that compose liberal capitalism.
must situate that culture within the genealogy of liberal capitalist economic
In doing so, queer of color critique approaches culture as one site that
and social formations. That genealogy can, in turn, help us perceive how the
compels identifications with and antagonisms to the normative ideals promot-
racialized gender and sexual diversity pertaining to African American cultural
ed by state and capital. For Reddy, national culture constitutes itself against
formations is part of the secular trends of capitalist modes of production.
subjects of color. Alternatively, culture produces houses peopled by queers of
These are trends that manifest themselves globally, linking terrains separated
color, subjects who have been expelled from home. These subjects in turn
by time and space.
"collectively remember home as a site of contradictory demands and condi-
tions.*3 As it fosters both identifications and antagonisms, culture becomes
Queer of Color and the Critique of Liberal Capitalism a site of material struggle. As the site of identification, culture becomes the
The preceding paragraphs suggest that African American culture indexes a terrain in which formations seemingly antagonistic to liberalism, like marx-
social heterogeneity that oversteps the boundaries of gender propriety and ism and revolutionary nationalism, converge with liberal ideology, precisely
sexual normativity. That social heterogeneity also indexes formations that through their identification with gender and sexual norms and ideals. Queer-
are seemingly outside the spatial and temporal bounds of African American of color analysis must examine how culture as a site of identification produces
culture. These arguments oblige us to ask what mode of analysis would be such odd bedfellows and how it—as the location of antagonisms—fosters
appropriate for interpreting the drag-queen prostitute as an image that alle- unimagined alliances.
gorizes and symbolizes that social heterogeneity,a heterogeneity that associ- As an epistemological intervention, queer of color analysis denotes an
ates African American culture with gender and sexual variation and critically interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection,
locates that culture within the genealogy of the West. To assemble such a ideologies that have helped to constitute marxism, revolutionary national-
mode of interpretation,we may begin with the nascent and emergent forma- ism, and liberal pluralism. Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, respec-
tion known as queer of color analysis.z tively, have often figured nation and property as the transparent outcome
In "Home, Houses, Nonidentity: `Paris Is Burning,'" Chandan Reddy of class and racial exclusions. Relatedly, liberal pluralism has traditionally
discusses the expulsion of queers of color from literal homes and from the constructed the home as the obvious site of accommodation and confirma-
privileges bestowed by the nation as "home." Reddy's essay begins with the tion. Queer of color analysis, on the other hand, eschews the transparency
silences that both marxism and liberal pluralism share, silences about the in- of all these formulations and opts instead for an understanding of nation
tersections of gender, sexual, and racial exclusions. Reddy states, and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the
Unaccounted for within both Marxist and liberal pluralist discussions idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection,
ι progress, and confirmation. Indeed, liberal capitalist ideology works to sup-
of the home and the nation, queers of color as people of color ... take
up the critical task of both remembering and rejecting the model of the press the diverse components of state and capitalist formations. To the ex-
~
"home" offered in the United States in two ways: first, by attending to tent that marxism and revolutionary nationalism disavow race, gender, and
the ways in which it was defined over and against people of color, and sexuality's mutually formative role in political and economic relations is the
second, by expanding the locations and moments if that critique of the extent to which liberal ideology captivates revolutionary nationalism and
4 :: INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION :: S

marxism. To restate, queer of color analysis presumes that liberal ideology resembles Louis Althusser 's rereading of historical materialism. Queer of
occludes the intersecting saliency of race, gender, sexuality, and class in color analysis disidentifies with historical materialism to rethink its catego-
forming social practices. Approaching ideologies of transparency as forma- ries and how they might conceal the materiality of race, gender, and sexu-
tions that have worked to conceal those intersections means that queer of ality. In this instance, to disidentify in no way means to discard.
color analysis has to debunk the idea that race, class, gender, and sexuality Addressing the silences within Marx's writings that enable rather than
are discrete formations, apparently insulated from one another. As queer of disturb bourgeois ideology, silences produced by Marx's failure to theorize
color critique challenges ideologies of discreteness, it attempts to disturb the received abstractions like "division of labor, money, value, etc.," Althusser
idea that racial and national formations are obviously disconnected. As an writes in Reading Capital,
intervention into queer of color analysis, this text attempts to locate African
This silence is only "heard" at one precise point, just where it goes tm-
American racial formations alongside other racial formations and within
perceived: when Marx speaks of the initial abstractions on which the work
epistemological procedures believed to be unrelated or tangential to African
of transformation is performed. What are these initial abstractions? By
American culture.
what right does Marx accept in these initial abstractions the categories
from which Smith and Ricardo started, thus suggesting that he thinks in
To Disidentity with Historical Materialism continuity with their object, and that therefore there is no break in object
By relating queer of color subjects and practices to marxism and liberal between them and him? These two questions are really only one single
pluralism, Reddy suggests that queer of color analysis must critically engage question, precisely the question Marx does not answer, simply because he
the genealogy of materialist critique. In his book, Disidensifications: Queers does not pose it. Here is the site of his silence, and this site, being empty,
of Color and the Performance of Politics, Jose Esteban Μυήοτ argues, "Dis- threatens to be occupied by the "natural" discourse of ideology, in particu-
identification is the hermeneutical performance of decoding mass, high, or lar, of empiricism.... An ideology may gather naturally in the hollow left
any other cultural field from the perspective of a minority subject who is by this silence, the ideology of a relation of real correspondence between
disempowered in such a representational hierarchy." As Munoz suggests, the real and its intuition and representation, and the presence of an "ab-
queer of color critique decodes cultural fields not from a position outside straction" which operates on this real in order to disengage from it these
those fields, but from within them, as those fields account for the queer of "abstract general relations," i.e., an empiricist ideology of abstraction.
color subject's historicity. If the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and
As empiricism grants authority to representation, empiricism functions he-
class constitute social formations within liberal capitalism, then queer of
gemonically, making representations seem natural and objective. To assume
color analysis obtains its genealogy within a variety of locations. We may
that categories conform to reality is to think with, instead of against, hege-
say that women of color feminism names a crucial component of that genealo-
mony. As he uncritically appropriated the conceptions of political economy
gy as women of color theorists have historically theorized intersections as the formulated by bourgeois economists, Marx abetted liberal ideology. He
basis of social formations. Queer of color analysis extends women of color
identified with that ideology instead of disidentifying with it. Disidentifying
feminism by investigating how intersecting racial, gender,and sexual prac- with historical materialism means determining the silences and ideologies
tices antagonize and/or conspire with the normative investments of nation- that reside within critical terrains, silences and ideologies that equate repre-
states and capital.
sentations with reality. Queer of color analysis, therefore, extends Althusser's
As queer of color analysis claims an interest in social formations, it lo- observations by accounting for the ways in which Marx's critique of capital-
cates itself within the mode of critique known as historical materialism .$ Since ist property relations is haunted by silences that make racial, gender, and
histońcal materialism has traditionally privileged class over other social rela-
sexual ideologies and discourses commensurate with reality and suitable for
tions, queer of color critique cannot take it up without revision, must not universal ideals.
employ it without disidentification. If to disidentify means to "Irecyclej and An ideology has gathered in the silences pertaining to the intersections
Irethinkj encoded meaning" and "to use the code Iof the majority) as raw of race,gender, sexuality, and class. We may locate that silence within one
material for representing a disempowered politics of positionality that has "tendency" of marxism. Writing about that tendency as part of marxism's
been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture,"' then disidentification critique of Western civilization, Raymond Williams states, "'Civilization' had
6 :: INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION :: I

produced not only wealth, order, and refinement, but as part of the same the appropriation of the obiecιive conditions of life, and of the activity
process poverty, disοrde degradation. It was attacked for its 'arίίίίcίality _ which gives material expression to, or objectifies it (activity as herdsmen,
its glaring contrasts with a natural' or 'human' order."s As it kept silent hunters, agriculturalists, etc.)."
about sexuality and gender, historical materialism, along with liberal ide-
The property relations presumed within tribal communities suggested a
ology, took normative heterosexuality as the emblem of order, nature, and
racialized essence garnered through heterosexual and patriarchal familial
universality, making that which deviated from heteropatriarchal ideals the
arrangements. Another way of wording this would be to say that Marx
sign of disorder. In doing so, marxism thought in continuity with bourgeois
imagined social relations and agency—or as he says, "appropriation" and
definitions of "Civilization." Moreover, the distinction between civilization
"activity"— through heteropatriarchy and racial difference simultaneously.
as progress versus civilization as disorder obtained meaning along the axes
Explicating this assumption about social relations and agency, Marx argues
of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Hence, the distinction between norma-
in The German Ideology, man, who "daily (remakes his( life ... enters into
tive heterosexuality (as the evidence of progress and development) and non-
historical development" by "(making( other men" and "(propagating] their
normative gender and sexual practices and identities (as the woeful signs of
kind."12 Even earlie4 in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx
social lag and dysfunction) has emerged historically from the field of racial-
stated, "This direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is
ized discourse. Put plainly, racialization has helped to articulate heteropatri-
the relation of man to woman. In this natural species relationship, man's
archy as universal.
relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to
Marx universalized heteropatriarchy as he theorized property ownership.
man is his relation to nature—his own natural destination." ' For Marx,
In The German Ideology, he bases the origins of property ownership within
heteropatriarchy was the racialized essence of Man and the standard of so-
the tribe,stating,
ciality and agency.
The first form of ownership is tribal ... ownership.... The division of If a racially secured and dependent heteropatriarchy underlies Marx's ori-
labor is aί the stage still very elementary and is confined to a further exten- gin narrative of social relations and historical agency, then capitalist property
sion of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social relations represent the ultimate obstacle to heteropatriarchal practice and
structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal being. In disrupting heteropatriarchy, capital disrupted man's fundamental
family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves.' essence. Locating this disruption within the emergence of the commodity
form, Marx argues that
For Marx, tribal ownership presumed a natural division of labor symbolized
by the heterosexual and patriarchal family. This definition of the "tribe" as (p)roduction does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human
a signifier of natural divisions cohered with the use of that category in the commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with
nineteenth century. "Tribe" described a "loose family or collection headed this role as a mentally and physically dehumanized being.—Immorality,
common essence associated
not by a `king' but by a 'chief' and denoted a deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists.—Its product is
with the premodern."ta "Tribe" was a racialized category emerging out of the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.
the history of colonial expansion from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centu- Great advance of Ricardo, Mill, etc., on Smith and Say, to declare the exis-
ries. Tribes marked racial difference, securing and transmitting that difference tence of the human being—the greater or lesser human productivity of the
from one person to the next through heteropatriarchal exchange and repro- commodity—to be indifferent and even harmfuLt•
duction. As a racial category, "tribe" illustrates the ways in which racial The commodity disrupts the moral parameters of subjectivity and agency. As
discourses recruited gender and sexual difference to establish racial identity Marx states, the commodification produces man as a "mentally and physi-
and essence. cally dehumanized being," deforming agency and distorting subjectivity.rs
In addition, Marx characterized communal essence and identity as a found- For Marx, the symbol of that dehumanization could be found in none
ing prerequisite for property relations. As he states, other than the prostitute. He writes,

The spontaneously evolved tribal community, or, if you will, the herd—she Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of
common ties of blood, language, custom, etc.—is the first precondition of the laborer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute
 INTRODUCTION iNTRODUCTION :: 9

alone, but also the one who prostitutes—and the latter's abomination is population—living off prostitution'; on the streets and in `temples raised by
still greater—the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head.... Ιπ the ap- English materialism to their gods ... male guests come to exchange their gold
proach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed for debauchery."22 Reports of out-of-wedlock births, prenuptial pregnancy,
the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself.16 early marriage, masturbation, sexually active youth, and so forth arose dur-
ing this period and were for the British middle class evidence of a peaking
The prostitute proves capital's defilement of man. She symbolizes man's de-
sexual chaos. In doing so, they conflated the reality of changing gender and
humanization or more specifically, man's feminization under capitalist rela-
sexual relations with the representation of the prostitute and the working
tions of production. While man's essence in heteropatriarchy suggests un-
class as pathologically sexual. As middle-class witnesses to industrialization
deterred connections with other humans, with one's self, and with nature,
understood their own families to be sufficiently anchored against the moral
the prostitute represents the ways that capital disrupts those connections.
disruptions of capital, they regarded the working class as "rootless and un-
Capital now violently mediates man's relationship to himself, to others,
controlled—a sort of social correlative to unrestrained id."23 Corroborating
and to nature. As a figure of self-interest, the prostitute represents man's
presumptions about industrial capital's encouragement of libertinism, Fred-
descent into vulgar egoism. Suggesting this egoism spawned by capitalist
erick Engels argued, "[N]ext to the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of
alienation, Marx argues, "[Alienated labor] estranges man's own body the principal faults of the English working-men is sexual license."24 Marx's
from him, as it does external nature and his spiritual essence, his human use of the prostitute as the apocalyptic symbol of capital's emergence points
being. We can see that violent mediation very clearly as the worker to his affinity with bourgeois discourses of the day. Both bourgeois ideo-
who—like all prostitutes—must sell his own labor to survive. Castrated logues and their radical opponents took the prostitute as the sign for the
from the means of production, the worker has only that labor that resides gendered and sexual chaos that commodification was bound to unleash.
in his body to sell. As the prostitute is regarded as the property of "com- More to the point, pundits understood this gender and sexual chaos to
munal lust," the worker is "branded ... as the property of capital."ls As be an explicitly racial phenomenon. Indeed, in nineteenth-century Britain,
Marx imagines capitalist expansion through the disruption of heteropatri- the prostitute was a racial metaphor for the gender and sexual confusions
archy, capital implies the mobility of vice, the spread of immorality, and the unleashed by capital, disruptions that destabilized heteropatriarchal confor-
eruption of social transgressions. mity and authority.25 In fact, nineteenth-century iconography used the image
It was precisely this sort of eruption that bourgeois ideologues in nineteenth- of Sarah Bartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, who was ex-
century Britain feared the most. During this period, middle-class observers hibited in freak shows throughout London, to link the figure of the prosti-
conflated the anarchic possibilities of economic production with a presumably tute to the alleged sexual savagery of black women and to install nonwhite
burgeoning sexual deviancy among working-class communities, in general, sexuality as the axis upon which various notions of womanhood turned.26
and working-class women, in particular.19 The prostitute symbolized poor As industrial capital developed and provided working-class white women
and working-class communities' potential threat to gender stability and with limited income and mobility, the prostitute became the racialized figure
sexual normativity. As mills throughout London employed young British that could enunciate anxieties about such changes. Conflating the prostitute
girls, enabling them to buy clothes and other items that were previously with the British working class inspired racial mythologies about the sup-
inaccessible, middle-class citizens often saw working-class girls' tastes in posedly abnormal reproductive capacities and outcomes of that class. One
commodities as signs of awakening sexual appetites. Desires for ribbon, tale suggested that the bodies of British working-class women could produce
lace, and silks, those citizens reasoned, could entice young girls into a life races heretofore unforeseen. One magistrate warned that if "empty casks
of prostitution 20 As Thomas Laquer notes, "[Wjorking-class women were were placed along the streets of Whitechapel," it would help spawn species
thought to bear the dangers of uncontrolled desire that seemed to flow free- of tub men who would wreak havoc on communities in Britain, creating the
ly from οπ e domain to another, from legitimate consumption to illegitimate conditions by which "savages [would live] in the midst of civilization."27
sex."21 Giving credence to the idea that industrialization was engendering The universalization of heteropatriarchy produces the prostitute as the
prostitution, the French socialist and feminist Flora Tristan alleged that other of heteropatriarchal ideals, an other that is simultaneously the ef-
there were in "`London from 80,000-100,000 women—the flower of the fect of racial, gender, sexual, and class discourses, an other that names the
10 : iiTRiiUCtAii INTROouCTION :: 11

social upheavals of capital as racialized disruptions. Unmarried and sexu- The Mu ιtι plications of Surplus: U.S. Racial Formations,
ally mobile, the prostitute was eccentric to the gendered and sexual ideals
N ο nheter οnormativity, and the Overdetermination of Political Economy
of normative (i.e., patriarchal) heterosexuality. That eccentricity denoted Queer of color analysis can build on the idea that capital produces emer-
the pathologies, disorders, and degradations of an emerging civilization. gent social formations that exceed the racialized boundaries of gender and
Rather than embodying heteropatriarchal ideals, the prostitute was a figure sexual ideals, can help explain the emergence of subjects like the drag-queen
of nonheteronormativity, excluded from the presumed security of hetero- prostitute. At the same time, queer of color critique can and must challenge
patriarchal boundaries. the idea that those social formations represent the pathologies of modern
As such, she and others like her were the targets of both liberal and revolu- society. In other words, queer of color work can retain historical material-
tionary regulations. Those regulations derived their motives from the fact that
ism's interest in social formations without obliging the silences of historical
both bourgeois and revolutionary practices were conceived through heteropa-
materialism.
triarchy. We may imagine Marx asking, "How could she—the prostitute—be
Capital is a formation constituted by discourses of race, gender, and
entrusted with the revolutionary transformation of society?" Likewise, we
sexuality, discourses that implicate nonheteronormative formations like the
could imagine the bourgeoisie declaring, "Never could whores rationally
prostitute. In addition, capitalist political economies have been scenes for
administer a liberal society." Historical materialism and bourgeois ideology
the universalization and, hence, the normalization of sexuality. But those
shared the tendency to read modern civilization as the racialized scene of
economies have also been the arenas for the disruption of normativity. If we
heteronormative disruption. Marx fell into that ideology as he conflated the
are to be sensitive to the role that those normalizations and disruptions have
dominant representation of the prostitute with the social upheavals wrought
played within liberal capitalism, we can only take up historical materialism
by capital. Put differently, he equated the hegemonic discourse about the
by integrating the critique of normative regimes with the analysis of politi-
prostitute, a discourse that cast her as the symbol of immorality, vice, and
cal economy. In doing so, we must clarify the ways in which our knowledge
corruption, with the reality of a burgeoning capitalist economy. Taking the
of liberal capitalism implies this contradiction—that is, the normalization of
prostitute to be the obvious and transparent sign of capital, at what point
heteropatriarchy on the one hand, and the emergence of eroticized and gen-
could Marx approach the prostitute and her alleged pathologies as discur-
dered racial formations that dispute heteropatriarchy's universality on the
sive questions, rather than as the real and objective outcomes of capitalist
other. Understanding the drag-queen prostitute means that we must locate
social relations? At what point might he then consider the prostitute and
her within a national culture that disavows the configuration of her own
others like her to be potential sites from which to critique capital?
racial, gender, class, and sexual particularity and a mode of production that
Naturalizing heteropatriarchy by posing capital as the social threat to
fosters her own formation.
heteropatriarchal relations meant that both liberal reform and proletarian
While Marx, like his liberal antagonists, was seduced by the universaliza-
revolution sought to recover heteropatriarchal integrity from the ravages of
tion of heteropatriarchy, he can also help us locate procedures of universali-
industrialization. Basing the fundamental conditions of history upon hetero-
zation within state formations. As he writes in "On the Jewish Question,"
sexual reproduction and designating capital as the disruption of heterosexual
normativity did more than designate the subject of modern society as hetero- [The state] is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its uni-
normative. It made the heteronormative subject the goal of liberal and radi- versality only in opposition to these elements [private property, education,
cal practices. Under such a definition of history, political economy became an occupation, and so forth]. Hegel, therefore, defines the relation of the
arena where heteronormative legitimation was the prize. Universalizing het- political state quite correctly when he says: "In order for the state to come
eropatriarchy and constructing a racialized other that required heteropatriar- in to existence as the self-knowing ethical actuality of spirit, it is essential
chal regulation was not the peculiar distinction of, or affinity between, Marx that it should be distinct from the forms of authority and of faith. But this
and his bourgeois contemporaries. On the contrary, the racialized investment distinction emerges only in so far as divisions occur within the ecclesiasti-
in heteropatriarchy bequeathed itself to liberal and revolutionary projects, to cal sphere itself. It is only in this way that the state, above the particular
bourgeois and revolutionary nationalisms alike. Queer of color analysis must churches, has attained to the universality of thought—its formal principle—
disidentify with historical materialism so as not to extend this legacy. and is bringing this universality into existence."2%
 MiR Ο D U CTIO Ν Ντ eοουετιο :: 13

For Marx, the state establishes its universality in opposition to the particulari- o himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phenomenon." 32
ties of education, property, religion, and occupation. For our own purposes, Man, the subject of civil society, is not an unmediated figure. As an illusory
we may add that this universality exists in opposition to racial, gender, class, phenomenon, Man is constituted within discourse. Like the British prosti-
and sexual particularities as well. As heteropatriarchy was universalized, it tute and the race of tub men, Man testifies to capital as a simultaneously
helped to constitute the state and the citizen's universality. Lisa Lowe's argu- discursive and material site. The growth of capital implies the proliferation
ments about the abstract citizen's relationship to particularity and difference of discourses.
prove instructive here. She writes, The gendered and eroticized history of U.S. racialization compels us to
address both these versions of multiplication. Indeed, my use of nonhetero-
[The] abstraction of the citizen is always in distinction to the particularity
normativity attempts to name the intersection between the racialized inul-
of man's material condition. In this context, for Marx, "political eman-
tiplication of gender and sexual perversions and the dispersion of capitalist
cipation" of the citizen is the process of relegating to the domain of the
private all "nonpolitical" particulars of religion, social rank, education, property relations. Anxieties about this multiplication characterized Ameri-
can industrialization. The migrations of Asians, Europeans, Mexicans, and
occupation, and so on in exchange for representation on the political
African Americans generated anxieties about how emerging racial forma-
terrain of the state where "man is the imaginary member of an imaginary
sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal tions were violating gender and sexual norms. As racialized ethnic minori-
universality."29
ties became the producers of capitalist surplus value, the American political
economy was transformed into an apparatus that implanted and multiplied
The universality of the citizen exists in opposition to the intersecting particu- intersecting racial, gender, and sexual perversions. Nonwhite populations
larities that account for material existence, particularities of race, gender, were racialized such that gender and sexual transgressions were not inciden-
class, and sexuality. As a category of universality, normative heteropatri- tal to the production of nonwhite laboη but constitutive of it. For instance,
archy or heteronormativity exists in opposition to the particularities that industrial expansion in the southwest from 1910 to 1930, as George Sanchez
constitute nonheteronormative racial formations. In this formulation, the notes, "created an escalating demand for low-wage labor" and inspired more
citizen is a racialized emblem of heteronormativity whose universality exists than one million Mexicans to immigrate to the United States 33 The entrance
at the expense of particularities of race, gender, and sexuality. of Mexican immigrant labor into the U.S. workforce occasioned the rise
Ironically, capital helps produce formations that contradict the univer- of Americanization programs designed to inculcate American ideals into the
sality of citizenship. As the state justifies property through this presumed Mexican household. Those programs were premised on the racialized con-
universality, through claims about access, equivalence, rights, and humanity, struction of the Mexican immigrant as primitive in terms of sexuality, and
capital contradicts that universality by enabling social formations marked by premodern in terms of conjugal rites and domestic habits.34 In the nineteenth
intersecting particularities of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Those forma- century as well, San Francisco's Chinatown was the site of polymorphous
tions are the evidence of multiplications. By this I mean the multiplication sexual formations that were marked as deviant because they were nonrepro-
of racialized discourses of gender and sexuality and the multiplication of ductive and nonconjugal. Formed in relation to exclusion laws that prohib-
labor under capital. Addressing the multiplication of discourses and their ited the immigration of Asian women to the United States and out of U.S.
relationship to modernity, Foucault argues, "The nineteenth century and capital's designation of Asian immigrants as surplus and redundant labor,
our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexu- Chinatown became known for its bachelor societies, opium dens, and prosti-
alities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of tutes. Each one of these formations rearticulated normative familial arrange-
`perversions.' Our epoch has initiated sexual heteτogeneities."30 For Marx, ments and thereby violated a racialized ideal of heteropatriarchal nucleari-
the multiplication of class divisions and economic exploitation characterizes ty35 Likewise, as African American urban communities of the North were
modernity. As he states, "Growth of capital implies growth of its constituent, created out of the demands of northern capital in the early twentieth century,
in other words, the part invested in labour-power. "31 Despite conventional they gave birth to vice districts that in turn transformed gender and sexual
wisdom, we may think of these two types of multiplication in tandem. For ideals and practices in northern cities. As Kevin Mumford notes, spurted by
instance, in "On the Jewish Question," Marx states, "Man, in his most inti- a wartime economy and "in protest of outrageous repression" in the South,
mate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he appears both the Great Migration—through the production of speakeasies, black and tans,
 INTR°D υ CT]DN I NTRODUCTION :: 15

intermarriage, and fallen women—caused a change in "gender roles, standards at are "relativety redundant working populations ... that is superfluous
of sexuality," and conjugal ideals 36 to capitals average requirements for its own valorization."38 Surplus popu-
As capital solicited Mexican, Asian, Asian American, and African Ameri- lations exist as future laborers for capital, "always ready for exploitation
can labor, it provided the material conditions that would ultimately disrupt by capital in the interests of capital's own changing valorization require-
the gender and sexual ideals upon which citizenship depended. The racial- ments."39 Both superfluous and indispensable, surplus populations fulfill and
ization of Mexican, Asian, Asian American, and African American labor as exceed the demands of capital.
contrary to gender and sexual normativity positioned such labor outside the In the United States, racial groups who have a history of being excluded
image of the American citizen. The state's regulation of nonwhite gender from the rights and privileges of citizenship (African Americans, Asian Ameri-
and sexual practices through Americanization programs, vice commissions, cans, Native Americans, and Latinos, particularly) have made up the sur-
residential segregation, and immigration exclusion attempted to press non- plus populations upon which U.S. capital has depended. The production of
whites into gender and sexual conformity despite the gender and sexual di- such populations has accounted for much of the racial heterogeneity within
versity of those racialized groups. That diversity was, in large part, the out- the United States. As mentioned before, the heterogeneity represented by
come of capital's demand for labor. As a technology of race, U.S. citizenship U.S. surplus populations was achieved to a large degree because of capital's
has historically ascribed heteronormativity (universality) to certain subjects need to accumulate labor.
and nonheteronormativity (particularity) to others. The state worked to As capital produced surplus populations, it provided the contexts out of
regulate the gender and sexual nonnormativity of these racialized groups which nonheteronormative racial formations emerged?° As U.S. capital had
in a variety of ways. In doing so, it produced discourses that pathologized to constantly look outside local and national boundaries for labor, it often
nonheteronormative U.S. racial formations. In the case of Mexican immi- violated ideals of racial homogeneity held by local communities and the
grants, Americanization programs attempted to reconstitute the presumably United States at large. As it violated those ideals, capital also inspired wor-
preindustrial Mexican home, believed to be indifferent to domestic arrange- ries that such violations would lead to the disruption of gender and sexual
ments and responsibilities. Doing so meant that the Mexican mother had to proprieties. If racialization has been the "site of a contradiction between the
be transformed into a proper custodian who would be fit for domestic labor promise of political emancipation and the conditions of economic exploita-
in white homes, as well as her own. As George Sanchez notes, "By encour- tion,"41 then much of that contradiction has pivoted on the racialization of
aging Mexican immigrant women to wash, sew, cook, budget, and mother working populations as deviant in terms of gender and sexuality. As for-
happily and efficiently, Americans would be assured that Mexican women mations that transgress capitalist political economies, surplus populations
would be ready to enter the labor market, while simultaneously presiding become the locations for possible critiques of state and capital.
over a home that nurtured American values of economy."37 In the case if Marx addresses many of the ways in which capital fosters social hetero-
Asian Americans, immigration exclusion laws worked to ensure that the geneity and therefore nonequivalent formations. For instance, he states,
gender and sexual improprieties of Asian Americans would not transgress
As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and
U.S. boundaries as residential segregation worked to guarantee that such
in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for a rural
impropriety among Asian and Asian American residents would not contami-
working population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital
nate white middle-class neighborhoods. In like fashion, vice commissions
employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being compensat-
in New York and Chicago, along with antimiscegenation laws, attempted to
ed for by a greater attraction of workers, as is the case in non-agricultural
insulate middle-class whites from the real and presumed gender and sexual
industries. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the
nonnormative practices of African Americans and Asian Americans.
point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on
Despite his naturalization of gender, sexuality, and race, Marx is useful
the lookout for opportunities to complete this transformation.... There is
for thinking about how capital fundamentally disrupts social hierarchies.
thus a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population 42
Those disruptions account for the polymorphous perversions that arise out
of the production of labor. Marx defines surplus labor as that labor that capi- Moreover, as capital produced certain working populations as redundant, it
talist accumulation "constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct re- inspired rural populations to migrate in search of employment, a move that
lation with its own energy and extent." Surplus populations are populations ensured greater and greater heterogeneity in urban areas. The constant flow
16 :: INlRQDUCTIOII INTROOUCTION :: ί 7

of surplus populations from the rural to the urban captures the diverse his- normative prescriptions, especially in those moments in which it warns to
tories of nonwhite migrations within and to the United States. For instance, placate the interests of the state.
this movement from the rural to the urban denotes the history of African While capital can only reproduce itself by ultimately transgressing the
American migration. boundaries of neighborhood, home, and region, the state positions itself as
As well as exceeding local and regional boundaries,surplus populations the protector of those boundaries. As the modern nation-state has histori-
disrupt social hierarchies of race, gender, age, and sexuality. As it produces cally been organized around an illusory universality particularized in terms
surplus, capital compels the transgression of previously established hierar- of race, gender, sexuality, and class, state formations have worked to protect
chies and provides the context for the emergence of new social arrange- and guarantee this universality. But in its production of surplus populations
ments, identities, and practices. As Marx states, unevenly marked by a racialized nonconformity with gender and sexual
norms, capital constantly disrupts that universality. As the state and het-
We have further seen that the capitalist buys with the same capital a greater
eronormativity work to guarantee and protect that universality, they do so
mass of labour-power, as he progressively replaces skilled workers by less
against the productive needs and social conditions set by capital, conditions
skilled, mature labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults
that produce nonheteronormative racial formations. If heteronormativity is
by that of young persons or children. (788)
racialized, as I have been arguing, then it is not only gender and sexual in-
To adapt this insight to the circumstances of U.S. working populations we tegrity that are at stake for heteronormative formations, like the state, but
might add "immigrant" and "nonwhite" to that of "less skilled," "female," racial integrity and purity as well. As capital disrupts social hierarchies in
and "child." Hence, the creation of surplus is the violation of the bound- the production of surplus labor, it disrupts gender ideals and sexual norms
aries of age, home, race, and nation. that are indices of racial difference. Disrupting those ideals often leads to
Surplus populations point to a fundamental feature of capital: It does new racialized gender and sexual formations. To restate, capital requires
not rely on normative prescriptions to assemble labor, even while it may use the transgression of space and the creation of possibilities for intersection
those prescriptions to establish the value of that labor. Capital is based on a and convergence. Capital, therefore, calls for subjects who must transgress
logic of reproduction that fundamentally overrides and often violates hetero- the material and ideological boundaries of community, family, and nation.
patriarchy's logic. Subsequently,capital often goes against the state's uni- Such transgressions are brought into relief through the capitalist production
versalization and normalization of heteropatriarchy. Discussing the ways in of labor. As surplus labor becomes the impetus for anxieties about the sanc-
which capital bypasses heterosexual means of reproduction, Marx argues, tity of "community," "family," and "nation," it reveals the ways in which
these categories are normalized in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
The expansion by fits and states of the scale of production is the precondi-
Indeed, the production of labor, ultimately, throws the normative bound-
tion for its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former,
aries of race, gender, class, and sexuality into confusion.
but the former is impossible without disposable human mateńal, without
Nonheteronormative racial formations represent the historic accumula-
an increase in she number of workers, which must occur independently of
tion of contradictions°7 around race, gender, sexuality, and dass. The variety
the absolute growth of the population. (785-86)
of such racial formations (Asian, Asian American, Mexican, Chicano, Native
Continuing with this argument, he states American, African American, and so forth) articulates different racialized,
gendered, and eroticized contradictions to the citizen-ideal of the state and
Capitalist production can by no means content itself with she quantity of
the liberatory promise of capital. In doing so, they identify the ways in which
disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields.
race, gender, and sexuality intersect within capitalist political economies and
It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is
shape the conditions of capital's existence. To address these formations as
independent of these natural limits. (788, italics mine)
an accumulation means that we must ask the question of what possibilities
Capital is based on a fundamentally amoral logic. Capital, without pressures they offer for agency. We must see the gendered and eroticized elements of
from the state or citizenry, will assemble labor without regard for norma- racial formations as offering ruptural—i.e., critical—possibilities. Approach-
tive prescriptions of race and gender Capital,on the other hand, will oblige ing them as sites of critique means that we must challenge the construction
18 : ι τααυυcτιοrv ωτααυυcτι m :: 19

of these formations as monstrous and threatening to others who have no nonheteronormative formations can help us see how U.S. capital has also
possibility of critical agency and instead engage nonheteronormative racial been regarded as a site of pathologies and perversions that have designated
formations as the site of ruptures, critiques, and alternatives. Racial forma- racialized nonwhite communities as the often ominous outcome of capital's
tions, as they are constituted nonnormatively by gender and sexual differ- roductive needs. As I stated earlier, queer of color analysis attempts to
ences, overdetetmine44 national identity, contradicting its manifold promises explain how gender and sexuality variegate racial formations and how that
of citizenship and property. This overdetermination could compel intersect- variety indexes material processes. We must engage racial knowledge about
ing antiracist, feminist, class, and queer struggles to emerge. African American culture as it was produced by sociology if we are to under-
stand the gender and sexual variation within African American culture as
the outcome of material and discursive processes.
Ε pistemο~οgy, PοΥtka Economy, and Regulation
In Modernity and Self-Identity, Anthony Giddens argues that reflection
Historical materialism is not the only inquiry into social formations char-
is one of the institutional traits of modernity and that "[sociology], and the
acterized by investments in normative epistemes. Canonical American soci-
social sciences more widely conceived, are inherent elements of the institu-
ology betrays those investments as well. Canonical sociology denotes a dis-
tional reflexivity of modernity."46 In the United States, the social changes
cursive formation that emerges out of Enlightenment claims to rationality
hat characterized American modernity brought different peoples and cultures
and scientific objectivity. These claims entail an investment in heterosexual
within close proximity to one another. Because of these changes, sociology
patriarchy as the appropriate standard for social relations and the signature
sought to "understand the ways in which societies (or cultures or peoples)
of hegemonic whiteness. As canonical sociology has racialized heteropatri- differed from one another,"4 initiating a foundational concern with dif-
archy through whiteness, the discipline has excluded and disciplined those ference into sociology's reflexive project. We can see American sociology's
formations that deviate from the racial ideal of heteropatriarchy. interest in difference in the discipline's fascination with the social conditions
We can see the exclusionary and disciplinary techniques at work in the of African American existence. For early American sociologists of racial rela-
discipline's engagement with African American culture. American sociology tions, the question of African American culture became the location within
has historically understood civilization as the production of wealth and order which sociologists could speculate about the relationships between moderni-
and as the spread of disorder and dehumanization. American sociology, like zation and cultural difference. Even though these sociologists of race often
historical materialism, has proffered heteronormativity as the scene of order presumed that they were studying racial phenomena that were external to
and rationality and nonheteronormativity as the scene of abandonment and them, the sociology of race was, in fact, a site for the production of racial
dysfunction. In doing so, the discipline has contributed to the discursivity knowledge that "consisted ex hypothesi in the making of difference."48 The
of capital. I turn now to canonical sociology because it has contributed to sociological writings about race "[were] part of the reflexivity of modernity:
that discursivity as it has produced racial knowledge about African Ameri- they [served] routinely to organise and alter the aspects of social life they
can culture. Indeed, sociology has been a hegemonic site of reflection about [reported] on or [analysed]."49
African American culture and has read that culture consistently through a American sociology began as a way to reflect on "the vast dislocations from
heteronormative lens. American sociology has deployed liberal ideology as extremely rapid urbanization and industrialization. [It] was shaped from the
the main paradigm through which to read American racialization. Histori- start by a moral response to immediate national social problems—racial and
cal materialism has provided the means by which canonical sociology could cultural concerns prominent among them."S0 The social problems that oc-
translate processes of state and capital into a narrative of African Ameri- casioned sociological interest were ones posed by migrations to urban areas.
can racial formation and disruptions to gender and sexual ideals.45 In fact, n sociological discourses, African American migration loomed largely in
universalizing heteropatriarchy and understanding that universalization as narratives of urban and industrial dislocations and in the moral responses
whiteness and through American citizenship defined the core of sociological 0 national and social problems enunciated of the axes of race and culture.
reflection about African American culture. As it has done so, formations like hereas in 1910, 637,000 African Americans lived in cities in the North
the drag-queen prostitute have been a constant preoccupation that canonical and the West, by 1930 that number had grown to 2,228,000 51 Sociologists
sociology has constructed as pathologies emblematic of African American worried that African American migrants from rural beginnings were cul-
culture. Looking at canonical sociology's relationship to African American turally unfit and morally unversed for the demands of city life. Canonical
20 :: INTRODUCTION NτeοουετιοN :: 21

sociology imagined African American culture as the site of polymorphous tions, but also through the racialized body. Sociology helped to establish Af-
gender and sexual perversions and associated those perversions with moral rican American corporeal difference as the sign of a nonheteronormativity
failings typically. During this period, sociologists broke with prior formula- presumed to be fundamental to African American culture. Marking African
tions of African American racial difference by eschewing explanations of Americans as such was a way of disenfranchising them politically and eco-
biological inferiority but revised those formulations by offering the cultural nomically. In sum, the material and discursive production of African Ameri-
inferiority of African Americans as an explanation for urban poverty and can nonheteronormativity provided the interface between the gendered and
social upheaval. Often sociologists explained African American poverty and eroticized properties of African American racial formation and the material
upheaval through what was considered African American gender, sexual, practices of state and civil society.
and familial eccentricity. Sociological arguments about African American I theorize African American nonheteronormative difference as a way of
cultural inferiority were racialized discourses of gender and sexuality. As thinking discourse and contradiction in tandem. Foucault argues against the
Kobena Mercer argues, "[A]ssumptions about black sexuality lie at the presumption that the modern age was simply about the repression of sexu-
heart of the ideological view that black households constitute deviant, dis- ality, arguing instead that scientific discourses have produced a multiplicity
organized and even pathological familial forms that fail to socialize their of sexual perversions. Foucault is also arguing against narratives that locate
members into societal norms."52 the age of repression within the development of capitalism and bourgeois
At the base of sociological arguments about African American cultural order.58 We may extend and revise Foucault's argument by addressing the
inferiority lay questions about how well African Americans approximated ways in which sociological discourse produced multiple sexual and gender
heteronormative ideals and practices embodied in whiteness and ennobled in perversions coded as nonwhite racial difference and as the study of African
American citizenship. For instance, African Americans' fitness for citizenship American culture. By engaging capital as a site of contradictions that com-
was measured in terms of how much their sexual, familial, and gender rela- pels racial formations that are eccentric to gender and sexual normativity,
tions deviated from a bourgeois nuclear family model historically embodied I have also attempted to revise the presumption that capital is the site of
by whites 53 The sexualized construction of African Americans was both a gender and sexual uniformity.
way of grounding African American racial difference within the so-called But canonical sociology has produced that heterogeneity to discipline it. In
vagaries of the sexual and a way of locating African Americans within liberal The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin defines canonization as a process
capitalism. Liberal ideology has typically understood the family as that insti- that attempts to suppress the heterogeneity of meaning. For Bakhtin, the het-
tution that provides stability and civility against the instability and ruthless- erogeneity refers to the multiplicity that characterizes a given social context.
ness of civil socίety.54 That ideology has historically constructed the African Sociology, when incarnated canonically, attempts to discursively suppress an
American family as an insufficient tether against the chaos of civil society. The actual material heterogeneity. The material heterogeneity that I've been dis-
advancement of capitalism, therefore, has occasioned the state's efforts to dis- cussing is one that critically exposes the gender and sexual diversity within ra-
place the social burdens of that advancement onto relations within the private cial formations. That multiplicity points to the illusions of universal claims as
sphere, making the African American family the bearer of those burdens. they are taken up by canonical sociology and the American state. As canoni-
Liberal ideology has recommended conforming to the heterosexual nuclear cal sociology suppresses heterogeneity in the name of universality, it becomes
family model as the appropriate way to bear such burdens.55 Canonical an epistemological counterpart to the state's enforcement of universality as
sociology has consistently abutted that ideology by demanding the hetero - the state suppresses nonheteronormative racial difference. Pathologizing the
normalization of African Americans as the primary resolution to economic material heterogeneity embodied in African American nonheteronormative
devastation. By "[naturalizing] heterosexuality as the only possible, sensible, formations disciplines its critical possibilities. As a site that arches toward uni-
and desirable organizing principle by which society and social relations can versality, canonical sociology can only obscure the ways that nonheteronor-
function,"56 canonical sociology aligned itself with the regulatory impera- mative racial formations point to the contradictions between the promise of
tives of the state against African Americans. equality and the practice of exclusions based on a racialized gender and sexu-
African American culture has historically been deemed contrary to the al eccentricity, an eccentricity produced through discourse and articulated in
norms of heterosexuality and patriarchy. As its embodiment in whiteness practice. As the universal has been the justification for political and economic
attests, heteronormativity is not simply articulated through intergender rela- regulations of those formations deemed antithetical to it, canonical sociology
22 :: INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION :: 23

has intersected with forms of nationalism and capital over the gendered and not referring to black sociologists. While these authors may be canonical
sexual regulation of nonwhite populations. to African American studies, they are part of the unseen and subterranean
As canonical formations suppress the multiplicity of a social context, layers of American sociology. While seemingly a progressive and democratic
they also regulate the diversity that constitutes a discipline. As canonical move, including African American sociologists within the definition of ca-
formations are constituted through claims to universality, they oblige them- nonical sociology actually denies the regulatory and exclusionary practices
selves to the regulatory and exclusionary imperatives of those claims. They of canonical formations and suggests the perfection of the discipline. This
must present their own histories as ones emptied of formations that contra- sort of move is really liberal ideology applied to epistemology. Rather than
dict universality. In the context of canonical sociology, black sociologists reifying the suppression of African American sociologists by not addressing
occupy such a position. During periods of segregation and industrializa- them at all, I attempt to demonstrate the ways in which canonical sociology
tion, African Americnn sociologists were incapable of claiming the illusory has usurped their intellectual work and banished them from the taken-for-
universality fostered by canonical sociology. Black sociologists such as St. granted and lived history of American sociology.
Claire Drake, Horace Cayton, and E. Franklin Frazier operated within a As it has imputed African American culture with hegemonic meanings,
historical moment that constructed the black body as the antithesis of the ra- canonical sociology is part of the genealogy of African American nonhetero-
tionality and universality of Western epistemology and American citizenship. normativity. It has constructed African American racial difference as the
Whereas the bodies of canonical (i.e., "white") sociologists were unmarked exemplar of social pathologies that suggest gender and sexual disorders.
by particularities of gender, sexuality, class, and race, the bodies of black Moreover, it has affixed that meaning to African American culture and to Af-
sociologists were the signs of racial differences that placed the rationality rican American bodies. Canonical sociology has consistently said that these
of African American sociologists into question. The nonheteronormative hegemonic formulations are appropriate to understanding the upheavals
racial difference associated with black bodies prevented them from claiming formed by industrialization.
canonical status. For instance, during the 7.930s the Carnegie Corporation
asked a "neutral" and "objective" Swedish sociologist—Gunnar Myrdal—to
head the major study of race relations within the United States rather than Culture, Heterogeneity, and Rupture
E. Franklin Frazier, despite Frazier's status as the authority on race within In their introduction to The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital,
the states.59 Canonical sociology excluded black sociologists as subjects Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd make the following argument:
who could not claim the universal properties of the rational subject of epis- We suggest "culture" obtains a political force when a cultural formation
temology and the citizen-subject of the United States. comes into contradiction with economic or political logics that try to
Without a doubt, black sociologists from the thirties to the seventies ref unction it for exploitation or domination. Rather than adopting the
contributed to the body of sociological knowledge. We need only think of understanding of culture as one sphere in a set of differentiated spheres
how influential Charles Johnson's work was to Gunnar Myrdal's American and practices, we discuss "culture" as a terrain in which politics, culture,
Dilemma or to how F. Franklin Frazier's theories about the black family and the economic form an inseparable dynamics°
laid the groundwork for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family. As a
regulatory and exclusionary formation, canonical sociology has subjugated I have been implying throughout this chapter that epistemology, along with
the history of African American sociology, making authors like Myrdal, politics and economics, composes the cultural terrain as well. Indeed, Af-
Moynihan, Park, and Burgess the spectacular representatives of American rican American culture obtains a political force as American sociology has
sociology's interest in social relations during periods of industrialization. attempted to retool African American nonheteronormative difference for
In turn, canonical sociology has made black sociologists such as Du Bois, state and economic exploitation and domination. As the site of nonhetero-
Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson, normative difference, African American culture materially and discursively
Kelly Miller, and Monroe Work part of the unread genealogy of American registers the gender and sexual heterogeneity of African American racial for-
sociology. Canonical sociology expresses an ideological imperative, one that mations as critiques of the contradictions of state and capital and the regula-
calls for the subjugation of the historical roles of African American soci- tions of canonical sociology.
ologists. Hence as I address canonical sociology throughout this text, I am This book critiques canonical sociology by concentrating on a cultural
24 :: ιατsοσυετιοα iNTRODUCTION :: 25

form that negotiates with the material and discursive components of Afri- Aesthetic culture has pronounced progress and perfectibility within the
can American culture. That cultural form is the African American novel. intertwining languages of nationalism and normativity. The nineteenth-
Indeed, the material and discursive multiplicity of African American culture century French intellectual and Enlightenment exponent Germaine de Stael
registers upon African American novels. As I have been suggesting, the defined the relationship between canonical Iiteramre, nationalism, and mo-
gender and sexual heterogeneity of that culture interrogates the singularity, rality when she wrote, "Literature can derive its enduring beauty only from
normativity, and universality presupposed by national culture. As minority the most perfect morality.... If Literature can serve morality, it must also
cultural forms, African American novels record that interrogation. Produced have a powerful influence upon renown, for there can be no enduring honor
within a history of exclusion and nonwhite racialization, these forms are in a country where there is no public morality."s+ As literature upholds pub-
both within and outside canonical genealogies. Hence, we cannot assume lic morality, it gives honor to the nation. According to Madame de Stael,
that African American cultural forms interrogate national culture in ways literature's aesthetic function is inseparable from its normative and political
that are transparent or intentional. Canonical formations pressure cultural function. David Theo Goldberg situates the Enlightenment's reformulation
forms, in general, but literature in particular. The contradictory formation of classical aesthetics within eighteenth-century practices of racialization. He
of African American literature—as both within and outside of canonical states, "(Ijatural qualities of beauty and perfection were supposed to be
genealogy—means that we can exploit its alienation from canonical presump- established on a priori grounds of racial membership."b} Progress and per-
tions of universality and normativiry to provide a critique of the ways in fection became the racialized tropes of the Enlightenment and were immedi-
which African Americans have been racialized as pathologically nonhetero- ately associated with aesthetic culture. Celebrating the dictates of morality
normative. We may even use this cultural form to deepen our understanding would assure literature its universality and grant distinction to the nation-
of the gender and sexual multiplicity that constitutes African American cul- state, a distinction and universality that, in the context of the eighteenth and
ture. If we were to relate this sort of interrogation to queer of color analysis, nineteenth centuries, were racialized and normalized.
we might say that queer of color critique employs cultural forms to bear wit- In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville echoed Madame de
ness to the critical gender and sexual heterogeneity that comprises minority Stael's sentiments. Discussing the relationship between the life of the mind
cultures. Queer of color analysis does this to shed light on the ruptural com- and the rational individual who is the epistemological counterpart of the
ponents of culture, components that expose the restrictions of universality, liberal citizen-subject, Tocqueville states that "[poetry], eloquence, memory,
the exploitations of capital, and the deceptions of national culture. the graces of the mind, the fires of the imagination and profundity of
As an example of the ways in which canonical ideologies pressured Af- thought, all things scattered broadcast by heaven, were a profit to democ-
rican American literature, we need only look at the historical and ideological racy, and ... served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness
circumstances out of which black writing arose. In Figures in Black: Words, of man.*64 Tocqueville, like Madame de Stael, assumes intellectual and aes-
Signs, and the "Racial" Self, for instance, Henry Louis Gates identifies the thetic work will promote the normalizing knowledges of the liberal state.
ways that African American literature arose as a way to claim humanity for Those knowledges distinguish between the rational citizen, who embodies
African Americans, and in doing so, took up Enlightenment practices of and claims the rights and privileges of citizenship,versus the irrational other,
recognition and legitimation. He argues, who can never possess those rights and privileges." If morality is that which
(The] black tradition 's own concern with winning the war against racism legitimates certain social practices, then liberal ideology delegated aesthetic
culture to justify normative social relations and the liberal nation-state.
had led it not only to accept this arbitrary relationship but to embrace
Moreover, aesthetic culture could demonstrate moral fitness for citizenship,
it, judging its own literature by a curious standard that derived from the
demonstrating that the citizen-subject is idealized through race and con-
soul applications of the metaphors of the great chain of being,the idea
ceived in normativity.
of progress and the perfectibility of man,as well as the metaphor of capaci-
Accordingly, liberal ideology has often presented literature as a mecha-
ty derived initially from eighteenth-century comparative studies of the
anatomy of simian and human brains and then translated into a metaphor
nism by which marginalized groups can bid for the normative positions of
for intelligence and the artistic potential of a "race.*61
state and civil society. Abolitionists used the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley and
the letters of Ignarius Sancho to show "that the untutored African may pos-
Inasmuch as African American writing thematized progress and perfectibili- sess abilities equal to an European."" Aesthetic practices would grant access
ty, it located itself within the signature preoccupations of modernity. to national culture and Western civilization and would bestow the properties
26 :: INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION :: 21

of the rational (i.e., "white") citizen-subject onto the irrational other. As

not contradictory. 1 simply mean to suggest that African American culture's
canonical interpretations format literature to enable morality, they presume own particular contradiction of being racialized as nonheteronormative pro-
literature's obligation to normalize and universalize heteropatriarchal rela- duces nonheteronormativity as a site of rupture. Canonical sociology could
tions. As we saw with canonical sociology and historical materialism, univer- not produce nonheteronormativity as a site of rupture because whether as
salizing and normalizing heteropattiarchal relations would also necessitate 5nρplicant or as critic, sociology universalized and racialized heteropatriarchy
disciplining nonheteronormative formations. Indeed, regulating nonhetero- and pathologized nonheteronormativity as nonwhite difference. In this book,
normative elements exposes a nationalist imperative at work within aesthet- I have juxtaposed sociological texts alongside African American novels to
ics. As it responds to canonical pressures, literature engages the racialized demonstrate how African American culture as a site of reflection compelled
genealogy of citizen and state formations. struggles and confrontations over the meaning of the gendered and sexual
As queer of color critique addresses minority cultural forms as both diversity associated with African American culture. In other words, l situate
within and outside canonical genealogies, pointing to the ruptural possibili- African American novelists alongside canonical sociologists to illuminate
ties of those forms means that culture is not simply exhausted by its com- how African American culture as an epistemological object produced dia-
plicity with regulation. Inasmuch as minority cultural forms are eccentric logical relations that both exceeded the formal parameters of its interlocu-
to the normative and racialized properties of canonical formations, they tors and confused the distinctions between factual and fictive enterprises.
suggest possibilities outside the normative parameters and racialized bound- In chapter 1 1 address the formation of nonheteronormative subjects and
aries of those canonical structures. For instance, following Komi Bhabha, practices in industrial Chicago during the 1930s. I analyze Richard Wright's
we may say that African American novels, as minority cultural forms that Native Son; Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie's The
suggest the racialized gender and sexual nonnormativity of African Ameri- City; and an unpublished ethnography about a transgender ball on Chicago's
can culture, only mimic the properties of canonical literature. As discourses South Side. Each of these texts refers to the discursive explosion around a
of mimicry, they estrange themselves from the normalizing knowledges upon heterogeneously constituted African American culture. Moreover, they point
which canonical literature is founded, namely its reliance upon and privileg- to the ways in which U.S. industrialization disrupted hegemonic gender and
ing of the normative heterosexual subject idealized by the West. Apprehend- sexual ideals and how that disruption was spoken as racial difference.
ing African American literature as a critical cultural site means that we must Chapter 2 analyzes an unpublished chapter from Ralph Elfison's Invisible
read it not simply as consistent with the universalist ideals of nationalism. Man. In this chapter, a black queer university professor named Woodridge
We must read African American literature as a cultural form, that is, to calls for a critique of the ways in which canonical literary and sociologi-
show how it disrupts those ideals by referring to a gender and sexual multi- cal formations serve as discursive locations that produce racial and sexual
plicity constitutive of African American culture. knowledge about African Americans. Chapter 2 interrogates the ways that
As African American cultural forms distance themselves from the nor- nonheteronormative subject formations critique developmental narratives of
mative claims of canonical formations, they simultaneously estrange them- migration, narratives that figure nonwhite migration as witness to the liberal
selves from liberal articulations of aesthetics and canonical enunciation state's perfection and to capital's benevolence. Such narratives presume a
of sociology. Historically even African American novels, as cultural forms, subject whose ethical development is organized normatively. As nonhetero-
often converged with American sociology in a contest over African Ameri- normative subjects of color are estranged from the normativity of ethical
can representation, naming sociology as a contradictory and ambfvalent'z development, African American nonheteronormative subjects rebut social
enterprise located between the humanities and the natural sciences and posi- science, literature, state, and capital's presumptions about progress, perfect-
tioned as both the critic and the supplicant of the American state.'" As such, ibility, and recognition. Disputing those presumptions offers insights about
sociology's claims to objectivity were often dogged by suggestions of discur- the migratory narratives of other racial formations. This chapter then evokes
sivity, especially where racial matters were concerned. And its declarations canonical sociology's role in creating a discourse around African American
of progressive solidarity with racially egalitarian projects were questioned nonheteronormativity to reconsider Foucault's theory of how sexual knowl-
on the basis of sociology's discursive practices,which often enabled, rather edge is produced and upon what subjects that knowledge is based.
than disabled, racial regulation. Hence, in saying that African American As chapter 2 critiques developmental narratives from the vantage point
culture is a site of contradiction, 1 do not mean to suggest that sociology is of nonheteronormative social and subject formations, chapter 3 analyzes
28 :: INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTiON :: 29

rationality as a subject and social formation that linked the racialization of acterized by an unprecedented gender and racial diversity. Hence, theorizing
African Americans to racialization within colonial regimes. As the book ap- intersections was a way of naming the manifold outcomes of that diversity
proaches racialization as the production of gender and sexual heterogeneity, and determining what new strategies and opportunities for coalition could
chapter 3 interrogates diaspora as a gendered and eroticized process as well. arise from it. In this context, black lesbian feminists engaged Toni Morri-
The chapter engages African American nonheteronormative formations to son's Sula as a means to fashion a subject who could critique the aforemen-
refuse the discrete presumptions of national identity and to link up with tioned displacements and create alternatives to them.
the anticolonial struggles of diasporic blacks. To do so, l juxtapose Gunnar The conclusion to this book explores the ways that contemporary state
Myrdal'sAmerican Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy with formations lubricate the mobility of capital by enlisting middle-class minori-
James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to highlight the gender and ties to regulate the gender and sexual eccentricities of nonwhite populations.
sexual regulations of American citizenship and to locate those regulations The present moment requires a critique of canonical social science, and state
within Western nation-state formations, in general. In the chapter, 1 real and revolutionary nationalisms as they all participate in the gendered and
Go Tell ►t on the Mountain as an analysis of the ways in which Western sexual regulation of nonwhite peoples. In the conclusion, 1 acknowledge
rationality is a technique of racialization that requires erotic subjugation. 1 the complicity between state formations under globalization and minority
go on to locate critiques of rationality's disciplinary imperatives within the middle classes as the cooptation of prior social movements. I argue that con-
genealogy of decolonization. I conclude by insisting that diasporic critiques temporary globalization is one in which normativity still organizes state and
integrate analyses of gender and sexual normativity. citizen formations, but apprehends subjects previously excluded from the
Taking the gender and sexual exclusions of decolonizing and civil rights normative privileges of sovereignty and rights. This chapter also theorizes
struggles as its point of departure, chapter 4 explores the emergence of black posmationalist American studies as one epistemic formation that might pre-
lesbian feminist critiques in the 1970s, analyzing how woman of color theori- sume the relations specific to woman of color and queer of color subjects as
zations of intersections index the rise of transnational capital as an economic a way of imagining forms of sociality and agency that exceed the normative
formation that commodities nonwhite female labor for surplus extraction. binds of citizenship.
By locating the emergence of black lesbian feminism within the exclusions We need a study of racial formations that will not oblige heteropatriar-
of anticolonial, revolutionary, and cultural nationalist social movements, 1 chy, an analysis of sexuality not severed from race and material relations, an
argue that black lesbian feminist formations attempted to disrupt the norma- interrogation of African American culture that keeps company with other
tive genealogy of oppositional movements. To contextualize this emergence, racial formations, and an American studies not beguiled by the United States.
the chapter creates a dialogue between Toni Morrison's Sula and Daniel This book represents an attempt to theorize queer of color critique as an
Patrick Moynihan's 1965 text, The Negro Family: A Case for National Ac- answer to these needs. As an inquiry into the nonnormative components of
tion, popularly known as The Moynihan Report. The chapter analyzes how racial formations and as a challenge to the manifold restrictions of normative
The Moynihan Report, through its theory of black matriarchy, presented epistemes, queer of color analysis can be another step in the move beyond
the grammar of state and citizen formation as the one most appropriate for identity politics and toward what Angela Davis calls "unlikely and unprece-
decolonizing subjects, a grammar that insisted on the disciplining of gender dented coalitions."69
and sexual nonnormativity. As an example of how revolutionary nationalism
intersects with the normative protocols of canonical sociology, the chapter
attempts to show how investments in heteronormativity provided occasions
for unlikely alliances between radical movements and liberal social science.
For instance, the chapter looks at the way in which revolutionary national-
ism invested in Moynihan's theory of matriarchy, arguing that the theory
displaced anxieties about the destabilization of heteropatriarchy onto black
women's hunger for castration and occluded the gendered exploitations of
capital. Black lesbian feminists attempted to theorize these displacements
and occlusions and address contemporary capital as a set of relations char-
148 :: CONCLUSiON

liberal subjects, arguing for the universalization of black men through ac-
cess to black women's bodies. Given a historical context in which middle
classes are positioned as the regulators of the intertwining gender, sexual,
and racial differences of lower classes, Wilson's argument implies not only a
difference between black lower-class women and white middle-class women,
but suggests an equivalence between white and black middle-class subjects.
It is important to recognize that this equivalence is brokered against the
Notes
nonheteronormative difference of African American working-class subjects,
particularly women. An equivalence between white and black middle classes
Preface
implies that both can claim, to varying degrees, normative privilege against I. The web address for the site is htιpJ/Icweb2.loc.gov/ammem/saohιml/exhibit/
the denigrated status of black poor women, in particular. aointro.html.
In a context such as this, middle-class status fortifies normative privilege
for African Americans who can claim it, ostensibly purifying racial differ- Introduction
ence of its nonheteronormative hues, casting nonnormative racial difference 1. Queer of color analysis, as 1 define it in this text, interrogates social forma-
as a gendered and eroticized phenomenon specific to black poor and work- dons as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest
ing classes. As I argued in chapter 4, national liberation's bid for normativi- in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and
ty coupled with the upward and downward expansion of social structures practices. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of
has produced crossracial alliances over middle-class access to normative color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique.
privileges. As contemporary globalization polarized minority communities 2. Chandan Reddy, "Home, Houses, Nonidenticy: 'Paris Is Burning," in Burning
economically, it produced the social conditions whereby class differences Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder.
Westview Press, 1997), 356-57.
could help establish the normative stator of racial subjects.
3. Ibid., 357.
Within this historic moment characterized by the normalization of racial-
4. Jose Esteban Muńoz, Dfsidensiflcańons: Queers of Color and she Performance
ized class formations, we need modes of analysis that can address normativi-
of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 25.
ty as an object of inquiry and critique. Cultural and revolutionary national-
5. Louis Althusser argues, "Historical materialism is the science of social forma-
ism are fundamentally incapable of posing such an inquiry as they arise out dons." See For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 251.
of a genealogy of normativity. Cultural and revolutionary nationalisms have 6. Μυί oz, Disidenti/ications, 5.
no mind for gender and sexual normativity. But if it is to study society in 7. Louis Aithusser and ttienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (Lon-
its fullest complexity, postnationalist American studies must mind this very don: Verso, 1979), 88.
phenomenon. We need a postnationalist American studies that can address 8. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
the complex formations obtained in this moment of globalization, forma- 1977), 18.
tions whose racial, gender, sexual, and class differences obtain their distinc- 9. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Tńe German Ideology, trans. Dirk J. Struik
tions through engagements with normativity. In the preface of this book I (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 43-44. Emphasis mine.
10. David Theo Goldberg. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Mean-
asked where the familiar faces of black queer subjects were in the picture
ing (Loudon: Blackwell, 1993), 63.
of my hometown. It is worth asking where the faces of queer of color sub-
11. Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, trans. Jack Cohen (New York:
jects are within pustnationalist American studies. Where, for instance, is the
International Publishers, 1964).
transgendered man who wore Levi's held up by suspenders, or the sissy who 12.Ibid., 49.
played for us on Sunday mornings? It is not enough to merely recognize 13. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk). Struik,
their existence. In this moment of transgressions and regulations, we must trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 134.
approach these subjects as sites of knowledge. 14. Ibid., 121.
15. The modem conception of subjectivity and agency (liberal and revolutionary)
arc thoroughly normalized. David Theo Goldberg, for example, makes the following

Ι49
150 :: NOTES TO INTRODUCTION NOTES ιο INTRODuCTION :: 151

argument: "Moral notions tend to be basic to each sociodiscursive order, for they are 32. Marx, "On the Jewish Question," 34.
key in defining the interactive ways social subjects see others and conceive (of) them- 33. George Sanchez, "Go after the Women," in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural
selves. Social relations are constitutive of personal and social identity, and a central Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Du Bois (New
part of the order of such relations is the perceived need, the requirement for subjects York: Routledge, 1994), 285.
to give an account of their actions. These acounts may assume the bare form of ex- 34. 'bid, 291-92. Gloria Αnzaldόa writes that the borderland is the place for the
planation, but they usually tend more imperarively to legitimate or to justify acts (To "squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the
ourselves and others). Morality is the scene of this legitimation and justification" half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through
(Racist Culture, 14). the confines of the "normal" (Borderlands: The New Mestiza-La Frontera (San Fran-
Indeed the modem conception of agency has historically and consequentially un- cisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999], 25).
derstood formations that fall out 0' the normative boundaries of morality as incapable 35. See Nayan Shah, "Perversity, Contamination, anJ the Dangers of Queer Do-
of agency and therefore worthy if exclusion and regulation. One of the principal mesticity," in Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
tasks of antiracist queer critique must be to account for those formations expelled (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001)•
from normative calculations of agency and subjectivity. Accounting for those forma- 36. Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and
tions means that we must ask what modes of engagement and awareness they enact, New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
modes that normative conceptions of agency and subjectivity can never acknowledge 1997), xviii.
or apprehend. 37. Sanchez, "Go after the Women," 289-
16. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 133. 38- Marx, Capital, 782.
17. Ibid., 114. 39. Ibid, 784.
18. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes 40. By arguing that capital produces gender and sexual heterogeneities as part
(London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 482. of its racialized contradiction, I wish neither to privilege a discourse of repression,
19. Thomas Laquer, "Sexual Desire and the Market Economy during the Indus- nor to assume a corollary formulation-chat capital is the site of equivalences or
trial Revolution," in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Donna uniformities. Indeed, this material and discursive production of surplus is the racial-
Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 185-215. ized production of nonheteronormative-and therefore racially differentiated and
20. Ibid., 208. nonequivalent-sexua I ities.
21. Ibid. 41. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 23.
22. Ibid., 189, quoting Flora Tristan, London Journal, vans. Denis Palmer and 42. Marx,Capital, 795-96.
Giselle Plneetl (1840; reprint, London: George Prior, 1980), 79. 43. Aldiusser defines contradiction as `the articulation of a practice ... into the
23. Ibid., 208. complex whole of the social formation" (For Marx, 250). Althusser goes on to state
24. Ibid., 190, quoting Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in that the accumulation of contradictions may produce the "weakest link" in a system:
England: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Britain ( Moscow: Foreign Languages "If this contradiction is to become 'active' in the strongest sense, to become a ruptur-
Publishing House, 1962), 61. al principle, there must be an accumulation of 'circumstances' and 'currents' so that
25. Anne McClintock, "Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race, and the Law," Bound• whatever their origin and sense ... they 'fuse into a ruptural unity'" (For Marx, 99).
ary 1 19, no. 2 (1992): 80-82. 44. For the theory of overdetermination, see ibid.
26. Evelyn Brooks Hammonds, "Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: 45.1 thank Grace Hong for making this implication clear to me. Robert Park
The Problematic of Silence," in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic cites Marx as the theorist who inspired an engagement with social transformation.
Futures, ed. M. Jaequi Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York and As Park stares in "Race Ideologies," "What students of society and politics know
London: Routledge, 1997), 172. about ideologies and about revolutions seems to have its source, for the most part, in
27. Laquer, "Sexual Desire and the Market Economy," 210-11. the literature inspired by Karl Marx and by the writers who inherited the Marxian
28. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Rob- tradition." Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contem-
ert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), 33. porary Man (New York: Free Press, 1950), 303.
29. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: 46. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Duke University Press, 1996), 25. Modem Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2.
30. Michel Foucault, The History of SexιaΙihs vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Rob- 47. Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of
ert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 37. Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 43.
31. Marx, Capital, 763. 48. Goldberg, Racist Culture, 150.
152 :: NOTES ΤΟ INT ROOUCTI0N NOTES Τ0 CHAPTER 1 :: 153

49. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 14. 63. Goldberg, Rads: Culture, 30.
50. Thomas Pettigrew, The Sociology of Race Relations: Reflection and Reform 64. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Gar-
(New York: The Free Press, 1980), xxi. den City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 11.
51. James Mckee, Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective 65. My distinction between the "rational citizen" and the "irrational other" is
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 128. analogous to Immanuel Wallerstein's use of the "citizen" and the "barbarian" in "The
52. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Stud- Insurmountable Contradictions of Liberalism: Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples
ies (New York: Ruutledge, 1994), 150-51. in the Geocultures of the Modem World-System" (The South Atlantic Quarterly 94,
53. As Rose M. Brewer argues in "Black Women in Poverty: Some Comments on no. 4 (fall 1995]: 1161-78).
Female-Headed Families," "Most analyses of the underlying causes have been filled 66. Gates, Figures in Black, 8.
with normative assumptions about what is proper and improper familial behavior, 67. My use of "ambivalence" is borrowed from Zygmunt Bauman, who in his
and, consequently, social scientists often have labeled the family formation practices chapter "Philosophy and Sociology" argues that establishing discursive authority means
of the black population 'inappropriate"' (Signs: journal of Women in Culture and making the boundary of the "organic structure" sharp and clearly marked, which
Society 13 (1988(: 331). See also Angela Davis and Fania Davis, "The Black Family means "excluding the middle," suppressing or exterminating everything ambiguous,
and the Crisis of Capitalism," Black Scholar 17, no. 5 (September/October 1986): everything that sirs astride the barricade and thus compromises the vital distinction
33-40. The work of black queer intellectuals extends this discussion to show how between inside and outside. Building and keeping order means making friends and
the labeling of black familial forms as inappropriate denies families formed out of fighting enemies. First and foremost, however, it means purging ambivalence (Bau-
same-sex unions any positive regard, labeling them "immoral" and "threatening." man, Intimations ofPostmodernisy (London: Routledge, 19921, 120).
See especially Cheryl Clarke's `The Failure to Transform: Homophohia in the Black 68. See Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagina-
Community," in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed' Barbara Smith (New tion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and Pettigrew, The Soci-
York: Kitchen Table-Women of Color Press, 1983). Sec also Isaac Julian and Kobena ology of Race Relations.
Mercer's "True Confessions: A Discourse on Images of Black Male Sexuality," in 69. See "Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the U.S.A.," in
Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill (Boston: Lowe and Lloyd,The Politics of Culture.
Aiyson Publications, 1991).
54. For a discussion of the family's place within liberal ideology, see Wendy Brown, 1. The Kees-paυts of Servility
"Liberalism's Family Values," in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Moder L Robert E. Park,Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary
nity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135-65. Man (London: The Free Press of Glencoe,1950), 138-51.
55. As Sheila Rowbotham noted, "The family under capitalism carries an intoler- 2. Ibid., 36-51.
able weight: all the rags and bones and bits of old iron the capitalist commodity sys- 3. Stow Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago: 1905-1945 (Urbana and Chicago:
tem can't use. Within the family women are carrying the preposterous contradiction University of Illinois Press, 1987), 68.
of love in a loveless world. They are providing capitalism with the human relations it 4. Ibid., 63.
cannot maintain" (Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Harmondsworth, Middle- 5.
Ibid.
sex: Penguin, 1973], 77), quoted in Brown, "Liberalism's Family Values," 151. 6. Robert Ε. Park, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man," in Race and Cul-
56. David L Eng and Nice Y. Horn, eds., Q G A: Queer in Asian America (Phila- ture, 354.
delphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5. 7. James Barren and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and
57. I thank Judith Halberstam for helping me arrive at this argument. the 'New Immigrant ' Working Class," in journal of American Ethnic History (spring
58. Foucault, The History of Sexuality; 5. 1997):11.
59. Steinberg, Turning Back, 26-29. 8. Ibid., 8.
60. Lisa Lowe and David I.loyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of 9. Ibid., 12.
Capital (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1. 10. Ibid., 14.
61. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self 11. Ibid.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxiv. 12. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 13-14.
62. Morroe Berger, ed. and vans., Madame De StaYl: On Politics, Literature, 13. During the eras of Prohibition and vice reform, prostitution and alcohol con-
and National Character (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company) Inc., 1964), sumption were thought to be in tandem with each other. The association was made,
142-45. in large part, because the saloon was the location for the purchase of both alcohol