Sharon Patricia Holland

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

You can't be what you were So you better start being just what you are
Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION The Last Word on Racism 1

CHAPTER ONE Race: There's No Place like "Beyond" 17

CHAPTER TWO Desire, or "A Bit of the Other" 41

CHAPTER THREE S.H.E.: Reproducing Discretion as the Better Part of (Queer) Valor 65

CONCLUSION Racism's Last Word 95

Notes 115

Bibliography 147

Index 161
The Erotic Life of Racism has had several permutations over the last decade. It first started as a book
about "generations"-a book that, thankfully, Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press suggested I didn't
want to write. It then became a more conventional project by taking on the shape of an introduction, a
few chapters demonstrating my theoretical rubric, and a tidy conclusion. That manuscript made it
through the first round of reviews, but it wasn't yet a book-it hadn't yet become the project I wanted to
write. I thank the readers on that second attempt for suffering through a fledgling project. In the two
years after that second attempt, I began to write a rather long introduction to the existing project-one
that comprised some fifty pages or more of analysis. I took this portion of the project to a writing
group with Cathy Davidson-it was there that she suggested I siphon off the expository chapters of the
book and concentrate on the theoretical side. In that moment, The Erotic Life of Racism began to
blossom and take its present shape.

The title came before the book itself, calling me to write a book that could measure up in some way
to the weight of that phrase. I do not know if I have succeeded in this task. Over the last decade that
this project took shape, there have been many people and institutions to which I am indebted. I hope
in my brief recounting that I do not forget anyone along the way.

I would first like to thank the University of Illinois, Chicago; Northwestern University; and Duke
University for providing generous research funds to support this project, and for providing, perhaps
unwittingly, the institutional experiences that continued to demonstrate to me that there was a need for
it. During a crucial phase in the development of the book, I received a Senior Lectureship in
American Studies from the Fulbright Foundation. While teaching two courses at Universidad
Complutense ("La Complu"), I was able to present work that would eventually become part of this
book. In particular I would like to thank Isabel Duran Gimenez-Rico, Carmen Mendez Garcia, and
Ana Anton-Pacheco Bravo, my wonderful colleagues at the university. I also extend a heartfelt thank
you to the graduate students in my feminist theory course-their responses to the articles and books we
read were often unpredictable and thoroughly stimulating. Thank you for a wonderful five months in
Madrid.

This book would not have been possible without my colleagues in feminist studies, queer studies,
and critical race theory. Their work has inspired me to write this little treatise as homage to the
brilliance and the fine critique found in the interstices. May they see vestiges of their words
throughout these pages, as this one is, I hope, for all of us. I would like to thank Jennifer Brody for
pulling the beginnings of this project out of the trash, putting the pieces back together, and setting them
on my desk late one night along with some simple words to greet me with my morning coffee: "Keep
writing this."

Thanks to Darcy, who always came through, and to Jacob Mueller whose passion for
interdisciplinarity is infectious and whose presence in the classroom I will always miss. To Michael
Main, who is among the best of graduate studies assistants and who kept my calendar open for work
on this project and often reminded me of where I needed to be and how I should get there. I still miss
you. To my dear friend Chris Messenger, who knows all things Faulkner and whose teaching is
impeccable. Thanks also to the graduate students in the University of Illinois, Chicago, seminar that
Chris and I taught together. Our readings and discussions in that classroom led to some of the
questions that became the conclusion for this project. Thanks to Janet Messenger, whose diversity of
talents is an inspiration. Thanks also to the graduate students in my Critical Race Theory seminar at
Northwestern-they are a fierce group of folks with intellectual acumen and compassion. The seminar
was a banner one and I thank you all. To Wannalee Romero whose wit, grace, and serious rigor
pushed my research along at a crucial moment-thanks for keeping it all together while I was in
Madrid. To Robin, Nicole, and Folayemi whose voices in my undergraduate seminar on feminist
literature still ring, and whose visits to my office hours were always delightful and a welcome break
from the e-mails and committee responsibilities. To Anna Kivlan, who worked tirelessly on
copyediting and checking notes for accuracy, often filling in missing information and providing
crucial last-minute library searches for materials.

Toward the end of the project I made my first return trip to Chicago, where I had spent the better
part of the last decade. I thank Greg Laski, Wannalee Romero, and Melissa Daniels for welcoming
me back with open arms-I will always remember that homecoming evening. To my Chicago family,
words cannot express how much I miss you and hold you in my heart always. Lisa Freeman and
Heather Schmucker, thanks for being my homegirls and for holding me when I need it most. Jennifer
Brier and Kat Hindmand, I miss your warmth and love. I give thanks to Judith Sensibar for her help
with the Faulkner section and for her encouragement, and I thank David Sensibar for his love of wine
and support of all of my endeavors. Thanks also to Judy Raphael and Tony Philips whose creative
vision has touched me in more ways than I can count. To E. Patrick Johnson and Stephen Lewis, I
remember you both every time I sit down to a beautiful meal. To Mark Canuel, for his friendship and
Capricorn love. To Johari Jobir, your intellectual companionship is sorely missed-Ralph Lauren is
holding a table for us.

Toward the end of writing this book, I purchased eight acres and moved into the woods at the back
of a watershed. I did not know it at the time, but the land I now call "home" was once part of one of
the largest black farmsteads in North Carolina. A friend suggested that I call it "Sweet Negritude"-the
land here signals all the permutations of the life, love, and mystery of blackness. I give thanks to all of
my friends in North Carolina who have kept me going through three very difficult years-Kim Turk,
Cate Smith, and Bruce, Doreen, Josie, and Katie Sanfelici. To Christine Callan at Copa Vida and
Tracy Gill at Joe Van Gogh, thanks for keeping the coffee going while I wrote, revised, and wrote
again. To Laurabelle and the gang at Watts for keeping me fed and letting me laugh out loud. To Kathy
Rudy whose love of animals matches my own, and to Kristine Stiles whose friendship is steady and
enduring. To Shelba and Starr, bright lights in the Carolina sky. To all the horses, hounds, and humans
at Terrell's Creekthanks for welcoming me and helping me enjoy the ride. With the animals on my
mind: to Samar and Ebenezer, who I long for every day, and to Winnie and Webster, who run away
but always come back home. I also would like to thank Ken Wissoker and Jade Brooks at Duke
University Press for their faith in this project, and of course, thanks to my meticulous readers whose
generosity of engagement was more than any author could expect or ask for.

The last group of thanks goes to my family, near and far. To Yoshi Campbell-your love for me is
unwavering and I am proud to call you "sister." To my homegirls Sylvia Villarreal and Tae Hart who
know me. To Tom, Ella, and Muriel Beyer-see you at the Cape again for another jellyfish rights
symposium. To Meta Dewa Jones and family-steady, wise, and always there for me. To Ryan and Liz
Ananat-I am proud in so many ways, not least among them to be the "grandmother" of your little one.
To Anne Cubilie, who knows how to cut through bullshit like a knife through butter-thanks for taking
me through the fire. To Etan Nasreddin-Longo who sees all things and just knows. To Kathleen J.
McCabe-a writer's writer and whose advice, friendship, and careful eye helped to bring this project
home. Thanks to my mother for being the fiercest protector of my righteous mind. And finally to the
Holland clan (Lexus, Flip, and Jackie)we take a licking and keep on ticking-but especially to Jackie,
whose big heart is something to aspire to.

Dismayingly, institutionalized racism and prejudice endure

too, long after the abolition of slavery, or the desegregation
of public institutions, or the protest marches or the shattering
acts of violence. Racism, it turns out, can take the heat.

-Joy Gregory, on her adaptation of Studs Terkel's "Race:

How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American
Obsession"

Most horrific acts committed by one person against another

occur as small thoughtless gestures under mundane, if not trite,
circumstances.

-Jennifer Culbert, "Beyond Intention"

The erotic is the mode of subjective communication.

-Deborah Bergoffen, "Out from Under"

It is time to recognize the political dimensions of erotic life.

-Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex"

A few days after Tupac Shakur's death in 1996, I pulled into a Safeway parking lot in Palo Alto,
California, with my friend's fifteen-year-old daughter, Danielle. We were listening to one of Shakur's
songs on the radio; because he was a hometown boy, the stations were playing his music around the
clock-a kind of electromagnetic vigil, if you will. An older (but not elderly) woman with a grocery
cart came to the driver's side of my car and asked me to move my vehicle so that she could unload her
groceries. The tone of her voice assumed fruition-it was not only a request but a demand that would
surely be met. The Southerner in me would have been happy to help; the critic in me didn't understand
why she simply couldn't put her groceries in on the other side where there were no other cars or
potential impediments. I told the woman that I would gladly wait in my car until she unloaded her
groceries-that way, there would be plenty of room for her to maneuver.

While she did this, I continued to listen to Shakur's music and talk with Danielle. We were
"bonding;' and I was glad that she was talking to me about how Shakur's death was affecting her and
her classmates. When I noticed that the woman had completed her unloading, I got out and we walked
behind her car toward the Safeway. What happened next has stayed with me as one of the defining
moments of my life in Northern California. As we passed the right rear bumper of her car, she said
with mustered indignation, "And to think I marched for you!" I was stunned at firstwhen something
like this happens to you, you see the whole event in slow motion. I recovered and decided that I had
two options: to walk away without a word or to confront the accusation-to model for Danielle how to
handle with a modicum of grace what would surely be part of the fabric of her life as a black woman
in the United States. I turned to the woman and said, "You didn't march for me, you marched for
yourself-and if you don't know that, I can't help you."

When average people participate in racist acts, they demonstrate a profound misreading of the
subjects they encounter. The scene related above dramatizes a host of racialized relations: the
expectation that black women will cease a connection with their own families in order to respond to
the needs of white persons; the comprehension of a refusal to do so as a criminal act; the need to
subject black bodies to the rule of race; and the absolute denial of the connection between seemingly
disparate peoples that the phrase "civil rights march" connotes. For that woman in the parking lot, the
civil rights struggle was not about freedom for us all, it was about acquiring a kind of purchase on
black life. I would be given the right to participate in "democratic process," but the ability to exercise
the autonomy inherent in such a right would be looked upon with disdain and, at times, outrage.

The scene from the parking lot stays with me as if the woman and I were locked in a past that has
tremendous purchase on my present. In my mind, we hover there touching one another with the lie of
difference and nonrelation balancing precariously between us-like the characters Rosa and Clytie at
war on the dilapidated staircase in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, a scene I explicate at
some length in the conclusion of this book. The psychic violation of that moment in the parking lot
haunts me still; but it is the intimacy of that moment that arrests me. That woman expected something
from me-one usually does not expect anything from strangers. Moreover, our connection as women,
tenuous though it might have been, was completely obscured, if not obliterated, by this racist act. It
was then that I began to think about "race" under the auspices of racism, the thing that according to the
epigraph for this chapter "endures."

Racism defends us against the project of universal belonging, against the findings, if you will, of the
human genome project. Racism, after all, "can take the heat." Perhaps racism can take the heat
because of its "universal" appeal. One of the first tenets of critical race theory is that "racism is
ordinary."' For scholars of critical race theory, "racism" is almost always articulated as an everyday
occurrence, as pedestrian rather than spectacular, although we have seen evidence of its gendered
spectacularity through historical watersheds such as Emmett Till (both then and now) and James
Byrd.2

In this project my first grounding is in the work of critical race theory, with the understanding that
everyday racism defines race, interprets it, and decrees what the personal and institutional work of
race will be. My second grounding is in the work of sexuality studies and queer theory; both are
critical projects dedicated to various articulations of the erotic lives of individuals. In this book I
will demonstrate that although contemporary sexuality studies and queer theory have committed
themselves to a thoroughgoing analysis of racist practice, rarely do they actually succeed in this
endeavor. Can work on "desire" be antiracist work? Can antiracist work think "desire"? What would
happen if we opened up the erotic to a scene of racist hailing? In this work I attempt to enrich
conversations about our erotic life and our racist practice. I contend that it is possible to have both
conversations at the same time, and in the same space of such intimate subjugation.

Racism requires one to participate in what I would call a project of belongingif the work of
producing racial difference(s) is to reach fruition. I have used the phrase "project of belonging" to
signify two sets of relations. One is a "real," biological connection, a belonging that occurs at the
level of family (blood relation). A crude understanding of race is that it is always already the thing
that happens in the blood: think "one-drop rule;" "blood quantum," "blueblood," or "sangre pura." The
second set of relations is the result of the work of identifying with others, a belonging usually
imposed by a community or by one's own choice. Given the slipperiness of identity, identifying with
others can be a fictitious and fantastic undertaking. Fantasy, of course, can oscillate between delusion
and creative hope. As Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown observe, "In the everyday world, the facts
o f biological difference are secondary to the meanings that are attributed to them. `3 Here it is
meaning that matters. In the purely existential accounting, human beings make meaning everyday and
we have come to understand, like Miles and Brown, that such matter(s) creates the materiality of
race. My work in The Erotic Life of Racism interrogates the meaning of such creative ambitions and
argues that we don't create meaning as much as we reproduce it.

Joy Gregory's words given in the first epigraph ground racism in what appears to be the long
history of black suffering in the United States. In short, desegregation, abolition, and protest marches
conjure black bodies so very readily; it is almost as if we think of those events as belonging to "the
black experience"-and in many ways they do. What I want to open up here is the possibility that these
events might not only signal black physical and political forms, but also mark a profound revision of
the place we have come to know and call home. What if these histories no longer belonged to a
people but instead comprised what we mean when we say the word "American"? I want to argue that
when we see and say "race;" regardless of how much we intend to understand race as being had by
everyone, our examples of racial being and racist targets are often grounded in black matter(s). In this
instance, the black body is the quintessential sign for subjection, for a particular experience that it
must inhabit and own all by itself.

What better way to think about how this conjuring of the black body works than through the
anecdote with which I begin this book. I use this incident not to make a point about its universality
and thus elevate it to privileged status (although I know that at some point this might be unavoidable),
but rather to elicit both the intimacy and the quotidian nature of racism. A scene of everyday racist
practice opens in two directions: one in which the scene focuses relentlessly upon the individual,
seemingly to the exclusion of such leitmotifs of antiracist struggle as structure and caste; and the other
in which the event unravels a series of dependencies and intimacies both unexplored and unexplained.
It is this latter direction that I hope the reader will both follow and find intriguing. In the final analysis
quotidian racism can seem rather unremarkable; my point is to bring what cannot be remarked upon
without some embarrassment to fuller recognition and accounting. To this end, that woman in the
parking lot wanted a connection with me-one solidified through time and place by a history, a
genealogy that she could readily attach to me. In short, she hailed me, and rather than respond in kind,
I spoke. To make matters worse, my tiny little speech act in a Safeway parking lot became a
contentless utterance-which was confirmed by her look of surprise, if not horror, when I opened my
mouth. Her pronouncement was not designed to elicit a response, it was fashioned to keep me in my
place. My retort offered her an alternative model-a refraction rather than a reflection of her own
situatedness. As Toni Morrison once reminded us, "Definitions belong to the definers not the
defined."4 Clearly.

Where racism imposes racial purity, however, law and practice will code identification across
differences as impossible-even if it happens, even if it is real.5 Even though every human visage and
quotidian encounter bears witness to miscegenation's imprint, miscegenation remains an
impossibility; we are still made to choose a category, to state who our people are, and to relate to one
cultural mode of being over and against another as if categories, communities, and belonging are
positioned in finite relationship. As Adrian Piper notes in her essay "Passing for White, Passing for
Black": "In this country, . . . the fact of African ancestry among whites ranks up there with family
incest, murder, and suicide as one of the bitterest and most difficult pills for white Americans to
swallow."6 It is interesting that Piper counts incest as one of the holy trinity of family travesties; as
scholars of Southern history and literature in particular have indicated, incest is frequently
miscegenation in the Southern imaginary. In other words, because of chattel slavery we cannot readily
separate the practice of incest and the occurrence of miscegenation. We can't have one without the
other, yet we are so confused about the matter of race-who has it, how did we get it, is it just
"culture" after all-that we have managed to spin exciting yarns about its place in our "family"
histories.7 For example, more than twenty years ago I discovered that my father's father was in fact a
"white" man, and it took me another decade to call him "grandfather" with any real conviction.

I use the phrase "blood strangers" to articulate this cognitive dissonance in order to mine the
contradiction between human practice and collective (mis) understanding." While race creates the
possibility for blood strangers, it also employs its primary ally and enforcer, "racism;" to police the
imaginary boundary between blood (us) and strangers (them). Racism transforms an already porous
periphery into an absolute, thereby making it necessary to deny all kinds of crossings. Moreover, even
when those crossings appear less obvious-when women appear together in a quotidian scene of racist
violence, for example-racism succeeds in breaking the tacit connection between them. In other words,
racism irrevocably changes gendered relationships. Racism can also be described as the emotional
lifeblood of race; it is the "feeling" that articulates and keeps the flawed logic of race in its place.
When assessment is on the line, the "races" take their seats at the American feast of difference. This is
the catch-22 of race: it renders theorizing about "it" impossible because it stabilizes identity for those
who impose it and for those who work to expose it.

In this book I seek to mine the interstice between the insistence of critical race theory upon the
"ordinary" in racist practice and the call by queer theory for us to take care of the feeling that escapes
or releases when bodies collide in pleasure and in pain. This interstice is the moment-the blip in
time-that is of great importance to my work here.9 We focus on race, but rarely on the everyday
system of terror and pleasure that in varying proportions makes race so useful a category of
difference. But siting and citing everyday racism is almost like stating a belief in the paranormal.
Racism dismembers the "real"-so robs and eviscerates it that nothing and no one can appear as
"whole" in its strange and brutal refraction.

One of the chief arguments of my project is that race coheres in the everyday practice of familial
belonging. Since "the family" has not only been the cornerstone of liberal ideology but also black
community belonging, it is important to ask-nearly 150 years after the abolition of slaverywhether or
not the preservation of the idea of the "black" family is working for us.10 This is not a query that can
be politely asked or answered but it is a necessary one, and this project seeks to begin not by
rehashing the race/ culture debate but simply by asking if the same scaffolding that applies to
quotidian racist practice might not also be the same structure that engenders the survival of the core
concept of blackness, especially as such a concept relates to notions of familial and community
belonging. The turn toward the quotidian is not one that focuses on prejudice but rather on the
discretionary acts and, yes, racist practices that each of us make in everyday decisions such as
choosing someone to sit beside on the subway, selecting a mate or a sperm donor, or developing a list
of subjects for an academic study. The autonomy usually attached to erotic choices should be
reevaluated to think through these attachments.

In order to worry that every day, to think about how much racism demands of us, from us, this book
returns to that somewhat banal pairing otherwise known as the black/white binary. Such a return, to
echo Hortense Spillers, might be "embarrassing" or "backward."" When race becomes the basis for
social organization-determining and fixing not only what we are to others, but also defining who we
are-it gains an immutability that neither pro nor con can shake-it gains ontological might and becomes
"too high to get over, too low to get under. 1112

This book moves in the direction of prevailing work in critical race theory-toward racism and
away from race-with one, if not two, caveats. It is my contention that we cannot get away from the
black/white binary while thinking through the work of racism. In calls to abandon the black/ white
dichotomy for more expansive readings of racism's spectacular effects, critics often ignore the
psychic life of racism. What appears as an opening up or an expansion of the territory from "race and
racism" to "racisms" might simply be a misrecognition of the primary work of racism.13 In the
beginning moments of Against Race, Paul Gilroy offers the reflection that "black and white are
bonded together by the mechanism of `race' that estrange them from each other and amputate their
common humanity." 14 Gilroy's visceral insight is a testament to the fact that we cannot get away from
our interpretation of the primary work of race at the junction of black and white; the estrangement that
Gilroy alludes to is odd, given that relations between the two are and have been so intimately
articulated."

While I do not want to contest that globalization indeed has resulted in a proliferation of "racisms, I
do want to insist stubbornly that the psychic life of racism can best be read in the context of the United
States in the space where black and white intersect, where the outer limit of doing and being are
exercised and felt by those who seek to negotiate their place at the "American" table. I say this even
as someone who has great investments in the fields of Afro-Native and Native American studies.
What I am driving at here is simple: even though critics want to move away from a black/ white
binary toward a more "open" field of inquiry, the way in which we understand how racism manifests
itself is through a black/white example that belies a very static, but necessary, repetitious reading of
racist practice. What work, critical or otherwise, have we performed to move beyond an interaction
that to begin with we barely have been able to be truthful about (to ourselves, to others)? If anything,
the chatter on the left and on the right during the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 20o8
assures us that we are by no means ready to give up the binary.16 It performs a fantastic service for
us.

In this book I seek to correct a consistent misreading of racist practice. Too often the insidiousness
of slavery casts a long shadow over the interpretive work that we perform; in our effort to uncover a
terrible wrong, "a woeful shame, "a national embarrassment;" we sometimes want to read the present
as if it actually lived in this same dreadful past. We exist in a kind of Nietzschean ethics-where the
present is consistently the past's particular factotum.17 In this drama the parts are cast and we play
them to their fullest, and because these relations have been cemented it is difficult for us to see
beyond them to something else that might motivate us. This familiar reiteration in black and white has
an equal and opposite upshot: it prevents "slavery" (writ large) from being seen in all of its formative
machinations. Instead, slavery is relegated to its black and white players in a past, which desperately
needs to be forgotten. I am not sure if that something else alluded to above exists or is even worth our
contemplation, because to move forward in this moment, given all that has happened, would surely be
like committing suicide-of a generational sort. But, at the risk of being contrary, this project goes to
that territory.

The theoretical exploration I make here encourages us to reimagine the connection between black
and white and to open up the interstitial and charged space between critical race theory and queer
theory. This text and its readings therefore serve as an arrest in a seemingly perpetual critical
backward motion. In queering the inquiry, for example-in returning to the black/white binary and
asking what really happens or happened there -we might be able to consider, at least for a moment,
what our "pleasure" might look like; what being together, figuratively and literally, might yield -aside
from, at times, the miscegenated being." As I mentioned earlier, I am also aware that such a focus on
the black/white binary in terms of queer studies might seem backward in and of itself. As Tavia
Nyong'o points out, "theory ... can present itself as being explicitly `about' race, class, and sexuality
while continuing to serve the function of regulation and discipline. A major aspect of this regulation
... is the frozen dialectic between black and white, and . . . between straight and queer, that is
produced and reproduced within cultural forms both sophisticated and otherwise."19 In this book I
want to defrost that signal dialectic-to revise the black/white encounter's oppositional narrative to
speak to us across place and (in)appropriate time.

So often our "racist" culture is held as separate and apart from our desiring selves. To think about
desire is to arrive at a queer place. But I do not mean for that queer place to become overdetermined
by its association with desire, with the erotic. In essence, I am opening the door to a notion of the
"erotic" that oversteps the category of the autonomous so valued in queer theory so as to place the
erotic-the personal and political dimension of desire-at the threshold of ideas about quotidian racist
practice. As Simone de Beauvoir reminds us in The Second Sex: "The erotic experience is one that
most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition."20 It is this striking ambiguity
that not only brings us back to the quotidian but also to the strange and often violent modes of racist
practice.21 I use the erotic also to capture some sense of its historical connection to feminist
phenomenological thought, a process that I outline in chapter 2 of this book.

When I invoke the phrase "queer place;' I am thinking of queers here in much the same way as
Randall Halle understands this constituency: "Not the acts in which they engage but rather the
coercive norms that place their desires into a position of conflict with the present order."22 My
project comes from the other end of that question; rather than see desire as the force that "conflict[s]
with the present order," I enlist the erotic as a possible harbinger of the established order. In doing
so, I want to imagine what happens to the "white" side of the equation-what happens to whiteness in
close proximity to blackness-and what happens to our conceptualization of the "us"? At the outset, it
is important to note that I do not attempt, in the words of Michael Hames-Garcia, to "recast questions
of race into the language of desire."23 Rather, by thinking about racism as quotidian practice, much
like the critical race theorists whom I deeply admire, I understand racism as wielding incredible
power in its ordering of family, generation, and desire-in both black and white.

The focus on moving "beyond" race and its black/white binary-a condition I myself have wished
for and often depended upon-actually speaks to a persistent problem inherent in the black/white
encounter: namely, that this crossing seems impossible; that this crossing almost never happens. In
other words, what happens when someone who exists in time meets someone who only occupies
space?24 Those who order the world, who are world-making master time-those animals and humans
who are perceived as having no world-making effects-merely occupy space. When James Baldwin
asked, "How much time do you want for your progress?" he was marking this dichotomy.25 If the
black appears as the antithesis of history (occupies space), the white represents the industry of
progressiveness (being in time). It is possible to surmise that resistance to this binary might actually
be telling a truth about our sense of time and space instead of a truth about the meeting itself. We often
talk of inequalities that emerge in black/white meeting, but we rarely understand those structural
impediments and inequalities in terms of the phenomenological readings of time and space. For
example, to return to my opening narrative, in that moment in the parking lot I was occupying space;
the woman was not only occupying time but also performing her ability to represent its material
nature. My temporal immateriality yoked my presence to the needs and desires of my white female
counterpart; my inability to serve therefore represented an intrusion upon the woman's daily
activities. I became an affront to the order of things, and her comment "to think I marched for you"
was an invitation to take my place among the officially sanctioned table of contents for black/white
herstory and relation.

At points in this project I return to the problem of "history" with varying degrees of critical
success. In theoretical discourse, generally speaking, we have been bound by a fervent desire to make
sure that we are historically grounded. In queer theory especially, this historical arc has been fleshed
out through the work of Michel Foucault.26 While Foucault's historical trajec tory for the invention of
the homosexual in the mid-nineteenth century is pathbreaking, it glides over signal events in the
Americas such as transatlantic slavery or Indian removal as if these events bear no mark upon our
sexual proclivities. In this mode of inquiry, a whole array of fruitful belongings, imaginings, and
gestures can go unremarked upon and ultimately undervalued in critical discourse about sexuality.
When the problem of history is laid at our feet, the imagined place for the black body is (re)produced
out of the thin air at the critical heights of queer theory. This thin air mires the "black" in absolute
relationship to the "white" as if their belonging were carved in glacial ice. The air up there is frosty
indeed, and to speak about the black body at that atmospheric level is to produce a narrative of
degradation to which that body is perpetually mired.
 My argument with history, therefore, is not about its necessary efficacy or its archival rigor; my
contention here is with how it is used to either fix a critical trajectory for a discipline (in the case of
queer theory especially) or to ground a discussion of race in appropriate histories of black and white
peoples in particular. In attempting to wade through the materials in the fruitful critical and fictive
exchanges that I highlight, I find that history has a very limited reach where black/white bodies are
concerned. As I have stated earlier, even though integration is our gold standard, we seem wholly
unable to practice it critically.

I begin this book with a scene in a Safeway parking lot, and I end it with a reading of one of the
central chapters of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! The material in between is mostly taken from
critical theory, and given the stakes of my project-in queerness, blackness, and gender-Faulkner's
signature and very canonical work might seem like an odd capstone. Faulkner's novel is a searing and
relentless catalogue of racism's battle for the American soul. As he observes at one point in Miss
Rosa Coldfield's narrative: "There is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts
sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well
as lovers know because it makes them both. "27 Abrogate. Enemies. Lovers. These words help to
mark the complicated trajectory of racist practice, and to me it felt perfect to end this book with one
of the most articulate manifestos about how to begin the process of repudiating such abrogation.

At the same time, my choice of Absalom, Absalom! resists the urge to find what I term the
"black.female.queer" representation as the obvious repository if not endpoint for a project that as it
evolves seeks to find how we lost this representation in the first place. The goal here is to get
comfortable with that loss so that we can account for our forgetting in the first instant while
simultaneously marking such a moment by not replacing the representation, by not making the obvious
critical move to recover black.female.queer with an appropriate sign of her belonging. The periods in
my configuration are meant to place the terms in figurative contestation, reflecting both the ease with
which such terms are grouped and the relative incommensurability of the terms in critical
conversation.

It is my hope that as scholars move through this book they might begin to uncouple their own
critical trajectories, if not desires, from their usual embeddedness. My hope, further, is that there
might be new spaces opened up for finding what we have lost or forgotten without the customary urge
to reestablish the object of our desire, so to speak. In that space of the erotic-the political and the
personal-we might be able (ifnotready) to revise or even resist the object(s) of our critical desire as
we come to understand just what it takes to make the erotic such a generative space. I am interested in
outlining one aspect of the critical condition rather than displaying a repertoire of somewhat
prescriptive endings to a story that is still unfolding.

I open chapter r with a sampling of pertinent critical race theory arguments about race and racism
as a way to explore how such arguments have helped to diversify the critical field of antiracist study.
In this chapter I perform what I hope is an important intervention by reading across a spectrum of
critical race theory work, thus demonstrating that there is much to be gleaned from concerted attention
to the field's many critical corridors and interdisciplinary claims. In chapter2, I stage the interface
between "the erotic" and "racist practice" by delving into the relationship between feminist theories
of the erotic from the mid to late twentieth century and how these theories have paved the way for the
erotic's disarticulation from racist practice. I argue that the erotic gains its autonomy during the
feminist sexuality debates in the early 198os and that such erotic autonomy becomes central to the
articulation of a queer studies project, much to the detriment of a critical antiracist practice. In
chapter3, I return to the kind of inquiry evidenced in the first chapter, as I read across a range of
queer studies work that positions itself in response to an overwhelmingly (white) queer theory. Given
what the black/white binary tells us (or does not) about racist practice, I argue that the continual
staging of one (racial) project over and against the other serves to harness black.female.queer (a
constellation that I use throughout that chapter) in static relation to queer studies as a whole, such that
this body (ofwork) is literally lost as an active critical voice. Finally, in the conclusion I perform a
reading of Jacques Derrida's "The Last Word on Racism" / "Racism's Last Word" and his theory
about "touch" in the context of one of the most important black/ white interactions in American
literature-the meeting of Rosa Coldfield and Clytie Sutpen on the staircase during the only chapter
narrated by Miss Rosa in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

In speaking to my classes on critical race and sexuality theory over the years, it has become clear to
me that our methodology for thinking through the queer body can be cited along three registers: the
psychoanalytic, the critique of global capital, and the biopolitical 28 This project will move through
a range of work dedicated to these epistemological registers but will resist the temptation to be
seduced by one method of inquiry over another. My attempt here is to redirect our theoretical
underpinnings, and my implicit question is whether or not these discourses are aiding us in our
attention to the specter of racist practice that intermittently haunts queer studies conferences.29 In
many ways the responsibility for "fixing" the problem of race in academic discourse seems to have
landed in our queer laps. But why? What is the underexplored connection between sexuality and race
that makes us believe we can solve for x when other disciplinary endeavors have seemed unable to
do so or have abandoned the project altogether? What can queer theory's desire do for understanding
racist practice? Perhaps there is an answer to this question in the early work of Hortense Spillers,
when she observes that during relations under chattel slavery, "whether or not the captive female
and/or her sexual oppressor derived `pleasure' from their seductions and couplings is not a question
we can politely ask. Whether or not `pleasure' is possible at all under conditions that I would aver as
non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. 1130 Spillers's query loosens the
neat connection between the nineteenth-century homosexual and the queer community of the early
twenty-first, thereby making their reliance upon pleasure/desire as a defining matrix less edifying,
more problematized, and somehow less clearly autonomous as it once seemed.

In this book I intervene at two levels, one academic and one beyond the academy in a historical
moment in the United States that wants desperately and unconvincingly to call itself "postracial:" On
the academic level, I reunite theoretical arguments that, increasingly, have lost touch with one
another-as if once upon a time they didn't have a history to share and a future at stake together. As we
have seen, these two theoretical stances are critical race theory and queer theory. I am insisting that
critical race theory and queer theory must come back together in this moment to resolve key issues
and understandings in much the same way that my undergraduate and graduate students insisted that I
do in terms of being clear about the connection between the two-a demand that was not always
adequately met on my part. When I realized that I had no working roadmap for confluence and/or
dissention is the point at which I began the work that became the heart of this project.

While both critical race theory and queer theory have taken a rich and fruitful transnational turn-one
that also carries with it a legacy of nonidentitarian, multiple issue layering-in this historical moment,
both within academic theory and beyond, I insist that in the erotics of the old black/white binary we
understand not only racism but potentially our erotic selves. I am not in any way saying that global
understandings don't matter. They do. There are also local, historically situated features of the
black/white binary that, in their definitional and oppositional clarity, illuminate our moment and our
academic theories in (un)(re)productive ways. This book returns us, ever again, to the black/white
binary that many theorists were happy to leave behind. That glee alone should tell us there is
unfinished business-but by no means have we forgotten it, solved it, or even, in the end, addressed it.
This all-too-brief glimpse takes a look at the structure in which desire and subjugation, belonging and
obligation, are linked in theory and practice.

Ultimately, I have not forgotten the details of the scene in that Safeway parking lot, and I never will.
In that one hailing denied is embedded an outrageous erotics of racism that in its quotidian expression
represents for me an act of profound ontological rupture. A bit of character assassination, for sure, but
also an occasion to reflect upon resisting the hailing through its potential for further theorization.
What that moment in the parking lot was designed to engender is the spectacular lie of our separation
from one another as communities and individuals on this planet. The Erotic Life of Racism is an
experimental exploration in the denial of that hailing, in the stubborn insistence that we do belong to
one another despite our every effort, at home and in the institution, to lose track of, if not forget
altogether, such belonging. This book reorders the terrain of critical contact. Because, now as ever,
there is no safe way but just an ordinary road that we all must travel, I move to the first iteration of
the erotic life of racism.

It seems that race, like the presumption of innocence, the

Hippocratic oath, or "till death do us part," is too useful a
fiction to dispense with.
 -Richard Thompson Ford,

"What's Queer about Race?"

"Race" is not what it was.

-Paul Gilroy, Against Race

The rhetorical force of race talk is its ability to invoke that wonderful place called "beyond." If we
can divest ourselves of our preoccupation with the past, if we can shed who we are (or have been) to
one another, then we can get beyond race. Such joyful overcoming is worthy of a civil rights dirge or
a Heideggerian tirade on the ends of (human?) history. But as time ticks on, moving beyond looks a
lot like getting over. The particular conundrum here in this desire to move beyond, to get over, race is
its reliance upon a future in which we will become, at least discursively, productive. In the wake of
Johannes Fabian's classic Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), critics
such as Lindon Barrett and Michelle Maria Wright have contributed to the further dismantling of the
time/space continuum-otherwise known as the West's progress narrative-and the centrality of black
bodies to modernity's reimagining of the white self.'

As I noted in the introduction, this peculiar overcoming might have its roots in a somewhat pedantic
intelligence about the relationship between black and white. It is precisely because the black subject
is mired in space and the white subject represents the full expanse of time that the meeting of the two
might be thought of as never actually occurring in the same temporal plane; yet the desire to get over
such a meeting is immediate and the recovery is often swift. Exactly how does one move beyond a
nonevent? How can this encounter be so important to us if these two never literally meet? Or to put it
another way, maybe my encounter with the woman in the Safeway parking lot attests to the problem of
relation-we meet all the time, but like Faulkner's Judith and Henry at Sutpen's Hundred the words we
exchange when we happen upon our nonhappening serve as "brief staccato sentences like slaps" that
reverberate off the walls, corridors, alleyways, and yes, even parking lots around us.2 This persistent
ordering of such a meeting (one that we usually show up to with script in hand) might lead us to
understand the fervent desire to move beyond an encounter that has in fact already occurred in the
blood, and yet in time and space remains a nonoccurrence.

The (non)happening, and our critical obsession with its potentiality, marks a strange and
schizophrenic approach to the very idea of relation. In racist ordering, relation is defined as those
who shape time and those who stand outside it, as those who belong to your people, and those who do
not. Only grave trespass can produce another order altogether. What makes that parking lot scene so
compelling to me is that although my female counterpart certainly wanted to order time for me by
manipulating the space I occupied ("moveyourcarplease"), she became the one who turned back the
clock, thus changing the terms of the relationship. That confrontation illuminates the way in which
racist logic ensnares even the racist trying desperately to declare the order of things, verbally or
physically. By refusing to move in that Bartleby the Scrivener way-politely, I preferred "not to"-I
challenged her to find another way to move me. And she did; but not without giving up her own
stronghold on time's order of things. To move me she had to situate me in a discourse I would
recognize, and in that one moment she looked back past me. Like a rider on a difficult horse, she tried
to bring me up under her so that we could move forward-a move that in equestrian parlance equals
mastery.3 In that instance, she touched on the mysterious life force of racist endeavor: in constantly
trying to align the world according to a particular ordering, it arrests time rather than attests to its
futurity. For her beyond race is nothing of the sort-it is just an order of things in which black (radical)
yields to white (liberal). Theoretically speaking, beyond signals a very dangerous turn for antiracist
struggle as it reifies nonrelation while simultaneously reinscribing the past (one's history) in a master-
slave dialectic. Such is the order of things.

If relation technically happens (two persons, black and white) face to face) but never occurs given
the time/space split, then what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva observes holds great purchase on my following
review of work in "race" studies. As he notes: "People cannot like or love people they don't see or
interact with. This truism has been corroborated by social psychologists, who for years have
maintained that friendship and love emerge when people share activities, proximity, familiarity, and
status.`4 While reorganizing "status" under capitalism in the United States might be more than a small
challenge, it is not difficult to see that proximity and familiarity can create the conditions to overcome
racist practice. Or do they? What if proximity and familiarity don't create a level playing field of
difference, but instead replicate the terms upon which difference is articulated and therefore
maintained? What if our coming together (allthetime) is the thing that we continue not to see as the lie
of nonrelation and difference rolls off our tongues each time we say who we are and where we come
from?

In the last two decades of humanities scholarship on race and racism, proponents on either side of
an increasingly widening gap have moved through the terrains of racialization as social construction,
identity politics, critical race theory, and genetics and genomics in order to understand what
constitutes so fraught a belonging.' For example, as Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres, in their own
formulation of racism, announce: "In our analysis `race,' simply put, is the child of racism."' By
placing race in pseudo-biological relationship with racism, Darder and Torres metaphorically reify
the problem of biological relationship that makes studies of race and racism so difficult to manage.
Settling the problem of biological belonging is the psychic life of race, and race work is always
already performed by quotidian racism. My project gives depth and shape to the work of racism,
arguing first and foremost, as have other Americanists, that racism is not anomalous to quotidian life.
The argument here is that racism orders some of the most intimate practices of everyday life, in that
racist practice is foundational to making race matter.

Given my earlier preoccupation with (non)relation, I wonder if proximity is the cure for the bad
faith of racist practice? In the end, one would wish for more elaboration on Bonilla-Silva's part:
What kind of proximity, what level of familiarity? Are we talking "family" here? If one lives and
works in a world primarily populated by phenotypically white people, proximity slowly morphs into
the singularity that is monocular. In this instance whose perspective, whose "see [ing]" will matter
most?

Bonilla-Silva's contention about the kind of beneficial work that proximity and familiarity can do is
muddied by Jennifer Richeson and J. Nicole Shelton's pioneering work on interracial interaction.
Proximity at the level of blood relation does not ensure antiracist practice at all. As Richeson and
Shelton find: "Given that interracial contact may be the most promising avenue to prejudice reduction,
it is important to examine factors that undermine positive interracial contact experiences, as well as
those that facilitate them." In their view, knowing that interracial interactions are cognitively draining
is not enough; instead, they suggest "that it is not the goal to control prejudice per se that results in
cognitive depletion but, rather, the cognitive processes that individuals employ (i.e., vigilance,
suppression, effortful self-presentation) to avoid appearing or behaving in prejudiced ways."' This
new science about race interaction may be helping us to acknowledge that race may not be on the
body, but it certainly is "in" it, as studies such as that of Richeson and Shelton compel us to see
certain cognitive machinations as constitutive of the racialized drama we give character to in
quotidian life. What are we seeing when we see what we see? Are we uploading the same old script
and playing our respective parts or are we letting the situation be? Are racial encounters the amor fati
for the twenty-first century?

Where any idea of association-in the bedroom, parking lot, or boardroom-is repudiated, time
matters most when the question of descent shackles biology to it. As beings enter into the symbolic
and become subjects-the stuff from which personhood is crafted-they enter into a history that literally
is not their own; history, in terms of descent, belongs to someone else in the sense that not only is it
dependent on those who have come before but also on their place in the racial order-a place that, in
turn, defines one's own. Such is the tricky matter of race. As Sonia Sikka, reading Heidegger and his
Volk, argues: "Descent becomes a determining factor through the way that biology enters `history';
that is through the inevitable role that it plays in self-identification."$ In the racial order of things,
black/white subjects who speak of race connect themselves to the historical in a way that
differentiates one history from the other. The purpose here is to maintain the illusion that there is very
little shared historico-biological material.

The fact that one has to have a "history" in order to be connected to a people racializes the meaning
of "history" and simultaneously locates the idea of being related (to someone) to a quotidian progress
narrative, one that can be counted by its black and white parts. Here, a rhetoric of "beyond" gives
meaning to the meeting of black and white as a nonevent, as the nonevent allows for bloodlines to
articulate themselves in a racially ordered fashion. Put more forcefully, Stuart Hall reminds us that
"the essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking
what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signifier
`black' is torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a biologically
constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of racism we are trying to
deconstruct.79 Hall's statement demonstrates the problem the historic plays in attempts to both
recognize the black body and deploy it as a signifier for something other than the biological. He
argues for the black body's attachment to the historical, among other categories, by believing that this
affiliation is apart from the "biologically constituted." But if to have a history is tied to racial
homology, if not feeling, then to think the black body in the historical is to connect it to some trace of
its biological force. Such belonging is reiterated in black narratives of community that seem to
depend upon the link between biological futurity (generations) as historical connection-or in other
words the way historical connection is realized is through the biological.

In thinking through this particular beyond-the "reality bites" of critical race studies-it might be
fruitful to take some time to consider both where critical energies are focused in the discourse on race
and what stories about race and racism are consistently rehearsed in that familiar place.

One of my objectives in this chapter is to provide an overview of work in critical race theory that has
helped us to arrive at the theoretical crossroads I have articulated as a meeting between critical race
and queer theory. What I outline here is a trajectory for critical race scholarship that has been pivotal
in shaping future projects on the nature of race and racism; that contributes in some way to moving my
own argument in a particular direction; and that represents some but by no means all of the diversity
of work in the field.10 My hope is that the following redaction will provide an adequate grounding
for the intersection I attempt to effect in chapter3.

Black feminists such as the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw and the political scientist Cathy
Cohen draw upon work in gender studies to complicate not only the intersection of conflicting
oppressions but also the object of our scholarly inquiry." Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" (1991) is a lengthy exegesis
of several cultural, political, and structural narratives in support of her principal claim that critical
feminist methodologies about "women" do not apply to the situationality of women of color and black
women in particular. Early in her essay, Crenshaw alerts us to the fact that her focus is upon the
intersection of gender and race, although, she notes, "class or sexuality are often as critical in shaping
the experiences of women of color."12 While the notion of intersectionality has come under critique
a s unwieldy and diffuse, and Crenshaw in particular has been criticized for collapsing "black
women" into "women of color," the difficulty that the next generation of feminists have with
Crenshaw's analysis is not that it attempts to do too much but that it cannot account for sexuality in its
framework. Moreover, what intersectionality lacks in Crenshaw's paradigm is a sound methodology
to pair with its critique of prevailing assumptions about race and gender.13 Nevertheless, feminists
and critical race scholars have long used her model of the multiple crossings of gender, race, and
class, with varying results.14

Perhaps the most important contribution to the discourse on race made by Crenshaw's essay is that
it was not only a part of early black feminist critiques of poststructuralist thinking, but also that it
articulated a way in which social constructionist approaches to theories about race were still useful
in scholarly work. As Crenshaw notes: "One rendition of [the] antiessentialist critique-that feminism
essentializes the category of womanowes a great deal to the postmodernist idea that categories we
consider natural or merely representational are actually socially constructed in a linguistic economy
of difference. While the descriptive project of postmodernism, of questioning the ways in which
meaning is socially constructed is generally sound, this critique sometimes misreads the meaning of
social construction and distorts its political relevance."15 It is unfortunate that Crenshaw's reading
here is somewhat tautological-as "meaning" interacts with "social construction" as both origin and
byproduct.

Nevertheless, I would like to point out that Crenshaw helps to shape discussions within feminism
about the category of woman and essentialism that reached their peak with the publication of Judith
Butler's Gender Trouble (199o) thus signaling her engagement with central tenants in feminist thought.
Crenshaw does follow the arc of black feminist critique-a critique that is thoroughly situated against
an evacuation of the category of woman for the poststructuralist's linguistic economy of difference. In
essence, she wants to reserve some room for the material effects of social construction. The material
effects argument has been very successful in keeping alive the social constructionist position within
critical race theory -a position that resists the particular flow of poststructuralism's discursivity. For
Crenshaw, the social construction of race defines a nuanced politic-one in which ideas about race
have material force and therefore phenomenological meaning. In this critical situation we are
somewhat betwixt and between: not rid of woman entirely, but not satisfied with her racial makeup
either.

After Crenshaw's critique of the political saliency of identity, such a position became harder and
harder to maintain within queer theorizing, especially as poststructuralism's fragmented body gave
way again and again to persistent regulatory regimes so that nothing could be written on or in its
changing form. As such, the body's materiality slowly became mere byproduct. What is interesting for
my focus in this book is that when the body becomes byproduct-becomes shaped by discourse-it
moves away from the efforts of critical race scholarship to engage its materiality in a dialectical
discourse of "race/racism" and finds itself wholly invested in sexuality. Once Foucault gave the
(homosexual) body a history it could reiterate for itself as "the one;' not just "a one;" the body wrests
itself from the same historical trajectory of materiality that life in the Americas demanded.16 Gone
are the histories of slavery and removal for this fragmented, discursively besieged body; what is
present is the beautiful life awaiting it in the realm of all things queer and possible. Is it at this point
that the queer body abandons race?

As if in response to Crenshaw's marginalization of sexuality in the landscape of the intersection,

Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics"
(1997) attempts to redirect our critical energies in queer studies away from models of respectable
objects of inquiry to those who are the most maligned and misunderstood (hence the title). In doing
so, she reminds me of the second wave claim that feminism's subject was intended to be the most
oppressed woman in society." Cohen's overall strategy is to probe "the disjuncture, evident in queer
politics, between an articulated commitment to promoting an understanding of sexuality that rejects
the idea of static, monolithic, bounded categories, on the one hand, and political practices structured
around binary conceptions of sexuality and power, on the other.."'$ Central to Cohen's claim here is a
call to reimagine the limits of queer critiqueexpressed at the boundary between hetero and homo-as
an occasion to examine what the formation of a "decentered political identity" might look like.

Inherent in Cohen's interrogation is a demand for queer theory to look to its roots in the social
movements of the late 196os and early 1970s and their discursive rationales for more liberating
fodder.19 In other words, Cohen seems to anticipate the advent of "queer of color critique"-which
makes an attempt to ground a queer critical politics in another monolith otherwise known as "women
of color feminism;' through the figure of the sexual outlaw.20 Cohen takes seriously Gayle Rubin's
claim in "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" (1984) that future
work in the new sexuality studies would focus upon the most besieged sexual minorities. Both
Crenshaw and Cohen represent important shifts for work on race and gender, even though many of the
critical interventions that followed Crenshaw's article seem to conceive of race as a genderless
space, thus skirting the necessity to speak to gender in any comprehensive or meaningful way.21
Nevertheless, when critics working in critical race theory need to nod toward gendered relations,
they find themselves at the doorstep of Crenshaw's work.

Historical materialists such as Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown or social constructionists such as
the cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy would have us understand the importance of race by ridding
the critical landscape of this useless fiction. In the case of Miles and Brown, our critical attention is
drawn to the invisible and therefore to the mitochondrial war that race, as part of capitalist ideology,
wages against oppressed peoples in the name of cultural nationalism.22 In this instance, a move from
the various fictions of race to the work of racism also usually entails the recovery of a class analysis
(Miles and Brown) as part of what makes race "work;' thus rescuing race from its stranded location
on the highway of identity politics. A lack of attention to the importance of a political economy, a
class politics in the discourse of race, has driven scholars such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy to
challenge those who insist upon the primacy of race in social relations at the expense of "class"-in
essence, theirs is a stubborn insistence that economic and political concerns are intertwined.

I group Gilroy with Miles and Brown for two reasons: their roots in British cultural studies and the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and their importance to one another as interlocutors.23
Gilroy's most salient contribution to "race" studies can be cited in Against Race: Imagining Political
Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000). In grappling with identity in particular, he asserts: "Nobody
ever speaks of human identity. The concept orients thinking away from any engagement with the basic
antianthropological sameness that is the premise of this book" (98). By getting away from the
particularity of "identity;" which harnesses all human action for the benefit of racial and ethnic
stereotype and biological difference, Gilroy hopes to arrive at the human. Moreover, Gilroy attempts
to move us away from our obsession with a "racialized biopolitics" (185), where one's identity is
irrevocably attached to the body. While Gilroy's critique has its revolutionary moments, it is still in
the social constructionist vein because it posits an afterlife-a beyond-for the body that cannot be
sustained by data on race and its material effects. For Gilroy, a "planetary humanism" (17) and
"planetaryhumanity" (356) are absolutely necessary. He urges this move even though "this sharp turn
away from African antiquity and toward our planet's future is a difficult and delicate affair, especially
if we recognize the possibility that the contested colonial and imperial past has not entirely released
its grip upon us" (335)• At least in Gilroy's case, we should jettison our reliance upon catastrophic
moments of human being for a more apt and futuristic plan; one in which another way of relating
would unfold-an anti-anthropological way of being together. Here the beyond and its temporal frame
become the nasty buggers that we just cannot escape. After Lucy it looks like African antiquity is
indeed our future, not our past.

Gilroy's work is important to my investigation for three reasons: first, he insists upon a "planetary
humanism;' which echoes a more conservative approach to the discourse on race (the
"wearetheworld" approach); second, he beckons to a "future" that moves against a faction of queer
theorizing that holds no brief for the "future"-embodied by the figure of the (racial) child and
therefore heteronormative; and third, he depends upon the black/white dichotomy throughout his work
to make evidentiary claims about racist practice, a fact that epitomizes the problem that my book
seeks to engage.

Gilroy's formula for beyond circles back to my earlier contention that it might be time for a
reassessment of the survivalist mode for black being-a mode steeped in the often faulty logic of
blood, belonging, and family, a trifecta that has not paid off but still has particular resonance within
black life and letters. The direction of Gilroy's argument moves against the grain of most critical race
work where getting beyond race does not reduce its persistence but only reifies its several fictions (I
am thinking here of Derrick Bell's early work in critical race theory). I admit that Gilroy's penultimate
remarks are compelling, and I do think that the question remains of how can that movement, that
beyond, involve a vision of the self that does not include the messy materiality of the body? Or a
materiality that mires the body in a location it might not want to occupy?24 Most importantly, Gilroy
seems to be asking whether or not "human" systems along the Western time/space continuum are the
only systems that matter. There is a very interesting eco-narrative buried in Gilroy's conclusions, and
this is in my view the more profound question that Gilroy poses.

If we want to get beyond the body, why is it that these two bodies (black and white) become the
primal scene of racist practice? In other words, while there are a myriad of racisms in the world,
racist effects are grounded when they become proof of something that whites specifically do to
blacks. My opening narrative about the incident in the parking lot would seem to solidify this
evidentiary paradigm, but I contend that the scene does other work because it is not spectacular but
quotidian, and because it speaks to the twisted logic of race that insists that the body's materiality can
only be cited in a certain register-that its essence is really only skin deep. My argument moves in the
direction of the quotidian because I believe that we have yet to understand just what racist practice is,
and focusing on the everyday of the trifecta (blood, belonging, family) mentioned earlier might help to
locate a racial politic much closer to home than we have imagined heretofore.
 In my mind the parking lot narrative serves to point out the ways in which we are indebted to race's
faulty logic-that when we make claims for ourselves and others as racialized beings we invariably
put an end to connection and therefore reproduce the very difference that we seek to ameliorate.
Gilroy's argument highlights the problematic of "beyond" outlined in this chapter. When we want to
think of one race, the human race, then we become insensitive to the very real, very material effects of
racist practice; but when we return to that practice, we can only see something produced by the
machinations of large systems like the university or the state. We often only have eyes for the
spectacularity of racist practice, not its everyday machinations that we in turn have some culpability
in. This desire to see ourselves as exempt from racist violence, no matter how small, is part of the
same logic that attempts to excise life choices, erotic choices, from these larger systems. What we
would have called racism is now "personal choice" or becomes mildly prejudicial. For example, to
say that I am not hurting anyone when I say that I prefer to sleep with one racialized being over
another, is to tell a different story about the erotic-one where the autonomous becomes clouded by the
sticky film of prejudice morphed into quotidian racism. The erotic, therefore, touches upon that aspect
of racist practice that cannot be accounted for as racist practice but must be understood as something
else altogether.

Having jettisoned race as a false category of difference, in their book Racism Miles and Brown
take a far more practical approach to their articulation of racism by focusing upon the historical
emergence of Western nationalisms through capitalism and the importance of racist programs and
policies in maintaining the nation-state at the advent of modernity. They eschew "an analysis of
racism" in terms of "a phenotypically identifiable victim" and note that "the influence of racism and
exclusionary practices is always a component part of a wider structure of multiple disadvantage and
exclusion" (17). In particular, they mark the evolution of scholarly work at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies that highlights changes in Britain in the late 197os and specifically
cites a "new racism" emerging from the shift toward a more global, free-market economy and the
phenomenon otherwise known through various cultural studies critics, such as Stuart Hall, as
"Thatcherism" (61). One could say that the contemporary semantic equivalent for work on
"Thatcherism" is the work on neoliberalism by the new American Left, a connection that makes a
stronger argument for critical race work in cultural studies as it is broadly defined 25 No longer
tethered by legal restrictions and cultural iconography, racism in the late twentieth century moves to
its underground bunker-if it cannot be seen or treated by legal jurisprudence then it simply does not
exist. Miles and Brown, moreover, see that focus upon institutionalized racism, specifically in the
American context, amounted to the following understanding of the actors in racism's drama: "The
dominant and subordinate groups are usually designated by reference to skin colour, as `whites' and
`blacks' respectively. Consequently, racism is, by definition, effected (intentionally or otherwise) by
`white' people to the disadvantage of `black' people" (66).

For Miles and Brown this static configuration represents "a significant deflation of the concept of
racism"(67).26 Miles and Brown are important to my project because of the way in which they
remind us of the split between American and European conceptualizations of racial formation and its
effects.27 Their explicit contention that racism has been too often considered as something white
bodies do to black bodies identifies an important break in the transatlantic view of what racism
actually is; for Miles and Brown "American" understandings of race rely too often on models of
"prejudice" rather than of "power" (70). By casting American understandings of racism as focused on
"prejudice" rather than on "power;' Miles and Brown are able to interpret the black/white binary as
not only situationally archaic but also worthy of our critical contempt. In the wake of arguments like
theirs, scholars working at the intersection of queer theory and critical race theory tended to adopt
this widely held view-a view that is constitutive of the transnational turn in critical discourse. Having
thought of all things American as purblind, scholars began to focus on the "larger" picture-a picture in
which they themselves play little part. At this stage I want to reiterate that the turn to the transnational
as a critical category has been very fruitful to engagements both at "home" and abroad, especially
with regard to the extent to which "home" is neither here nor there for many global and migrant
populations. What I am pinpointing here is the psychic life of that turn and the consequences it has had
for studies that focus upon the local rather than the global. Chief among this group would be work in
Native studies, which rarely if ever gets taken up by theorists working in the space we now call the
"transnational."28

By contextualizing the American practice of racism in an archaic view of racial history, Miles and
Brown inadvertently construct attention to black/ white relation as a matter of historical record rather
than psychic continuum. Once the black/white dynamic is embedded in a history, any appeal to that
dynamic creates the condition of backwardness in which negative racialized belonging has been
continually mired. In retrospect, Gilroy's call to move "from African antiquity" also produces racist
practice as constitutive of a problematic, though noble past. The question here is how to create a new
formula for understanding racist practice in a logic in which it exists rather than through a
corporeality that we have come to recognize or a history that belongs to it.

Other scholars such as David Theo Goldberg and Philomena Essed join Miles and Brown in
challenging scholars in the United States to "face outwards" and move away from a critical race
theory mired in "American parochialism."29 Miles and Brown's critique of the American academy
stems largely from a desire to have "a concept of racism that has the ability to grasp and comprehend
the diversity of the phenomenon to which it refers" (86). In this appraisal, the black/white binary
occludes our vision, preventing us from recognizing that only a few inches away another being is
moving down the same stretch.30

The charge of "American parochialism" has had a significant impact upon subsequent studies of
race and racism in the United States, causing scholars to broaden their inquiries or explain away their
inability to do so. It is my contention that this expansion of the discourse to other racisms or other
bodies hasn't diminished the need to rethink the black/white binary and its hold upon exemplary
epistemologies. This looking "outward," pace Essed and Goldberg, might not be the remedy for our
confused racial feeling.
 In the final analysis, it is important to note that Miles and Brown are intent upon thinking of racism
as ideology: "Racism can successfully (although mistakenly) make sense of the world and provide a
strategy for political action. It follows that, to the extent that racism is grounded in economic and
political relations, strategies for eliminating racism should not concentrate on trying exclusively to
persuade those who articulate racism that they are `wrong, but on changing those particular economic
and political relations" (107; emphasis in original). For those scholars who think of racism as
ideologically bound, it is necessarily subtended by a set of economic and political relations. While I
don't want to refute those claims, I do offer that these sets of relations-economic, political, or
otherwise-are attended by a host of perceptions that rupture the binary logic of an ideological
paradigm. Quotidian racism in the American tradition might be dependent upon economic and
political relations, but it escapes our notice when such relations turn their attention to the procreative
possibilities of our erotic lives. In that case, racist action is not only justified but also necessary to
prevent slippage into the other-so remarkably unlike the self. Racism is phenomenologically bound,
but it has exceeded the expectations of the bodies it is attached to; bad faith always cuts in more than
one direction when procreative license and practice is at stake. I will think through this constellation
of possibilities further in chapter 2.

In contrast to Miles and Brown, the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in Racism without Racists
understands racism as an ideology, but he does not give up on the saliency of the black/white binary,
at least in terms of how data are collected. In unpacking the concept of "color-blind racism;' Bonilla-
Silva focuses upon select data that reveal the justifications by white respondents for discrimination in
a post-civil rights era.31 For BonillaSilva, "subscribing to an ideology is like wearing a piece of
clothing. When you wear it, you also wear a certain style, a certain fashion, a certain way of
presenting yourself to the world. 1131 In essence, Bonilla-Silva not only acknowledges that racism,
despite our desperate hope, has not disappeared, but that it has a rhetoric, a style through which it
survives. In order for this style to be recognized, it has to be reiterated. Moreover, in his review of
white attitudes about race and discrimination, he notes that more often than not whites were in the
mood to get over the past-and that "past" could usually be represented by the specter of slavery.33

One of the primary truths of African Americanist intellectual work is that we are not yet done with
slavery-a political stance on the historical that continually thwarts scholarly and well-intentioned
efforts to move beyondit. Many have mistaken this contention either as evidence of a backward
politic-one that specifically runs contrary to an American bootstrap ideology-or as an instance of the
primacy of the black experience to the exclusion of all others in the historical matrix. This couldn't be
further from the truth. I am not proposing here that either of these contentions is unwarranted. Rather,
one could only think of "slavery" as specific to the black body if we were to think of it in the
narrowest of terms. We are not done with slavery because we have yet to thoroughly investigate its
psychic life. This is not to pit the past against the present in a dysfunctional causal relationship (a
problematic I pointed out in the introduction to this book). To rethink slavery among us is to take
seriously the ways in which its logic of property, belonging, and family reshaped each and every one
of those concepts irrevocably, as well as the lives of the subjects-black, white, native, Hispanic-who
lived within this discursive logic. No one has asked for a return; rather, we have asked for a more
thoroughgoing and therefore intellectually challenging way of seeing ourselves-past, present, and
future.

Despite its progressive agenda, Bonilla-Silva's work still relies on (as almost all qualitative
research needs to) the visible divide between black and white to make a point about their
(non)relation. How can work that provides an "unrepentant critique" of racism not be mired in race as
a biological category?34 After all, how are scholars going to collect the data? We have to start
marking categories and making them work for us at the onset, and this process of categorization can
be strikingly similar to the work that racism performs for race. When assessment is on the line, the
"races" take their seats at the American feast of difference.

Perhaps the most important contribution Bonilla-Silva makes is in answer to Michael Omi and
Howard Winant's claim in Racial Formation in the United States that "blacks can be `racist' too. 1135
Bonilla-Silva posits: "The question needs to be rephrased from `are blacks as "racist" as whites?' to
`are blacks as "prejudiced" as whites. I do so because the concept of `racism' as used by most social
scientists and commentators is grounded on methodological individualism (the separation of `racist'
and `nonracist' individuals) and psychologism (assuming `racist' individuals are pathological,
whereas those who are not `racist' are normal). In contrast, I have attempted to conceptualize racism
as a sociopolitical concept that refers exclusively to racial ideology that glues a particular racial
order. 1136 At the onset of this paradigmatic shift, Bonilla-Silva returns to the prejudice/ power
paradigm of Miles and Brown by arguing that racist practice should be reconfigured to "prejudice"-a
demotion in every sense of the word. This opts blackness out of racist practice so that the subsequent
sentences allude to other bodies. In a sense, in this racial order whites are still racist and blacks
simply are prejudiced. Nevertheless, Bonilla-Silva's bold gesture here comes closest to the aims of
this project-one that seeks to normalize racism, to move away from "good" or "bad" assessments of
its agents (black and white) and toward an understanding of its psychic life and how that life "glues a
particular racial order."

The erotic is one particular kind of glue. The attempt here is to cease thinking about that racial
order as constitutive of a hierarchy in which whites are on top and blacks are on the bottom-even the
more materialist intervention such as Miles and Brown has eschewed such correlation. In chapter 2 I
delve into the extent to which one particular set of discussions of the erotic in feminist circles
influenced and altered scholarly approaches to the erotic. I am suggesting that a critical reexamination
of that process might yield more evidence for how racist practice became untethered from the erotic
as well as the subsequent critical maneuvers to somehow reattach the thing that was removed from the
collective queer body.

What makes race work for us? Why do we need it? In order to push this quotidian exercise toward
the work of queer theorizing, I focus on the erotic. The erotic life of racism is the bridge between
theories of race and theories of sexuality in all of their diverse complexity. Moreover, by thinking
through the erotic-the personal and political dimensions of desire-I differ from Bonilla-Silva in that
his reliance upon an ideological ordering for understanding racism still assumes that racism is
structured in a particular way. But when in the orbit of racism one cannot help but think about being
there at all because race talk always wants to be someplace else: beyond black and white
("Can'tweallgetalong?"); beyond the self ("I'm not a racist, but"); beyond the situation ("I wanted to
say something, but"). By anchoring the erotic to racist practice, I champion an alternative location for
grounding racism-in the quotidian and intimate action that brings belonging to one another out into
bold relief and perhaps also into question.

I cannot conclude my review of Bonilla-Silva's work without mentioning that for the second edition
of Racism without Racists, Bonilla-Silva added a penultimate chapter, "E Pluribus Unum or the Same
Old Perfume in a New Bottle?" to discuss the importance of recent statistics on Latinos being the
largest minority group in the country and what significance this might have for our understanding of
race and its location in the black/ white binary. As he argues:

The biracial order typical of the United States, which was the exception in the world racial
system, is evolving into a complex and loosely organized triracial stratification system similar to
that of many Latin American and Caribbean nations.... This new order ... will be apparently more
pluralistic and exhibit more racial fluidity than the order it is replacing. However, this new
system will serve as a formidable fortress for white supremacy. Its "we are beyond race" lyrics
and color blind music will drown the voices of those fighting for racial equality ... and may even
eclipse the space for talking about race altogether. Hence, in this emerging Latin America-like
America, racial inequality will remain-and may even increase-yet there will be a restricted
space to fight it.37

Bonilla-Silva's new conclusions are important to my project because they demonstrate that moving to
a multicultural space might not eliminate the problem of race for us all; that "beyond" is a place
where achieving a "new order" looks like more of the same. What would moving in the direction of a
multicultural space do for our collective understanding of this nation's past? If the conceptualization
of the past privileges whiteness as the bigbang theory of the multicultural (that whiteness arrives and
therefore makes "races, "difference;" etc.) then we are moving toward a "multicultural" society. If that
history, however, privileges the presence of diverse Native American cultures in our tale of origin,
then the multicultural ground that is our future unmakes a past already seething with multiculturalism's
heterogeneity.

The predicament outlined above is precisely why I devote the pages of this book to returning to the
binary: just as one would return to a neighborhood that one grew up in because something important
happened in that place, and in order to have a "future" one ought to have a fuller and more adequate
accounting of the events that took place there. In queer studies the "future" is rendered in the negative
because of the championing of queer (male) bodies and their unproductive coupling. The "no future"
noted by Lee Edelman that I'd like to posit here fills in the missing piece of this most pervasive form
of queer critical engagement-what is that nonproductive space looking back upon or forward to? As
Edelman offers, "At the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural text of politics and the
politics of cultural texts lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not `fighting
for the children; the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of
reproductive futurism."38 It is in this unpredictable future that queer meets the race work of beyond.
If the queer is posited against an agenda of relentless biological warfare then what might beyond,
what might the "future," really be gesturing toward? Beyond gets its most trenchant application in
BonillaSilva's text as the not-so-distant location (the "triracial" event), and its racial diversity
prepares us for a further diminishing of the efficacy of scholarly work on race. But shouldn't this
happy future provide us with so much more? In my assessment, the purpose of "the future" is to wed
us to a particular kind of repetition where the reiteration of past practice enlists both
heteronormativity and biological belonging on its side to hide racist endeavor in quotidian practice.
The racial event embedded in the process of biology's search for a future entails some critique of the
networks of racial belonging and power that subtend such avid seeking.

I want to return to the system of white supremacy that Bonilla-Silva implicitly engages and that
critical race work seeks to understand. BonillaSilva thinks of white supremacy as "racialized social
systems" that "became global and affected all societies where Europeans extended their reach" and
therefore takes for granted its acknowledged presence among us.39 There is great debate in
historiography (BarbaraFields,inparticular) as to when Euro-supremacy became "white" supremacy. I
can think of no better articulation of the presence of "white supremacy" among us than Charles Mills's
analysis of the "social contract." Mills begins The Racial Contract with the following startling
observation:

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is
today. You will not find this term in introduc tort', or even advanced, texts in political theory. A
standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say
something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill and
Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristrocracy,
democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism,
and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political
thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic
political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission
is not accidental.40

In this dramatic opening, Mills reminds me of my own experience in a standard introductory

philosophy and literature course at Princeton University and takes me to the unanswered questions
seeking refuge in words like "genius" and "merit" and "great books." Why do some of the most
influential works of Western thought say so little about white power as a political system? In thinking
of white supremacy as "based on a `contract' between whites, a Racial Contract;' Mills remakes the
social contract devised by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.41 A critique of Mills's position here
could rest on a reliance upon happenstance (Europeans happened to be white and, ergo, white
supremacy) as biological imperative. This kind of thinking leads us to believe that if only "we" were
in power then things would be different, even though "history" tells another story (I am thinking here
of Cherokee slavery or the Israeli occupation of Palestine, for example). What if human overcoming
were simply a way to ignore questions of systemic planetary abuse, for example? (aquestionthat lurks
in Gilroy's earlier remarks).

The larger question here is beyond the scope of this study, but I do think that Mills's
conceptualization is both eye opening and beautifully disastrous, because at the end of the day the
racialized aspect of "white" supremacy uncovers something more pernicious in its wake: namely, the
extent to which acts of quotidian differentiation can normalize racist endeavor.42 The question here is
not who is doing it, or how, but rather why racial differentiation is necessary at all and when it is,
what system (already inplace) might it be participating in?

By identifying white supremacy as a political system, Mills calls our attention to the kinds of
detrimental civilizing effects that pollute notions of political and cultural terms such as "manifest
destiny" or the "New World." In addition, Mills makes a different historical genealogy matterone that
Foucault, for all of his attention to biopower, to turning the human into a regulated and regulatory
entity, seems to neatly omit; one that is instrumental to the production of narratives of citizenship,
belonging, and that twenty-first-century truism called "nation building." Nevertheless, what is useful
in Mills's assessment of white supremacy is his emphasis on epistemological force, as it has a way of
"prescribing norms for cognition to which its signatories must adhere.`43 This is where Mills's
findings pair well with those of Richeson and Shelton-where modes of cognition produce a certain
kind of race work, albeit often unseen.

Mills's other important contribution to the discourse about (white) racism is his insistence upon the
centrality of race to Western ideals and its importance in a nascent dialectic. Mills seems to move
against the grain of discourse on race by observing that race rather than a developmental outcome of
Western expansion is "in no way an `afterthought; [or] a `deviation"' from those ideals but rather
constitutive of .44

Historians and political theorists seem to have reached some consensus about the Enlightenment's
take on race; a consensus that involves seeing the Enlightenment's increasing focus on race as a
growing out of more religious or national concerns. In sum, critics often prefer a gradualist approach
to understandings of the Enlightenment, and they claim that race develops as a distinct category and
becomes a biopolitic when the social sciences emerge as disciplines and succeed in cementing "the
body as the locus of identity and difference."45 Mills's difference from prevailing understandings of
the Enlightenment project is expressed methodologically: his view on race and the racism it
engenders is steeped in analytical rather than continental philosophy.46

Nevertheless, one important example of this gradualist approach to Enlightenment race theory is
outlined in Thomas Gossett's early work on race: "The importance of Negro slavery in generating
race theories in this country can hardly be overestimated, but it must be remembered that there was a
minimum of theory at the time the institution was established. The theory of any political or social
institution is likely to develop only when it comes under attack, and the time for opposition to slavery
was still far in the future."47 While Gossett's oppositional paradigm might not be the best trigger for
antiracist action, the feminist theorist Robyn Wiegman offers one articulation of the encumbered
landscape of racial formation.41, In her analysis of the role of new technologies such as camera
obscura in the making of what would come to constitute the visual or knowledge about the visual, she
provides some cautionary remarks: "We would be wrong to assume that the motivating force of
natural history was to establish scientific prooffor white supremacy in a theory of multiple creations.
"49 Wiegman's emphasis on the classification and therefore differentiation of bodies is mirrored in
Mills's later assessment of the Racial Contract as something that "makes the white body the somatic
norm.1150 In essence, Mills's quest is to get at the materiality of moral reason, while Wiegman's
point is to think through how that materiality produces and subtends knowledge about a subject or, for
that matter, a field of inquiry. In returning to the "how" of interaction, and perhaps moving away from
the analytical to the phenomenological, Mills asserts that "on matters related to race, the Racial
Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a
particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and
socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand
the world they themselves have made."" Mills's insistence upon the (benign) social contract as in fact
a racial contract also does other work here-it transforms the singularity of rationality at the center of
the Western episteme, and as a consequence redefines racism as a very rational act.52 Racist action
makes the system of racial differentiation work. What is useful to my project is that Mills's work
allows for racist action to come into the quotidian-a move that puts his work solidly within critical
race theory's critical trajectory.

As if to prove my claims that talk of race is always already laced with a strange temporality,
neither here nor there but always with us, Wiegman offers the following: "If rethinking the historical
contours of Western racial discourse matters as a political project, it is not as a manifestation of an
other truth that has previously been denied, but as a vehicle for shifting the frame of reference in such
a way that the present can emerge as somehow less familiar, less natural in its categories, its political
delineations, and its epistemological foundations."53 Where the present can be rearticulated for what
it is, and where what it is-its cognitive life-can be rendered like fat through its epistemological
foundations, then this might be the place where Wiegman and Mills meet.54

As a feminist scholar Wiegman's goal is to see how such supremacy works in concert with racist
and sexist practice. As she writes: "The productive function of the discourse of sexual difference as
an increasingly deployed mechanism of racial signification and control attaches in ways to black male
bodies that are crucial to a feminist politics of antiracist struggle-to a feminist politics that is not
simply invested in bringing back the black woman into critical view, but which traces the historical
a nd theoretical contexts that shape her absence and that speak more broadly to the intertwining
relationship between patriarchy and white supremacy."55 Wiegman's attention to gender (a category
that lacks illumination in Mills's text)56 in the complex matrix of race/sex/sexuality/class has
important implications for this project, as my goal here is to return to that nexus that critics
acknowledge profoundly shapes postmodern understandings of who we are and how we interact, yet a
nexus they profoundly misread or undertheorize. Like Wiegman, the chapters that follow in this book
ultimately focus upon how we have lost the black (lesbian) body. In my focus here, however, I do not
argue that this erasure is produced by patriarchy and white supremacy. Instead, I understand this
disappearance as also necessary to a certain mode of queer theorizing that cannot account for itself
without that body's erasure-even in its precise moment of absolutely recognizing and inscribing it.

This review of critical race theory would not be complete without a nod to the work by
practitioners of postpositive realism. Satya Mohanty, Paula Moya, and Michael Hames-Garcia,
among others, articulate their project as an attempt to engage the fault lines of postmodernism's
critique of constructivism by offering a critical alternative wherein we can see the inherent value in
experience while simultaneously retaining objectivity, and rejecting, in the words of Mohanty, "as
overly abstract and limiting this conception of objectivity as presupposition-free knowledge." By
"understand[ing] multiculturalism as a theory of social justice" and defining multiculturalism "as a
form of epistemic cooperation across cultures," Mohanty and his critical allies move the discussion
about race away from the zero sum game of "us vs. them" and toward a groundingin identity that
cannot be easily assailed from the vantage point of a colorblind neoliberalism.57 The epistemic
significance of identity and the importance of multiculturalism to the postpositivist realist project are
more thoroughly outlined in Moya's Learning from Experience.511 Mohanty lodges his critique in the
same political theory as Mills, but their faith in its applicability and even universality differs greatly.
While I am not convinced by postpositivist realist claims about multicultural possibility, that project
has usefulness for this study because of its emphasis upon emotion. In paraphrasing the work of the
philosopher Naomi Scheman, Mohanty surmises that "our emotions provide evidence of the extent to
which even our deepest personal experiences are socially constructed, mediated by visions and
values that are `political' in nature, that refer outward to the world beyond the individual."59 Mohanty
gestures toward the very same province of emotion-let's call this "racial feeling"-that I seek to unpack
in this book. This shift toward "emotion" has critical manifestations in work on "public feelings;"
bodily affect, and performance, and it is my hope that what I touch upon here will add to that
conversation but in an unfamiliar register. It is to this psychic life of emotion-volatile and
pleasurable-that I now turn.
where being queer and female is as rude as we can get.

-Cherrie Moraga,

Loving in the War Years

Kwame Anthony Appiah tells us, "In our private lives, we are morally free to have aesthetic
preferences between people, but once our treatment of people raises moral issues, we may not make
arbitrary distinctions"' Writing in another time, Emmanuel Levinas asks, "Is the Desire for the Other
(Autrui) an appetite or a generosity?"2 These two quotes exist in relationship to one another, as
Appiah's excuse for the ego's embarrassing commitments are relegated to "aesthetic preference" and
Levinas's equivocation between appetite and generosity speaks to the means rather than the ends of
such commitments. At issue here is whether or not aesthetic preference ever passes as proper moral
practice.3 Since Appiah's words are grounded in his study of "racisms" and Levinas's are not, it
would seem a bit of a stretch to hold them in conversation with one another. But the words "appetite"
and "generosity" are compelling here, and their use for a dis course about racism and its erotic life
could be quite generative. In reading the words "appetite" and "generosity" together, one could
surmise that what we need to do is turn an appetite-an "aesthetic preference"-into an antiracist stance;
a "generosity" that has great potential. Let us suppose that where the error occurs for Appiah is when
our motivational energy turns what is aesthetic differentiation into a moral absolute. But what if such
a beginning is always already flawed? What if that little thing called individual preference is the
sounding moment for racist desire? How can one unmake the (queer) autonomy of desire-the thing that
is shaped, like many other emotions, and circumscribed by the racist culture that we live in?4 How
can one disarticulate a personal preference from a racist attitude? When does a simple preference
become an absolute?5 Appiah's formulation harbors a contradiction, since what was once "aesthetic
preference" becomes an "arbitrary distinction" only when treatment of people raises moral issues. A
personal preference can become morally reprehensible when the private becomes public. This split
between private and public, personal and political, has been soundly critiqued by feminist scholars
and queer scholars, notably by Michael Warner in his searing examination of America's obsession
with sex, shame, and censure in The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life
(1999). In essence, distinctions are okay so long as they remain in the realm of the personal (not
always political perhaps), but when members of the group become cognizant of their precarious
desires, there is a moral imperative to bring them in line with accepted standards of behavior.

My premise here is that we have uncoupled our desire from quotidian racist practice for far too
long. What follows in the next section is an examination of that uncoupling and how it might have
been wrought over time and space. Much of the conversation about "the erotic" has taken place under
the auspices of sexuality studies. I now turn to that discourse to map some of its key players since
Gayle Rubin's groundbreaking essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality" (1984)-an essay that helped to "birth" at least two genealogies of queer studies work: one
trajectory organized by Halperin, Warner, Bersani, and Edelman, and the other organized by Butler,
Sedgwick, Halberstam, and Halley. I note these players on the field because the majority of the
writers in queer studies feel the need to address or cite the contributions of these queer studies
scholars in some form or other. The gendered divide is alarming here as work in one order of queer
studies sees the body as consistently under attack by both regulatory regimes and the symbolic order,
while the other mode of queer address focuses on persistently calling into question the body's
situationality.

In speaking about the racist prohibition embedded in the binary between black and white, Marlon
Ross observes that "the black-white polarity enables Americans to continue to deny the polymorphous
course of all human desire. Giving Americans a screen for projecting fear, this polarity prevents them
from dealing directly with the unclassifiable, uncolored course of desire itself'6 For Ross, racist
prohibition prevents "human desire" from working its steady magic. Like Gilroy, Ross imagines the
realm of (queer) desire as an "uncoloredcourse;' enlisting the category of the human to provoke us
into seeing how unencumbered desire should and could be. I am very much in support of this claim;
however, what I propose to unveil is how desire became so autonomous in queer theory and why
claims to some universal humanity, though laudable, do not quite capture the kind of complex and
often pernicious work that a "black-white polarity" does for us both critically and in everyday
practice.

It is my contention here that racist practice does limit human desire by attempting to circumscribe
its possible attachments-a point I argued in the introduction to this book. Here I pose that there is no
"raceless" course of desire, and I do so to ascertain the practiced nature of quotidian racism and how
those practices shape what we know of as "desire." In other words, this work might attempt to answer
the question posed by Michael Hames-Garcia in "Can Queer Theory Be Critical Theory?": "To what
extent can the privileging of desire as a realm of freedom and/or transgression [within queer studies]
occlude the collusion of desire with domination and oppression?"'

While queer materialist scholars have examined desire's "collusion" with domination and
oppression, there has been little work on how the psychic life of racism might have its erotic, desiring
components. Elizabeth Freeman comes close to my observations here in her creation of the term
"erotohistoriography," which she claims is "a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures
that counters the logic of development" and "indexes how queer relations complexly exceed the
present."" Freeman's presentation of desire is so capable that it can even remaster "the logic of
development;' as it is articulated through a paradigm of past/present/ future. Unlike its erotic
counterpart-cast as exceeding the boundaries of duration-racism consistently embeds us in a "past"
that we would rather not remember, where time stretches back toward the future, curtailing the
revolutionary possibilities of queer transgression. Freeman's configuration moves us away from
Edelman's celebration of queer futurity's lack and centers the critique upon a capricious nonlinearity-
or to be more precise, an exacting and disabling recursivity that appears like a scene from Waiting for
Godot.9

It is my pledge in this book to find the admittedly tenuous although nonetheless compelling
connection between the erotic and racism. My work on the erotic moves the boundary of the
understanding of desire by queer studies from the province of an abstract and autonomous desire
toward the materiality of the everyday, while simultaneously maintaining attention to queer studies'
inheritance from feminist inquiry.10 While I do not promise an explicit critique of capital, I am
indebted to scholars such as Rosemary Hennessy who have taken it upon themselves to think through
the relationship between capitalism and sexuality. In one of the most salient critiques of Rubin's
groundbreaking "Thinking Sex," Hennessy offers the following view: "When desire is understood as
lust, where lust is equated with a basic human drive, its historical production becomes invisible.
More to the point of my argument, invocations of lust as a natural experience to which women have a
right can limit our thinking about human agency, including sexual agency, to individual terms and so
forestall the possibility of linking this aspect of human life and agency to a more collective endeavor.
Desire remains abstracted and reified, and so we are also not enabled to see that this particular form
of desire is not even available to all women"11

Like Michael Hames-Garcia, Hennessy cautions us to rethink the radicalism in which queer desire
is so awash. While her alignment of desire with "lust" might seem almost prudish, the materialist
feminist vocabulary that Hennessy utilizes necessitates viewing desire as historically produced. For
the most part, queer theory's sense of historically produced desire gets its most salient critique in
Halperin's essay "Is There a History of Sexuality?" By thinking through erotic connections between
peoples in classi cal Athens as manifestations of power through various forms of state citizenship,
Halperin is able to question our preconceived notion of what a history of sexuality might look like.
Therefore, Hennessy's insistence that desire is historically produced has special salience both inside
of the Marxist lexicon from which she draws and for my earlier contention that history matters, but its
organization and alignment of bodies within its discursive boundaries can detract from fuller
explications of how bodies actually work, move, and interact. My claims about history here and
elsewhere have their precursor in Linda Hart's work on lesbian s/m. Focusing her critique on Linda
Wayne's observations about the display of symbols "particularly fascist imagery" representing
historical atrocities, Hart observes: "While I myself, like many other pro-s/m lesbians, found it
extremely difficult to accept the wearing of such symbols, Wayne is, I think, right to point out that to
view them as static representations, iconographically and inextricably linked to acts that they once
signified, contributes to their power to represent these acts as if they are outside history. That is not to
say that what they have represented is not historical, but it does seem to suggest that this history has
obtained a certain static, immutable quality, a timelessness."12 As I argue in this book,
representations of the historical have gotten in the way of our ability to see black/white relation in
anything but static terms.

Having a right to our queer desires is a fundamental tenet of queer theorizing, and Hennessy
problematizes this theoretical arrangement-an arrangement that, as we shall see here and in the next
chapter, has its black and white parts. By abstracting desire, notes Hennessy, queer theory detaches it
from lived experience-especially the lived experience of women. Unlike Butler, Rubin, and others
Hennessy does find space to address "women," and so her project holds a brief for feminist critique
by not foreclosing as theoretically bankrupt our ability to speak to the condition of women as a
category. Moreover, Hennessy's valuation of "desire" attaches it to "a more collective endeavor"-an
endeavor I see as holding out the possibility for racism's rhetorical return to the landscape of the
erotic. Again, we are called to remember the public and private, personal and political, and this
collective quickly becomes politicized and oddly black and white the more that critiques of queer
theory's center abound.

In addition, it is important to note that in this project I am very aware of how the erotic is tied to
notions of blackness, and race as blackness. Blackness, at least as it is understood in visual culture,
not only produces "erotic value" for whiteness,13 but it holds the very impossibility of its own
pleasure through becoming the sexualized surrogate of another. In a sense, blackness can never
possess its own erotic life. Scholars on "blackness" such as Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman
have contributed to the Fanonian concept of blackness as the thingness of the thing by arguing for a
more absolute abjection under slavery and colonization-an abjection that places the black body in
peril and, for Hartman at least, even in the midst of somewhat quotidian scenes of pleasure.14 My
explorations at the boundary between black and white attempt to unmake this foregone conclusion.
While queer studies might believe that desire always produces or makes "difference," even violently
so (I'm thinking of Bersani reading Lacan here), the shape and texture of that "difference" is usually
defined within the limits of queer theory's appropriate object-sexuality. To reiterate: in thinking
through the erotic my project is guided by work in queer theory but not grounded in its usual set of
critical investments. Ultimately I attempt something rather inappropriate, if not uncomfortable;
namely, I suggest that we can't have our erotic life-a desiring life-without involving ourselves in the
messy terrain of racist practice. To think through this connection-how we uncoupled racism and the
erotic and how we rearticulate the connection-I now move back in time to our thorny feminist
inheritance.

QUEER PHENOMENON

In the last decade or so feminist critics and philosophers have been resurrecting and reinterpreting
Simone de Beauvoir's existentialism-notably her intellectual departure from Sartre and contribution to
his work; the faulty translation by H. M. Parshley of her seminal work The Second Sex; and her
various influences across the disciplines.15 The chief component of Beauvoir's oeuvre is an
acceptance of the erotic as a philosophical category -an allowance that stems from her work with
phenomenological concerns. Her claims culminate in The Second Sex, which among other things
establishes a feminist ethic of the erotic. The kind of meaning that Beauvoir alludes to in the erotics of
all psychic relationships is very similar to Andre Lorde's later conceptualization of the term. In
speaking of the erotic, Beauvoir advances the following observations: "The erotic experience is one
that most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh
and as spirit, as the other and as the subject." She continues as follows: "There is in eroticism a
revolt of the instant against time, of the individual against the universal: to try to channel and exploit it
risks killing it, because live spontaneity cannot be disposed of like inert matter; nor can it be
compelled in the way a freedom can be."16 What Beauvoir finds in the erotic is rooted in the
revolutionary potential for a certain autonomy. This revolutionary potential is constitutive of an
autonomy that tends to drive much of early queer studies workthe erotic is risky for the whole because
it focuses exclusively on the individual by breaking an individual off from the regulatory structures
that make community, place, and home while simultaneously casting the queer subject over and
against such normative spaces.17 For Beauvoir, the erotic is a good thing because it quite simply
allows women in particular to possess their own sexuality. If the erotic cannot be "compelled in the
way a freedom can be;" then it rests in a plane apart from other and perhaps more pernicious desires.
But what if our erotic selves have been compelled not just by state intervention but also by such terms
as "community;" "home," and "race"?18

The erotic thus recalls the impossibility of community with another, mocking our ability to connect,
and also highlights the reciprocal nature of subjectivity, or what it means to be a subject-as
subjectivity is constituted not so much from a belief in the self and one's own actions but in the
understanding of another with whom we have connection (hell is the other, after all). The life of the
erotic is cradled in the definition of what it means to be human in the first place, and in the second
ordering of the erotic through eroticism it contextualizes for Beauvoir the pleasure and danger of
women's sexuality, specifically.19 As if to capitalize on the fruitfulness of this philosophical
predicament while still holding out hope for Beauvoir's brief for the female subject, Lorde remarks
that "the erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane ... firmly
rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."20 The capacity of this "feeling" and
our need to pay attention to it could easily be recognized in the spate of theoretical discourse on
"public feelings" and "affect"-discourses that implicitly align themselves with early feminist musings
about the unexpressed or the unrecognized.

Lorde's work on the erotic in "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" was delivered twenty-six
years (1978) and published over thirty years (1984) after Beauvoir's The Second Sex was first
published in 1952. It expresses a commitment not only to the erotic but also to a gendered erotic; one
harnessed by and for women: "The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of
profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic
and emotional components of that need-the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work
of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal .. . reduc [ing] work to a travesty of necessities, a
duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love."21 Both Beauvoir and
Lorde indicate an investment in the erotic for its potential to undermine preexisting notions of the self
(woman's self) and society. This conceptualization of the erotic is constitutive of phenomenological
work from Husserl to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty to Levinas, and although a rich appraisal of this
trajectory would be fascinating, it would take us beyond the specific purpose of this book. From the
dialectical to the transcendental to being itself, the remnants of phenomenology's claim upon the queer
studies project can be seen everywhere-as sexuality can potentially mark the signal event that moves
the old Cartesian contest between self/society into the intimate space of the bedroom, thereby pulling
us into the contest of self/other/self at play and calling for a rearticulation of our relations, public and
private.22

In this regard, phenomenology's stake in the personal and the political finds its most comfortable
adaptation in the work of queer studies, an adaptation that fuels claims against the apparent myopia of
queer studiesa myopia that queer of color critique and to some extent black queer studies attempt to
redress. Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology is an adept reimagining of phenomenology's utility for a
queer studies project on the body in time and space. In it she notes, through a reading of Fanon, that
phenomenology tends to orient itself on the surface of things. She sees Fanon as a counter to the
depthlessness of phenomenological claims: "Fanon asks us to think of the `historic-racial' scheme ...
the racial and historical dimensions are beneath the surface of the body described by phenomenology
which becomes, by virtue of its own orientation, a way of thinking the body that has surface appeal"
(rro). While I am respectful of this almost postpositivist attempt to make race matter-to have those
social relations that express racial feeling matter to the surface schema that is phenomenology's
contribution to the table of ideas about perception and consciousness-I am not wholly convinced that
the inside/outside or surface/depth paradigms serve us well here.

One other contribution to the discussion of surface is Jay Prosser's meticulous assessment of that
very surface and its absenting of the transsexual body. In arguing very persuasively that "just below
the surface" of the foundational texts in sexuality studies is the transgendered body, Prosser critiques
trans as the ultimate metaphor for queer's postmodern fluidity and performative movement. For
Prosser, queer theory is so indebted to the surface model of subjectivity-discourse on the body but not
in itthat the materiality posed by the transsexual body cannot and ought not to be read as part of the
same matrix.23 All of this talk of racial and trans being beneath the surface points toward an
embeddedness in the flesh with which my project is uncomfortable.

Materiality is a beautiful thing, but when it is marked by the historical in such a way that one has to
provide a certain (and often delimiting) narrative to legitimize and make legible the body's presence
(think of the scene in the Safeway parking lot that opens this book) then we run the risk of treating
history as essence rather than as one narrative among many. Prosser does, however, attempt to correct
this problem of the historical by creating an alternative archive, thus utilizing transsexual narratives
as fodder for understanding the body's materiality. His study is important to my project because its
investment in the flesh doesn't always rely upon the historical dimensions of materiality to write the
human being for us. But the material effects of erotic investments are not always so tangible as racist
effects seem to be, or are they?

I return briefly to one moment in Ahmed's text that dovetails with the penultimate analysis in this
chapter as I seek to unpack as well as complicate the codependent relationship between racist
practice and desire. In defining the directional motivations of colonialism, Ahmed offers the
following reformulation: "The `direction' of the social wish is for access, and this `direction' also
makes others accessible ... It is not that nations have simply directed their wishes and longings
toward the Orientbut rather that the nation `coheres' an effect of the repetition of this direction.... Such
repetition is not innocent but strategic: the direction of such wishes and longings makes others
available as resources to be used, as the materials out of which collectives might `write' themselves
into existence. 1124 The fine line between source and resource is not necessarily the political power
of a state apparatus, but rather the trained disciplinary matter of an intellectual inquiry. In critical
practice we have seen time and again how "women of color" or "race" are reiterated as strategic
categories of difference; their deployment speaks volumes about the resourcefulness of discursive
endeavors.

For Ahmed, bodies are a centrifugal force-they "tend toward" as much as they pull others in.
Clearly the focus upon desire-the erotic of Lorde and Beauvoir to some extent-is important in the
process of orientation under colonialism, as desire (longing) marks the place of colonial access, thus
turning the desired one into a kind of melancholic digestif. You can attempt to incorporate it all you
want to, but the thing you want will remain forever elusive, so you must try to capture it in other
ways-fixing it through law (the condition of the child shall follow the condition of the mother in the
United States context) and custom (the overall perception that the idea of a "neighborhood" reflects
cultural ebb and flow rather than racist practice). The spatiality of affective relations outlined by
Ahmed changes both the direction and the definition of desire itself. Here, the erotic is less like
autonomous life and more connected to a matrix of desiring relations that tend to make it difficult to
mark where racist (here, colonial) practice begins and where our good desire ends."s Is the desire for
another an appetite or a generosity? Whether appetite or generosity, desirein queer theory in the
twenty-first century holds no brief for "women" and the host of materialist concerns that come with
her writ large.

Beauvoir's and Lorde's work on the erotic is punctuated by what feminists have come to think of as
essentialist claims about the "nature" of the feminine and female experience, although the new
renaissance in Beauvoir studies has tried to provide a more nuanced understanding of her
contributions to feminist inquiry by interrogating the charge of essentialism against her. In any event,
Lorde and Beauvoir want to claim for "women" a particularized purchase upon their experience. In
recent years, it has become almost impossible to speak for or about women within emerging
feminist/queer theorizing because of the call to a subjectless feminism first put forth by Butler in
Gender Trouble, rearticulated in her essay in differences "Against Proper Objects" (1994), and cited
across a spectrum of critical texts.26 Sonia Kruks's review essay of Beauvoir criticism notes that
Sara Heinamaa's investigation of Beauvoir's work sees value in her focus on the lived experience of
women-a focus that is not the same thing as essentializing them. Moreover, it is clear in Heinamaa's
reevaluation of Beauvoir's place within phenomenology that the purpose of her study is to break us of
the habit of seeing Beauvoir in Sartre's shadow. To this end, Heinamaa's work is a major
reconsideration of Beauvoir's oeuvre. More to the point, she demonstrates the extent to which Butler's
early work on feminist philosophy was engaged in a concerted dismantling of Beauvoir's essentialist
existentialism.

For example, one can see evidence of the feminist debate over Beauvoir's legacy in the text and
footnotes of Gender Trouble. In one instance Butler remarks, "Note the extent to which
phenomenological theories such as Sartre's, Merleau-Ponty's, and Beauvoir's tend to use the term
embodiment. Drawn as it is from theological contexts, the term tends to figure `the' body as a mode of
incarnation and, hence, to preserve the external and dualistic relationship between a signifying
immateriality and the materiality of the body itself."27 As with much of philosophical writing, we are
directed in both Butler and Heinamaa to a fundamental misreading of the philosophical texts at issue
so that in the end it is hard to say which reading might be exact(ing) enough to merit our collective
attention. My own reading of Heinamaa's work sees that again and again in Beauvoir and in critical
evaluations of her work, race is set apart from sexed embodiment sincefor Kruks as well-all societies
do not necessarily make racial distinctions. But this works only if we know to what "race" or the
"racial" actually refer. In reading this reassessment of Beauvoir I am reminded of how the racialized
subject is lost in the play of desire, flesh, consciousness, and transformation-how the body appears to
another and how it is historicized makes it legible (to critics) and therefore determines its
relationship to the philosophical question at hand.28 Philosophy can only see black/white subjectivity
in a historical interface where blackness is denied access to a white social contract or where
whiteness determines the limit of the law. Have we really begun to see (black) white subjects as
racialized beings within a framework that doesn't lose them to a white supremacy that looks more and
more like something out of the blinding whiteness that concludes Shelley's Frankenstein?

BLACK BODIES, BLACK FEMINISMS

If race is a mark on the body that is nonnegotiable-under the skin and on the surface-then what do we
do with it? In essence, how can philosophy account for the lived experience of a body it has, in the
words of Heinamaa, "failed to think and imagine," or a body it has failed to think or imagine in any
but static ways?29 How can you make appear the thing that is necessary to disappear in order for the
work of philosophical inquiry to commence? Each of these questions points to the way in which the
body is imagined as the grounding figure for the creative origins of philosophical thought. For the
most part, whenever neoliberal thought wants to think about the body of color, this figure is deployed
through a historical matrix that mires the racially embodied in one particular historical dynamic. The
dialectic produced from this dynamic imposes transcendent being for the one and historical meaning
for the other. This conundrum is very similar to the one that Mills poses in The Racial Contract-how
can philosophical inquiry account for the invisible (toitself) system of white supremacy? By thinking
through our erotic commitments, we might come to think differently about the historical-we might find
a grounding for racist practice that acknowledges both systemic practices and quotidian effects that
far exceed our patterned understanding of how history has happened to us.

Ironically, Simone de Beauvoir might be one of the few philosophers to pay some attention to New
World slavery in her accounting of women's oppression, although that attention is made through a
problematic analogy. As Margaret Simons argues in Beauvoir and "The Second Sex," Beauvoir
understands that "the master and slave, engaged in human activities, are, in Beauvoir's view,
essentially similar and yet radically dissimilar to woman, who is confined to a lower, animal-like
life" (25). The problem here is really with the category of the human rather than that of the slave, as
Simons continues: `A major problem with this comparison between slavery and women's oppression
lies in Beauvoir's characterization of slavery. In the American slavery experience, which Beauvoir
refers to extensively, justifications for slavery relied upon racist ideology espousing the animal-like
character of the slaves. Instead of being seen as essentially similar to their masters, slaves were
perceived as radically dissimilar. Slaves were thus confined to the category of the `Other' in racist
ideology, as women were in sexist ideology" (26). This is a common opposition, and one that was
much critiqued by feminist scholars in the 198os and even into the 19905.30 But I do not believe that
we have left behind this useful formulation, as reconstituting the black/white binary as woman of
color versus queer theory (at least in queer of color critique), does nothing to loosen the ties that bind
blackness to a particular historical accounting. This kind of theorizing draws and quarters
black.female.queer in an unrelenting logic of forgetting and displacement that is still being played out
in contemporary theorizing. I shall engage this body of thought in the next chapter.

A few pages later in her book, Simons reviews feminist criticism from the 19705 and notes that
"one is struck by the relative lack of attention given to racism and the oppression of minority women"
(28). Racism is something done to "minority women" rather than a practice affecting all "women" in
the larger culture. Unfortunately, Simons relies upon the same representational dichotomy that has
dogged mainstream feminism and sparked the publication of All the Women Are White, All the Men
Are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave-a critique of the "proper object" of critical (feminist) inquiry
that emerged long before Butler's queries in Gender Trouble. To narrow this problem somewhat, I
ask how do we get past (get over?) the exasperating static situation of the (black) female body?
History includes the doers and the done to, so that seeking refuge in historical situationality doesn't do
much to remind us that something called "black feminism" is always already at the table of feminist
ideas.

In Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic"-the most thoroughgoing (black) feminist engagement with the erotic-
she proposes that we siphon off our erotic self from its opposite, the pornographic. As she writes:
"The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the
confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned
away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information,
confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of
the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without
feeling" (54). This is one of the most important feminist statements in the latter part of the twentieth
century.31 In my view, it places the most visible branch of black feminist thought in direct opposition
to an emerging sexuality studies. Jennifer Nash, in her essay "Strange Bedfellows: Black Feminism
and Antipornography Feminism;' goes so far as to say that "antipornography feminism's fingerprints
smudge the lens through which black feminism examines sexuality, pornography and pleasure."32 In
viewing emerging black feminist debates on sexuality as promoting a kind of "sexual conservatism,"
Nash's critique falls squarely into the path of the problem I begin to outline here.

Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic;" published in the same year as Gayle Rubin's groundbreaking
"Thinking Sex;' does the work of moving black feminist inquiry away from an understanding of all
sexual minorities (perverts) prostitutes, pederasts, and sex workers) as having a collective stake in
dismantling the regulatory regime of sex law.33 In "Uses of the Erotic" emphasis is upon bridging the
gap between women through deploying difference as a strategy of intersection rather than
segregation.34

By seeing the erotic in opposition to a definition-lacking pornography, Lorde's essay secured her
understanding of the line of demarcation between the two. This interpretation has its roots in an
interview conducted in 1982 and published in the collection of essays entitled Against
Sadomasochism. In this interview Lorde takes a stand against s&M practice by seeing it as part of
women's experience of the pornographic and marshalling a black feminist thought against both the
kind of queer subjects that Rubin would consider worthy of our attention and the type of theorizing
necessary for such an engagement to take place. But in Against Sadomasochism it is not Lorde's
interview that gives us a standard portrait of historical embeddedness because Lorde is careful not to
subject her critique of s&M to a history specific to the black body. Instead, it is Alice Walker's
epistolary engagement of the problem of s&M role play that calls attention to the problem of
historical reenactment.

In "A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?," Walker recounts the
following story: "Imagine our surprise therefore, when many of us watched a television special on
sado-masochism that aired the night before our class ended, and the only interracial couple in it,
lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was
mistress (wearing a ring in the shape of a key and that she said fit the lock on the chain around the
black woman's neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was-the white woman
said-her slave."3s

Walker's "A Letter of the Times" reminds us that we can take history very personally, especially
when the players line up so nicely. In the same volume, Judith Butler's "Lesbian s&M: The Politics of
Dis-Illusion" (a piece originally written in 1980 during the period of her dissertation work) manages
to strike the same spiritual high notes as Lorde's work does. As Butler writes: "Saying yes to lesbian
sex seemed to mean saying no to heterosexist power. And it seemed to mean saying yes to a new and
creative power. Opposing the notion of power as domination, lesbianism has meant for many of us a
re-posing of power as the extension and creation of new ways of loving" (169). This kind of open-
ended language by Butler certainly mirrors Lorde's sense of the expansive nature of women-
lovingwomen community. At another moment during a critique of Pat Califia's call to prevent the
policing of "our private fantasy lives" (171), Butler even goes so far as to say, "If I am trying to fight
the Man and also worry about pleasing my sisters, I can see how private fantasy might become a
haven of sorts. But the question is, is it a haven?" (172). Judith Butler-fighting "the Man"! Yet man or
no man, the opposition between public and private here is still important in the early stages of queer
theorizing-and I would maintain that this opposition has played a role in cementing what the
objectives of an emerging discourse about "queer" would embrace.

In her final analysis Butler engages the "tension between moral feminists and sm." Like Rubin and
Sedgwick, Butler would come to see feminist ethics as "moral" and therefore part of the regulatory
regime of knowledge and power unduly directed at queer bodies that queer theory set itself up to
thoroughly critique. Somewhere in this moral bathwater, the black female body swirls. Butler's
claims in this early piece intersect with my work on desire because she is quick to remind us that "our
desires are not so straight-forward. They are, I think, complexes of things, fears, hopes, memories,
anticipations" (172-73). Ultimately she writes: "I am simply saying that to conceive of desire as a
law unto itself [the sm position] ... and the key to destroying repressive sexual orders is to exaggerate
the autonomy and intelligence of desire." Here, Butler worries about the efficacy of desire as an end
unto itself. Thinking through our historical location, Butler moves to drag desire through history's
gantlet, reminding us that "there is no full-scale escape from our historical situation and the legacy of
domination that has become ours" (173). In the end, Butler acknowledges that "it is crucial that both
power and politics get reshaped and deepened from having passed through the lesbian experience... .
There is also the `power of the erotic' in Andre Lorde's essay of that name" (173). Walker, Lorde and
Butler all rely upon some aspect of essentialist readings in order to make their collective point about
power, women, and lesbians. I am most intrigued by Butler's use of the word "our" as a modifier for
"historical situation;" and I want this moment in her early work to return us to my recurring
questioning of the matter of "history" among us. As we can see from the brief excerpts from all three
critics, "history" means something very different for each of them. When Butler refers to history, she
is absolved of having to specify its productive meanderings; when Walker speaks to history, she
means ideologies of domination and subordination cemented during chattel slavery; and when Lorde
nods toward the historical, she means the relationship between the state and the province of women's
spiritual power. Here, history is capable of doing so many things to us and for us.

All of these definitional permutations are of some consequence to the landscape of queer theory as
we know it. It is my contention that when we move toward the specificity of power, when we try to
wrap our minds around it, we also begin to wrestle with the problematic attachments that feminists
like Walker seem to give to those power relations.36 Regrettably, whether Walker actually aligned
"power" with the history of slavery or not, her use of the term would be taken as a direct reference to
it, while Butler's use would appear universal, less particular, and therefore meaningful to everyone.
Historical embeddedness reeks of insincerity when we allow blackness to take the burden of what
should be political as personal. If we tie the black female body to the inevitability of slavery's
abusive sexual terrain so that every time we think of enslaved black women and sex we think pain,
not pleasure, then we also fail to acknowledge our own intellectual responsibility to take seriously
how the transatlantic trade altered the very shape of sexuality in the Americas for everyone. To echo
Spillers here, this is not a polite question to ask, but in my view a necessary one.

Against Sadomasochism includes the work of a diverse collection of women, many of them women
of color. It is clear that Butler feels (at least in 198o) that she cannot have a discussion about desire
or the erotic without directly engaging black feminist thought; years later she would be soundly
condemned as having ignored it altogether. What happened to this moment of integration, this queer
intellectual coupling? In what ways have we forgotten it while historicizing queer theory's rise from
feminism in ways that make it easier to forget both this early crossing and profound disagreement? In
many ways, Butler's later work continues to think through the impossible conundrum of having our
cake and eating it too. How can desire's autonomy ever be fully expressed in a situationality that
mires it in a certain history? How can we begin to speak to desire in productive ways without
marking this history and making it matter? The question for my project is how can we mark and make
this history without attaching it to some bodies rather than others? Ultimately, I argue, we have also
lost the saliency of black feminist disagreement with an emerging queer studies project. In the next
chapter I will demonstrate how that voice has been harnessed productively and nonproductively in
intellectual interventions in the future of queer criticism. Recourse to history does not help to give
clarity to our efforts to unseat biology, as quotidian narratives of black presence in the historical
conjure a body wholly responsible for the history in which it is made manifest to us.

QUEER REPRODUCTION

Early practitioners of queer theory-many of them present at the important conference at Barnard in
1984 that resulted in the volume Pleasure and Danger-had to know about the back and forth between
queer feminists and those aligned with Women Against Pornography. Women of color who did
participate in the conference (Spillers, Moraga, and others) were wary of the move toward sexuality
(and said as much in their creative and critical presentations), fearing that the problems of inclusion
and voice that had plagued feminism would carry forward.37 More importantly, the move toward
queer theory and away from feminism cast feminist ethics as "moral" regulation and therefore
jettisoned the ethical considerations upon which prevailing feminist criticism had relied.38 It is
important to note that Walker, Lorde, and Beauvoir are interested in how sexual practices relate to
ongoing discussions of feminist ethics. I do not believe that these (black) prescriptive feminist
concerns have translated into the less regulated environment in which queer studies finds itself. When
queer of color critique performs the task of making black feminist and woman of color feminism
matter to our theoretical projects, I do not know if this black feminist work on queer pleasure finds its
way into the equation. In our subsequent understandings of what went wrong with queer theorizing,
we somehow forgot the fact that significant and visible black feminists (Lorde and Collins, for
example) absented themselves from a somewhat fruitful, if problematic debate about how we take our
pleasure.
 The result has had an equal and opposite effect. In some early queer theory, ethical or "moral"
concerns would mire us in regulatory regimes that constrict the queer body as well as tether us to a
stubbornly homophobic feminism; on the other hand, "ethical" concerns in late queer theorizing
continually ensnare us in regimes of domination and suppression that mark the "ethical" as the place
of whiteness and belonging in such words as "citizenship, "nation," and so on. What has been cast as
ethical or moral is harassed by neoliberalism's long reach. What has been lost here is the desire to
speak to the "ethical" in regard to the personal, since now it is perceived as being attached to a
backward feminism or tethered to a corrupt ideology of global domination and biopower. Focusing
on the personal in this formulation reduces the political impact of theoretical work by diminishing the
importance of the state and its regulatory regimes. It is time to reassess what the personal is in the
wake of history and how historical meaning is made in queer theorizing.

In essence, the debate about "sexuality" and black and colored bodies in feminist studies has yet to
be concluded. Thinking through the very problem of s&M (in black and white) in the transition from
one disciplinary home to another points to a possible wrinkle in the ongoing queer theory project.
What is at stake in queer theorizing is to take this s&M scene and forget about its black/white casting,
so that what queer theorizing says about queer acts (at least until queer of color critique) is wonderful
so long as we do not get specific; so long as we do not get personal. In many ways, mainstream queer
theory wants to leave history behind. I want to emphasize here that such desire is and can be fruitful,
as the erotic scene can now move unencumbered by history's power play. What I want to argue with
is the extent to which such a leave-taking does little to unpack the pur posefulness of the black/white
interaction in this historical scene. This purposefulness is one that marks our unwillingness to grapple
with the binary, our adept reiteration of queer history's real trajectory, and our assignation of some
histories to certain bodies.

I shall argue in the next chapter, perhaps very contrarily, that the personal is political, that
absenting these somewhat conservative black feminist opinions from the women of color intellectual
project performs damaging work. If we introduce the diversity of self-identified black lesbian
feminist work to the conversation, will it mire us again in a historical repertoire that we find so
annoying? Will S.H.E. (singular, historical, exogenous) prevent us from forgetting?

In truth, not even Cathy Cohen's intervention-which I discussed at length in chapter r-could get
queer theory to turn its head toward the political consequences of black.female.queer. And this is
mostly because Cohen's overarching concern in "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" is with
queer politics, not theory. The political harasses the queer studies project that wants to envision itself
as less personal, more global, and therefore of consequence. Nevertheless, Lorde's essay became a
minor bump on the highway of high theory, and it provides one of the first black feminist injunctions
against the messy contemplation of pleasure and desire that queer theory would undertake in the next
two decades.

There have been sustained discussions and critiques of Lorde's work in black feminist criticism,
and while much of it has been laudatory few have ventured to see the parallel between Beauvoir's
design for the erotic and Lorde's conceptualization of its place in "women's" lives.39 In the end, we
seem to have accepted the abrogation here, so that the erotic appears to stand in fundamental
opposition to, in Lorde's words, a "racist, patriarchal" society. I see in this subjection of "the erotic"
to the sort of women's work that sits in opposition to the pornographic as both troublesome and
somewhat undertheorized. Lorde boldly states: "The erotic functions... [as] a bridge between the
sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and
lessens the threat of their difference."40 The challenge is to address Lorde's assumption (and Butler's
early though tacit adoption) of the view that the erotic "functions" as a means to undo difference,
rather than facilitate its entrenchment.

On the other hand, what better way to understand racist practice than to gauge its particular
investment in usurping the power of the erotic-the perfect location, according to Lorde, for the
erosion of difference rather than for its reinscription. The erotic in queer hands works its magic
because it functions in a very neat nonreproductive zone-it can be the repository of our desire for that
nonreproductive ordering so necessary to a post-Edelman futurity, since "future" is already what
comes after.41 Even in Beauvoir's framework, there is space for the erotic to mean more to women
than just a vestibule or passageway to the reproductive sphere. In many ways, the wrestling of the
erotic from the zone of reproduction's inherent futurity has been a necessary move in feminist and
queer scholarship, because it frees up the gendered body to do some extraordinary work.

I am not the first feminist scholar to point this out; Biddy Martin notes while reading Sedgwick that
"gender, and the theory of gender offered by feminism, then, are associated with reproduction and
with women.`42 Sexuality emerges and becomes recognized in the severance of the erotic from racist
practice, from the pornographic, so that reproduction (the province of feminism) can be dispensed
with and the act of forgetting what biology is for (racial belonging, procreating) can commence. Like
Martin, I want to hold open the possibility of reproduction's meaning here-not for its relationship to
women but rather for what its consistent practice says about the racial. Racist practice is still haunted
by reproduction's persuasive arc insofar as the "racial" binds itself to the decision to pursue the
future, the next generation. In order for queer studies to take this arc seriously, it must begin to see the
material function of the erotic, and given the call for gay marriage and more reproductive and familial
rights for queer subjects, its meaning in the quotidian course of queer life.

The problem that biology presented for feminism was worked out through the necessary sex/gender
distinction in the late second wave. Once feminism understood biology (now not even "sex") to be as
indeterminate as socially constructed sex roles (gender), then the category of "woman" could slip out
from under biological necessity and societal baggage to roam freely with its "male" counterpart.
Biddy Martin has pointed out the queer investment in the mobility of the male over and against the
inflexible female quite articulately.43 The importance of overcoming the "biological" in feminist
discourse is evident in Sonia Kruks's review of Beauvoir scholarship, where she notes that "what
these recent treatments of Beauvoir have in common is their return to her work as a site at which we
may address impasses that confront feminist theory today. Taken together, they point us beyond
unmitigated poststructuralism, toward a post-poststructuralism that reaffirms the importance for
feminism of retrieving the lived experiences of embodiment and of overcoming not only biological
but also discursive forms of "44

What I am arguing here is that race and racist practice mire an unfettered feminism in the
materiality of the body and the idea of its limit. Where "the biological" is understood as
"reductionism," the black racial project is excoriated for its crippling backwardness, since it is
embedded in notions of the biological that do not help it make the case for better (racial) feeling. On
the other hand, jettisoning the biological as the province of women in order to open up the space for
queer (re)production does not facilitate the dismantling of racism's foundational logic. Queer theory's
inheritance from feminism is, for many queer theorists, to continue to denounce talk of race as identity
politics and ignore "racist practice" altogether, because these things are entirely disruptive to a
theoretical project invested in the autonomy of (woman's) erotic preference, to echo Appiah. But, as
postpositivist realist theory demonstrates, just because we eschew talk of race does not mean that
racist effects vanish.

As materialist feminists raged against the poststructuralists and vice versa in the 199os, it became
clear that the subject of woman was not over just yet. While feminism might have conquered the
biological determinism in which sex/gender was mired, it has yet to wage the battle against the same
biologism embedded in the racist practice that produces race. A woman freed from her biology-
whether through theory or technology, to remember Shulamith Firestone here-still faces the potential
of that biology; its potential is written as a racial contract, to remember Mills here, as well as a
gendered one.45 When John D'Emilio proclaimed that "capitalism has led to the separation of
sexuality from procreation;" thus freeing "human sexual desire" from the reproductive sphere, he
signaled the beginnings of a queer autonomy for the work of desire.46 What he left behind is the
ability of queer studies work adequately to account for racist practice in the midst of such autonomy.
Perhaps this is the ethical moment that Beauvoir, Lorde, and Walker worry about? Racism turns us
toward the bare life of procreation-regardless of how technology has freed us from the neces sity of
putting a penis in a vagina for procreative work to commence. We still have the messy nucleus of
procreation's racial order to contend witha racial order that in many ways is justified on both sides of
the binary as either racial pride or nostalgic yearning.

While Beauvoir conceives of the erotic in often heteronormative terms, Lorde opens the door for its
interpretation through diverse kinds of sexual configurations, which she explores more loosely in her
biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. In doing so, she comes dangerously close to the
incest taboo-often a marker of absolute difference between subjects in the context of the family.47
Judith Butler remarks on this particular prohibition: "What will the legacy of Oedipus be for those
who are formed in ... situations where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is
dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its
stasis no longer holds?"48

Butler understands this challenge to the claims of social and cultural norms of kinship as the result
of changing structures of relating among queer families (for lack of a better word). I offer that the
question she asks can have more radical claims if she were to extend it to the infrastructure of
American slavery-articulated as something imposed upon and practiced by us all, rather than
something particular to certain bodies. Such claims to kinship-in black and white-were and are
obliterated by liaisons created as a result of slavery's economic structure. Gone is the acknowledged
relation among relatives; present is the raw nerve of the incest taboo, set aside for the purposes of
securing national wealth and international dominance. The place of slavery in queer studies work has
yet to be reckoned with, and this is perhaps because the boundary-breaking futurity in which queer
studies finds its subject would balk if such a subject were held to a transhistorical vision of time-a
vision that expands Foucault's conceptualization of a queer calendar to other historical events in its
vicinity: a queer begetting of magnificent proportions!49

Within five years of Lorde's Sister Outsider (1984), David Halperin helped to mark the trajectory
of queer studies work with the following statement about sexuality as it was currently understood:

Sexuality defines itself as a separate, sexual domain within the larger field of human
psychophysical nature.... Sexuality effects the concep tual demarcation and isolation of that
domain from other areas of personal and social life that have traditionally cut across it....
Finally, sexuality generates sexual identity; it endows each of us with an individual sexual
nature, with a personal essence defined (at least in part) in specifically sexual terms, it implies
that human beings are individuated at the level of their sexuality, that they differ from one another
i n their sexuality and, indeed, belong to different types or kinds of being by virtue of their
sexuality.50

By recognizing that sexuality must somehow be understood as something that represents a

"demarcation;' a cutting off from other "social life;' Halperin pinpoints the problem embedded in
early sexuality studies that still prevents us from thinking through race, sex, nation, queer in any way
that can be agreed upon, in practice. For Halperin, the very modern idea of "sexuality" creates "the
autonomy of sexuality as a separate sphere of existence." How did queer studies come to believe that
sexuality holds the key to "the hermeneutics of the self"?51 While it is not Halperin's project to spend
time thinking through this question, it is clear in the critical race scholarship discussed earlier in this
book that sexuality discovers its history during the rise of the age of reason. The taxonomy of post-
Enlightenment life requires that we order sexuality and racial belonging. One can think of these
movements as coterminous rather than separate and distinct. The biological determinism that made
sexual acts mean something to male and female bodies came hand in hand with the kind of biological
determinism necessary to make race(s) work.52
 My reading of this coterminous becoming for race and sex would put Robyn Wiegman's work in
conversation with Halperin's rather than relegate their contributions to two separate but important (if
not equal) strains of critique. Race, sex, and sexuality might have emerged from the "New" World
together, but it would be difficult to see them in the same room and consider their consanguineous
condition outside of apocalyptic narratives that continue to order what racism, is, does, and means to
us. As sexuality gained a hermeneutic that it could depend upon for evidentiary claims about
subjection (not subjects), it pulled up and parallel to the bumper of race's fictitious known world.

Lorde is part of a long line of feminist "mothers" whose new age hopes for "women's" connection
far exceeded their ability as women to practice what they preach. My goal in these pages has been to
create an alternative genealogy for how the erotic became uncoupled from the arc of racism's reach.
With this trajectory in mind, I now turn to queer critical attempts to bring race and racism back to the
table of queer ideas. In the next chapter I focus on the discretionary claims of queer criticism's
interdisciplinarity while simultaneously holding a brief for the loss and forgetting and
unrecoverability of black.female.queer presence in the making of such critical interventions.

The deepest terror of every socially marked human

beingcolored, female, queer... [is] that no matter what we
write think about or say, no matter how we fashion
ourselves and our work, we will be incessantly returned and
reduced to this single marking, that it will be produced again
and again as "the truth" of our being, our thinking, our
worldly endeavors.

-Wendy Brown, "The Passion of Michel Foucault"

Those forced to wait or startled by violence, whose activities

do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines
do not synchronize with it, are variously and often
simultaneously black, female, queer.

-Elizabeth Freeman, "Time Binds, or Erotohistoriography"

For even if I left, I would have to return, would have to recross

the borders of the United States, where the significance of the
"Negro" designation is so thoroughly sedimented that it
conditions even my attempt to forget what it means.
-Phillip Brian Harper, "The Evidence of Felt Intuition"
Colored. Female. Queer. Black. Female. Queer. The epigraphs above are ordered in a profound
exceptionalism that convinces me that American studies did not have to go global to make the claim
that the exceptional is certainly part of the rhetoric that glues understandings of who and what we are
to one another. Black, female, colored, and queer share a simultaneity that opens them to violence,
reduction, and forgetting. This is a historical ordering so sedimented, to echo Harper, that even our
attempts to forget such a designation are futile. And we do want to forget, often in the very act of
remembering. As Faulkner once offered, "memory believes before knowing remembers."'
Black.Colored.Female.Queer. marks an undisciplined sector of the discipline: the representations of
her have shifted from the dangerous and volatile to the abject and weak; S.H.E. (Singular. Historical.
Exogenous) is both protector and protected. Her status con tinually reminds us that we have not yet
accomplished our lofty goal of politically efficacious and practiced theory. In fact, theory fails her all
the time. My goal in this chapter is to trace how we have simultaneously lost and found her (black,
female, queer) in various critical attempts to have her mean something to the discipline of queer
theorizing.

Wendy Brown in "The Passion of Michel Foucault" concludes her scathing critique of James
Miller's homophobic assessment of Foucault with the epigraph I cite above. The arrangement she
utilizes-"colored, female, queer"-is a common one, and since Kimberle Crenshaw first coined the
term "intersectionality" feminist critiques have been dogged by its absolute will to discretion-to
represent each term in its discrete semantic location. For this particular critical conundrum,
discretion is the better part of valor: it might be brave to think of these terms as intertwined, even
messy, but it is much safer to chug along thinking of them as discrete, distinct, separate. But the
categories "black," "colored," "female;" "queer" point to a persistent problem in queer theorizing-
how to have our queer theory and our feminism while still seeing the colored body or how to have
our colored criticism while still seeing the female and the queer body and so on. My epigraph from
Harper's work is meant as a playful rejoinder to the endpoint erected by Brown's grouping; we
conclude with her, only to forget our entangled relation. The foregoing analysis suggested that queer
studies needs critical race work in order to reassess its take on the erotic and in order for the
antiracist endeavor to commence. This chapter chronicles the articulation of the queer studies project
through various attempts (black queer studies and queer of color critique) to remind it of its persistent
forgetting.

Although this mapping could have several origins, perhaps the best place to begin would be with
the special issue of differences, "More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory" (1994), in
which several feminist theorists grapple with the "subjectless" critique of the new queer studies.2
What is most obvious when reading "More Gender Trouble" is that there are more attempts here, in
line with Eve Sedgwick's contribution to the field (Epistemology of the Closet), to commit finer acts
of separation along the lines of Gayle Rubin's initial call to see sex and gender as separate. Elizabeth
Weed, contributor and founding editor of differences, notes: "More accurately, the analytic space
[Sedgwick] opens up looks to drive a wedge not simply between sexuality and gender, but between
sex-sexuality and sex-gender."' In essence, the purpose of the collection is to speak for queer theory
in a feminist context as well as to articulate which master narratives-deconstruction, psychoanalysis,
knowledge-power-can and will be important to queer theory's painful but necessary final "break"
from feminism, a break that Janet Halley attends to in her book Split Decisions: Taking a Break from
Feminism.

But the differences volume (later published as a book edited by Weed) also arises at a particular
moment in academic discourse. During its inception, "identity politics" was being soundly thrashed
by those in the more theory-inclined Left who wanted to take a break from the noise being made by
folks of color, to put it plainly. In Rosi Braidotti's conversation with Judith Butler about the shape of
feminist theory in Europe, Butler remarks: `As you no doubt know, there has emerged an important
and thoroughgoing critique of Eurocentrism within feminism and within cultural studies more
generally right now. But I wonder whether this has culminated in an intellectual impasse such that a
critical understanding of Europe, of the volatility of the very category, and of the notions of nation and
citizenship in crisis there, have become difficult to address. "4 Butler's semantic trajectory here is
telling and worth remarking upon in some depth.

She begins first by establishing a critical intimacy with Braidotti ("you no doubt know")-letting the
reader also understand that this "thoroughgoing critique of Eurocentrism" is of some importance to
their discussion. In the next step, she takes us right to what I call a criticision-somewhere between an
intellectual statement and a bris-a critic's way of pronouncing the death knell for a particular
intellectual line of inquiry by managing it like a nasty little killer T cell-excising doesn't always
work, but it does produce a cleaner member, so to speak. Once the critique of "Eurocentrism" has
been disarmed and appropriately managed then the efficacy of this critique is no longer certain. An
important conversation within feminist and cultural studies (one that alludes to the rise of critical race
discourse) is produced as an intellectual impasse-one that threatens the ability of "Europe" (the new
subject here) to be able to speak its own diversity and destiny; one that includes the terms "nation"
and "citizenship" rather than a term like "Eurocentrism." This effort to contain one term
("Eurocentrism") and redeploy others ("nation," "citizenship") is produced by a perceived "impasse."
Since an impasse can be a dead end as well as a block to progress, Butler's language here reinterprets
valid intellectual disagreement as dead end. Moreover, this impasse is also minimized to a
misunderstanding of terms rather than a fundamental disagreement over the workings of racist
practice. At this point in queer theorizing, the questions were never really about naming, although
public debates devolved into the name game. Instead, what was at issue is, I shall argue, still at issue:
to what historical trajectory would queerness attach itself, so that it could be legible to itself and to
others? Which geographic locations would be meaningful for queer theory's central inquiries?

Butler has other reasons for casting a wide net over this embroiled debate. At the time, she was
under fire in many feminist circles for being blind to race in general; a critique brought from the
conference circuit to the publishing arena with Paula Moya's Learning from Experience.' In "More
Gender Trouble," there is subtle if not detectable anxiety about the black body,6 and it is clear that as
the special issue moves from Butler's introduction to the interactive responses at the back of the
volume, the more nuanced relations between "feminism" and its master narratives become, and the
more we seem to lose the black body (critical or physical). This anxiety about the black (female)
body and its function within queer studies work is evidenced in Evelynn Hammonds's "Black
(W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" where she observes:

I could perform that by now familiar act taken by black feminists and offer a critique of every
white feminist for her failure to articulate a conception of a racialized sexuality. I could argue
that while it has been acknowledged that race is not simply additive, or derivative of sexual
difference, few white feminists have attempted to move beyond simply stating this point to
describe the powerful effect that race has on the construction and representation of gender and
sexuality. I could go further and note that even when race is mentioned it is a limited notion
devoid of complexities. Sometimes it is reduced to biology and other times referred to as a
social construction. Rarely is it used as a "global sign," a "metalanguage."7

Hammonds decisively points to the larger questions within queer studies work-questions that remain
unanswered despite the emergence of black queer studies, queer of color critique, and most recently,
the discourse of settler colonialism brought by native studies scholars.'

What to do with that black body that marks-at least in Hammonds's playful yet serious
configuration-the angry boundary between feminism and queer studies by returning the fields to their
cloying material life?9 As if to answer this question in part, but in another vein, black queer studies
inquiry stretches across two important publications: the special issue of Callaloo, "Plum Nelly: New
Essays in Black Queer Studies;' published in 2000 and edited by Jennifer DeVere Brody and Dwight
A. McBride, and the volume Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by E. Patrick Johnson
and Mae G. Henderson and published in 2005. In their introduction to "Plum Nelly, Brody and
McBride ask "how might we conceive of the place of black queer studies?" (286). For both, that
place or intellectual home is in African American studies, and their intent is to present the essays as a
commentary upon that "home" and its lexicon rather than produce a sustained critique of queer studies
and queer theory per se. "Plum Nelly" is important because it marks a serious departure from the
politics of cultural specificity located in "identity difference" to what Marlon Ross in "Camping the
Dirty Dozens" proposes as "identification as a temporal process" (291). This is a temporality that
Jose Munoz investigates as disidentification in his groundbreaking work Disidentifications: Queers of
Color and the Performance of Politics and that Judith Halberstam later capitalizes upon in In a Queer
Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. As Ross notes: `Although it is impossible to
`evacuate' totally the grounding of cultural identity in spatial metaphor, we might be able to disrupt
this spatializing tendency, at least temporarily, by thinking of cultural identification as a temporal
process that enables and constrains subjectivity by offering up resources for affiliating with, while
also disaffiliating against, particular social groupings, which themselves are constantly being revised
over time by individuals' reconstitution of them" (291). Ross's critique is indebted to feminist
theorizations about difference and is similar to the work of Munoz, who explicitly borrows from this
group's vocabulary to coin the term "identities-in-difference," which imagines that some "identities
use and are the fruits of a practice of disidentificatory reception and performance"10 The next
generation of queer scholars of color would borrow from Munoz the paradigmatic term "queer of
color" and turn it into a critical critique, notably with the publication of Rod Ferguson's Aberrations
in Black and the special issue of Social Text, "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?," edited by
David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz. I will get to this new wave of queer
scholarship at the end of this chapter.

Ross's lead essay in "Plum Nelly" focuses on black nationalist invective and its relationship to
camp, and his argument is finely wrought, detailing the ways in which (black) nationalist critique has
situated while also allowed for the presence of the black queer body. The battle that black queer
studies wages here is one from within and without-one that mainstream queer studies and queer theory
perhaps is free to disengage from. For white queer studies scholars to battle alongside queer allies in
underrepresented groups the critique would get very messy indeed as white subjects-seen as always
already privileged-would have to engage the particularized prejudice of marginalized peoples. In
other words, is it possible for (white) queer theory to join in the call to interrogate the efficacy of
black claims to difference?"

It is my contention that this somewhat thorny proposition-that white colleagues engage in the
dismantling of African Americanist constructions of the black self-keeps black queer studies in
particular from being embraced by both queer of color critique and other queer studies projects. The
prohibition against calling out the disenfranchised (especially the black disenfranchised)-be they
heterosexist or not-is still fully ingrained in neoliberal thought.12 Nevertheless, as the movement for
LGBTQ civil rights hits one roadblock after another, it is clear from the faculty meeting to the blog
entry that white subjects have been more inclined to critique black subjects, even though such
critiques are usually salted with the same kinds of bad analogy, historical sedimentation and outright
racist invective that I have critiqued elsewhere in this project. But the forgetting of the black body-its
relegation to someplace else in queer studies-continues, as there is something politically necessary
that cannot be done, or even acknowledged as possible by (white) queer counterparts, without dire
political consequences. The players here are disciplinarily defined (African American studies, queer
studies) and the boundary between them makes a mockery of the very interdisciplinarity that critical
mingling should foster. It seems that the racial divide haunts us continually, as we can still say, "you
can say things that I cannot" and mean it with all sincerity. I am convinced that reimagining the erotic
life of racism might hold some possibility for a critical recuperation here, as the focus on quotidian
racist practice and its manifestation in the sphere of the erotic (who we love and how we reproduce)
might disrupt our rather static notions of the black body and its historical repertoire (or the
potentiality of its repertoire?) and the white critical body as it seeks to politely trespass upon it.

What we find in "Plum Nelly" is a subtle correction of the aesthetic and archival record that is
queer theory, so that when Henderson ventures to mark Baldwin's Giovanni's Room as a metaphorical
"closet," and then recalls his allusion to the "panic" incited by the homosexual, she can then remind
Sedgwick that her reimaginings of the territory of the homosexual had in no small part been fully
anticipated by Baldwin.13 Again, we might ask ourselves why the African American (queer) canon is
of little theoretical use to the (white) practitioners of an emergent queer theory. As with Butler's
reading in Bodies That Matter of Nella Larsen's Passing, black example is mired in the biological-it
is important when one wants to look at race meeting "queer" or some other category, but as
Hammonds observes in the first incarnation of feminism meets queer studies: it is rarely used as a
"global sign"-it always has particularity.14 Examples of this theoretical tension abound in
"PlumNelly,15 and Michael Cobb's piece, "Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative;" returns to the cadre of
intellectuals in the Harlem Renaissance who contributed greatly to queering the very centeredness of
race as a founding hermeneutic for an understanding of black being. What the black body is good for,
at least theoretically, is wholly challenged not only in the primary texts of the Harlem Renaissance but
also in the critical tradition that attempts to make sense of them. Why then this persistent need to see
the black body as narrow referent, as reproducing a historical fixation for human being while
simultaneously offering itself up to the discipline as someone else's to own and manage?

By the time queer studies evolves into queer of color critique in 2005, we are well on our way to
the turn to the transnational in queer theory-a turn that inadvertently marks work that focuses on United
States populations as problematically parochial.16 What is interesting is that this turn is anticipated
in "Plum Nelly" by Phillip Brian Harper's closing piece, "'Take Me Home': Location, Identity,
Transnational Exchange."17 One could certainly argue that the first turn to the transnational comes out
of Gloria An zaldua's very influential Borderlands/La Frontera-and this turn is in some part a
response to how postcolonial criticism reconfigured the geographical reach of the transnational.
Borderland theory pushed back on that remapping, thereby moving the intellectual fodder for
discussions about racial difference to a psychic and material space that was more liminal and
intimate; a space that ultimately privileged a principal hybrid subject.18

In recalling two experiences while in Canada-one with "trade" at a cash machine and the other at
customs-Harper reflects: "If the discomfiture I experienced during my interview on the street is thus
partly traceable to the anxiety with which I both recalled and anticipated my national-border crossing,
then it would appear to constitute an instance-however paltryof a particular psychic effect much
commented upon in recent theoretical work. Specifically, it would seem to comprise the
disorientation characterizing the transnational imaginary in the era of global capitalism."19 1 am
reminded here of my discussion in chapter 2 of Sara Ahmed's attempt to use phenomenology's
commitment to space and perception in order to think through what disorientation might mean to a
queer project. Harper engages the "transnational imaginary" in an unraveling of his two experiences,
which invoke problems of power, status, and ultimately conceptualizations of citizenship.
 Toward the end of Harper's piece, he cautions against a move to the transnational as a corrective to
the somewhat "limited" focus on issues affecting persons living within the United States. Instead,
Harper suggests that the very same United States subject would find it hard to break away from this
"inward orientation" even in their evaluation of all things outward. In closing, Harper suggests "that
state-ideological functions can never be conceived apart from citizen-subjects whose activities and
consciousness they call into being, which themselves certainly have not yet been unmoored from the
imperatives of modern state nationalism."20 Harper's analysis and caution has great usefulness for
this study, as it redirects our attention to the potential for subjects traditionally marked as "among the
oppressed" to inhabit a certain kind of privilege-the erotic life of racism rears its ugly head-while
also indicating a moment in (black) queer theorizing where the turn to the transnational is perceived
as risky, if not intellectually suspect. Harper worries that our attempts to look "outward" do not
always compel us to think that our own actions and reactions are part of the problem that we seek to
engage; this doubling back upon the self-a kind of critical self-reflection-is crucial to the work of
theory. But what happens to these critical maneuvers in the next incarnation of the empire strikes back
for black queer studies?21

For Johnson and Henderson in Black Queer Studies the goal is to "reanimate" African American
studies and queer studies so that African American studies can take into account (again, now the
second call) the importance of sexuality (not just hetero) to its intellectual project and so that queer
studies can find a way back to thinking about the take on race by African American studies in that
project. Although Johnson and Henderson do not allude in their introduction to the "Plum Nelly"
collection, they seem to set for themselves a similar trajectory. But the increasing anxiety about the
particularity of the black body is evident in their introduction:

In its current configuration, the volume's content is clearly centered within the regional context of
the United States. Nonetheless, we are aware of the very important implications of diaspora and
postcolonial studies relative to black American sexuality. We are also conscious of the
sometimes narcissistic and insular theorizing of U.S.-based academics who do not thoroughly
engage the impact of globalization and U.S. imperialism on the transnational flows of racialized
sexuality.... Our focus here primarily on U.S. racialized sexual politics is not meant to be
totalizing or polemic but rather strategic. Black queer studies is a nascent field and we feel
compelled to prioritize a concomitant embryonic theoretical discussion within U.S. borders in
order to make an intervention "at home," as it were.22

Johnson and Henderson unwittingly reinscribe the particularity of blackness and its specificity-its
"embryonic" nature-in order to make a brief for attention to its geographic and historical
situationality.

I cannot help but comment upon the use of the terms "embryonic" and "nascent" to describe a black
queer studies project. These words testify to the important status that reproductive metaphors have for
work on race. While the heteronormative properties of reproduction appear to be what "queer" stands
in opposition to, how can such metaphors be useful to a black queer studies manifesto? The literary
critic in me wants to hold a brief for the (shadow) importance of reproduction here because it sutures
race to the erotic. When one makes an argument for a "racial" project, the terrain turns rocky very
quickly because one is now obliged to do a certain kind of race work, and this work, erotic or
otherwise, enlists racist practice. The real time of reproduction's orthodoxy-biology/race-creates the
conditions under which black queer studies can now become visible.

As if in anticipation of this problem, Johnson and Henderson also acknowledge the critique of their
position offered by one of the essays in the collection, Rinaldo Walcott's "Outside in Black Studies:
Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora." In this essay Walcott asks, "Why is it that the black
studies project has hung its hat so lovingly on U.S. blackness and therefore a `neat' national project?
And how does a renewed interest in questions of the diaspora seem to only be able to tolerate U.S.
blackness and British blackness?"23 While Johnson and Henderson seem to deflect the transnational
moment by addressing it in the introduction, there is the nagging sense that a project on United States
blackness marks it as parochial, a claim made by some critical race scholars in their attempt to
unwed racist practice from a black/white paradigm mired in a specific geographical space. It has
been my contention throughout this study that this black/ white binary is constitutive of the racial
imaginary, since so many evidentiary claims about racist practice return repeatedly to this specter of
absolute difference. It is time to bring our imaginary in line with our critical practice-it is time to
come clean about the erotic charge of racist endeavor. One way to begin this work is to rethink the
place of reproduction (not as hetero or homo, not as feminist or women's) and its attention to biology,
race, and belonging.

Once the authors have outlined the province of black queer studies, they then direct their attention
to an overwhelmingly "white" queer theory. As E. Patrick Johnson reminds us, "there is some `race'
trouble here with queer theory. More particularly, in its `race for theory, queer theory has often failed
to address the material realities of gays and lesbians of color.1124 Here again a black (racial)
project is set in opposition to a white (racial) project, so that the black/white binary is wielded to do
some heavy lifting, while the editors make the simultaneous claim that black queer (racial) belonging
i s a different kind of project altogether. Similarly, in "Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm"
Marlon Ross, citing Maurice Wallace's contribution to the dismantling of "the closet" as a
particularly "gay" metaphor, and continuing a critique embedded in Henderson's take on Baldwin in
"Plum Nelly," argues: "(white) queer theory and history are beset by what I call `claustrophilia; a
fixation on the closet function as the grounding principle for sexual experience, knowledge, and
politics, and that this claustrophilic fixation effectively diminishes and disables the full engagement
with potential insights from race theory and class analysis."25 In arguing that the closet metaphor
helps to link the coming homosexual community to a "powerful narrative of progress;" Ross also
notes that the very genesis of queer critique-Foucault's knowledge-power theory-relies upon an
erasure of the racialized body (read by Ross as "black," not white) in order to prepare it for its
inscription as homosexual. In his analysis, the work of the sexologists casts reproduction for the
homosexual as a failed function of and a failure to reproduce the Anglo-Saxon.

This brief emphasis on the importance of reproduction to the invention of the homosexual is of great
consequence for this study because it marks a crucial point at which the two branches of queer studies
I have been following here both repudiate the reproductive for homosexuality and banish it from the
theoretical center of queer discourse. I have argued earlier that this movement away from
reproduction's material force also had much to do with queer theory's need to take a break, echoing
Halley, from feminism. In Ross's redaction of the sexologist's findings, the failure to (re)produce the
Anglo-Saxon is part of the constellation of lack in which the very idea of the homosexual rests. If we
were to take reproduction here as part of the matrix of racialized desire, we can then see how this
turn away from reproduction is racially marked, not because it reveals a loss of Anglo-Saxon
sanguinity per se, but because it also produces reproduction as a function of white racial belonging
rather than as a function of all racial belonging.

In light of my musings about reproduction and feminism in chapter 2 I want to engage two arcs of
thought in queer studies engagements: one in which reproduction (a feminist province) is utilized as a
failure of whiteness, and the other in which this failure is coded as always already a property of one
racial group over another where the concern is for white racial reproduction, not black racial
reproduction. The particular embeddedness of desire (the erotic) and racist practice-both of which
come out of the defining of reproduction here-is hard to see. Every time we say queer theory and think
or feel an opposition between black and white, the erotic shadow of racist practice casts itself on the
wall. Queer studies takes the high road by continuing to view its racial inheritance as something to be
repudiated (a repudiation that I read in Miss Rosa's rejection of Sutpen's proposal in Absalom,
Absalom! in the conclusion to this book); a repudiation manifested in its focus on the biopower of the
child. This repudiation is often celebrated as something queer theory can be proud of. But this
renunciation also comes at a cost, as it places blackness outside of the lifework of reproduction, thus
losing the material function of blackness in the discourse of reproduction and homosexuality, as well
as its culpability -its ability to serve as an agent and actor-in the quest for racial belonging. Although
I have taken issue with the way in which "white" queer theory is deployed here, Ross's critique
serves to dismantle many of the assumptions of universality and collectivity embedded in the word
"homosexual."

In picking up on the challenge to (white) queer studies posed by black queer studies scholars, queer
of color critique emerged between Callaloo's "Plum Nelly" and Black Queer Studies with the
publication of Roderick Ferguson's Aberrations in Black (2003), a book that grounds the discussion
of queer theory in the work and contributions of "women of color."26 Ferguson's redaction of women
of color feminism observes that "it attempted to negate the normalization of heteropatriarchal culture
and agency by the inchoate global economy. Indeed, black lesbian articulations of difference, queer
identity, and coalition bear traces of this negation" (118). In his introduction to the book he announces
that "queer of color analysis presumes that liberal ideology occludes the intersecting saliency of race,
gender, sexuality and class in forming social practices," while also noting that it "extends woman of
color feminism by investigating how intersecting racial, gender, and sexual practices antagonize
and/or conspire with the normative investments of nation-states and capital" (4). Given my earlier
explication of some black feminist investments in the discourse on sexuality it is clear that these
"normative investments" litter black feminist thought, making "liberal ideology" the possession of
whom and for what ends? In essence, Ferguson's question and my own would be: do all of black
feminist critics necessarily stand outside of "liberal ideology?"

In sum, this is a tall order for black feminism in particular, as its particu lar theoretical might is
figuratively used to usher in a queer critique that focuses upon "historical materialism." For Ferguson,
"put simply, women of color feminism, generally, and black lesbian feminism, particularly, attempted
to place culture on a different path and establish avenues alternative to the ones paved by forms of
nationalism" (118-19).27 The slippage between women of color and "black" is neatly negotiated by
Fergusonthis is a welcome addition to feminist thought-but my query here has to do with what kind of
work the category "woman of color" both recognizes and obfuscates. With such heavy emphasis upon
dismantling the status quo at the intersectional thoroughfare, black feminism must be represented as an
exceptional entity, capable of sitting in the vanguard of sexual liberation.

There are familiar elements here-the importance of intersectionality, for one-but there is also new
territory, as Ferguson follows Munoz's lead in identifying what role "queer of color" can play in
critiquing global capitalism and normative heteropatriarchy.211 In addition, there is a profound shift
not only in the underpinnings of the queer theory project, but also in the bodies that such a project
might take as its imaginary/imagined focus. By changing the arc of queer theory's citational terrain,
Ferguson moves away from the genealogy that extends from Foucault outward, to one that might begin
with Marcuse and Davis, and extend to Lowe, Sanchez, Hong, Goldberg, Mercer, and Sandoval, to
name a few. In queer of color critique, gone is the citational repertoire (e.g., Butler, Sedgwick,
Halperin, Warner) found in both black queer studies projects. This reordering is a profound shift in
queer theory, and my attempt here is both to laud this bibliographical shift and also to think through
what Ferguson is asking of us as theoretical practitioners. In essence, what does queer of color
critique want us to do, really?

What comes out of this evolving critique is the way in which the black (female) body as the
vanguard theory of a woman of color feminism again signals the intersection, or to borrow words
from Hortense Spillers, is "vestibular to culture."29 Can a body of work be a new paradigm? My
query leads me back to Hammonds's desire to have race be a "global sign;' rather than something to
be remarked upon perfunctorily so as to get it out of the way. Now that S.H.E. is in the center, will the
landscape of queer theorizing shift to acknowledge her presence?

Nevertheless, Ferguson's contribution does build upon critical race work in that he is attuned to
racist practice. He notes by way of Chandan Reddy's work that "racist practice articulates itself
generally as gender and sexual regulation, and that gender and sexual differences variegate racial
formations. This articulation, moreover, accounts for the social formations that compose liberal
capitalism" (3). By focusing on racist practice as gender and sexual regulation Ferguson provides a
useful paradigm, as do his colleagues in black queer studies, for our understanding of racist
practice.30 I take this notion a step further by returning the focus on the regulation of sexual practices
to the terrain of reproduction-where racist and homophobic practice cohere for nation-state and
neighbor.

It is clear that in focusing upon queer of color critique and global capitalism, scholars like
Ferguson (and by extension Munoz and Reddy) want to return the saliency of "woman of color
feminism" to ongoing materialist debates about sexuality in the age of transnational flows. As Munoz
writes in Disidentifications, "If queer discourse is to supersede the limits of feminism, it must be able
to calculate multiple antagonisms that index issues of class, gender, and race, as well as sexuality"
(22). By this time in the theoretical game, feminism has solidified as a project that should be
superseded, which gives it the status of a relic and simultaneously excises the very contributions of
women of color to the production of a very diverse feminist discourse that queer of color critique is
poised to commit itself to. The difficulty lies in this deployment of black.female.queer as an entity
whose historical underpinnings necessitate a situation where S.H.E. (Singular, Historical,
Exogenous) is functionally illiterate, where S.H.E. can be forgotten, and where her intellectual
contributions matter insofar as they awaken the senses to a past politicoknowledge formation in which
S.H.E. can be readily contained. Her figuration at this point in our critical history looks profoundly
like that of the native subject in Phil Deloria's Playing Indian, where ideas of nation, place, and origin
are wholly invested in seeing and believing in the archaic native-in promoting a dead zone (think
"impasse") -one echoed here by the figuration of black.female.queer.

Can the aims of the "woman of color" feminist project be harnessed for discussions about
liberalism in a post-9/11 world? Before I answer this question, it is important to note that I am
naturally suspicious of the terms "liberal" and "liberalism;' which queer of color critique attempts to
turn our attention toward in the next iteration of the critical project. The work of liberalism marks the
political landscape around us so severely as to sever one population from another so that liberals are
out there somewhere and the rest of us (call us black feminists) are wedded to the always already
political critique or rigorous action. But, as we all know, any marriage provides safe harbor for
infidelity. Critiques that cannot seem to bear the weight of their own conclusions-ones that segregate
as well as discriminate-worry me to no end and open themselves up for a profound skepticism, if not
devastating blindness for this black.female.queer. What kind of legibility will a black.female.queer
critique have if she falls outside of the neat political boundaries set for her in the roll call of critical
agents?

I am not the only queer theorist who has had difficulty with liberalism's significance to the queer
studies project. In Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Jasbir Puar notes that
"it is precisely by denying culpability or assuming that one is not implicated in violent relations
toward others, that one is outside of them, that violence can be perpetuated. Violence, especially of
the liberal varieties, is often most easily perpetuated in the spaces and places where its possibility is
unequivocally denounced. . . . It is easy, albeit painful, to point to the conservative elements of any
political formation; it is less easy, and perhaps much more painful, to point to ourselves as
accomplices of certain normativizing violences."31 Puar's insistence that "normalizing violences" can
proliferate, even in critical work is crucial to my project. In the end, I ask: what more normativizing
act can there be than to participate in reproduction? And given its normativity, a classification that we
are indebted to queer studies for illuminating, what kinds of work within the racial project does
reproduction perform?

As if in answer to this question, David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz-the editors
of the special issue of Social Text "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?"-assembled to query the
"political utility of queer" by imagining "a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that
sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm
understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent" (r). Their words here are
clearly poised to take on the challenge issued in David Halperin's early essay ("Is There a History of
Sexuality?") to think through the way in which sexuality became unhinged from other social and
political practices.

Given the events after 9/11, the editors of "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" find a certain
historical and political urgency for a new queer critique-one that makes the turn to the transnational a
fait accompli, as "queer diasporas" problematize "what could be called queer liberalism" (1).32
Queer liberalism is not only a province of whiteness, it is also deeply invested in the export of
American ideals and ideas that might not be transferable to a larger world order. The veiled critique
here concerns itself with "whiteness" and also, implicitly, with the kind of parochialism observed in
United States critical practices. This queer liberalism has also been remarked upon in the work of M.
Jacqui Alexander, who observes that "an early epistemic marriage between queer theorizing and the
dominant methodologies of poststructuralism in the U.S. academy has had the effect of constructing
queer theory in a way that eviscerates histories of colonialism and racial formation."33 Liberalism,
especially queer liberalism, pointedly disregards "histories of colonialism and racial formation"a
liberalism that queer of color critique utilizes woman of color feminism to stave off. Alexander
rehearses the feminist argument that poststructuralist accountings of quotidian life fall short of the
mark in recognizing the complexities of intersectional existence, yet the "subjectless" critique has
such provocative pull on the queer imaginary that its intellectual claim of doing certain work for us is
prima facie and seductive. The editors of "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" see the potential
for a radical break with queer liberalism while concomitantly investing in a notion of queer as a
political though unfixed referent. Can such high hopes for queer's flexibility be able to contain the
twenty-first-century contours of black.female.queer?

When the editors cite the recent and "significant body of work on theories of race;" however, they
do not mention a single book by queer studies scholars who also happen to identify as black, female,
and lesbian, although their work can be recognized under the moniker, woman of color feminism.34 In
addition, while they acknowledge the importance of nation, state, governmentality, and sovereignty,
they miss an opportunity to engage a host of Native American studies scholars and their founding
presence in debates both here and abroad on the capricious nature of such terms. To point this out in
the special issue of Social Text is to think through my own intellectual work as a queer studies
scholar, as the move away from the messiness of identity politics toward something that looked more
fluid and inclusive almost necessitates a forgetting, a leaving behind of the parochial, often
represented by black.female.queer. In essence, when queer theory looks outward, to remember
Harper's caution, it often engages in the particular "American" practice of forgetting
black.female.queer. If she appears at all, she is reproduced within the confines of a delimiting
(historical) racial practice, one for which we can have no accounting.

To bring us back to that body is a risky move indeed, but my attempt here is not only to make that
move but also to understand it as a move toward the relational, rather than the singular. Therefore, the
"body" that I seek here has a very queer materiality, for it is simultaneously forever absent and
always already present-we can always marvel at its ability to matter so much, and then not matter at
all. Black being is deeply invested in whiteness, to the extent to which racist practice dictates how
they and we belong to one another. My attempt here is not to throw shade on an extraordinary
collection or to belittle the place of queer of color critique in the queer theory project. Rather, my
questions point toward the larger issue of losing a queer black body. Citing black.female.queer in
queer theory is a forgetting that has proportionate outcome across sexuality studies.
Black.female.queer voices are foundational, but not generative, as there is little active engagement
with the diversity of this relational voice. It is my contention that the overarching problem here is that
queer of color critique is not solely addressing the remnants of identity politics, but the object of
queer theory's ongoing ridicule: a feminism that somehow turned the corner on the black body and
never looked back. Underneath the critique of queer liberalism is actually an argument about feminist
claims upon both the black body and its historical specificity.

The editors of "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" acknowledge both the efficacy of "queer
of color' critique" and the extent to which such critique might contribute to what they call "queer
intersectionality" (6). While earlier projects like "Plum Nelly" and Black Queer Studies see critical
race theory as a fruitful genesis, queer studies now embraces the critique within critical race theory
of a "U.S. nation-state"-based "conceptual frame" as parochial, thus bringing to fruition the fear by
black queer studies that lack of attention to a "diaspora" abroad might eventually hurt its inquiry. But
the idea of the nation-state as United States based elides the possibility that native governments exist
in contested relationship with this nation-state, often unmarking and remaking its boundaries and
turning the idea of "abroad" into home once again. It seems here that the queer reiteration of the
"subjectless" critique produces material effects-too high to get over, too low to get under. In wanting
to preserve some of the poststructuralist pie-a move that Alexander warns is difficult to
sustain"What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" has to jettison something.

The issue's lead essay, "Punk'd Theory" by Tavia Nyong'o, engages the work of Cathy Cohen and,
by extension, the problem of "intersection"; and even in its concluding moment, it riffs off of the work
of Ann duCille in heralding the intersection as a dangerous place.35 Racial blackness and vernacular
culture are at the heart of Nyong'o's piece, and it is clear from the start that queer of color critique's
most valuable contribution to queer studies work is the relentless interrogation of this thing called
"queer theory." loon Oluchi Lee reminds us: "While queer theory has made tremendous efforts to
interweave the political discourses of race, class, and gender in the theorization of queer
identification, it is rarely the case that such `generous' theoretical gestures actually make it out of the
box into the practiced lives of sexualities and genders." In the same breath Lee also aligns feminism
with a problem particular to gay male theorizing: fear of the moniker "female." He declares: "Gay
male critics fear `female' and in this they have an ally in second-wave feminism-because the work of
gender identification is ultimately seen as a system of impermeable biological boundaries, whose
operation is totalizingly hierarchical."36 Again, the specter of the biological appears at the precise
moment feminism is called to account, and Lee is quick to note that the refusal of the "female"
position is problematic for a queer (male) theory inherited from feminism. What is problematic here
is that Lee claims for "feminism" a totalizing perspective that is not supported by feminist critical
attention to this issue. There was and still is a debate within feminism about the problem of the
biologicala problem that has been reinterpreted as "white" feminism's claim on a particular racial
order. But this idea of "feminism" would have to separate woman of color feminism from the larger
and therefore real feminist project, an exclusion that I have maintained elsewhere is more practiced
critique than actual archival truth.37

Amy Villarejo's "Tarrying with the Normative" on black history takes the challenge posited in
Ferguson's book-to bring race and class (through Marxist analysis) to queer theory's table-as
foundational to her own method. Villarejo is right about Ferguson's inheritance from British cultural
studies, and hers is the only sustained critique of Ferguson's claims in the collection of essays. Within
that critique, Villarejo acknowledges Ferguson's fusion of "feminist critique with queer critique;' a
recognition of alignment that deserves some scrutiny here, as the "feminist" project is taken by
Villarejo and Ferguson to now be about "heteropatriarchy." The major step forward here seems to be
the privileging of a woman of color feminism within and as feminism. Villarejo's quarrel with
Ferguson stems from his deployment of the term "nonheteronormative" to both designate "a
pathologizing racial logic" and "figure of defiance and critique" and from his treatment of sociology
and literature as canonical equivalencies (72, 74). Her argument with Ferguson's use of
"nonheteronormative" as a both/and proposition cuts across the particular problem of citing
black.female.queer in queer studies projects. The both/and position is not only hard to sustain, but
also unwieldy.

In Villarejo's text, "African American" is often seen side by side with "exploitation, degradation,
abjection, and exploitation" (73). Villarejo astutely marks the place where "African American"
becomes too high to get over and too low to get under in the rhetorics of racist practice through which
the term comes to be known by each and every one of us. "African American" is both a sign of
contestation (revolution?) and exploitation. This problematic relationship to blackness returns me to
Harper's remarks in the epigraph to this chapter that even our attempts to escape such structured
definition rely so heavily upon it that we inevitably must treat the encounter as an act of profound and
impossible circumnavigation.

Villarejo then proceeds to propose a counterreading by thinking through Ferguson's missed

opportunity in regard to the "critical potency of queer theory.... [which] offers ways to fly with
language and desire away from homology and continuity.... [It] can offer ... a way to grapple with
feeling and with response (affect), a way to work in the interstices of contacts, affiliations, relations"
(75). In essence, Villarejo wants to preserve for queer of color critique the importance of queer
theory's openness to feeling and affect. Because Villarejo's critique is centered upon a sustained
reading of Ferguson's contribution to the field and his readings of literature, she does not have room
to deploy other queer African Americanist readings of black "literature." A host of black queer
studies work on the place of the literary in black culture cannot be engaged here, and so there is a
missed opportunity to document, at least via footnote, all of the dissenting queer black voices in this
call to think through the place of the black literary imaginary in the queer of color critique project.38
This is the moment in Villarejo's essay where a nod to the black studies project would create
connection, if not relationship, between the two subfields.

I would like to propose that the call to revere "women of color feminism" also serves to mask its
historical specificity as well as contribute to its unmaking. The work of "intersectionality" as it is
marked in the essays in "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" serves as an interesting case in
point. The boldest challenge to "intersectionality"-which always already has its foundational trace in
Crenshaw's early work and has been construed since then, thanks to Patricia Hill Collins, as a black
feminist theoretical apparatus-is expressed in Jasbir Puar's essay, "Queer Times, Queer
Assemblages." She writes:

The Deleuzian assemblage, as a series of dispersed but mutually implicated networks, draws
together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect. As opposed to an intersectional model
of identity, which presumes components-race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion-are
separable analytics and can be thus disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven
forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and
permanency. Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming and thus stabilizing of identity
across space and time, generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative of
identification.... As a tool of diversity management, and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism,
intersectionality colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state. (127-28)

Having said all of this, Puar then cautions us with a footnote: "This is not to disavow or minimize the
important interventions that intersectional theorizing makes possible and continues to stage, or the
feminist critical spaces that give rise to intersectional analyses" (138; emphasis mine). I have
practiced a similar caveat at the start of my critique of queer critique; such premonitory statements
indicate the presence of an unsettling anxiety. There are two gestures at work in this disclaimer: that
the important interventions of intersectionality are known because they are unnamed, and that
"intersectional analyses" are the particular property of feminism. Interestingly enough, several black
feminists, chief among them Cathy Cohen, have already argued in tersectionality's narrowness, so why
the anxiety about minimizing a critique that has already been under intense scrutiny? That Puar's
assessment of intersectionality's feminist appropriation reads as its mandate is troubling; that she
anticipates the critique is seriously smart.

In reading this collection of essays one witnesses the contemporary playing field for
black.female.queer narrowed considerably: these bodies have resonance historically, but they do not
figure as contemporary interlocutors to engage, debate, or theorize around. The trans black prostitute
that conjures up the tale of queer of color critique in Ferguson's first iteration is indeed vestibular to
culture: she is Vanna White turning the letters so you can see them and hopefully get paid. My
argument here is not that black.female.queer critics have not been solicited for inclusion in the Social
Text special issue; rather, my critique seeks to get beyond the exclusion/ inclusion problematic that
has dogged much of contemporary theorizing. My comments here are meant to engage the conditions
under which something called black-queer-feminism (woman of color feminism) can be engaged.
These conditions mandate a forgetting that is temporary but nonetheless quotidian (insofar as the
repetition of such an exclusion is played out).

Gayatri Gopinath is another contributor to the special issue of Social Text who acknowledges the
contributions of critical race theory, specifically the work of Stuart Hall, but the critical race citation
here focuses on the conceptualization of diaspora from Hall rather than the United Statesbased
critique grounded in an interrogation of everyday racism. When the queer meets diaspora in
Gopinath's "Bollywood Spectacles;" it enables and "becomes a way to challenge nationalist
ideologies by insisting on the impure, inauthentic, nonreproductive potential of the notion of
diaspora." The "nonreproductive" gets requalified as "domestic space outside a logic of blood,
purity, authenticity, and patrilineal descent" (158). While these are laudable aims for a queer project,
they do point toward the particular ways in which queer endeavors are marked by a compulsive
theoretical privileging of the nonreproductive. As I have argued throughout this book, why should we
assume that a queer (non) reproductive space is outside the bounds of racist practice? Moreover,
given that queer families abound, why is "queer" marked as nonreproductive?

But in Gopinath's essay we do find a further articulation of Ferguson's project as she reminds us
that queer of color critique is poised "to reject the parochialism of American studies as well as the
underlying heteronormativity of even its postnationalist versions" (159). The black queer studies
concern about its own parochialism is echoed in Gopinath's assessment of what queer of color
critique can and will do, but the door opens, at least citationally, on a conversation with these
scholars about the place of populations at home in relationship to the overwhelming
"heteronormativity" of the American studies project. Black queer studies has had much to say about
this problem and the expectation should be that a conversation ensues; instead, this discourse falls
between the cracks of a narrowly defined American studies and a retooling of the postnationalist
space as heteronormative. In the Social Text collection we are ever reminded of the importance of
"diaspora" as a critical move outward. This also leaves a native studies critic like myself wondering
what to do with issues of native sovereignty and presence within the tightly construed matrix of
United States-based versus diasporic critical engagements. One could certainly find fodder for a
queer studies project in the fact that the only queer marriage in all of Oklahoma that was actually
legal occurred under the auspices of the Cherokee nation. But how would a black queer studies or
queer of color critique project open itself to a discussion of this queer romance if it is blind to the
ways in which native peoples have also shaped discourse about the diasporic as well as the national,
both at home and abroad? Even in the context of calling for renewed respect for contributions by
women of color to discourses about sexuality and nation, the different parts of a new queer studies
project are not speaking to one another.

Toward the end of the Social Text collection, Michael Cobb assesses the intersection of race,
religion, hate, and incest and observes that "blackness should not [be] merely testimony or
autobiography. Blackness, instead, functions most effectively as a powerful language of critique."39
This pull to the universality of (black) critique is definitely evident in the special issue and it reminds
me of Hammonds's call to see race (read black) as a "global sign." But the call to think about
"blackness as a powerful language of critique" produces a unity of vision within black intellectual
work that is difficult to sustain. Moreover, in heralding our ability to see past the autobiographical
moment, we forget how importantly those quotidian experiences shape the diversity of black being. In
calling for more attention to the quotidian materiality of critical hubris, I attempt in this book to think
through how this loss of black biodiversity becomes evidence of an unsettling critical anxiety.

Cobb's essay is one of the few in the collection, let alone in queer theory, to utilize the theoretical
contributions of Hortense Spillers. I would like to take a moment by way of conclusion to return to
one of her most influential pieces, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe;" which was written in 1987. In one
pivotal moment in this essay, Spillers ventures to offer the following: "Indeed, we could go so far as
to entertain the very real possibility that `sexuality' as a term of implied relationship and desire, is
dubiously appropriate, manageable, or accurate to any of the familial arrangements under a system of
enslavement, from the master's family to the captive enclave. Under these arrangements, the customary
lexis of sexuality, including 'reproduction,' `motherhood; `pleasure; and `desire' are thrown into
unrelieved crisis" (231). Spillers boldly suggests that sexuality's very vocabulary has been altered by
human being's bizarre machinations under slavery. Cobb is right to ascertain that scholars need to
return to Spillers's work and its applicability to sexuality studies. If these categories-motherhood,
pleasure, desire, reproduction-in sexuality's abridged dictionary are thrown into crisis by the
institution of slavery, where does that leave the overall study of sexuality? Notice here that Spillers
does not offer a prescriptive analysis of the meaning of reproduction, motherhood, pleasure, or desire
for black bodies; instead her critique hinges on a variety of pressures that slavery exerts upon all
manner of human relation. Hammonds returns to the spirit of Spillers's foundational piece when she
remarks upon the "global sign" that race refuses to become in feminist and queer theorizing.

Spillers's observations also point toward a very important dialectic in the erotic life of slavery:
that the conditions of contact imply "non-freedom for both or either of the parties" and have
reverberations "from the master's family to the captive enclave." Slavery's influential arc, captured in
Spillers's pointedly grotesque arc of flesh separated from the body of the enslaved by the master or
overseer's whip, touches and irrevocably alters the dynamic between white and black bodies. My
only slight correction here is in the relative distance Spillers maintains between "master's family" and
"captive enclave," thus reproducing the idea that law and practice somehow cohere in the
slaveocracy. But it is the lie of difference between us-"master's family" and "captive enclave"-that
makes what matters in slavery of biological concern, thus making its repercussions and erotic life
pertinent only to black life. In historical references to the importance of blackness to queer studies,
this same separation between black and white is maintained, so that even when we marshal the
history of colonialism and slavery for use in our analyses, these histories seem to be useful or only
have meaning to black subjects.

Does black femaleness carry the sign of history's reach upon us so completely that we must give her
up in order to go about our theoretical business? Having jettisoned "reproduction" for
heteronormativity, and having assigned black.female.queer a very high critical standard to live up to,
the ability to speak to her quotidian messiness has been lost altogether. In Janet Halley's mixed
assessment of the question with which I began this section on queer studies work-what is the
relationship between feminism and queer studies?-there is some consideration of the problem. In
Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (20o6), Halley spends a good portion
of her time redacting key feminist arguments, intersecting them with one another and with theoretical
paradigms from queer studies. She states, "I argue here for a politics of theoretic incommensurability"
(3). By constituting queer theory as a "break" from feminism-one that she encourages-Halley has the
inconvenient task of determining which arguments are most representative for both accounts. While I
am all for a move toward agreeing to disagree in critical discourse, I am less enthusiastic about the
methodology Halley employs to move us in this direction.

In the sub-section of part 2 of Split Decisions "Convergentist and Divergentist Hybrid Feminism"
Halley utilizes the Combahee River Collective Statement as a black feminist contribution to
mainstream feminist theory. When she compares it to Mackinnon and Spivak, the (w)holes are evident
and one wonders why she chose a political manifesto instead of a piece of (black) feminist theory for
her comparison. Why mix genres here? In essence, why not use Spillers, for example, or Mae
Henderson? I am not trying to say that the collective and its statement has had little significance in
feminist theorizing; what I am arguing for here is more attention (again) to the diversity of opinion
among (black) feminists as well as some attention to the political differences that genre demands and
marks for scholars.

But the observation above is both beside the point and part of my larger one as well: the diversity
of voices of black feminist theorists cannot be taken into account because if they were the theoretical
landscape would be altered to such a great extent that the queer project Halley envisions would find
itself in "unrelieved crisis," to echo Spillers. Halley's redactions of pivotal critical stances within
feminism and queer theory constantly urge us to think differently about what feminist theorizing is
asking us to do (for women). In preparing scholars of sexuality studies to take a break from feminism,
she considers what feminism asks of us by producing a series of lists as a rhetorical measure. The
first list-gleaned from Adrienne Rich's famous list in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence" -is produced with the following caveat: "Do you like the ur-list of structuralist feminism?
Or does it make you feel paralyzed? Take your time; really read it slowly; read it the way you would
a poem by Gertrude Stein" (195) 40 In this list the characteristics of male power are enumerated:

r) To deny women [our own] sexuality [by means of clitoridectomy and infibulations; chastity belts;
punishment, including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures
against masturbation; denial of maternal and postmenopausual sensuality; unnecessary
hysterectomy; pseudolesbian images in media and literature; closing of archives and destruction of
documents relating to lesbian existence];

2) Or to force it [male sexuality] upon them [by means of rape (including marital rape) wife beating;
father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialization of women to feel that male sexual "drive"
amounts to a right; idealization of heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, advertising, etc.,
child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; the harem; psychoanalytic doctrines of frid- gidity
and vaginal orgasm; pornographic depictions of women responding pleasurably to sexual violence
and humiliation (a subliminal message being that sadistic heterosexuality is more "normal" than
sensuality between women)];

3) To command or exploit their labor to control their produce [by means of the institutions of
marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid
employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion,
contraception, childbirth; enforced sterilization; pimping; female infanticide, which robs mothers
of daughters and contributes to the generalized devaluation of women];

4) To control or rob them of their children [by means of father-right and "legal kidnapping"; enforced
sterilization; systematized infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts; the
malpractice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as "token torturer" in genital mutilation or in
binding the daughter's feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage];
5) To confine them physically and prevent their movement [by means of rape as terrorism, keeping
women off the streets; purdah; footbinding; atrophying of women's athletic capabilities; haut
couture, "feminine" dress codes; the veil, sexual harassment on the streets; horizontal segregation
of women in employment; prescriptions for "full-time" mothering; enforced economic dependence
of wives] ;

6) To use them as objects in male transactions [use of women as "gifts"; bride-price; pimping;
arranged marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals, e.g., wife-hostess,
cocktail waitress required to dress for male sexual titillation, call girls, "bunnies;" geisha,
kisaengprostitutes, secretaries];

7) To cramp their creativeness [witch persecutions against midwives and female healers as pogrom
against independent, "unassimilated" women; definition of male pursuits as more valuable than
female within any culture, so that cultural values become embodiment of male subjectivity;
restriction of female self-fulfillment to marriage and motherhood; sexual exploitation of women by
male artists and teachers; the social and economic disruption of women's creative aspirations;
erasure of female tradition]; and

8) To withhold from them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments [by means
of noneducation of females (60% of the world's illiterates are women); the "Great Silence"
regarding women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture; sex-role stereotyping
which deflects women from science, technology, and other "masculine" pursuits; male social/
professional bonding which excludes women; discrimination against women in the professions].
(195-97)

I reproduce the "ur-list" in its entirety to demonstrate its specific purchase, not only upon Halley's
envisioning of early queer feminism's assessment of women's situation, to echo Beauvior, but also
upon our own conceptualizations of when and where black.female.queer enters into the historical arc
of feminist theorizing. This list could easily serve as a manifesto for the antislavery society, where
the ways in which "[slaveholding and nonslaveholding] men" exert control over enslaved women
seem very similar, but not one of the examples of male power includes the range of possibilities for
the enslaved person, or mentions "slavery" as a constitutive practice of "male power." I am not trying
to argue that "slavery" should automatically be associated with black.female.queer; instead, what I
want to point out here is the way in which this particular epoch in United States history is easily
elided in both Rich's and Halley's schema. It is a forgetting that recalls the thorny place of the black
female body in feminist accountings of itself. It is as if the history of slavery literally belongs to
someone else-it is another disciplinary terrain. Having fashioned this history as the property and
responsibility of the subaltern others in United States culture, the project of feminist theorizing and,
subsequently, queer theorizing can commence.
 Black.female.queer occurs in Halley's reiterative enumeration as if it were contained in psychic
brackets; brackets made even more seductive by Halley's insistence that we read the "ur-list" as if it
were "a poem by Gertrude Stein." Later in her reading of how to take a break from feminism, Halley
finds a way to reproduce Butler's earlier attempt to make sense of "Eurocentrism" and the culture
wars. By yoking black feminism to a morally bankrupt and outmoded "convergence feminism;" Halley
can then package "it" in her later "thought experiment" as an impossible apparatus for achieving
(feminist) justice in legal jurisprudence. In a case involving pregnant women at the workplace, she
concludes: "Convergentist feminist antiracism and feminist postcolonial work seek solutions that
merge the interests of black workers, offshore workers, and pregnant women in the United States. And
I agree that it is very important to seek possibilities of such merger, and to act on them politically. But
even to see them clearly you have to be willing to see moments in which their interests don't
converge, and you have to be ready to decide when to give up and do things for one group of workers
at the expense of another" (288). I am inclined to agree with her that at least in legal practice some
interests will be accommodated over others. At the end of the last piece in her examination of
specific legal cases, Halley can confidently assert: "One motive force driving the Brain Drain [in
feminist scholarship] is, surely, the ferocious preclusion imposed on inquisitive minds and avid
justice seekers by a paranoid structuralist and prescriptive convergentists presuppositions, indeed by
the stricture that theory must create living space" (341; emphasis mine).

I must be honest and say that while reading Halley's brilliant take on several complex and vexing
legal decisions involving sex, gender, and sexuality, I am in agreement with her about the legal and
theoretical stakes of narrow (feminist) approaches to them. What I find here, however, is that the way
in which Halley parses that theoretical universe does nothing (1) to represent the diversity of the
black feminist position she then repudiates; (2) to challenge the foregoing (lesbian) feminist claim to
women's particular situation; or (3) to address the ways in which the jettisoning of black.female.queer
is a foundational turn in queer theorizing. What Halley has not taken a break from is feminist theory's
deployment of the black body and its insistent, even cloying material recall.

Social Text's "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" along with queer of color critique seek to
redress this particular "wrong" in queer theorizing by centering their critique upon foundational texts
in women of color feminism-a feminism that has its grounding in black feminist work. Caught in the
middle between the struggle to forget and to remember, S.H.E. stands wholly outside or in vestibular
relation to feminism and queer theory, respectively. "Aragorn, it is you who are now responsible for
middle earth."

If we exclude all references to slavery's economies of reproduction and desire, then we can make
very discretionary claims about its influence upon us, while simultaneously forgetting the (black and
white, brown and red) bodies attached to its sorrow and woe. If we attach these bodies to a
thoroughgoing feminist catalogue of degradation at the hands of men, then we will not be able to
speak to the forgetting that must take place in order for queer theory (or feminist theory) to commence,
because wouldn't such a momentary lapse in responsibility, if not manners, warrant the full force of
angry black feminist response? It is my contention that we must break the cycle of our critical
attachments by breaking with the tradition of producing black.female.(queer) in a historical register
that matters only to her. By breaking with this mode of inquiry, we might be able to reach an epiphany
of sorts-one that would allow us to see what happened to us collectively. This collectivity might
restore just what we did and do to one another at the moment of our intimate interactions-erotic,
racist, and otherwise. This is the erotic life of racism that this book endeavors to unveil. It is the last
repository and also perhaps the first of our affective desire(s).

Much of this book has focused upon theoretical work in order to make its larger point. In the
conclusion I shift registers to examine the "touch" as a metaphor for both our erotic commitments and
our "biological" relations in the context of a literary reading. In the course of this examination, I think
through Derrida's explication of the touch and utilize this framing for a reading of what is generally
thought to be an American classic about race, caste, and gender: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! In
sum, I tentatively seek to answer one of the most thoroughgoing speculations of this project: what kind
of readings would we create, if the lie of nonrelation was and is not available to us?
This concluding chapter is an experimental exploration of the intimacy upon which everyday racism
relies. The work here is not focused upon egregious or spectacular acts of racist violence, but instead
investigates the more quotidian acts of racism-the kind that separate (and simultaneously conjoin)
black and white in family genealogies, the sort created by a simple touch or a word uttered between
"blood strangers;' a term I deploy in the introduction to mark both the saliency of race as a trope and
the absurdness of race as an ideology. In order to do this work, I deploy a series of scenarios,
passages, and scenes to mine the connection between race and gender and what we understand as the
experience-the feeling-of racism.

The first section, "The Last Word;" reads Derrida's provocative essay "Racism's Last Word" and
Toni Morrison's musings on the same subject in order to explore the role of language in our
understandings of how racism is articulated. The second section, "Faulkner's Touching Moment;'
provides a reading of Rosa Coldfield's narrative in William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!
that complicates the question of the touch. Throughout this reading, touch appears as an appropriate
metanarrative for racism because it engenders outrage as well as identifies connection in past,
present, and future. The attempt is to read racism through gendered and raced examples of its triumph.
The touch, I suggest, manifests itself as the psychic life of difference, transforming two categories of
being (human and nonhuman) into a charged space of pleasure and of possibility. The third section
serves as a bridge between explications of Faulkner's novel, using the controversy over Thomas
Jefferson's heirs and their final resting place to ask questions about the practice of slavery and its
psychic life. The fourth section returns to Absalom and provides a reading of the category "human" in
Rosa Coldfield's refusal of Thomas Sutpen's marriage proposal.

THE LAST WORD

As I have argued earlier, in order to talk about race we need to understand its connection to racism.
Such an exploration is even more necessary in an environment where our desire for color blindness
has made it possible to separate race from racism, its constant companion. Critical musings about the
end of race or about the inadequacies of the category altogether have assumed that race pilots itself
through national narratives, fictional enterprises, or family albums. This is not the case. Even as we
pronounce the death of race, we cannot overlook the fact that our attempts to articulate it into
oblivion, to pronounce the last word on race, simply have not worked.' In keeping with the
speculative nature of this chapter, I want to shift here to a metaphoric rendering of "the last word" in
order to meditate upon our simultaneous search for the end of race and our strivings for an adequate
articulation of it. An apt example of this arduous quest is Toni Morrison's selection of the final word
of her great novel Beloved. In her essay "Home;' published after the novel, she discusses its ending:
"Someone saw the last sentence of Beloved as it was originally written. In fact, it was the penultimate
sentence if one thinks of the last word in the book ... as the very last sentence. In any case the phrase,
`Certainly no clamor for a kiss,' which appears in the printed book, is not the one with which I had
originally closed the book."2

Upon her editor's suggestion, Morrison looked for a word that was not so "dramatic" or "theatrical"
as the original, now erased ending. She continues:

I was eager to find a satisfactory replacement, because the point that gripped me was that even if
the word I had chosen was the absolute right one, something was wrong with it if it called
attention to itselfawkwardly, inappropriately-and did not complete the meaning of the text, but
dislodged it. It wasn't a question of simply substituting one word for another that meant the same
thing. . . . I am still unhappy about it because "kiss" works at a level a bit too shallow. It
searches for and locates a quality or element of the novel that was not, and is not, its primary
feature. The driving force of the narrative is not love, or the fulfillment of physical desire. The
action is driven by necessity, something that precedes love, follows love, shapes it, and to which
love is subservient. In this case the necessity was for connection, acknowledgment, paying-out of
homage still due. "Kiss" clouds that point. (6-7)

In closing her remarks on writing Beloved, Morrison adds: "My efforts were to carve away the
accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence embedded in raced
language so that other kinds of perception were not only available, but were inevitable. That is the
work I thought my original last word accomplished; then I became convinced that it did not, and now
am sorry I made the change. The trouble it takes to find just one word and know that it is that note and
no other that would do is an extraordinary battle" (7).

The right word can also bring "the acknowledgment" that puts the erotic life of the text in motion, a
place in Beloved where categories of difference can also be at play. Morrison has not revealed what
that word might be, but I can't help but think that the original "last word" hovers somewhere between
"fuck" and "touch." Regardless, Morrison documents the quest for the penultimate pronouncement on
race-if one can think of the novel as a relentless meditation upon slavery's racist brutalities-as
ultimately unfruitful. Nevertheless, she does capture the inadequacy of the word "kiss" to an
articulation of fraught and dangerous relations between white and black subjects under slavery's
racist imperative. Mor rison's struggle with the word "kiss" and her attempts to work around "raced
language" points to the complex nature of racism and our attempts as writers and critics to write a
narrative of its permutations. Her reliance upon and repudiation of the erotic life of racism indicates
that we do find racism in the arena where intimates make "connection."

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida also attempts to explore "the last word" in his essay from
1985 "Racism's Last Word," which is more aptly translated from the French as "The Last Word on
Racism. `3 Derrida, however, deploys the metaphor in a different fashion. Speaking of the word
"apartheid;" he notes that the word remains the same no matter what the natural language in which it is
embedded. He observes that "no tongue has ever translated this name-as if all the languages of the
world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by
means of the word, as if all tongues were refusing to give an equivalent, refusing to let themselves be
contaminated through the contagious hospitality of the word-for-word" (331; emphasis mine). Derrida
uncannily uses a tongue/turn similar to that employed by Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937). Janie, the primary protagonist, pronounces: "Mah tongue is in mah friend's
mouth." Feminist and African Americanist critics have consumed reams of white paper devising
intricate and seductive theories about this statement. Surely one is that the phrase, "Mah tongue is in
mah friend's mouth," is both a figure of speech and an erotic declaration; its mimetic qualities abound.
If we take the tongue, we must also accept the word-"the contagious hospitality of the word-for-
word"-where Hurston troubles Derrida.

In general, many of Derrida's critics often take exception to his focus upon the play of language,
rather than upon the more concrete nature of material conditions.4 I would argue that Derrida's
language play opens up new possibilities for our understanding of racism and its legacy of action. In
addition, his vision of racism points to our inability to own it; to see it as a possibility for past,
present, and future. In working with the tongue and the word or, more precisely, with the simultaneity
of repudiation and acceptance that so characterizes racism's contradictory terrain, Derrida highlights
the active nature of racism:

At every point, like all racisms, it [apartheid] tends to pass segregation off as natural-and as the
very law of the origin. Such is the monstros ity of this political idiom. Surely, an idiom should
never incline toward racism. It often does, however, and this is not altogether fortuitous: there's
no racism without a language. The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but
rather that they have to have a word. Even though it offers the excuse of blood, color, birth-or
rather, because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse-racism.... institutes,
declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. A system of marks, it outlines space in order to assign
forced residence or to close off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates. (331)

Like Hurston, Derrida envisions tongues exchanging. His concept of "contagious hospitality"
underscores the problem of treating the tongue as a contaminant, insisting that the inevitable exchange
(commingling) is dangerous; that the act of transference and translation itself is corrupt.5 The
hospitality he refers to here is often interpreted as from outside-and the implication is that apartheid
therefore comes from some "foreign" place-that the word is not given to us by our "friends." Thus
"hospitality" is a contagion, making the wor(l)d a dangerous place. Perhaps the most pernicious
aspect of any sustained conflict between peoples is that phrases like "separate but equal;' "the final
solution," and "apartheid" are not the creations of institutions, of governing bodies, and of our
enemies. They are also the inventions of our intimates, our friends, our neighbors, and our blood
relations. Remember the transatlantic slave trade, Indian removal, and the Holocaust; witness Algeria
in the 195os; Bosnia in the 199os-the list is endless. Friendship is often the first "gift" of war.
 The trope of the tongue works in two directions: we engage in a word for word, tongue for tongue
reciprocation or we perform a refusal through abstraction-refusing to incorporate the word in our
own lexicon (making word and deed an aberration), rejecting it as someone else's experience (racism
is for or happens to one group over another), someone else's language (the word does not befit the
deed, the act), and ultimately, someone else's problem. And the problem of racism is always someone
else's to own-it has a place in that it occurs at the level of the everyday, but it does not have a home-it
manifests, but only as a fantastic event-an aberration in an otherwise lovely day. Its exceptionality is
its beauty. If the word does not have a place (no origin, no nation), a point of passing and passage
(two tongues intertwined), it ceases to exist.

FAULKNER'S TOUCHING MOMENT

In his essay "Le Toucher: Touch/To Touch Him," Jacques Derrida expounds upon the myriad
objectives and complicated interactivity of the touch: "For to touch, so one believes, is touching what
one touches, to let oneself be touched by the touched, by the touch of the thing, whether objective or
not, or by the flesh that one touches and that then becomes touching as well as touched. This is not true
for all the other senses: one may, to be sure, let oneself be `touched' as well by what one hears or
sees, but not necessarily heard or seen by what one hears and sees, whence the initial privilege of
what is called touch" (136). Though touching a person may seem simple, it is anything but. Both
physical and psychic, touch is an act that can embody multiple, conflicting agendas.6 It can be both a
troubled and troublesome component in the relationship between intimates, as in the case of Derrida;
or, alternatively, the touch mediates relations between friends and strangers.7 In fact, the touch can
alter the very idea as well as the actuality of relationships, morphing friends into enemies and
strangers into intimates. For touch can encompass empathy as well as violation, passivity as well as
active aggression. It can be safely dangerous, or dangerously safe. It also carries a message about the
immediate present, the possible future, and the problematic past. Finally, touch crosses boundaries, in
fact and imagination."

Ironically, even though we shrink from our experience of quotidian racism, we are apparently
incapable of living without categories of difference, even when those categories are at worse hurtful
and at best fictions in and of themselves. My central questions here are as follows: "What makes
difference work?" and "How do we accomplish its goals?" I again come back to racism as the action
that makes race matter. In a psychoanalytic register, Freud offers an account of our need to
differentiate. He surmises that "even where the original inclination to identification has withstood
criticism-that is, when the `others' are our fellow men-the assumption of a consciousness in them rests
upon an inference and cannot share the immediate certainty which we have of our own
consciousness." In other words, even when we recognize someone as "human;" we destroy the
pleasure of recognition and of reciprocity. We do not permit ourselves fully to interpret or see the
human we encounter as having the same consciousness or even the potential for the same as us. While
my purpose here is not to engage Freud's complex deliberation(s) about the human psyche, it is
noteworthy that the work of difference, as conceived of by Freud and perhaps as experienced by all
of us to some extent, is never really complete. Our desire for absolute difference cannot be satiated. It
keeps coming back to question the legitimacy of our own claim that we really are a single and unique
consciousness. There is no endpoint to our gambits with the other, which breaks in upon our
singularity, causing us to react indignantly, "Oh, it's you again?" We feel the same burden when
touched by another. The touch, crossing boundaries, affirms the inadequacy of this boundary between
selves.

The power of the touch as both boundary and trespass is wonderfully illustrated in the following
explication of one of William Faulkner's greatest novels. In one now (in)famous scene in Absalom,
Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield exhibits hysterical rage when Clytie (Sutpen's "half black" daughter)
arrests her ascent of the staircase at Sutpen's Hundred by placing a hand upon her arm. Behind this
gesture and the anger it provokes is a terrible story. For Faulkner's most famous novel is organized
around a family saga that takes place in the old and the new South and extends beyond the Civil War.
In 1833, Thomas Sutpen arrives in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, with a "design" to build a
mansion and establish a hundred-acre plantation: "I had a design. To accomplish it I should require
money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family-incidentally, of course, a wife. I set out to acquire
these, asking no favor of any maxi' (218). Shortly afterward, in 1838, he marries Rosa Coldfield's
older sister Ellen. As the novel takes several temporal and narrative shifts, we hear the convoluted
tale of Sutpen's early years. Before his arrival in Mississippi, Sutpen's first attempt at fulfilling his
design goes awry when he discovers that the woman he marries in Haiti is not white but Creole. He
puts her aside in New Orleans and travels to Mississippi. But his design is again challenged when his
son from this first union, Charles Bon, plans to marry his half-sister, Sutpen's daughter and Rosa's
niece, Judith. Charles Bon is literally the past coming back to haunt Sutpen's design. In order to
prevent the marriage, Henry Sutpen (son of Judith and Thomas) kills Charles and then disappears.
Henry's reasons for committing murder are always a matter of speculation throughout the text.

In the novel's present tense (January 1910), the narrative is pieced to gether as Quentin Compson
and Shreve Davenport sit in their Harvard dormitory recalling the story as told to Quentin by Rosa
and his father, Colonel Compson. Rosa's first-person narrative, contained in chapter 5 of Absalom,
Absalom! encompasses both her return to Sutpen's Hundred just after Henry Sutpen kills Charles Bon
and the seven-month period when Rosa, Clytie, and Judith wait for Thomas Sutpen to return after the
Civil War. When she arrives at the foot of the stairs in 1864, within two years of Ellen's death, Henry
Sutpen has killed Charles Bon and vanished; Judith, Bon's intended, stands outside the door she will
not open, clutching her wedding dress in one hand and the picture of Charles's New Orleans wife
(like father, like son) in the other. Clytie stands between Rosa and the door beyond which the dead
body of Bon resides.

In this signal passage, we find Rosa obsessed with Clytie's "black arresting and untimorous hand on
my white woman's flesh" (115). Listen to Rosa's rage, which exemplifies my concept of "the touch":
 Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. Possibly even then my body did not stop, since I
seemed to be aware of it thrusting blindly still against the solid yet imponderable weight ... of
that will to bar me from the stairs; possibly the sound of the other voice, the single word spoken
from the stair-head above us, had already broken and parted us before it (my body) had even
paused. I do not know. I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into
something monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere
amazement and outrage.... Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which
abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering,
which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both.... But let flesh touch with
flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. Yes, I stopped
dead-no woman's hand, no negro's hand, but bitted bridle-curb to check and guide the furious and
unbending will-I crying not to her, to it; speaking to it through the negro, the woman, only
because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon, expecting and
receiving no answer because we both knew it was not to her I spoke: `Take your hand off me,
nigger!' (115)

What makes Rosa's obsession with Clytie's touch so remarkable is that even in the midst of absolute
chaos and trauma, Rosa chooses to focus upon that touch and its possibility. Here, the touch assumes
experiential knowledge, while it also calls upon its witnesses and players to testify to it as connection
and repudiation, making it part of that person's experience and daring her to dis-own it. The parallels
to Derrida's conceptualization of nations refusing an intimate exchange-"word-for-word" refusal-are
several and uncanny. When Rosa finally utters the word "nigger" at the end of this rambling scene, it
is almost anticlimactic; she has already proven that the touch does transform, or at least it has the
possibility to translate, to convey meaning from one to another. The touch is vividly personified and,
as an entity in the text it is always already present-it does not happen to Rosa so much as it connects
Rosa and Clytie in a past whose imbrication occurs through blood and law. Rosa and Clytie become,
literally, blood strangers. Like Derrida's conceit about racism's incorporation and repudiation by
national bodies, Rosa's narrative refuses the touch at the same time that it proves its inevitability
throughout time, rather than in time. In essence, the touch transforms, becomes legible because it
moves beyond "the negro" and becomes "it"; Rosa begins to see the touch as her adversary ("I crying
not to her) to it; speaking to it through the negro, the woman") and as she realizes this, she also
embraces its unequivocal presence.

Faulkner renders the touch between Clytie and Rosa as not solely violent, but erotic. The touch is
so compelling here that the prevailing narrative of race is undone and a multitude of possibilities find
fruition. The language of the passage is entirely visceral-as Rosa's body moves forward within the
action of the novel, her mind is arrested and preoccupied with the inevitability of the touch. The
mind/body split that Rosa endures mimics the structure of racism-how everyday people play the game
of distancing themselves from racism by seeing it as not part of their daily routine but as someone
else's devastating failure at communication. She runs headlong into the "truth" of the past-her blood
relationship to Sutpen's black and white family-that renders the language of getting there absolutely
inarticulate. Language is literally "broken"-ungendered and unraced. It hovers in chapter 5 of
Absalom, Absalom!, witnessing its own demise as there is no adequate language for Rosa's
experience of Clytie's touch, which is why we have such a convoluted articulation of this moment by
Rosa. The touch they share potentially unmakes gender, as it dismantles racial difference because the
two women are called upon (through Rosa's voice) to contemplate the meaning of difference, to
reside in the space where a gendered connection is made (im)possible by racism's quotidian assault.
Rosa's panic is made all the more inviting because of Clytie's relative silence-a silence that Faulkner
makes very few attempts to move beyond.

In another manifestation of difference, Rosa remarks: "Even as a child, I would not even play with
the same objects which she [Clytie] and Judith played with, as though that warped and Spartan
solitude which I called my childhood ... had also taught me not only to instinctively fear her and what
she was, but to shun the very objects which she had touched" (116). Faulkner identifies Rosa's
personification of "objects" as they become intermediaries between one body and another. Rosa's
"objects" are constitutive of "the human." How we become "human" then is mediated by an ever-
present "touch" of the material, the object, the not-us, threatening incorporation. Moreover, what Rosa
reacts to is not the threat of belonging to (sharing the same gene pool with) Judith and Clytie; she later
says that she sees them as no different than she. Rather, Rosa's reaction to Clytie's touch introduces
the threat of belonging. But the anxiety caused by this threat is only perceived-it is only a
performance, if you will, because each character in Absalom, Absalom! fully understands that the
commingling which she or he loathes has already taken place. The "objects" at work in the book take
on the position of the virtual body, representing both "terror" and "pleasure" and eliciting a
simultaneous response from the reader -titillating fear and absolute disavowal.10

The intimate moment that Rosa and Clytie share is ordinary. It is quotidian intimacy that forces us
to realize the other as someone with whom we interact and have an impact upon; our acknowledgment
of this connection represents the touch and its fruition. We do not create intimacy; it is there awaiting
our recognition." Let me rephrase this: we are bound intimately to others whether we realize or
acknowledge such connection. The touch is the sign without a language to make it legible to "others."
Rosa's experience of Clytie's touch creates a psychic presence so powerful that it draws another
woman, Judith Sutpen, into its web. In the end, the women-Rosa, Clytie, and Judith, like the three
Fates-become "one being" (129). For Faulkner, the touch "abrogates." It nullifies our stubborn
insistence upon separation between races, sexes, or nations, if you will. After all, in Faulkner's
"modernism," black and white bodies do not always occupy separate spheres. What is at stake here is
not presence at all, but the idea of it; the knowledge, no matter how circumscribed that "presence" is
only (as with Clytie) half the story.12

JEFFERSON'S GRAVE DISTURBANCE

In spring 2001, NPR's Morning Edition ran a report about the Thomas Jefferson Heritage
Organization and its attempt to preserve the "character" and "reputation" of our third president. The
organization had produced a six-hundred-page report stating that the DNA evidence linking Jefferson
to Sally Hemings's children was inconclusive. John Work, an eighthgeneration relative of Jefferson
and president of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, was "deeply disturbed by the thought that
President Jefferson slept with a young slave."13 What astounds me is that the relatives who champion
Jefferson do not see the fact that he owned slaves in the new republic as any kind of stain on his
"character" or "reputation." Jefferson's detractors see the connection to Hemings as evidence of the
"complicated" nature of early American society. His advocates see this "evidence" as a complete
occlusion of what it means to be a "founding father" in the first place. What is in jeopardy is (white)
paternity.

In addition to this report, NPR also ran a story on Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone, a
parody of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind told as a series of diary entries by the illegitimate
and enslaved half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara. In its first attempt, the Mitchell estate successfully sued to
stop the initial publication of Randall's parody, citing violation of copyright law by infringing upon
the estate's sequel rights. The decision was eventually overturned in appellate court, and The Wind
Done Gone eventually reached the public. Cheryl Crowley of NPR interviewed several writers and
critics about the book, one of whom was Lauren Berlant of the University of Chicago. All of them
noted the dominance of the now infamous classic, how its "mythic portrayal of the South" is more
widely read and available than histories of "plantation life" and "reconstruction." In addition, Berlant,
speaking for the academy, argued that the novel has achieved a kind of "normative" status in the
imagination, providing a cultural fantasy that endures. 14 Even Jefferson's own words cannot curb our
lust for the fantasy of slavery-its "human" refuse, if "refuse" here denotes both "trash" and
"renunciation." In speaking about our nation's "manners" in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson
remarks:

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the
existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and
degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an
imitative animal. This quality is the germ of education in him.... The parent storms, the child
looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves,
gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny,
cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain
his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. (168)

We are left to wonder if Jefferson is that prodigy and, therefore, exception to the will to tyranny. If
the root of the word "prodigy" vacillates between the marvelous and the monstrous, the potential for
human action is so mercurial here as to be of no consequence. Here, the psychic life of language holds
open the poles of slavery's behavioral enterprise. The institution of slavery is truly what Coleridge
sought in the demonic imagination: a beautiful but horrific sublime, a state wherein all possibility,
imagined or otherwise, is managed and contained. Jefferson is Sula watching her mother burn, not out
of spite but interest. Moreover, this passage is flooded with what I would call negative language
about the category of the human. In Jefferson's piece, human exchange gives way to "commerce" and
any and all human connection is arrested by a series of relations that makes the figures in Jefferson's
hypothetical one with the machinery of slavery itself. The possibility of attaining or engaging in the
kind of status bestowed upon the category "human" is withheld from everyone in Jefferson's short
narrative and what we are left with are the "odious peculiarities" that also manage to thrive without a
proper name.

Jefferson's poignant dismantling of the human through the perpetuation of a pervasive and therefore
dominant narrative makes American slavery legible only as a fiction-and yet one worth preserving by
any means necessary. The sexual practice of the nation's third president and the story at the root of
Gone With the Wind are both haunted by touch: the image of Jefferson sleeping with (touching) Sally
Herrings, or the idea of Scarlett O'Hara's (half) black sister putting her pen to paper (touching) the
legacy of Scarlett and Rhett.15 The prohibition against the touch extends even to the grave, as
Jefferson's relatives and those of Sally Herrings continue to quarrel about the burial ground at
Monticello. The idea of separate but equal ground annoyed descendants of Herrings, one of whom
remarked, "Nothing's changed in two hundred years, has it?" On the other hand, John Work sent a
letter to over seven hundred family members, "complaining that the lines between the two cemeteries
`would blur' over time and lead to `a graveyard of Jefferson's descendants, both real and imagined.'
"16 Whiteness forms the stuff of the "real" and blackness is always already imagined territory.
Jefferson's "white" relatives want to spare his legacy, his image from the "odious peculiarities"
associated with slavery; his "black" relatives want to put an end to our understanding of such
relations as "odious" or "peculiar" at all. When we think of slavery in America, we'd rather have the
violent touch of enslaved bodies or the love that dare not speak its name-both "accounts" serve as
romanticized fictions of past events. We are constantly hovering between these two inventions and
are reminded that any attempt at the "truth" about slavery is simply unavailable to us. John Work's
racism polices the border between black and white, male and female. At this contested border stands
the body of a black woman; the fight over generation(s) and our claim upon it and them always enlists
a gendered and raced standard.

If touch can be interpreted as the action that bars one from entry and also connects one to the
sensual life of another, then we might go so far as to say that racism has its own erotic life. It is the
particular legacy (if not genius) of the Confederacy that it was able to convince an entire nation to
look toward the future for events that had already taken place in the past; to believe that emancipation
would result in rampant miscegenation. Think about the kind of shame and then rage you might
provoke when you ask someone to articulate the problem of racism (I am thinking of Du Bois here)-
not from someone else's history but from their own. Even though property is everything in America,
you will find difficulty in getting your neighbor to "own" this small piece of our collective pie.

Let me offer the following series of relationships. Our understanding of slavery as Americans
vacillates among the good, the bad, and the ugly. Some see its touch as violent; others, like the
purveyors of the legacy of Mitchell's novel, view "it" as doing more good than harm. Any attempt to
revisit this myth called the past is likely to be viewed as just plain ugly. In Faulkner's imaginary the
abrogation of the touch is precisely the problem: we are flailing at institutional structures like family,
like race, without the proper implement; for Faulkner it is the touch that both sears the flesh and
provides the opportunity for its suture.

"SO IT'S THE MISCEGENATION, NOT THE INCEST, WHICH YOU CANT BEAR"

The quotation that guides the argument in this section comes from the next to last chapter of Absalom,
Absalom! The novel's signal and single investigative rationale goes without question and without
answer, as Quentin's recounting of Sutpen's family saga continues at a furious pace while Shreve
interjects his own interpretation of the events. In this moment, Quentin imagines Bon saying to Henry:
"So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear" (293). Henry does not answer,
because the sentence has no question mark. Moreover, because the question (or lack thereof) comes
from all of the sons of the novel," it stands without a proper host, without the "hospitality" or
invitation that would let it loose on the chosen family; without the embodiment necessary to bring the
word to fruition, or into flesh. That this question is never answered or asked in Absalom, Absalom! is
perhaps the silence into which the last word on racism enters. So, too, racism's last word will never
be the end of "it" surely, only a mark of its repudiation. Miscegenation, as the space of commingling
and (un)like a vacuum, drags more than just race into its orbit. It also takes categories like
brother/sister, human/animal, and produces an end product that is now the "us" that we used to call
"them."

The absolute lack in which Faulkner's miscegenation /incest paradigm finds itself embedded is a
measure of the tension between an emerging American model and an existing European model of the
incest narrative; a model epitomized by the tragedy of Oedipus and trivialized in the Americas as a
space without trauma or even the resolution that can result from remorse. If Oedipus blinds himself to
the "truth" of his own sexual life, the American equivalent is not even on the horizon of appropriate
responses of fear and shame. The response, articulated in Faulkner as silence-for it is a waste of time
to tell someone what they always already know-is always "so what." It is revisited in Charles Bon's
rambling love letter to his sister Judith. His words are filled with arrogant resignation:

We have waited long enough. You will notice how I do not insult you either by saying I have
waited long enough. And therefore, since I do not insult you by saying that only I have waited, I
do not add, expect me. Because I cannot say when to expect me. Because what WAS is one thing,
 and now it is not because it is dead, it died in 1861, and therefore what IS ... Because what IS is
something else again because it was not even alive then. . . . I now believe that you and I are,
strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live. (rob-9)

Bon regards his union with Judith as inevitable and therefore allies himself with a time that exists
outside his own actions in the novel-his is an existential dilemma, fraught with erotic circumstance.

My call for a revised incest paradigm is by no means original, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
have signaled the end of the psychoanalytic mode of the Oedipus complex with their introduction of
theories of the "anti-Oedipus" model.'' But my desire to see a revised paradigm has as its rationale
countless testimonials of recovered memories of incest trauma in the 198os and 199os-from
published scholarly articles to talk show venues. It became patently clear that the "fact" of incest
wasn't so much a problem for readers-and, in particular, audiences across the country-as their
reaction to it. In an American Oedipal myth, the son wakes from his sister's bed and eyes you with
defiance-a practiced nonchalance bred in the bosom of slavery's enterprise.19 The "so what?" is
loud, clear, and never cautious, never accompanied by the constant companion of wrongful
transgression: contrition. What "survivors" and "victims" alike clamored for was an audience-
someone to "listen;' and in that listening acknowledge the problem and pain of incest. What they got
was a stubborn refusal to see the danger in insouciance.20

In addition, and perhaps more radically, our conservative understand ing of the incest paradigm
also provides a neat separation between the human and the animal. Incest functions for the family
much like race functions for the nation-both simultaneously keep and clean house. The problem is that
incest and race do not and have not functioned as barriers between family members or nation-states;
they are both tiny little fictions that preserve our sense of separateness and belonging.

Nothing disturbs the project of belonging more fully than the play at its outer boundary, where
family and nation, in their more celebratory moments, stake a collective claim upon the difference
between the human and the animal. In this register, a radical reading of Faulkner's work might prove
fruitful. While Faulkner's work does indicate that his characters change very little over time-(there is
no amazing grace in Faulkner's cosmos, only a pervasive relentlessness)-the status of the human as a
principal site of inquiry is given less privilege than the how and the what (a cow, human chattel, an
indecipherable ledger) of human interactions. Faulkner's human characters' attempt to demonstrate a
range of human emotions, their obsession with a kaleidoscope of differences and their metaphorical
equivalents, marks their journey in each narrative as wholly about something other than the human.
The information that Faulkner's characters carry with them and the way they pass on the memory of
slavery and removal (I am reminded of Jefferson's chapter on manners here) is to engage in certain
practices, ritual and habitual, that circumscribe the human. At the same time, any information that we
or the characters might have about the past is doomed to be lost in a present where such information
is rendered useless. This problem is most recognizable in the extent to which a particularly American
relationship to incest is emphasized in Absalom, Absalom!

At the end of the novel, we have to ask ourselves: What is the "it" that Quentin does not "hate"? The
very end of the narrative suggests that there are humans interacting, dependent upon and independent
of one another, but there is also a system-call it another narrative, call it the same onethat continues to
trump what it means to be human altogether. Shreve is convinced that slavery is about human refuse:
that the South is doomed is evidenced, not by practice but in and through the characters or bodies left
in its wake. That Rosa and Quentin engage in a dance of listening and telling that is rendered obsolete
by the structures of slavery that make the dance necessary in the first place is a point to which I now
return. For Quentin, it is the practice (of slavery's economy, of incest's anti-Oedipal refrain) that
continues, so as he attempts to tell the story and is constantly interrupted by Shreve, he is reminded of
the practices of the slavocracy that give rise to his/our present circumstances. Although dated, Irving
Howe's remarks upon the consciousness of white men in Faulkner's novels still have some resonance:
"Beneath the white man's racial uneasiness there often beats an impatience with the devices by which
men keep themselves apart. Ultimately the whole apparatus of separation must seem too wearisome in
its constant call to alertness, too costly in its tax on the emotions, and simply tedious as a brake on
spontaneous life. "21 Howe rightly identifies the gendered nature of black/white relationships in
Faulkner's cosmos. Quentin's refusal to listen to Rosa's narrative is an indication of how slavery's
remains are not about the human, as much as they are about systems, manners, and ultimately
devastating practices. Perhaps this is why Rosa refers to her youth as "that warped and spartan
solitude which I called my childhood, which had taught me (and little else) to listen before I could
comprehend and to understand before I even heard" (116).

Unlike Rosa, Quentin is not bound to the reciprocation required by the act of storytelling. Faulkner
writes:

But Quentin was not listening, because there was also something which he too could not pass-
that door, the running feet on the stairs beyond it almost a continuation of the fatal shot, the two
women, the negress and the white girl in her underthings ... pausing looking at the door, the
yellowed creamy mass of old intricate satin and lace spread carefully on the bed . . . the two of
them, brother and sister, curiously alike as if the difference in sex had merely sharpened the
common blood to a terrific, an almost unbearable, similarity, speaking to one another in short
brief staccato sentences like slaps. (142-43)

Quentin repudiates Rosa's word for the arrogance of his own. Had he listened to Rosa's story, he
might have found a way out; a break in the constant rehearsal of the same practices that relegate the
human in Absalom, Absalom! to the heap of remains created by slavery's enduring legacy.22 We have
to remember that Quentin is not an agent of the past, he is only privy to its memory; he does not know
what happened, so that the detail of the above scene merely announces a resurfacing of his own
personal quagmire-his own desire to sleep with his sister. In fact, we could say that Quentin's only
desire in Absalom, Absalom! is to extract meaning from the narrative that contributes to his own
personal and incestuous quest. A quest marked by miscegenation as well.

Rosa's narrative-contained almost entirely in chapter 5 of the novel-is the absolute repudiation of
the practices imbedded in slavery that allow for its continuance. For the characters in Faulkner's
"human" tragedy, actions are preordained-subject not only to history (dismantled by modernism's
blunt instrument) but also to other structures that exist in a time outside the novel's telling of "human"
stories. In one of the novel's most important confrontations, Sutpen, during a "minute's exchange," tells
rather than asks Rosa to be his wife. She recalls this "courtship" in two moments; the first: "He
talking not about me or love or marriage, not even about himself and to no sane mortal listening nor
out of any sanity, but to the very dark forces of fate which he had evoked and dared, out of that wild
braggart dream where an intact Sutpen's Hundred which no more had actual being now ... as though in
the restoration of that ring to a living finger he had turned all time back twenty years and stopped it,
froze it" (136). And the second: "I was (whatever it was he wanted of me-not my being, my presence:
just my existence, whatever it was that Rosa Coldfield or any young female no blood kin to him
represented in whatever it was he wanted-because I will do him this credit: he had never once
thought about what he asked me to do until the moment he asked it)" (137). In both excerpts, "being" is
interpreted as the house (Sutpen's Hundred) and the absence of Rosa, of the human subject altogether.
Rosa's choice is a hard one; for as she violently rejects becoming Sutpen's common-law (and then,
perhaps, legal) wife she experiences a simultaneous reification and absolute abjection: she gives up
the right to become property for what is proper, only to become the very thing that she resists. In this
scene, whiteness is categorically unable to transform one into a viable subject in the eyes of the larger
community. The minute Rosa attempts to substantiate her whiteness, her difference (she is not Clytie,
or Judith, or the now deceased Ellen), is the moment in which she loses her claim to that category.
Rosa's earlier en counter with Clytie's touch, with the failure of the authority of whiteness, begins to
inform her decision in this case. Regardless of her obsessive repudiation of it, the touch allows Rosa
to witness her connection to Judith and to Clytie, so that when Sutpen returns and off-handedly does
not ask but states that Rosa will marry him, she sees her fate as a white woman in relationship to the
two women with whom she shared a house. The confluence of miscegenation, incest, and war
catapults Rosa into a decision to step out of slavery's everyday life. As she recognizes this, she seems
to repudiate being like Judith or Clytie-and this move initially appears as the preservation of white
womanhood that we expect from Rosa. Sutpen's return, however, bears no acknowledgment of Rosa:
Judith is "daughter" and Clytie retains the recognition of her name (Ah) Clytie"), but for Rosa there is
nothing but complete objectification and Sutpen's remedy to this predicament is to offer Rosa a
marriage of sorts.

Sutpen's "touch" (or its absence) brings the erotic life of the novel to the forefront. For his
command of marriage here indicates a continuance of past practices rather than a creation of a future
contract or coupling. Rosa recalls the scene: "[He] came and stopped and put his hand on my head
and (I do not know what he looked at while he spoke) save that by the sound of his voice it was not at
us nor at anything in that room) said, `You may think I made your sister Ellen no very good husband.
You probably do think so. But even if you will not discount the fact that I am older now, I believe I
can promise that I shall do no worse at least for you"' (135-36). It is a "ceremony" where Sutpen is
"both groom and minister" (136). He has all the power of subjectivity, and for Rosa to become a wife
she will have to accept all loss of meaning in such a title for herself and, as her memory ensures us,
for all three women at Sutpen's Hundred. Moreover, she will also be unable to engender another
generation that can inherit the gift of whiteness. Rosa goes to her fate as a picker, spinster, ghost with
resignation -she loses the very whiteness that she so ardently defends from the beginning of chapter 5.
It is the very practice of white female subjectivity and Rosa's desire for it that keeps the economics
(blood) in this case) of slavery intact; Rosa discovers that a step outside of this economy surely
entails the death of the subject, as she understands it, but it is a risk she is willing to take. And in
doing so, Rosa becomes the perfect counterpart to Sutpen (a man obsessed with the practice of
[racist] outrage): a woman who abso lutely repudiates the substantiation of white subjectivity that
racist practice requires. The residual effect of Rosa's renunciation is that she cannot reconcile herself
with her own actions. Sutpen's touch-his own desire to continue racist practice-locks them both in the
dance of racism's aftermath, as Rosa's rage toward Sutpen colors all relationships with him. With or
without marriage or commingling, the erotic life of Sutpen's design and its repudiation determine the
tenor of the novel. When Rosa and Sutpen enter the scene of proposal and potential coupling, Rosa is
taken to the outer boundary of race and incest: she moves into the space of the human and animal; she
sees the chattel she will become if she accepts Sutpen's vulgar offer, and also what she will be
without it.

Between a rock and a hard place, Rosa accepts the inevitability of porousness-she understands the
separation of white and black and, by extension, human and animal as not only impossible but
dangerous. In the seams of this narrative is that racial shibboleth, to which we have become so
accustomed that resisting it is futile. When we pay attention to the erotic life of racism, we move onto
another playing field altogether where we must abandon the positions that hold white and black being
in such static relation.

On the staircase or in the parking lot, we mark the time/space continuum of our belonging. Cars,
people, children, come and go on that same pavement where this book began, and I do not know
whether the Safeway has been leveled for another strip mall or if it stands still, beckoning us to some
version of the quotidian in which we all share. In our reiterations of slavery's several endeavors, it is
time to write a new chapter of our relation(s) as truly interdisciplinary, where the dangerous work of
the everyday has some transformative (phenomenological?) agency. This book is just one attempt to
remember what quotidian moves we must make in order to contain our racial feeling, and how the
work of racism is important to that practice. To bring us back to a beginning of sorts, "You can't be
what you were / So you better start being / just what you are."23
INTRODUCTION

The subtitle of this introduction is taken from a translation of the title of Jacques Derrida's
essay "Racism's Last Word." Parts of this chapter and the conclusion were published as "The
Last Word on Racism: New Directions in Critical Race Theory," South Atlantic Quarterly
104, no. 3 (2005): 403-23.

i. The term "critical race theory" reflects its indebtedness to and significant departure from the
Frankfurt school's Marxist cohort. For an analysis of the important legal theory behind the critical
race theory movement, see Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory. In the introduction to the
volume, the editors write that "although Critical Race scholarship differs in object, argument, accent,
and emphasis, it is nevertheless unified by two common interests. The first is to understand how a
regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained
in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed
ideals such as `the rule of law' and `equal protection.' The second is a desire not merely to understand
the vexed bond between law and racial power but to changeit" (xiii). By rejecting the idea that the
aim of intellectual work should be objectivity, critical race theory maps the possibilities for intimate
connection between author and subject, community and academic enterprise. See also Richard
Delgado and Jean Stefancic who in Critical Race Theory make the claim that "racism is ordinary, not
aberrational" (7).

2. The FBI exhumed the body of Emmett Till from its Alsip, Illinois, burial spot in 2005 after
federal prosecutors reopened the investigation into his 1955 murder. Investigators found that an
autopsy had never been performed on Till's body at the time of his death and that the cause of death
had never been determined. A documentary film about the murder suggested that forensic evidence
links others besides the defendants Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam to his death. Bryant and Milam were
acquitted of Till's murder by an all-white jury, but later told Look magazine that they were
responsible for it. See Monica Davey and Gretchen Ruethling, "After 50 Years, Emmett Till's Body is
Exhumed," New York Times, June 2, 2005; Debra Pickett, "Till's Well-Preserved Body Exhumed:
Autopsy Planned in Federal Probe of Boy's 1955 Murder," Chicago Sun-Times, June 2,2005;
Gretchen Ruethling, "EB.I. Will Exhume the Body of Emmett Till for an Autopsy," New York Times,
May 5, 2005, and "Kin Disagree on Exhumation of Emmett Till," New York Times, May 6, 2005;
Kyle Martin, "FBI Defends Its Decision to Exhume Till's Body," Greenwood Commonwealth, May
16, 2005; and Shaila Dewan, "A Crescendoing Choir from the Graveyards of History," New York
Times, August 21, 2005.

On the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, see Carol Marie Cropper, "Black
Man Fatally Dragged in Possible Racial Killing," New York Times, June io, 1998 and "Town
Expresses Sadness and Horror over Slaying," New York Times, June 11, 1998; Rick Lyman, "Man
Guilty of Murder in Texas Dragging Death," New York Times, February 24, 1999, and "Texas Jury
Picks Death Sentence in Fatal Dragging of Black Man," New York Times, February 26, 1999; "Trial
Begins for Second Suspect in Dragging Death," New York Times, September 14, 1999; "Second Man
on Death Row in Dragging of Black Man," New York Times, September 24, 1999; and "Third
Defendant Is Convicted in Dragging Death in Texas," New York Times, November 19, 1999.

3. Miles and Brown, Racism, 88. See also Grosz, The Nick of Time, for a discussion of our
misconception of Darwin's famed notion of "survival of the fittest" and its relationship to time,
gender, and race.

4. Toni Morrison, Beloved, 19o.

5. In thinking through law and custom, Charles Mills observes that "the Racial Contract establishes
a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites
is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom. And the purpose of this state, by contrast with the
neutral state of classic contractarianism, is, inter alia, specifically to maintain and reproduce this
racial order, securing the privileges and advantages of the full white citizens and maintaining the
subordination of nonwhites" (The Racial Contract, 14). I can think of no better interlocutor for Mills
than the work of David Theo Goldberg in studies such as Racist Culture, The Racial State, and
Anatomy of Racism. Racist Culture is a graduate-school primer on racism, the Enlightenment, and
how racist exclusions perpetuate structural inequalities. The Racial State is an extension of the first
book and focuses on the state as the arbiter of racial expression. Anatomy of Racism is an edited
volume with contributions from Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lucius Outlaw, Frantz Fanon, Nancy Leys
Stepan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Sander L. Gilman, among others. Goldberg's effort in this
text seems to be to outline the various contours of "race talk" (xi).

6. Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black," 250.

7. Gillian Harkins in Everybody's Family Romance proposes that we pay attention to the "latent
radicalism of 199os narratives" (9). In her introduction she writes: "The book reads incest as a trope
bridging changing formations of U.S. nationalism, one that exploits the modern coupling of family and
nation to recode violence and hegemony in formations of emergent social life. Thus I argue that incest
both reveals hidden forms of gendered violence and lends itself to new hegemonic forms of domestic
consumption. But this book also reads incest as a trope able to interrupt this revelatory hegemony,
stealing away from the enclosures of either residual forms of nationalism or emergent forms of social
organization" (4). Harkins takes seriously Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's charge in Empire that
in order to unseat the particularly dangerous hold that neoliberalism has had on contemporary
political culture, new narratives and aesthetic interventions must be brought to life. See in particular
Harkins's assessment of how a "refunctioned incest trope might be used to remake the generational
borders of kinship" in chapter 5, "Consensual Relations: The Scattered Generations of Kinship"
(r88). Her review of the Rind study should be of particular interest to scholars working in fields
across race, sex, gender, and sexuality. I return to a discussion of antineoliberal thought in chapter 3.

8. Kwame Anthony Appiah calls this particular predicament "cognitive incapacity" ("Racisms," 6).
For Appiah, this means that even when one is confronted with overwhelming evidence that one's
beliefs are invalid, one will still hold onto archaic forms of knowledge, especially if such knowledge
requires a reflection upon one's own self-image or, more drastically, a shift in the redistribution of
wealth or privilege.

9. In their guest column for PMLA, "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?," Lauren Berlant
and Michael Warner conclude that "queer commentary has tried to drive into visibility both the
cultural production of sexuality and the social context of feeling" (347)•

io. Robert Reid-Pharr's work in Conjugal Union and Once You Go Black makes him one of this
generation's most important critics of the black intellectual tradition. It is a shame that for Reid-Pharr
the black intellectual is always already figured as male, thereby making his provocative and insightful
musings rigorously gendered and, as such, less useful to other companion projects. Nevertheless, the
sentiments expressed in Once You Go Black parallel many of my observations here about how
blackness is taken to be understood from within and without. As ReidPharr notes, "neither Black
American identity nor racialized oppression exempted one from participation in the maintenance-and
rearticulation-of the main structures of society, including those structures that work to oppress oneself
and ones community" (41). Reid-Pharr's work urges us to reevaluate our insistence of the black
subject's embeddedness-in community and in our narratives about it. As Reid-Pharr pronounced in
Conjugal Union, "I reject the notion that the black body is some species of the always already ...
During the antebellum period intellectuals began the arduous, awkward process of establishing the
peculiarity of the black body, the distinctiveness that could never be exorcised. I utilize the already
impossibly overdetermined notion of black embodiment, then, to refer, not to some demonstrable
physical fact, but to a specifically American ideological effect in which race is always produced on a
two-dimensional black/white axis" (6). My work returns to the production of that binary and the static
situationality of black being to understand what is lost and what is gained by holding "it" captive in
such restrictive critical sights.

n. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 208.

12. Michael Jackson, "Wanna Be Starting Something," Thriller (1982).

13. Constitutive of this shift away from race to racism is also an overwhelming need to break "with
the black-white racism problematic" and instead focus on what Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres
describe as "how best to conceptualize multiple racisms and racialized formations within the context
of demographic shifts, changing capitalist class relations, and global socioeconomic dislocations"
(After Race, 3).
 14. Gilroy, Against Race, 15.

15. I use the word "junction" here purposefully, as I want to call attention to the "thingness" of both
categories. Belief in "black" and "white" as essence is a belief in the impossibility of their
commingling. I want to call attention to the fact that their joined state is always already about their
objectification as things, not persons. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's assessment of Jack Forbes's
Black Africans and Native Americans she finds promise in his urgent request for us to see that the
racially inflected nomenclature of "conquest" and settlement dismantles the efficacy of the black-
white binary. Such promise relates to our ability to confront "today's blackwhite (or different-same)
liberal multiculturalism" ("Race before Racism," 48). But while the argument here is that this binary
might obscure other persons, this binary nevertheless continues to have psychic salience because we
seem to understand black-white interactions as doing the same thing over and over in the kinds of
stories we tell and interpretations we give to their relation.

16. See the coverage in the New York Times of the Congressional Black Caucus and the
presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, notably Matt Bai, "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?,"
New York Times, August 6, 2008. In this article Bai discusses the generational divide among black
leaders over Obama's candidacy, highlighted in particular by an exchange between Rev. Jesse
Jackson and his son, Jesse Jackson Jr. The latter, who was national co-chairman of Obama's
campaign, said he was "deeply outraged and disappointed" by his father's comment in July 2008 that
he wouldn't mind castrating Obama. The comment was sparked, according to news coverage at the
time, by Jackson's anger over Obama's admonishment of black fathers during a Father's Day speech,
and his "talking down to black people" For more on this issue, see Perry Bacon, "Jackson Incident
Revives Some Blacks' Concerns about Obama," Washington Post, July 11, 2008. See also Sheryl Gay
Stolberg, "For Obama, Nuance on Race Invites Questions," New York Times, February 8, 2010,
which discusses responses from black scholars, politicians, policymakers, and members of the media
to Obama's handling of the "race issue" and his dedication to the black community. See also Jonathan
Weisman, "Rev. Jackson Apologizes to Obama," Washington Post, July 10, 2008; and John Kass,
"Obama Backers on the Left Are Doing the Wincing Now," Chicago Tribune, July 13, 2008.

17. Nietzsche might not seem to be the best philosophic interlocutor to my ideas here, but Robert
Gooding-Williams in "Supposing Nietzsche to Be Black-What Then?" in his book Look, a Negro!,
has noted that his work can be useful for antiracist endeavors. As Gooding-Williams writes:
"Because Nietzsche declines to flatter European culture, but represents it as the contingent,
overdetermined product of slave morality, cruelty, decadence, and nihilism, he remains a useful
model for any thinker-indeed, for any African American thinker-who would puncture European or
now Euro-American pieties in order to date and imagine alternatives to the Eurocultrual legacies of
white supremacy. Nietzsche's colonialist fantasies can be a guide in this endeavor, for they repeatedly
implicate his demystifying criticisms of European culture" (132). Even Jacqueline Scott proceeds
with some caution: "Nietzsche might seem to be a counter intuitive source for contemporary race
theorists, but he undertook the task of healing his culture by revaluing the prevailing concept of race"
("The Price of the Ticket," 151). And as James Winchester observes: "Nietzsche was clearly very
interested in concept of race. The word appears more than two hundred times in the Colli-Montinari
edition of Nietzsche's work. It also appears frequently in his letters ... [he] is not the racist that some
claim that he is, but he does at times adopt some of the thinking on race that was prevalent in his own
time but is now widely questioned" ("Nietzsche's Racial Profiling," 255). See also Preston,
"Nietzsche on Blacks."

i8. Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection has offered us a way to think through pleasure as an
impossibility, thus continuing what I will argue in chapter 2 is a strong black feminist commitment to
disarticulate pleasure from scenes of subjection. Fred Moten in his critique of the sounding voice in
In the Break has thought to reimagine Hartman's work. In his analysis of Aunt Hester's scream and
engagement of Hartman's reading of it, Moten notes that "Douglass's is a primal scene for complex
reasons that have to do with the connectedness of desire, identification, and castration that Hartman
displaces onto the field of the mundane and the quotidian, where pain is alloyed with pleasure.
However, this displacement somehow both acknowledges and avoids the vexed question of the
possibility of pain and pleasure mixing in the scene and in its originary and subsequent recountings"
(4; emphasis in original). I wholeheartedly agree with Moten's view of pain and pleasure as mixed
feelings, and I understand his revision of Hartman's work to open up a space toward the nature of the
quotidian within scenes of subjection as a fruitful critical mode.

i9. Nyong'o, "Punk'd Theory," 30.

20. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 56.

21. I use the word "modes" here purposefully as it signals behavior that is automatic or habitual.
My use of the term "erotic" does not anchor itself in the psychoanalytic but rather fluctuates between
dictionary definitions of the words "desire" and "erotic." This project is located between the object
relations inherent in "desire"-a wish for something-and the way in which sexuality is inextricable
from the erotic itself.

22. Halle, Queer Social Philosophy, 117.

23. Hames-Garcia, "Can Queer Theory Be Critical Theory?," 216.

24. This observation is, of course, indebted to Fanon's undertakings in Black Skin, White Masks,
where he remarks, "I occupied space" (quoted in Gibson, "Losing Sight of the Real," 133) in a rather
dramatic passage about the signification of blackness in the context of colonization. This indebtedness
to Fanon in understandings of the time/space continuum is not explored in Elizabeth Grosz's first
critical endeavor, Space, Time and Perversion. I point this out here because in much of the work by
philosophers interested in race any talk of being, time, and psychoanalysis seems to warrant an
examination of or at least a cursory nod to Fanon and his contribution to understandings of
subjectivity. See also Henry, "African and Afro-Caribbean Existential Philosophies"; and Barrett,
Blackness and Value.

25. Quoted in McBride, "Introduction," 8.

26. See Holland, "The Beached Whale."

27. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 115.

28. I want to thank the undergraduates in my Queer Theory class at the University of Illinois,
Chicago, for their thoughtful engagement with contemporary theory and for teaching me how to
become a better teacher and reader of complex work. I want also to thank the graduate students in my
Critical Race Theory class at Northwestern University (fall 2007), whose love for the "racial"
project helped me to find a way to respectfully dismantle our positively charged racial feeling.

29. In 2003, discussions at two conferences erupted into furious debate. "The Ends of Sexuality:
Pleasure and Danger in the New Millennium" (April) at Northwestern and "Gay Shame" (March) at
Michigan proved that when we get around to the business of hating each other we tend to do it very
well indeed. In another register, Hiram Perez's scathing critique of the "Gay Shame" conference has
great resonance with this project. In seeking to unearth the definition of "brown" within the confines
of a stereotypical rendering of a gay brown body, Perez locates "brown" as ambiguous but
acknowledges its emergence out of "the prevailing black/white opposition of U.S. race discourse"-a
blackness here that is marked for "white dominant culture" as a way to "sustain the impossibility of a
private black sexuality" ("You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!," 186). The black/white
opposition here is conceived of as a problem for theorizing away from identity's embeddedness. Yet,
the brown body heralds the recognition of the black body's lack of privacy. While the goal here is not
to unpack the various permutations of black, brown, and white, it is clear from Perez's piece that
some accounting for if not rearticulation of the boundary between black and white is necessary in
order to begin to tell a different story of their relationship.

30. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," 231; emphasis mine.

1. RACE

i. Lindon Barrett's Blackness and Value, an excellent contribution to the analysis of race, gender,
and sexuality in African American literature, is often overlooked by many literary critics. Michelle
Maria Wright in Becoming Black links the work of Hegel, Gobineau, and Jefferson to furthering
interpretations of the "Negro" and its place in Western chronologies of being.

2. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 143.

 3. I am not the first critic to find horse and rider analogies interesting. See Freud, The Ego and the
Id, notably his reference to the relationship between the two. He writes: "Thus in [the ego's] relation
to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse;
with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed
forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his
horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of
transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own" (15). The ego essentially mediates the id
and super-ego. Thus, two primary components of ego are a system of perception and a set of
unconscious (specifically, preconscious) ideas. Its relationship to the unconscious id, therefore, is a
close one. The ego must control the id, like the rider, but at times the rider is obliged to guide the
horse where it wants to go. Likewise, the ego must, at times, negotiate the desires of the id. Finally,
the ego is "that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world"
(i5). It is this idea of perception that leads Freud to call the ego a "body ego" (17)-a mental
projection of the surface of one's physical body. These ideas of the body, perception, and materiality
are thoroughly explored in Jay Prosser's Second Skins. I am indebted to Carole-Anne Tyler for her
contributions to my understanding here via an e-mail exchange on July 29, 2010.

4. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 124.

5. One can see the beginnings of a discourse below skin level as early as 1985 in Dorothy Nelkin
and Susan Lindee's "The Media-ted Gene." The most recent foray into the territory of genomics and
epidemiology is Priscilla Wald's Contagious.

6. Darder and Torres, After Race, ioo.

7. Richeson and Shelton, "Negotiating Interracial Interactions," 316, 319.

8. Sikka, "Heidegger and Race," 91.

9. Hall, "What Is This `Black' in Black Popular Culture?," 472.

io. Among the key players in critical race theory are Kimberle Crenshaw, Anthony Appiah,
Philomena Essed, Howard Winant, Toni Morrison, Michael Omi, Cathy Cohen, Robert Miles,
Malcolm Brown, Paul Gilroy, Robyn Wiegman, David Theo Goldberg, Wahneema Lubiano, Charles
Mills, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Satya Mohanty, David Roediger, and Paula Moya. Although these
individuals are by no means all the players on the field, for me they represent the interdisciplinary
nature of scholarly work on race as well as many of its most important epistemological tracks. All of
these scholars have contributed to one or more of the following articulations: the social construction
of race, the problem of racism, and in particular, the place of "blackness" within modernity's
emerging racialized aesthetic. Although not all of these scholars will be examined in depth in this
chapter, each is responsible for a substantial intervention (whether we like it or not) in the discourse
about race. This list purposefully leaves out writers such as Dinesh D'Souza, Shelby Steele, James
McWhorter, and Thomas Sowell, among others. Although their work on race has been influential as it
corroborates common feelings about race in the context of the United States, the scholarly aspects of
their work leave much to be desired. Most of these writers rely upon specious claims about racial
identities, or disregard entirely the available research, empirical and qualitative, on the subject of
race.

Much of Appiah's influence upon the discourse of race and racism stems from his bold reading of
W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Conservation of the Races." In this reading he interprets the thrust of Du
Bois's signature text and its plan for African American participation in the polity of the United States
as in collusion with scientific racism's dependence upon the biological as social determinant. See
also Bernasconi, introduction to Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy; Sundstrom, "Douglass
and Du Bois' Der Schwarze Volksgeis' ;and Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism. Much like the
postpositive realist theorists Paula Moya (Learning from Experience) and Linda Alcoff ("The
Problem of Speaking for Others"), Essed wants to make experience, in particular "black" experience,
central to her study of racism in the European context. Her interdisciplinary work focuses primarily
upon the Netherlands, and she defines racism "in terms of cognitions, actions, and procedures that
contribute to the development and perpetuation of a system in which Whites dominate Blacks" (39).
See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Lubiano,
The House That Race Built; and Roediger "White Workers, New Democrats, and Affirmative
Action." See also Wing, Global Critical Race Feminism, which is especially focused on legal
studies.

ii. See Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins"; and Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens."

12. Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins," 1245.

13. Intersectionality has become something that black feminists "do" by default. For a time in the
i98os it didn't matter if you were working on "intersectionality" directly or not; if you appeared to be
a black feminist, you were assumed to be working on it. By the same token, a nod to intersectionality
in any feminist conference paper was assumed to represent a whole host of theorists in exchange for
actual engagement. In chapter 3, I find Jasbir Puar's nod to "intersectionality" interesting precisely for
these reasons-it is the psychic life of the term that appeals to me here.

A comprehensive history of intersectionality does not exist, but it has its roots in sociological
methodologies and was popularized by Patricia Hill Collins. A good example of the default position
on intersectionality can be found in Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: "We can recall here the
importance of `intersectionality' to black feminist theory. Given that relationships of power `intersect,'
how we inhabit a given category depends on how we inhabit others" (136).

14. One of the most cogent contextualizations of Crenshaw's method can be found in McCall's "The
Complexity of Intersectionality." In After Race, Darder and Torres attempt to interrogate
intersectionality, but make no effort to cite Crenshaw let alone argue with her (see, in particular,
chapter 5, "What's So Critical about Critical Race Theory?"). In addition, Paul Gilroy calls for "far
more patient and careful attention to issues of gender and sexuality than critics have been inclined to
do so far" (Against Race, 182), but in his analysis of hip hop and reference to Henry Louis Gates's
now infamous defense of 2 Live Crew, he makes no mention of Crenshaw's invaluable critique of this
very public critical misstep on the part of Gates. A more recent investigation of intersectionality's
long reach is Jennifer Nash's "Re-Thinking Intersectionality." In a section titled "The Theoretical
Importance of Black Women," Nash observes that "intersectionality's reliance on black women as the
basis for its claims to complex subjectivity renders black women prototypical intersectional subjects
whose experiences of marginality are imaged to provide a theoretical value-added" (8).

15. Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins," 1296.

16. Denise Ferreira da Silva is similarly vexed by Foucault's inability to think through the
relationship of race and sexuality. As she writes: "What prevents Foucault from fully incorporating
the nineteenth-century concept of the racial in his critique of modern thought, I think, is not an
empirical limitation-though such limitations are significant, as indicated in Stoler's (1995)
examination of how the discourse of race participates in the formation of bourgeois European
sexualitybut his partial engagement with modern representation" (Toward a Global Idea of Race, 25).
Lynne Huffer intervenes in critical discussions of Foucault's use of "history" with a reimagining of the
place of his History of Madness in our critical repertoire. In sum, Huffer wants scholars of feminism
and queer theory in particular to return to this text and view it as foundational, as Foucault's views of
history are mapped out in this crucial but all but forgotten text. As she writes: "Foucault's most
important contribution to the question of how to think about the past [is that] he understood the
philosophical work of history making as fraught negotiation between the present and the future whose
purpose is to bring that which is `irreparably less than history' into view. Doing so, he made a
commitment to a different time" (Mad for Foucault, 19). In chapter 3, Huffer goes on to challenge
mistranslations of Foucault's more playful language in Sexuality One, queer theory's ur-text.

17. See Stone, "Sisterhood Is Powerful." See also Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful.

18. Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens;" 25.

19. This move to ground queer studies-to have it acknowledge its indebtedness to women of color
in particular-is starting to make shifts, not in queer theory but in feminist historicizations of the second
wave. Chief among these reenvisionings of the second wave is Kimberly Springer's Living for the
Revolution. In addition, see Rosalyn Baxandall's "Re-visioning the Women's Liberation Movement's
Narrative" and Brian Norman's "'We' in Redux." Both Baxandall and Norman reevaluate the content
of early black feminist organizations and statements with the aim to reimagine their importance in the
formation rather than the contribution to second wave discourse. I thank Robyn Wiegman for
introducing me to their writings, which have been invaluable to my work on second wave feminism
both inside and outside the classroom.

20. This movement in queer studies was first embarked upon by lose Munoz with the publication of
Disidentifications, which takes Gramsci's notion of the "organic intellectual" seriously with splendid
and provocative results. The second wave of queer of color critique came about with Aberrations in
Black, Rod Ferguson's move to rethink the place of "capital" in queer critique while simultaneously
focusing upon the golden age of women of color feminism. A special edition of Social Text from
2005, "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now," centers queer of color critique by providing an
opportunity for scholars to bolster the emerging discourse with their own readings. While much has
been said about queer of color critique, its relationship to black queer studies in particular remains to
be articulated. The fundamental question is if black queer studies used black feminist paradigms in its
analysis of the efficacy of queer critical strategies, how is queer of color critique different from black
queer studies? One obvious difference is the explicit engagement with historical materialism that is at
the heart of the work in queer of color critique.

21. Hortense Spillers, however, is the notable exception. Although she does call for a genderless
space in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," it is not with the same results for a discourse on race. I will
be examining Spillers's contributions more closely in chapter 3.

22. Walter Benn Michaels would consider himself a member of this latter camp, and he would add
that arguments of race over class contribute to the very thing that antiracist discourse is supposed to
prevent: the cementing of cultural norms as ontological truths. See the now infamous exchange in
Critical Inquiry between Michaels and Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield: Michaels, "Race
into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity"; Gordon and Newfield, "White Philosophy";
and Michaels, "The No Drop Rule." Darder and Torres in After Race both observe that "race-
centered scholars have unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion that politics and
economics are two separate spheres of society which function independently-a view that firmly
anchors and sustains prevailing class relations of power in society" (io6-7). Michaels is in no way
the originator of the "class over race" paradigm-in the late 1970s William Julius Wilson in The
Declining Significance of Race put forth the proposition that class might matter more than race. One
could even say that the struggle between race and culture began with the depoliticization of race in
Britain, a moment that Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown as well as Satya Mohanty recognize as
signal in the development of contemporary ideologies of race and culture. See Miles and Brown,
Racism; and Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History, 17.

23. Miles and Brown in Racism consistently refer to Gilroy's Between Camps. Many of the
concepts in this citation are echoed in Gilroy's Against Race.

24. I will have more to say about materiality and queer theory in chapter 2, when I redact Jay
Prosser's response in Second Skins to Butler's use of transsexual identity as a key signifier of queer
being.

25. See Duggan, The Twilight of Equality, and Munoz, Cruising Utopia, for brilliant redactions of
neoliberalism's effects. See also Jasbir Puar's seeringly accurate mapping of neoliberalism's
discourse in Terrorist Assemblages. Puar writes very persuasively, that "a pernicious binary ... has
emerged in the post-civil rights era in legislative, activist, and scholarly realms: the homosexual other
is white, the racial other is straight" (32).

26. Miles and Brown later view this black/white dichotomy as the cause of a commonly held idea
that "racism is conceived as something that `white' people think about and do to `black' people"
(Racism, 68).

27. I say this while fully recognizing that Miles and Brown intend Racism to be a transatlantic
perspective: Miles teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Brown teaches at the
University of Exeter.

28. See Bryce Traister's discussion of the transnational and American studies in "The Object of
Study."

29. See David Theo Goldberg and Philomena Essed's introduction to Race Critical Theories. In
their call to broaden the approach of critical legal race theory in the United States, Goldberg and
Essed remark that it is "marked by an American parochialism, with being caught up with more or less
restricted considerations of legal structures, conditions and rationalities in the U.S. context. Scant
attention is paid either to the applicability and implications of its key concepts outside of that context,
or perhaps more importantly (because more constitutively) to thinking its central concepts through
their globalizing significance and circulation" (4-5). My issue here is not with their call to thinking
beyond the borders of the United States but rather that such scholarship is always already global
when it thinks about the United States as perforated by many nations-native American
communitieswhich have a rich history of critical race work among them (see Miles and Holland,
Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds for a reconceptualization of diaspora). Moreover, this call to look
outward often puts the onus on the intellectual traditions of people of color in the United States to take
on the psychic responsibility of United States exceptionalism.

30. Elsewhere, Miles has noted that there is no such thing as race and therefore no "race relations,"
thereby citing a familiar argument in social science circles that those who perpetuate the efficacy of
the term "race" are responsible for extending its shelf life by continuing to employ it as a real
category of analysis (Racism after "Race Relations," 90).

31. Bonilla-Silva in his first chapter of Racism without Racists (12-13) describes his data sources
as the Survey of Social Attitudes of College Students (1997) and the Detroit Area Study (1998).

32. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 53.

 33. As Bonilla-Silva writes: "Whites interpreted the past as slavery, even when in some questions
we left it open (e.g., questions regarding the `history of oppression') or we specified we were
referring to `slavery and Jim Crow"' (ibid., 79).

34. Ibid., xv.

35. Quoted in ibid., 172. It is important to note that Bonilla-Silva's take on Omi and Winant is a bit
more trenchant than most. For example, Lucius Outlaw credits (as do others) Omi and Winant with
bringing our attention to the "racial state" and race as a "formation" within it. Outlaw argues that this
approach preserves "race" as a viable category of analysis because of Omi and Winant's attention to
its social and historical construction within the give and take of social struggle. See Outlaw, "Toward
a Critical Theory of `Race,"' 77.

36. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 173.

37. Ibid., 179. Charles Mills also takes note of the importance of "browns" in racial hierarchies in
Latin America. He cautions us to understand that this tripartite system does not alter the kind of power
that whiteness wields in a society or change the social status of those at the bottom. See his Blackness
Visible, especially chapter 5, "Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy."

38. Edelman, No Future, 3.

39• Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 9.

40. Mills, The Racial Contract, 1; emphasis mine.

41. Ibid., 7. For a detailed reading of their role in the development of contract theory, see 64-72.

42. I once was asked by a colleague in a philosophy department I was visiting if I thought that The
Racial Contract was weak philosophically. I have always thought of that question as resting upon
another set of assumptions-namely, that philosophical inquiry (always an inquiry about itself) is
inherently sound, or put another way, that the intellectual genealogy that philosophy employs to
traverse its own trajectory is the way to speak about all things philosophical.

43• Mills, The Racial Contract, n.

44. Ibid., 14.

45. See Wiegman, American Anatomies, 27.

46. It is beyond the scope of this project to outline the differences between analytical and
continental philosophy approaches to race, but it is commonly held that the analytical approach is less
fruitful than the continental approach. For a review of these methods, see Robert Bernasconi's
introduction to Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy. Bernasconi's argument for continental
philosophy as a better instrument for the task of dismantling race has to do with his commitment to a
certain rigor that his approach can sustain, as it relies upon actual readings of the key philosophical
texts rather than redactions of arguments within them that can be proven, disproven, or dismissed. As
he explains: "The recent explosion of interest in race theory among philosophers in English-speaking
countries has so far been largely dominated by philosophers whose training and frame of reference is
that of analytic philosophy. That marks a certain limitation not only in the resources available to them,
but also in the questions discussed. The focus falls on the reality of the concept of race, its relation to
biology, and such questions as whether racism implies a belief in race. Other questions, such as the
relation of race to culture, to history, and to one's sense of self, which have long been discussed by
Black philosophers throughout the world, have not been at the forefront of recent research in race
theory" (i).

47. Gossett, Race, 29. Gossett goes on to reiterate the widely held belief that justifications for
slavery of "Negroes and Indians" rested upon religious rather than biological differences. It is my
contention that this kind of caution in discourse about race anticipates and responds to the specious
claim of separatist black nationalist thought which can present a totalizing teleology of race and
racism. I want to thank Dwight McBride for bringing Gossett's work to my attention.

48. Marlon Ross in "Beyond the Closet as a Raceless Paradigm" takes issue with Wiegman's theory
of knowledge formation and race as an organizing principle: "If we take seriously both Foucault's
argument that the identity of modern homosexuality tends to be totalized as a singular species, and
Wiegman's argument that race becomes the primary organizing principle of modernity at least a
century earlier, then we arrive at a theoretical-historical impasse. If by the eighteenth century, race is
already marked on "the body" as a totalizing sign of invisible anatomical species difference, then
what happens in the nineteenth century, when, as Foucault argues, homosexuality is marked on `the
body' as a totalizing sign of invisible anatomical species difference? Are Wiegman and Foucault
talking about two totally different bodies?" (165). Ross's question is an important one. The problem
of history outlined here still seems to haunt the margins of queer studies work.

49. Wiegman, American Anatomies, 27.

50. Mills, The Racial Contract, 6i.

51. Ibid., 18. Mills elaborates upon his concept of epistemological ignorance with the following
gesture: "Whites will then act in racist ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally. In other
words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as
racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith, they will be morally
handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in seeing and doing the right thing. As I
emphasized at the start, the Racial Contract prescribes, as a condition for membership in the polity,
an epistemology of ignorance" (TheRacialContract,93). I contend here that the same cognitive
difficulty arises when anyone thinks race instead of racist practice. Thus, black subjects who eschew
amalgamation with white subjects in order to safeguard black culture are equally susceptible to
"racist" action, regardless of whether such actions have global or local impact.

52. Kwame Anthony Appiah sees "racism as the practice of reasonable human beings" ("Racisms,"
4). Appiah also suggests that racialism-the belief that there are "heritable characteristics, possessed
by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that
all members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share
with members of any other race"-was practiced and believed by some even before nineteenth-century
racialist science (5). All of this is an indication that although we tend to understand race along a
narrative of progression, the views to substantiate the science of race were in circulation long before
its fruition.

53. Wiegman, American Anatomies, 35.

54. Wiegman as well as Mills relies upon what she calls this "binary cleavage of race" to mine the
events that continue to reify such oppositionality (ibid., 40). Like Mills, Wiegman does want to site
white supremacy: "Ours is a white supremacist system asymmetrical in its economic and political
allotments, triumphant in its ability to mask deep disparity on the one hand, and yet thoroughly rigid in
i t s maintenance of naive individualism and rhetorical democracy on the other" (4142). The
differences between them are slight. Nevertheless, they both see white supremacy as having a
significant hand in racial formation.

55. Ibid., 84-85.

56. Mills's book does, however, delimit female gender-he borrows his title from Carole Pateman's
The Sexual Contract. In answer to critics on this issue, Pateman and Mills jointly published Contract
and Domination.

57. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History, 209, 198, xii.

58. See Moya, Learning from Experience, 100-35.

59. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History, 207.

2. DESIRE

The chapter title quote is from Stuart Hall, "What Is This `Black' in Black Popular
Culture?," 467.

i. Appiah, "Racisms," ii.

2. Levinas, Meaning and Sense, 52.

 3. Rachel Moran notes that "Americans overwhelmingly believe that so long as people do not
despise members of another race, they are free to love members of their own race without legal
interference or moral reproach" (Interracial Dating, 124-25).

4. M. Jacqui Alexander tenders the following political landscape: "Erotic auton omy signals danger
to the heterosexual family and to the nation. And because loyalty to the nation as citizen is perennially
colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality, erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of
undoing the nation entirely. . . . Given the putative impulse of this eroticism to corrupt, it signals
danger to respectability ... most significantly to black middle-class womanhood" (Pedagogies of
Crossing, 22-23). Alexander's chapter "Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: Feminism,
Tourism, and the State in the Bahamas" was originally published in 1997 as "Erotic Autonomy as a
Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist
Economy." Her work demonstrates the way in which queer erotic autonomy becomes par for the
course in theorizing about sexuality and thus represents another strand of (black) queer feminism in
line with Rubin's earlier call to think sex through erotic autonomy. For Alexander, erotic autonomy
undermines the social contract upon which civil engagement is formed-but if one were to think of that
contract, as per Charles Mills, as always already predicated upon a profound racial exclusion, then
the boundary of erotic autonomy shifts from a choice outside the bounds of civil life to a mechanism
intrinsic to civil life's apportioning of citizenship and belonging. The problem posed here echoes
Marlon Ross's quibble with Robyn Wiegman's work (see note 49 for chapter 1).

5. In her reading of Pat Califia's classic Macho Sluts, Linda Hart notes that Califia "implies that a
yearning for an absolute is constitutive of sexual desire" (Between the Body and the Flesh, 82). Hart's
work on lesbian s/m attempts to create a place for the visibility of lesbian desire in a psychoanalysis
that renders her manifestation as impossible.

6. Ross, "White Fantasies of Desire," 32.

7. Hames-Garcia, "Can Queer Theory Be Critical Theory?," 216.

8. Freeman, "Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," 59. Freeman begins this search for an erotic
life in an earlier article coauthored with Lauren Berlant, "Queer Nationality," where they identify the
necessity for "an expanded politics of erotic description" in the area of the public and the private
(154).

9. See Edelman's No Future. While Edelman's journey is psychoanalytically driven, there is another
discourse on this idea of the future and its masculinity in Beauvoir. As she writes: "Man's project is
not to repeat himself in time: it is to reign over the instant and to forge the future. Male activity,
creating values, has constituted existence itself as value; it has prevailed over the indistinct forces of
life; and it has subjugated Nature and Woman" (The Second Sex, 77). While we don't talk like that
anymore, to echo the New York Times review of the new translation, it is important to think about
how queer theory's relative obsession with psychoanalysis has prevented critics from taking on some
of the finer points about gender and difference it might have inherited from very early French
feminisms.

io. While Donald Morton's focus is not on race or racism, in `Birth of the Cyberqueer" he provides
a reading of "desire" and the emergence of queer theory over and against a lesbian and gay studies
approach. In thinking through calls by early queer theory to free sexuality from the sphere of
regulation and control, Morton notes that Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet produces a
"new space, [where] desire is regarded as autonomous-unregulated and unencumbered" (370). He
then notes that his own work "acknowledges the significance of desire but insists on relating desire to
the historical world (not an ideal one) and to worldly materiality" (371). Like Rosemary Hennessey,
Morton is a firm believer in historical materialism. While I can understand the materialist resistance
to a decontextualized postmodern subject, I do wonder what kind of embodiment the subject of
Morton's (and for that matter Hennessey's) prose might have. Nevertheless, since Hennessey's
important study, other materialist scholars have continued to think through the uncomfortable
opposition between queer studies and in particular, Marxist thought. See Judith Butler, "Merely
Cultural," and Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire.

ii. Hennessey, Profit and Pleasure, 185-86.

12. Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 59-60.

13. I borrow the phrase from Robert Gooding-Williams's explication of Casablanca in "Black
Cupids, White Desires," from Look, A Negro!, 21. See also work by Lorraine O'Grady, especially
"Olympia's Maid" and "Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline"; along with Wilson, Lorraine O'Grady; and
Aukeman, "Review of Exhibitions." See also Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Muse & Drudge,
S*PeRMK*T, and Tree Tall Woman.

14. Simone de Beauvoir in her musings about the work of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty
concludes that "if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline
for our projects" (The Second Sex, 46). Work on thing theory can be seen in Moten, "The Case for
Blackness" See Spillers, "'All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your
Mother"' in Black, White, and in Color.

15. For a superb redaction of important feminist work on Simone de Beauvoir, see Sonia Kruks,
"Beauvoir's Time/Our Time." Margaret Simons in particular attempts to deal with the three issues
stated here; see her Beauvoir and "The Second Sex." Beauvoir was the subject of one of Judith
Butler's early essays, "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex," and other early
essays point to the fact that Butler was a key player in feminist philosophical interpretations of
Beauvoir's legacy. Toril Moi's essay "While We Wait" specifically notes that one of Butler's
exceptions to Beauvoir is actually due to faulty translation. Moi observes: "Apart from the fact that I
can't quite see why it's normative to say that the body is a situation, the `instrumentality' invoked by
Butler [in Gender Trouble] is clearly Parshley's" (1023).

16. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 416, 67. In the Parshley volume the second quote is translated as:
"Eroticism implies a claim of the instant against time, the individual against the group; ... it is
rebellion against all regulation; it contains a principle hostile to society" (212; Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley [1952]). I juxtapose this Parshley translation and the
new translation to note the difference between the two, and the fact that faulty translation can lead to
misreadings of Beauvoir's intention. In essence both Margaret Simons in "The Silencing of Simone de
Beauvoir" and Toril Moi in "While We Wait" have demonstrated that the Parshley translation is
inadequate. Further, in Moi's words, by "completely betraying Beauvoir's thought, the English text
leads Anglophone feminist philosophers into error. The effect is to diminish the feminist intellectual
enterprise as a whole" (1023). See also Sarah Glazer, "Lost in Translation," New York Times,
August 22, 2004. After struggles with Knopf (the original publisher of the Parshley translation) and
Gallimard-a struggle noted in some detail by Moi- The Second Sex was published in England in
December 2009 and in the United States in April 2010. Despite the anticipation among Americanists
working in the United States academy, Francine du Plessix Gray's "Dispatches from the Other: A
Ne w Translation of The Second Sex" (New York Times, May 30, 2010), a review of the new
translation, is less than favorable. She notes: "Should we rejoice that this first unabridged edition of
`The Second Sex' appears in a new translation? I, for one, do not. Executed by two American women
who have lived in Paris for many years and taught English at the Institut de'Etudes Politiques, it
doesn't begin to flow as nicely as Parshley's."

17. I run the risk of moving against Deborah Bergoffen's sense that "autonomy," at least in The
Ethics of Ambiguity, "may be the ground value of the I, but it also directs us to the value of the other
and requires that the I be responsive to the demands of the we" ("Out from Under," 185; see also her
The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir). In essence, some queer theory interpretations of autonomy
have been in large part irresponsible ones, demonstrated in a kind of libertine ethic. There is little
sense that the demands of the "we" help motivate the intentions of this queer citizenry. Ironically
enough, Simone de Beauvoir's tract on the Marquis de Sade, Must We Burn de Sade?, establishes
both the importance of his philosophical intervention and the terms in which we must repudiate his
conclusions for ethical reasons.

18. My question here parallels, and runs into deep contradiction with, the marking of the project at
hand by one black feminist: "A queer black feminist practice requires marking race and class in
relation to desire and reveals that the telling of desire must always be a text written about race and
class no matter how encoded within gender oppression" (Harris, "Queer Black Feminism, 12). The
issue here is not with the desire to make race matter, but how that intellectual possibility is mired in a
material requirement that black somehow equals or speaks to race in exclusion of all other
subjectivities and identities that can also speak to the matter at hand.
 i9. The development of Beauvoir's argument is in part a response to the overt sexism of some
philosophical inquiry. In particular, as Richard Cohen notes, Beauvoir took it upon herself to level
the accusation of "sexism" against Emmanuel Levinas's conceptualization of women's sex in his Time
and the Other. Although Cohen, along with other critics that he points us toward, wants to believe that
Beauvior judged Levinas too harshly, the section that follows "Eros"-"Fecundity"-has a take on
"paternity" (91) that still privileges inheritance (biological or psychological) as a property or
function of the male. Levinas's presence in the work of queer studies is most deeply felt in Judith
Butler's work (notably Undoing Gender, Precarious Life, and Gender Trouble), and given his focus
on "death, sexuality, paternity" in Time and the Other (92), it is easy to see why, although I do
sometimes wonder what more or less does Levinas have to offer queer studies on this subject than
Beauvoir. Nevertheless, it is hard not to see the value of Levinas's critique of the ego in relationship
to the three categories, as for Levinas, "sexuality, paternity, and death introduce a duality to existence,
a duality that concerns the very existing of each subject" (92). Regardless, for Levinas sexuality is
something that cannot be accomplished without relation with another-it requires connection.

20. Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic," 54.

21. Ibid., 55. While feminists have utilized Lorde's work somewhat, little attention as been paid to
it in feminist theory as a whole. It is interesting to note that the editor of Sister Outsider, Nancy
Bereano, thought of both the collection and Lorde's work as theoretical. As she noted, "There can be
no doubt that Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches drawn from the past eight years of
this Black lesbian feminist's nonfiction prose, makes absolutely clear to many what some already
knew: Audre Lorde's voice is central to the development of contemporary feminist theory. She is at
the cutting edge of consciousness" (7). I find the use of the word "consciousness" to be an allusion to
feminist philosophy, and to the Beauvoir legacy in particular-a point that might have been missed in
most utilizations of Lorde's oeuvre.

22. See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. Ahmed wants to rethink the term "orientation" and its
relationship to "the spatiality of sexuality, gender and race" (2). Most importantly she wants queer
studies to be in "closer dialogue" with phenomenology (i). She also reads across several
epistemological registers including critical race theory, thus making this one of the few queer studies
projects to acknowledge its debt to that branch of critical thought. Ahmed's book does repeat the
feminist tendency to treat "race" and "sexuality" as rather discrete categories by separating her
analysis of them into two chapters ("Sexual Orientation" and "The Orient and Other Others,"
respectively). In addition, Randall Halle's Queer Social Philosophy seeks to undo the victim status of
the term "queer," and the group, in relationship to heterosexuality. By retelling the story of queer's
rise as a term in social philosophy, Halle hopes to retool our understanding of "queer" as necessarily
oppositional. Halle's analysis of Kant reiterates his articulation of the categorical imperative as "the
means whereby will as a generalizing act of reason moves individuals from acts based on their
particular dispositions [sexual acts/lust] to acts of communal interest" (55). For my purposes here,
queer serves to remind the heteronormative that certain persons commit certain acts for individual
pleasure and not the greater good, and therefore these individuals are a threat to civil society. This is
precisely the social irresponsibility that Halle attempts to disrupt.

23. In Prosser's thoroughgoing analysis of Butler's contributions to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender theory, he identifies Butler's theoretical misstep in a misinterpretation of Freud that then
"reconfigures sex from material corporeality into phantasized surface" (Second Skins, 40). See in
particular chapter i, "Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Trans substantiation of
Sex."

24. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, n8.

25. This query has its mirror in Robert Reid-Pharr's observation of Melvin Van Peebles's
filmography: "The difficulty faced by the midcentury Black American intellectual was the recognition
that, the power of the erotic being what it is, supposed black and white combatants might indeed have
become so intimate by early 1970s that it was difficult, if not impossible to see where black
innocence began and white guilt ended" (Once You Go Black, 165).

26. In Butler's concluding chapter of Gender Trouble, she remarks: "I began with a speculative
question of whether feminist politics could do without a `subject' in the category of women. At stake
is not whether it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make
representational claims in their behalf. The feminist `we' is always and only a phantasmatic
construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of
the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it
simultaneously seeks to represent" (142). The investment in the "subjectless" critique manifests itself
most vividly in the work of Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwise, although that work is not focused
upon the category of women, as such.

27. Butler, Gender Trouble, 152 n. 15.

28. See Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference. For another feminist
reassessment of Beauvoir's legacy, see Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, especially her comparison
between Beauvoir and Fanon, in chapter 7, "Beauvoir's Utopia: The Politics of The Second Sex."

29. Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference, 75. See also Merleau-Ponty, The
Phenomenology of Perception, especially the chapter "The Body in Its Sexual Being."

30. Nancy Bauer traces the usefulness of the Hegelian dialectic of master/slave to Beauvoir in
Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism.

31. Given the importance of Lorde's statement to feminism at the time, it is interesting that in Lynda
Hart's work on lesbian s/m (Between the Body and the Flesh) and liberal feminism's penchant for
representing lesbian sex as sanitized and full of feeling, she chose not to launch a critique of Lorde's
positing of the erotic in contradistinction to the pornographic.

32. Nash, "Strange Bedfellows," 52. Nash proposes that "in place of a normative reading of
racialized pornography, [my theory of] racial iconography asks new questions about black
spectatorship and black visual pleasures, attending to the historical and technological specificity of
both. In doing so, racial iconography allows black feminists to break with a lengthy tradition of
sexual conservatism and to instead embark on what Evelynn Hammonds has called a `politics of
articulation"' (69). Moreover, one could see how nicely Nash's observation of black pleasure and
spectatorship changes the alignment of racist practice from something that white subjects do to black
subjects to a more complicated playing field where erotic autonomy might have more traction.

33• This staged opposition between black feminism and queer studies has also been explored by
Laura Alexandra Harris in "Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle." She observes: "Black
feminist theory is likewise in turmoil over its parameters, its institutional position, and grapples with
the theorizing of sexuality. Revealingly, it only occasionally finds itself articulated in relation to the
overdetermining queer and feminist paradigms.... The dominant academic exclusion of black
feminism as `other' discourse, not queer not feminist, has a history both farreaching and
contemporary" (5).

34• Rubin's essay sees its subject as a sexual minority hounded and at times ravaged by a system of
"sex law." Her goal is to move feminist discourse away from the stance of those such as Women
Against Pornography that often colludes with the state and its policing force. About her essay she
states the following: "In the last six years, new erotic communities, political alliances, and analyses
have been developed in the midst of the repression.... [I] propose elements of a descriptive and
conceptual framework for thinking about sex and its politics [and] I hope to contribute to the pressing
task of creating an accurate, human, and genuinely liberatory body of thought about sexuality"
("Thinking Sex," 275). She also notes that a "democractic morality should judge sexual acts by the
way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of
coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide. Whether sex acts are gay or
straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video,
should not be ethical concerns" (283). While Rubin's call does seem to be liberatory, the worry for
feminist theorists should be what then does count as "ethical"?

35. Walker, "A Letter of the Times, Or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?," 207.

36. In the essay "The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies," Robin Morgan reiterates feminist
takes on historical attachments. As she notes, "There are, to be sure, various books recently published
on the fantasy lives of women. These books range from the pseudoscientific to the soft-core-porn in
their approach. Herewe can encounter the virulently anti-feminist thought of such Freudians as Marie
Robinson, whose book The Power of Sexual Surrender is to women what a tome called Why You
Know You Love It on the Plantation would be to blacks or one titled How to Be Happy in Line to the
Showers would be to Jews" (io9). When histories line up nicely and attach themselves to their
objects, the chance for meaningful exchange diminishes. Making political points via analogy has
plagued the Left since the new vangardism of the late 19505 and early i96os. The most recent
incarnation would be in the "like race" arguments for gay marriage. See Halley, "'Like Race'
Arguments"

37. Although Diane Harriford, who currently blogs for Ms. magazine, was present at the conference
and gave a paper titled "Sexual Purity: Maintaining Class and Race Boundaries" at the Barnard
conference, her paper did not make the publication of Pleasure and Danger. In addition, Olivia Espin
contributed a paper, "Cultural and Historical Influences on Sexuality in Hispanic/Latin Women:
Implications for Psychotherapy," to both the conference and the volume, but her work deals mostly
with the relationship of Latinas within "Latin" culture. Hortense Spillers is one of the only conference
participants to deal head on with the issue of the black/white binary in feminism: "Black American
women in the public/critical discourse of feminist thought have not acknowledged sexuality because
they enter the historical stage from quite another angle of entrance than that of AngloAmerican
women. Even though my remarks are addressed specifically to feminists, I do not doubt that the
different historical occasions implicated here have dictated sharp patterns of divergence not only in
living styles, but also ways of speaking between black and white American women, without
modification. We must have refinement in the picture at the same time that we recognize that history
has divided the empire of women against itself. As a result, black American women project in their
thinking about the female circumstance and their own discourse concerning it an apparently divergent
view from feminist thinking on the issues. I am not comfortable with the `black-woman/feminist'
opposition that this argument apparently cannot avoid. I am also not cheered by what seems a little
noticed elision of meaning-when we say `feminist' without an adjective in front of it, we mean, of
course, white women, who, as a category of social and cultural agents, fully occupy the territory of
feminism" ("Interstices," 79). In this book I return to this early feminist concern about history and
black/white bodies, with the aim of correcting the idea of separate but equal that the first sentence of
Spillers's quote seems to imply.

38. In chapter i of The Trouble with Normal Warner says it is "moralism" rather than "morality"
when certain tastes or sex practices are mandated for everyone. Suspicion of sexual variance among
those who think their own way of living is right "is pseudo-morality, the opposite of an ethical
respect for the autonomy of others" (4). A respect for the autonomy of others is itself a moral
argument that works against violence toward "women, sissies, and variant sexualities" (5).
Furthermore, having an ethic of sex, Warner argues, does not mean having a theory about what
peoples' desires should and should not be. In noting that the potential for abject shame always
accompanies sex, Warner observes that the ethical vision within queer circles is precisely that one
"doesn't pretend to be above the indignity of sex ... A relation to others, in these contexts, begins in an
acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. Queers
can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but because abjection is understood to be the
shared condition, they also know how to communicate through such camaraderie a moving and
unexpected form of generosity ... The rule is: Get over yourself" (35). The question here is whether or
not the same ethical standard extends to the racial. This problem is addressed in the opening to my
second chapter where the play of ethical commitment and racialized desire are evident.

39. For example, see the posting on the blog Racialicious by Andrea Plaid, "I Like the Erotic and
the Porn: Looking Back at Audre Lorde's `Uses of the Erotic,' " July 9, 2009, www.racialicious.com.

40. Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic," 56.

41. Marlon Ross also points out the importance of "non(re)production" in his discussion of the
heightened visibility in cities in the United States of "out" homosexuals: "White urbane homosexuality
maneuvers between, on the one hand, a respectable high society in need of homosexuals as a sign of
the right to nonproductive luxury and, on the other hand, the unrespectable margins of forbidden, self-
destructive criminality" ("Camping the Dirty Dozens," 297).

42. Martin, "Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias," 107.

43. In Martin's analysis of Sedgwick's explication of the relationship between sex, gender, and
sexuality, she states: "The result is that lesbians, or women in general, become interesting by making
a cross-gender identification or an identification with sexuality, now implicitly (though, I think, not
intentionally) associated with men, over against gender and by extension, feminism and women"
("Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias," 107). In addition, Laura Alexandra Harris
notes: "Queer, as it is often claimed by academically powerful white masculinity, sometimes suggests
and describes its political constituency as seductively fluid, unmarked, ambiguous, and chosen. This
fluidity sounds dangerously like the status of white masculinity to me" ("Queer Black Feminism," 12).

44. Kruks, "Beauvoir's Time/Our Time," 306.

45. See Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. Firestone's claim that technology (the pill, for example)
would ultimately free women of their bodies is one of the most forward-thinking pronouncements in
the early canon. It is my contention that later work from posthuman and cyborg feminism (N.
Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway among others) stems from this early work.

46. Quoted in Halle, Queer Social Philosophy, 114. See also D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay
Identity."

47. This chapter's conclusions about the erotic read against my earlier thoughts on Lorde's work.
See my essay "To Touch the Mother's C[o]untry;" especially page 220.

48. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 23. Michael Cobb also uses Butler's argument in Antigone's Claim to
think through the place of incest in public narratives of homophobia. He finds that "the horror of
incest is the current way to mark, to figure, the limits of what kinds of sexual tolerance toward gays,
lesbians, and bisexuals the current, extremely conservative political climate can accommodate"
("Race, Religion, Hate and Incest in Queer Politics," 259). Although Cobb's essay is concerned with
"like race" arguments, his attention to the incest taboo doesn't necessarily rethink its particular place
in the spectrum of American social life that I have outlined here.

49. Again, this could be queer theory's inheritance from phenomenological reconceptualizations of
"time" (as in Beauvoir's earlier statement) and the relationship of time to the intentionality of human
being. Interestingly, Deborah Bergoffen's work on Beauvoir attempts to mark Beauvoir's departure
from Sartre's conceptualization of intention, disclosure, freedom, and bad faith by recognizing her
introduction of delight and desire to the matrix of consciousness. In doing so, Bergoffen focuses on
the place of the child in existential work (Being and Nothingness and The Ethics of Ambiguity). She
notes: "Not only does she identify the child as innocent, that is, as not being in bad faith, she also
identifies others, `the negro slave of the i8th century' and `the Mohammedan woman enclosed in a
harem' who exist in situations that preclude their knowing their freedom and whose submission to the
authority of the other cannot be counted as an act of bad faith" ("Out from Under," 183). Bergoffen
takes no issue with Beauvoir's relegation of "Mohammedan" subjectivity to the sphere of the child
and its lack of personal agency in the face of the desire of another. The "harem" (whatever that might
be in Beauvoir's mind) experience might not be an acquiescence to domination but rather a thorough
understanding of the place of the hegemonic (in the Gramscian sense) in human relations.

50. Halperin, "Is There a History of Sexuality?," 259 (emphasis mine). Halperin's argument here is
to consider the place of sex among the ancients. In this community of citizens and others, Halperin
finds that sex was something to be performed on subordinates by superordinates and it therefore
indicated social status rather than dictating a particular ontology.

51. Ibid., 259, 271.

52. This reading is supported by Marlon Ross's accounting of the emergence of the homosexual in
"Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm." Ross also makes reference to Siobhan Somerville's
contention in "Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body." Work on the
connection between race, sex, sexuality, and sexual practice in the nineteenth century can also be
attributed to the scholarly contributions of Sander Gilman, especially "Black Bodies, White Bodies."

3. S.H.E.

i. Faukner, Light in August, 487.

2. The most extended critique of subjectlessness in Butler's Gender Trouble can be found in Paula
Moya's Learning from Experience. Moya argues quite persuasively that it is Butler's misreading of
Cherrie Moraga and jettisoning of a certain kind of French feminism that "clears the way for her to do
away with the category of `woman' altogether" (34).

3. Elizabeth Weed, "The More Things Change," 250.

4. Rosi Braidotti with Judith Butler, "Feminism by Any Other Name," 31.

5. There is the overarching feeling that Butler's third book, Bodies That Matter, with its readings of
Paris Is Burning and Passing was an attempt to respond to the psychic life of such criticism by
producing readings that would attend to those bodies in some direct way. But I believe that
Hammond's initial critique here is invaluable-the call was never to speak to the woman of color as
subject, but to subject a thoroughgoing critique of the category to the discursive importance of
racism's work in the field of inquiry. But in Butler's defense, how could she not have made such a
pedestrian mistake about the call here, as so many of the interlocutors at conferences across the
country were calling for attention to specific bodies, rather than a discursive field of investigation.

6. The clear exception here is Carole-Anne Tyler's "Passing: Narcissism, Identity and Difference,"
where she engages the place of psychoanalysis within feminist/ queer theorizing. Tyler notes that
"gender is often in danger of being ignored as a significant difference within theories and activisms
which seek to construct a community of adherents who share identities and a commitment to a single
`master signifier'-whether it is class, race, or sexuality-as that which can explain everything (the
inverse is also true, and in recent years feminism has focused intensively on `differences within')"
(233). Tyler points to the problem of the "master signifier" in emerging queer theory as the cure-all
for a persistent forgetting. It is a shame that her stunning monograph Female Impersonation was
published after Gender Trouble, as her concerted readings in that text really do much to take into
consideration some of the larger concerns of feminism and queer theory while not totally forgetting
the awkward and sometimes unmanageable materiality of the body altogether (see especially the
chapter "Feminism, Racism and Impersonation").

7. Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality," 127 (emphasis in
original).

8. For work in queer native studies, see GLQ: A Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, "Sexuality,
Nationality, Indigeneity." In the time between the publication of the differences special issue and the
"Plum Nelly" special issue of Callaloo, a special issue of Social Text was published titled "Queer
Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender." This special issue consists of a wide range of
contributors, many of them outside the field of queer studies. The editors (Phillip Brian Harper, Anne
McClintock, Jose Esteban Munoz, and Trish Rosen) note that theirs is a "'queer' critique, conceived
as a means of traversing and creatively transforming conceptual boundaries, thereby harnessing the
critical potential of queer theory while deploying it beyond the realms of sexuality and sexual
identity" (r). I am not including a review of the essays in this collection, although its appearance is
timely because the authors do not necessarily set themselves in opposition to or conceive of their
project as a critique of a prevailing queer theory, although they do conceive of the volume as an
"intervention."

9. See chapter 5 of my Raising the Dead, where I speak to the presence of the angry black lesbian
in feminist discourse.

io. Munoz, Disidentifications, 6. Jason King thanks Munoz specifically for contributing to the ideas
in his essay "Any Love: Silence, Theft, and Rumor in the Work of Luther Vandross" (443), indicating
there was a fair amount of connectivity between the Black Queer Studies project and an emerging
queer of color critique.

n. I do not think so, although certainly in my experience in academia I have encountered my share of
queer prejudice-at Stanford it came in the form of a slip of the tongue. One of my senior colleagues
actually managed to call Condoleezza Rice (then provost) the "n" word during one of his lectures.
Unfortunately, folks were too invested in hating Rice (locally and globally) to invest any political
capital in protesting such an outrage, and since Rice said nothing publicly about the matter, the
incident gained no political traction or national attention.

12. This moment does bring us back to the beginnings of radical feminism, as early second wave
feminists joined with black women in their critique of the sexism in the civil rights struggle. See
Echols, Daring to Be Bad. It is still one of the only texts to take a full accounting of radical feminist
organizations that emerged in the late i96os and early 1970s and an effort to assess their importance
to an emerging second wave of feminism.

13. See Henderson, "James Baldwin," 320.

14. As for the particularity of the black body, I am in no way arguing that this marginalization is the
fault of "white" critics. Anyone alive and breathing during the culture wars of the i98os-a time when I
was finishing college and entering graduate school-knows that the often misguided lingua franca of
affirmative ac tion on college and university campuses caused identity-bound groups to think of
themselves through a kind of strategic essentialism (after Spivak)-a posture that might have been
politically advantageous in the short run, but in the long run has had devastating consequences for
public policy and university life. The critical race legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford in his
analysis in Racial Culture brilliantly outlines what some of these consequences have been, at least in
the legal arena.

15. It would be intellectually dishonest if I did not report that Nada Elia's "'A Man Who Wants To
Be a Woman?"' actually resists this neat narrative, as she establishes "queer theory" as the
"consequence of such movements as poststructuralism and postcolonialism, which first successfully
challenged and critiqued, as they sought to overcome, oppressive binary polarities" (353). Theory is
the thing that comes after other movements and is therefore released from its responsibility to speak to
or for another.

16. It is generally thought that the idea of the transnational comes out of a post-9/ii reality, shored
up by the ongoing discourse of postcoloniality. Ann duCille critiques the relationship among African
American studies, Afrocentricity, and postcoloniality in Skin Trade. She concludes: "If we could see
beyond the tufts of straw and the feet of clay, I wonder what practitioners of these three discourses . .
. might learn from one another, and in particular what we might teach one another about the white
academy that both claims and disclaims us" (135). DuCille's point is an important one, though it has
no circulation among black queer studies critics. Although duCille worries about the relationship
among the three fields, ironically enough she would later go on to help found a journal in
transnational studies, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies.

17. Harper's Callaloo piece is actually an expanded reprint of an essay by the same title published
in Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations. It is interesting to note that
Harper's piece includes a personal vignette about a train encounter with a gentleman who mistakes
him for a Sri Lankan. M. Jacqui Alexander's chapter 2 of "Imperial Desire/Sexual Utopias: White
Gay Capital and Transnational Tourism" from Pedagogies also includes a selection from Shyam
Selvadurai's novel Funny Boy, also set in Sri Lanka.

18. I would also like to note that in chapter 4 ("Discourse and Dat Course: Postcoloniality and
Afrocentricity") of Skin Trade, Ann duCille launches one of the few critiques of the influence of
postcolonial thought on a nascent African Americanist project. DuCille sketches the debate between
so-called Afrocentrist scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and black intellectuals like Henry Louis
Gates, and the relationship between postcolonial studies and Afrocentricity. "What does it mean," she
asks, "when Afrocentricity is dismissed as methodologically sloppy, anti-intellectual identity politics,
while postcoloniality is affirmed as theoretically sophisticated oppositional discourse?" (123).
Although she points out that the des ignation "postcolonial" might be relatively new, the study of black
power relations between colonizer and colonized has a longer history in the United States (and
abroad) among black intellectuals, activists, and scholars. The distinction between these theorists and
the Asian scholars associated with postcolonial studies, says duCille, has led to the accusation-from
some Afrocentrists-that "foreigners" are once again taking over the field and that the interest of
outsiders was needed to "legitimize a discourse of which the academy took little note when it was
dominated by diasporic blacks" (125). But duCille stresses that postcolonial studies is not just a
beneficiary of or heir to other resistance narratives but is indeed its own reaction to the oppressions
of imperialism. If Afrocentricity has restricted its critique of hegemonic systems to its own local
politics, she says, postcoloniality, because of its engagement with theories of difference, has the
potential to present such a critique on a global level. DuCille cautions against appropriations of
postcolonial status to reaffirm the European or Anglo-American center, however, and stresses the
importance of strategic essentialism: "What I would wish for postcolonialism ... is not the therapeutic
essentialism of Afrocentricity but the strategic essentialism of an interculturally orientated African
American studies" (134). She ends the chapter with the assertion that the three discourses-African
American studies, postcoloniality, and Afrocentricity-all have something to "teach one another about
the white academy that both claims and disclaims us" (135). On the transnational and Anzaldua's
work, see also Debra A. Castillo, "Anzaldua and Transnational American Studies." Castillo attempts
to think through Anzaldua's legacy among her detractors and her critical allies.

i9. Harper, "'Take Me Home,"' 464; emphasis in original.

20. Ibid., 476.

21. Robert Reid-Pharr, inherently on the outside of this black queer studies endeavor and
suspicious of its namingat least, suggests "that it is not nearly so easy as presumably it once was to
establish with anything approaching certainty the essence of either a queer or a black subjectivity"
(Once You Go Black, 147).

22. Johnson and Henderson, Black Queer Studies, 3; emphasis mine.

23. Walcott, "Outside in Black Studies," 92.

24. Johnson, "'Quare' Studies," 129; emphasis in original.

25. Ross, "Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm," 162.

26. Black Queer Studies was the result of a paradigm-shifting conference, "Black Queer Studies in
the Millennium" (2000), organized by Henderson and Johnson at the University of North Carolina
(uNc). Although Aberrations appeared before the publication of the Black Queer Studies volume,
much of the content of the collection had been circulating widely in the critical community as a result
of the uNc conference. See also Dwight McBride's assessment of its importance in his chapter
"Straight Black Studies," in Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality.

27. Ferguson later argues: "African American culture, as this book has attempted to illustrate,
functions as one location that negates and critiques the normative itineraries of capitalist modes of
production" (137). This is quite a tall order for African American culture-that of making it the arbiter
of a wide range of goings on in the community at large. Ferguson attempts to parse this statement in
his conclusion by utilizing Cathy Cohen's work on the new place of the black middle class as the
"overseer of queer, poor, Hiv-positive, and drug-addicted persons in black communities, becoming
the normative antithesis to deviant African American subjects" (145). This parsing places black
middle-class identities within larger structures of control and domination.

28. M. Jacqui Alexander in Pedagogies (23-24) attributes the founding of this term to the work of
Lynda Hart, Fatal Women.
 29. See Spillers, "Interstices," 76.

30. It is also important to mark that Roderick Ferguson and Michael Cobb are the only "Plum
Nelly" and Black Queer Studies contributors who appear in the "What's Queer about Queer Studies
Now" special issue.

31. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 24.

32. This is a queer liberalism that gets marked as "white" in Hiram Perez's essay "You Can Have
My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!" As Perez notes, "I speculate in this essay on the resistance within
establishmentarian queer theory to thinking race critically, a resistance that habitually classifies
almost any form of race studies as a retreat into identity politics. This defensive posture helps
entrench institutionally the transparent white subject characteristic of so much queer theorizing. Queer
theorists who can invoke that transparent subject, and choose to do so, reap the dividends of
whiteness" (171). Perez notes that his theory of whiteness is taken from a well-known critical race
essay by Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property." In addition, Judith Halberstam's essay "Shame and
White Gay Masculinity" references the same conference that Perez interrogates (Gay Shame,
University of Michigan, March 27-29, 2003) and explicitly names white gay male homonormativity as
the problem that queer of color critique seeks to engage. It is here that Jacqui Alexander's work gets a
mention, but it is not her monograph. Instead it is the collection Alexander edited with Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures.

33• Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 70.

34• I can think of three black feminist contributions that have been important to debates about
sexuality, belonging, citizenship, and race: Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; Holland, Raising the
Dead; and Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing. The publication dates for Pedagogies and the Social
Text special issue are the same, but the omission of Alexander's work is puzzling because it comes
out of Halberstam's series at Duke, so at least one of the editors would have been aware of
Alexander's intervention. This could be due to the fact that Alexander's book is a collection of essays-
many of the key ones were published in the late 199os. In particular, Alexander frames her project as
"an inventory of sorts of my multifaceted journey with(in) feminism, an inventory that is necessarily
pluralized by virtue of my own migrations and the confluence of different geographies of feminism. In
this volume I am concerned with the multiple operations of power, of gendered and sexualized power
that is simultaneously raced and classed yet not practiced within hermetically sealed or epistemically
partial borders of the nation-state" (4). Perhaps it is Alexander's relationship to an always already
jettisoned feminism that prevents her work from being engaged with in this round of queer studies
critique? To this list I would also add Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color. That the
powerhouse presses for queer studies work are Duke University, New York University, and the
University of Minnesota cannot be argued, given the concentration of texts from these three publishing
houses in the editor's list of influential work. It is interesting to note that two of the texts I mention
here are from the University of Chicago Press. One of the most prolific and vocal queer native
scholars is Craig Womack, notably his Red on Red.

35. See duCille, "The Occult of True Black Womanhood," 593, 624.

36. Joon Oluchi Lee, "The Joy of the Castrated Boy," 38.

37. See chapter 5 in Holland, Raising the Dead.

38. See, among others, Reid-Pharr, Brody, Cohen, Johnson, Trafton, Somerville, Cobb, Spillers,
duCille, Harper, Ross, McBride.

39• Cobb, "Race, Religion, Hate and Incest in Queer Politics," 267.

40. Halley notes that Rich's list is derived from a "catalogue of the eight characteristics of male
power propounded by Kathleen Gough in 1975" (Split Decisions, 195), making the series of lists
seem to collapse upon one another and marking the referential in this case as rather impossible.

CONCLUSION

i. See Gilroy, Against Race; Appiah and Gates Jr., Identities; and Michaels, Our America.

2. Toni Morrison, "Home," 6.

3. Derrida was not the last scholar to have at racism. A full decade later, Dinesh D'Souza would
publish The End of Racism.

4. I want to note that Derrida's essay was published with a lengthy critique by Anne McClintock
and Rob Nixon, to which Derrida also responded. In essence, they remind Derrida, as one must rarely
remind Morrison and Hurston, that a word's meaning is not separate from its history, and this
relationship gives us a word's politics, forms the epicenter of its nervous system. For Derrida, it is
precisely this logic of relation-the idea that history creates meaning rather than confounds it-that
causes a word to adhere in one place and experience repudiation in an other. I believe that
McClintock and Nixon misunderstand Derrida's intent. Derrida doesn't necessarily repudiate racism's
checkered history so much as he wants to isolate the word itself and deploy it as a floating signifier,
or contaminant. What he finds is that so long as racism is perceived as someone else's problem by
those who live in its midst, history cannot adequately account for it. His view is radical in that it
emphasizes a lack of responsibility for racism that is epidemic in global cultures.

5. G. M. James Gonzalez in her essay "Of Property: On `Captive' `Bodies,' Hidden `Flesh, and
Colonization" (1997) observes that "tongue (language, voice, rhetoric) and thought (ideology) have
been among the deadliest instruments of colonialism.... Tongue and thought are, therefore, infectious
and untrustworthy within the colonizer and the colonized; for the colonized has also been infected"
(129).

6. This conclusion is indebted to the long history of ruminations on the touch in both philosophical
and feminist traditions. For other explorations of "touch," see Vasseleu, Textures of Light; and Grosz,
"Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh."

7. Derrida writes "Le Toucher" as a tribute to the work of his friend and colleague, Jean-Luc
Nancy.

8. Kimberle Crenshaw first used the term "intersectionality" in 1992. Ann duCille utilized
"intersection" as a trope in her essay on black women in the academy, "The Occult of True Black
Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies" (1994).

9. Quoted in Lippit, Electric Animal, 99. Lippit uses this passage to demonstrate Freud's reliance
upon the narrative of evolution (borrowed from Darwin) to engage the "estrangement of human beings
from subjectivity" (98).

10. Similarly, N. Katherine Hayles explores the role of "virtual bodies" in cyberculture and asks:
"What to make of this shift from the human to the posthuman, which both evokes terror and excites
pleasure?" (How We Became Posthuman, 4).

11. See Derrida's Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). I want to thank Tom Cohen and J. Hillis
Miller for bringing this work to my attention.

12. See Derrida's Of Grammatology for the protracted discussion of presence/ absence.

13. Emily Harris, National Public Radio (NPR), "Study Doubts Jefferson Fathered Flemings'
Child," April 13, 2001.

14. Rey Chow explores a parallel project on orientalism as fantasy in her "The Dream of a
Butterfly."

15. The romance of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler is a perfect example of white supremist
heterosexual love and has remained the ideal in that portion of the American imaginary where slavery
is remembered, if at all.

16. Associated Press, "Jefferson Heirs Plan Cemetery for Slave's Kin," New York Times, April
21, 2002.

17. During the course of that tiny interview in a Harvard dormitory, Faulkner writes that the
boundary between the past and the present becomes increasingly porous: "It was not even four now
but compounded still further, since now both of them [Quentin and Shreve] were Henry Sutpen and
both of them were Bon" (289).

18. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

i9. I am aware that the change from mother to sister might offer an even more complex snapshot of
an incest paradigm in the Americas. Perhaps the bedding of a sister is seen as a lesser charge than the
bedding of one's mother-a transgression against biological order itself.

20. Michael Cuesta's award-winning first feature film L.I.E. (2000) captures the spirit of what I am
arguing here, as one of its secondary characters carries on a relationship with his sister without
shame or an acknowledgment of the act of incest.

21. Irving Howe, William Faulkner, 118.

22. In telling the story of a New Age woman recounting her past lives to a disinterested partner,
Haraway writes the following: "In this cartoon, `man,' that is Boopsie's bored partner, is the one who
listens (sort of) ... Technology, including the technology of the body itself, is the real subject of
universal history. Trudeau knows that the story of technological progress is at the heart of
Enlightenment humanism. He also has just the right twist on how the humor works when the subject of
technical progress is woman and her body instead of man and his tools"
(Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse, 9). Haraway's explication
witnesses the indifference that women's narratives are often greeted with.

23. Fugazi, "Bad Mouth;" 13 Days. The epigraph to this book is reiterated here. The influence of
existential thought on Fugazi's music has its mirror in the work of Simone de Beauvoir. At one point
in The Second Sex, she notes: "For many women, the roads to transcendence are blocked: because
they do nothing, they do not make themselves be anything; they wonder indefinitely what they could
have become, which leads them to wonder what they are: it is a useless questioning; if man fails to
find that secret essence, it is simply because it does not exist. Kept at the margins of the world,
woman cannot be defined objectively through this world, and her mystery conceals nothing but
emptiness" (trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier [New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2010], 271).
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