Queer/Trans K’s

Taiwan

Queer analysis is necessary to understand relations with Taiwan.

Yin Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, “Unraveling the Apparatus of Domestication,” Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang, who’s research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Sinophone, and edited by Ari Larissa Heinrich, who received the Master's degree in Chinese Literature from Harvard University, 2014, http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/013795027

While the previous section aims to show how female romantic friendship in the story deserves critical attention, this section hopes to further reflect on the distinctions and intersections between that ambiguous intimacy and female homosexuality, and how such relationships may call for a more nuanced perspective of East-West cultural dynamics with the case of Sinophone Taiwan. Going back to the novella, a revealing fact about the narrative is that although the narrator has elaborated intensely her desire for A. she has consistently shambled the notion of tongxinglian, the orientation to have sexual attraction with persons of the same sex. Instead of either identifying herself as a tongs/11' (at least for a period of time) or showing absolute dis-identification with homosexuality, the narrator determinedly positions herself in a gray area where her relation to the hetero-marital regime is not bound by traditions and is strategically open. In the pages that follow, I argue such a gray area is indicatively woven by her generation’s long-distance American Dream and “Japanese Dream,” as semi-colonial subjects’ aspiration for real liberation in a nominally postcolonial age. I argue that the gray area says a lot about how Taiwanese elites imagined themselves at the edge of the Pacific Rim in the Cold War, especially as enlightened indigenous agents carrying the international initiative to modernize their Oriental patriarchal culture. By attending to the multi-layered investments in cultural translation embodied by the narrator, the nanative, and by extension the Taiwanese elites in the shadow and aftermath of the U.S.-centered Cold War order, this section concludes with thoughts on how the Sinophone paradigm may ameliorate teleological restrictions in conventional area studies.

Antiblackness

Static sex and gender categories are sites of intelligibility which render racial discrimination possible- it opens categories of un-humanness which establishes other forms of discrimination.

Wilcox 2015 (Lauren B., University Lecturer in Gender Studies and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, “Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations,” 116-117)CJQ

Butler’s performative theory of gender argues that one cannot meaningfully distinguish between gender as a product of human ideas and culture, and sex, which is presumed to exist naturally as a brute fact outside human influence. In other words, Butler argues that sex is not to nature what gender is to culture; rather, gender “designate[s] that very apparatus of productions whereby the sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999 [1990], 11). Sex differences are not only reproduced through discourses of gender, but both sex and gender are produced and regulated by what Butler refers to as the “heterosexual matrix.” It is not only gender norm, but also the heterosexual matrix that produces the illusion of the naturalness of sex and gender. Norms of heterosexuality stabilize both sex and gender through a “grid of intelligibility.” “Intelligible genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (Butler 1990, 17). Heteronormativity is premised on the belief that males are supposed to act masculine and desire females, and females are supposed to act feminine and desire men. If sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire do not line up in the way in which the heterosexual matrix demands, the subject will be unintelligible, not fully human. Any “break” between biological sex, gender performance, and desire is foreclosed as non-normative and “unreal” (Butler 1990, 17). Butler theorizes materiality not as a question of epistemological “reality,” but as a matter of the livability of certain lives: whether the norms governing gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and other categories allow one to be recognized as a human subject. If lives deviate from crossIng Bor der s , secur Ing BodIe s [ 117 ] recognizable, viable subjectivity, their lives will be unreal; they will not be bodies that “matter.” The experience of trans- and genderqueer people, as those embodied in a way that does not cohere with the norms of the heterosexual matrix, provides insight into how norms of gender are embedded into the airport security assemblage. Gender norms are not fixed or universal, nor do they exist in a vacuum. Gender norms are also linked to the production of racial distinctions, for example; Somerville argues that black people in the United States have been medically and culturally understood to have racialized physical characteristics that directly connect to their perceived abnormality in terms of gender and sexuality (2000). Stoler has also shown that gender and sexuality were sites in which European racial superiority was produced and maintained through the eroticization of racialized bodies and the surveillance of white bodies (Stoler 2002, 185–197). African-American women with “natural” or “Afro” style hair have had their hair patted down, despite not having set off any alarms or any other signs of “suspiciousness” in US airport security screening procedures (most famously in the case of Solange Knowles in 2011) (Sharkey 2011). As such, competently practicing gender in airport security practices also means conforming to ideas about proper gender appearance, which are grounded in ideals of whiteness, class privilege, and heterosexuality (see also Beauchamp 2009).8

Independently, the 1AC’s spectacle of pain legitimizes the sentimental politics that affectively undergird neoliberal governance

Strick 14 [Simon, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin, American Dolorologies, 2014, p. 132-6]

The concluding argument concerns late modern figurations of the body in pain. Spectacles of pain have proliferated in many forms in the contemporary American public sphere—if indeed pain hasn't become its primary and all-pervading obsession. Confessional TV shows exchange narratives of personal trauma and hurt for public intelligibility; cinematic spectacles of suffering, from The Passion of the Christ (2004) to torture-porn favorite Hostel (2005), exhibit the body in pain for profit, thrill, and public outrage; news reports narrate national-scale catastrophes through individual testimonials of pain; reality game shows such as Survivor measure their contestants' bodily pain capacities against their resistance to (or aggressiveness in) traumatizing and abusive group dynamics. There is also a proliferation of political discourse disclosing the injuries caused by contemporary forms of governing: public movements raise consciousness for excluded and abjected forms of living, feeling, and aching in Western democracies; critical discourses continue to shed light on the structural violence of regimes of power; the interventions of identitarian movements and groups successfully expand public recognition of social and political injury, changing the scope of intelligibility in the process.¶ These diverse affective phenomena are not always readily distinguishable in neoliberal regimes. Scholars such as Wendy Brown or Sara Ahmed have pointed out the coopting of identitarian politics in contemporary governmental regimes. These critical voices urge "[c]aution . . . against the assumption that 'speaking out' and 'making visible' within so-called radical politics can be separated from the conventions of self-expression in neoliberal forms of governance" (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 4). Bill Clinton's infamous tagline "I feel your pain" or Barack Obama's ongoing focus on a "politics of empathy"1 are only the presidential cases in point for an ongoing politics of pain that links recognition of suffering to democratic progress. Academic debates have matched this capitalization on pain and compassion as necessary ingredients to the development of politics, ethics, or community making, such as in Rosi Braidotti's call for the unification of feminist, gay, lesbian, and transgender identity politics under the label of a "community of the suffering."2 The various diagnoses of America as "wound culture" (Seltzer 1998) or "trauma culture" (Kaplan 2005), in this view, describe a highly disparate, tension-laden, and ambivalent field of affective discourse, rather than a unified or unifying fixation on pain in contemporary Western societies.¶ Lauren Berlant has argued that these politics of affect dictate the continuous envelopment of the political in sentimental rhetoric. Sentimentalism holds up the promise that subjectivity is granted in the recognition of pain and that democracy is realized as the participation in an ideal of common suffering and compassion. Sentimental discourses "locate the human in a universal capacity to suffer and romantic conventions of individual historical acts of compassion and transcendence. [They] imagine a nonhierarchical social world that is . . . 'at heart' democratic because good intentions and love flourish in it" (2008, 6). Sentimental rhetoric produces a public sphere assembled around pain bonded by feeling with what is unspeakable: a commonality of passionate and compassionate bodily subjects, or a "fantasy of generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain" (Berlant 2008, 6).¶ These arguments suggest a fundamental link between the sentimental evocation of pain and the discourses imagined as "at heart democratic." Indeed, the emancipatory project of democracy relies on articulations of pain, the recognition of those suffering, and a unified politics as remedy of this suffering. This is certainly true for American culture and its foundational ideas of promise and exceptionalism. The cultural sites I have pointed to participate in this evocation of a public sphere, where oppressive hurtings and social injuries are "counted in" toward a better politics of integration, understanding, and recognition. The sentimental linkage of emancipation through the circulation of pain and compassion as politics indicates a larger genealogy that dominates American culture and that this book has tried to elucidate. This genealogy was traced back to America's emancipatory foundation as a nation freed from colonial injury, and informed by a national history of successful incorporations of marginalized subjects into the national project (suffrage, abolitionism). American dolorologies has related this discourse to an apparatus of cultural technologies such as compassion, testimony to oppression, and articulations of affect and pain, and the materializations of race and gender they covertly enact. My analysis concurs with Berlant's observation that the various claims to pain as identity disarticulate their marginalizing effects in a rhetoric of universalization:¶ In the liberal tradition of the United States [testimony of pain] is not simply a mode of particularizing and puncturing self-description by minorities, but a rhetoric of universality located, not in abstract categories, but in what was thought to be, simultaneously, particular and universal experience. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that sentimentality has long been a popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and citizenship. (2000, 34)¶ This connection of pain, nation, and subjectivity has, on the one hand, led to the public sphere becoming more and more a site of intimate "affect" exchange. This transformation is visible in the proliferation of mediatized forms of confession, testimony, and other articulations of traumatized selfhood, such as reality TV or the culture of therapeutic discourse. These governmental forms of achieving public subjectivity through speaking pain imitate and appropriate the critical formulations of differential experience from identitarian movements, at times becoming indistinguishable from them: "We can also see a . . . collusion between liberal, capitalist forms of mass entertainment and individualist therapies, and the feminist importance of the personal" (Ahmed 2000, 12). The achievement of public visibility through the articulation of trauma and pain is furthermore supplemented by mainstream political discourse becoming compassionate and revolving primarily around the recognition of bodies in pain.3¶

Their over focus on the ontological determination of blackness in the continental United States excludes those who would seek to identify with blackness as a deterritorializing diaspora

Moten 14. Fred Moten, professor of poetry at Duke University, “Notes on Passage (The New International of Sovereign Feelings),” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014, pg. 59

At stake is precisely what it is that the thought of middle passage, that remaining in the supposedly viewless confines of the hold, makes it possible to imagine and improvise. It’s not just that there are flights of fantasy in the ship’s hold but also that such fantasy calls into more refined and brutal existence every regulatory structure through which we identify the modernity of the world. The problem has to do, in the end, with the exhaustive deprivations—in their relation to the revolutionary forces—that mark the lived experience of statelessness, which is, before its exclusionary imposition, a general and inalienable sociopoetic insurgency. In other words, the operative distinction is neither between the postcolonial state and diaspora nor the (neo-)imperial state and diaspora; the problem is the relationship between the state, however it is conceived and instantiated, and statelessness. How do we inhabit and move in statelessness? How is statelessness not only an object but also a place of study? The address of this question requires brushing up against a problematic implication. That implication is not that African American Studies bears the special responsibility of bracketing its own local concerns in the interest of a systemic analysis of the postcolonial state, an imperative that is underwritten by the assumption that certain kinds of attention paid to certain local conditions of black American social life not only imply but also enforce fixed notions of blackness that exclude some who would seek to claim blackness as (inter) national identity. Rather, the implication is that African American Studies must ever more fully repress its own comportments toward the interplay of anticoloniality and statelessness in the interest of analytic devotion to the post- colonial (African) state. When questioning the value or necessity of attention to certain local conditions of and within the striated generativity of black social life in the United States (where the pitfalls of the consciousness of passage seem to have their greatest intensity) is given as a kind of methodological imperative for those in the advanced guard of professional Afro-diasporic intellectual life; when we are constrained to wonder how the most enduring modes and experience of statelessness, lived and enacted by those who are said now to have a pre-Westphalian ontology and epistemology, have come to signify not only the most powerful manifestation of the Westphalian state but, more generally, something that seems to show up for Clarke and Wright as a kind of willed, self-imposed, exclusionary form of identitarian stasis; perhaps it is because a choice has already been made, at the most general level, for political order over social insurgency. The straight, deictically determined linearity implied by the distinction between pre-Westphalian and Westphalian delivers the brutal kick of a Hegelian historiographic and geographic cocktail, one designed to produce maximal effect by way of minimal flavor. This time, in the light of the state, which is manifest as deadly shade, Africa is a zone of relative advance. But what theoretical force is held in the ongoing generation of what is called the “pre-Westphalian”? What work does that force allow? Where did it come from? Is this a problematic of dialogue, as J. Lorand Matory, or retention, as Melville J. Herskovitz, would have it?27 Or is the real issue the preservation of “the ontological totality” that Cedric Robinson indexes to black radicalism, which is given in general as the enactment of the refusal of the state and which is, as Laura Harris argues, to be found in every instance of “the aesthetic sociality of blackness,” in every exorbitant local inhabitance of the motley crew that is instantiated by those whom Michel Foucault might also have called “prisoners of the passage.”28 Outside the history of sovereignty, self-determination, and their violent dispersion—that general and genocidal imposition of severalty, of the primacy and privacy of “home,” that Theodore Roosevelt prescribed for the indigenous people of North America as if it held the pestilential increase of a Matherian blanket—blackness keeps moving in its Müntzerian way. It does so in honor of the ways that the Peasant’s War continues to disrupt the Peace of Westphalia, which it anticipates, whose brutalities it brings online in the way that insurgency always brings regulation online. Such combinations of precedence and fracture—in addition to the simple fact that the slave trade continued two centuries after the series of treaties signed in 1648 that initialized the Westphalian system—call severely into question any historical calculus that places the middle passage and its modes of study (as opposed to its epistemology) under the rubric of the “pre-Westphalian.” However, under a Hegelian influence whose strenuous critique she elsewhere studies and extends as a mode of becoming (black), statelessness and nonarrival are objects of correction for Wright even as Clarke implies that adherence to the Peace of Westphalia, which is imagined to be applicable to Africa, whose pillage it foretells and propels, might guarantee the sovereignty of the postcolonial African state.29

Thinking blackness through ontology and structuralism locks it within pre-determined grids of intelligibility – only an approach that emphasized the formed nature of identity through assemblage theory can map a line of escape

Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 161-64

The force of Jackson’s line in Deleuze’s books—considered as an insinuation of blackness in the sense discussed above—is intensified when we consider the historical circumstances that drew Soledad Brother into Deleuze and his col- laborators’ orbit (the links between prison struggle in France and in the United States, the GIP’s interest in Jackson, Genet’s involvement in the publication and translation of Soledad Brother). And this force becomes even stronger when we consider the deeper trajectories of black resistance it carries. It is here, however, with respect to the question of history and of blackness’s relation to history, that a serious problem asserts itself. Each time Jackson’s name appears in Deleuze’s work it is without introduction, explanation, or elaboration, as though the line were ripped entirely from historical considerations. There is a temptation to dismiss this use of Soledad Brother as an ahistorical appropriation of Jackson’s thought by a European theorist or, worse, a decontextualization that effectively obscures the intolerable social conditions out of which Jackson’s letters were produced. But to do so would perhaps miss the way blackness claims an unruly place in philosophy and philosophies of history.

In “The Case of Blackness” Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, “What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies.” What if we were to think of blackness as a name for an ontology of becoming? How might such a thinking transform our understanding of the relation of blackness to history and its specific capacity to “think [its] way out of the exclusionary constructions” of history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies tend to reduce blackness to a historical condition, a “lived experience,” and in doing so effectively eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when they write, “What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self- positing as concept, escapes History” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). To bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the open—toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness signaled by the use of Jackson’s line as an “event in its becoming”—a few more words need be said about Deleuze’s method.

The use of Jackson’s writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encoun- ter unexpected injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all of sudden as though propelled by their own force. One might say they are deployed rather than explained or interpreted; as such, they produce textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick up and run with. Many names are proposed for this method—“schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmat- ics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 94)—but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice that opposes itself to the interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think of a book as “a little machine” and ask “what it functions with, in connection with what other things does it or does it not transmit intensities?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother functions in Deleuze’s books, connect- ing Jackson’s line to questions and historical issues that are not always explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further, it opens new lines where the intensities transmitted in Jackson’s book make a claim on our own practice.

This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and practice and to challenge some of the major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171) clarifies that he and Guattari have “remained Marxists” in their concern to analyze the ways capitalism has developed but that their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to more traditional theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of “war machines” as opposed to state theory; second, a “consideration of minorities rather than classes”; and finally, the study of social “lines of flight” rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these distinctions, as we will see, resonates with Jackson’s political philosophy, but as the passage from Anti-Oedipus demonstrates, the concept of the “line of flight” emerges directly in connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s encounter with Soledad Brother.

The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined by preexisting structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction. It names a force that is radically autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical accounts. It is above all for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not as a “structure” but as a “machine,” because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements, energies, and intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines forces us not only to consider the social and historical labor involved in producing soci- ety but also the ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement).

One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is “interpretation” and more specifically structuralist interpretations of society in terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism persisted in the “submission of the line to the point” and as a result produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the unconscious, that could not think in terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only in relation to finite points (the subject, the signifier) produces a calculable grid, a structure that then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system and of society generally. Louis Althusser’s account of the “ideological State apparatus” as the determining structure of subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will come back to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to invoke one of the terms given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and the potentials for giving consistency to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing the hidden structures of an intolerable system, Deleuze and Guattari’s method aims to map the ways out of it.

Exclusive focus on anti-Blackness and white supremacy obscures queerness and masks real violence - #BlackLiveMatter proves

Shackelford 15(Ashleigh Shackelford is a radical queer Black fat femme based in Richmond, VA. Ashleigh is a cultural producer, body positivity advocate, pop culture enthusiast, and a run-on sentence repeat offender. They are a community organizer at Black Action Now and the director of Free Figure Revolution. “The Politics of Erasure: Too Queer to Be Black, Too Black to Be Queer.” December 23, 2015. http://www.forharriet.com/2015/12/the-politics-of-erasure-too-queer-to-be.html#axzz4EDqFUMLS) // JRW

Years ago, I was invited to a discussion about coming out experiences for queer folks, and the whole room was white except for me. When it was my turn to talk about my personal experiences in coming out to my family, I was asked if I had difficulty being gay in my community and if my family was surprised because it was “rare to be a gay black woman.” I shut the whole room down and immediately addressed how anti-Blackness and queerphobia makes me more of a target for violence from white people than my own people. But I realized mid-justified-rage that it wasn’t worth educating these particular white queer folks because it was labor that came at the cost of my mental health. I let it go as a one-time bad experience, and tried to hope for the best in the next queer spaces I was invited to. The next time I attended a queer space—that, based off the invite list, seemed more multiracial compared to the one I had previously attended—I was set up yet again. I walked into the room and was greeted with cultural appropriation and fetishizing off jump. “Hey, gurl, yasssss, your whole life is on fleek!” Can we not? Being tokenized as a bridge to Black queer culture and language (EX: shade, bae, read, YAS bitch YAS, tea, slay, gag, etc.) and Black pop culture references (Beyoncé, Nicki, Trina, Lil’ Kim, etc.) is extremely violent and dehumanizing. I am also tokenized as a Black fat femme “vending machine” that only exists to give everyone else “life” with my confidence (re: inspiring white people with my resilience and power). Or to perhaps start a fight for you if shit goes down in a social setting (re: Love & Hip Hop politicking). I only get praise for my Blackness when it is commoditized as social currency or for my ability to support other non-Black folks in being the token Black fat femme. When I parade my Blackness (and pride in being Black) within my queer navigation of the world, I'm often met with silence and discomfort. Even more so, I'm met with violent denials of non-Black privilege or stereotypes of Black people being very queerphobic. I have many stories of how I am targeted more by the police, erased from queer resources, romantically ignored in queer spaces, and never taken seriously when I talk about intimate partner violence due to my intersecting identities (re: not being viewed capable of victimhood). I am often erased from writing opportunities or scholarship in discussing my queerness because I cannot separate my experiences from my Blackness. In addition, when I was arrested while participating in a #BlackLivesMatter protest, none of the queer multiracial groups within my local area reached out once to protect any of the queer Black folks assaulted by the police. On the other hand, in most Black spaces, my queerness takes a back seat unless it is defined as a Black queer space. It is important to note that Black spaces aren't more queerphobic than other designated spaces but rather that many Black spaces are operating under white supremacist guidelines that restrict everyone to adhere to notions of heteronormativity and have limited access to tools of certain language. Within this heteronormativity and inaccessibility comes a deeply misguided belief that queerness doesn't need to be uplifted or centered in a way that challenges the hegemonic idea that everyone is straight, cis-identifying, or cisnormative. (I use queerness as an umbrella term for sexuality, gender identity, and gender presentation that is considered deviant.) Queerness is seen as the minority, a once in a lifetime friend you meet—but not a thriving community that many Black people belong to, and thus, worth integrating into our idea of what “normal” is. These ideas of normal for open Black spaces usually uplift Black cisgender, straight people. In my work within the #BlackLivesMatter movement, I am overwhelmed by how often I put my queerness aside to remain palatable for crowds and behind-the-scenes politicking. For example, I once attended a Black Caucus event specifically to bring together various Black folks from the city together to build a coalition against local issues of anti-Blackness and classism. There was a direct incident in which pronouns were not respected and people were not addressed by their chosen pronouns, because some members didn’t understand the importance of this act. The facilitator wanted to parking lot the issue of pronouns until another time for the sake of building with everyone in the room. The problem with this mentality is that we can’t build with each other if we do not respect everyone’s humanity. None of us are perfect in our politicizing, but intentionally respecting people, even if you don’t understand their identity and truth, is required. The most violent part of all this is that I’ve felt forced to choose between and prioritize parts of my identity. In creating this hierarchy of my identity, I'm merely trying to survive the non-intersectional world that requires adapting to this violence to navigate it. I realize that I choose Black spaces over queer spaces because for me, there is more violence in spaces that do not qualify my Blackness as worthy rather than my queerness. Yet, in doing this, I am still terrified to be in spaces where patriarchy, misogyny, queerphobia, and transphobia are found, and I still fear for my life and mental health in Black spaces. There is a deep rooted reality that anti-Blackness is pervasive and perpetuated in our everyday navigation, and to be in a space of non-Black people perpetuating that violence is more triggering than to collect my own people for not seeing me fully. It hurts either way, but I have a preference in what hurt I engage in. In so many ways, I thrive in Black spaces in ways that I cannot anywhere else. Blackness is so foreign, so cancerous, and so illicit to white supremacy that it is overwhelmingly powerful to be in a room of unapologetic Black people—problematic or not. But queer spaces do not make me feel unified in anything, not even within my sexuality or gender identity. I am queer sexually, in that I date and engage with anyone who peaks my interest regardless of their gender or sexual identity. I am agender, in that I do not identify with a gender. In these components of my identity, my Blackness defines each of them because Blackness is inherently deviant, therefore everything about me will never fit within the confines of white supremacist conformity. I feel community in being Black and being around Black people. However, the power of that space alone is not enough to sustain me, though, nor does it change the reality of how violent these spaces can be to my well-being and safety. I want more from our overall community than only being able to guarantee safe spaces when I’m part of creating them. But more importantly, I need more to survive and to be my whole self, because I will not compartmentalize my humanity for the sake of everyone else. The sake of everyone else in the Black community speaks to power systems of who is worthy, who is normal, and who is dominant. Black queer folks have been here, doing the work, surviving the matrices of violence, and still showing up for everyone else. Liberation is not just dependent on Black racial justice. It must include all intersections of our identities. Choosing Blackness out of survival for my own personal navigation and political understanding does not address the reality that we must push our community as a whole to address our Black queer identities, existence, and humanity. It’s not enough to say #BlackLivesMatter and only mean some.

Activism and resistance against anti-Black violence in a radical, intrinsically queer act

McCune 2015 (Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. is an Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Performance Studies, as well as the Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program, at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is a scholar, activist, and artist. “Queerness of Blackness: Ferguson and Black Death.” Summer 2015. https://www.academia.edu/14204027/Queerness_of_Blackness_Ferguson_and_Black_Death) // JRW

The frequency of black death is itself queer. Strange. Out of place. Awkward. August 9, 2014 marked a reminder of the queerness in being and living black, when Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. This killing, occurring in the center of the nation, became the fulcrum for a national response to years’ past crimes of the state, such as the murders of Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Renisha McBride, and too many others. After hundreds of days of unrest, protest, and peacemaking, the return of Prosecutor McCullough’s nonindictment was more than a bad moment in the court system, but a queer way of saying that black lives did not matter. This act of juridical disrespect— both in the dismissal of witness accounts and the prosecutor’s defensive tone—said loudly that public resistance, riots, or demands for redress would not be met with great seriousness. For many who had hope for AT LEAST a trial, this moment of denial was tethered to a litany of moments where anti-black violence was met with little to no retribution or resolve. Upon the reading of the grand jury’s decision to not bring the case to trial, the blackness of Brown’s body would be queered in the public rendering of the jury’s heard testimony, strangely and reminiscently deformed in public view. In Darren Wilson’s statement in front of the grand jury, he referred to Michael Brown as a “demon” and like “Hulk Hogan,” historically racialized phantasmagoria which evokes fear and often requires defense. This reverting to what I call “canonical prejudice”1 constituted a historic deformation of black bodies in order that they cohere in historic of victims, at the hands of a very powerful state. The queerest of positions is to be the vulnerable and made criminal, in order to deny victimage for the sake of white narrative of “defense against all things black.” Indeed, while Darren Wilson’s words queerly made Michael Brown merely a thing—a source of evil that could only be destroyed through termination— he gave the public ammunition to demand a reimagining of the value of black life, as well as an institution of policies and procedures that would protect and serve the most vulnerable. Indeed, this forum attempts to respond to the scene— even resurrecting Brown and others through action and activism, through a collective reflection on the meaning of now, and marking the significance of multiple types of players (activists, scholars, preachers, and artists) in the reshaping of the dark American landscape. To be a “death-bound subject”2 is to be a queer subject, always in danger of being destroyed. Physically. Spiritually. Representationally. To reflect in the now, the question most pressing in the twenty-first century: How does it feel to be a death-bound subject? The response for many seems to be #BlackLivesMatter beyond their deaths and, therefore, the work continues. In this way, the queerness of blackness is not just about how tethered life seems to death, but also its relationship to living and creativity. What has emerged from the site of Ferguson, Missouri, are many queer things: Art. Activism. Advocacy. Anti-Racist Mobilization. Action. As a resident of the St. Louis community, I was able to be a part of the mass mobilization of folks who “shut shit down.” Beyond the proverbial and symbolic disruption in “business as usual” of state agencies and the everyday lives of St. Louis metropolitan residents with segregationist politics, I witnessed mostly young people of color generating a queer enclave of folk: activists, artists, and scholars from various struggles. Together, they combat the state’s collusion in anti-black terror. In many ways, I feel that this moment might evoke a feeling of “queer temporality,” moments where “one leaves the temporal frames of family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.” For me, the events in Ferguson and beyond disrupt the timeline in which black lives matter most at the cross-section of straight and black, but rather at the murky plain where gender and sexualities are ever-present—though often unremarked, even for many of those killed in the line of activist duty. Here, the operational time seems fast, fueled by bodies from various time zones, traditions, and acceptance of risks that speak to the importance and urgency of the now. Queerness of this black moment is also marked in the ways that suspension and suspicion cooperate, as folks engage with nonnormative bodies, sexualities, and genders as sometimes inside and sometimes outside. The oscillation here is also an allegory, for the life of nonnormative subjects within marginalized spaces— feeling at once free and trapped at sites of solidarity. Here, I attempt to bring together artists, activists, scholars, and performers who see themselves as queerly placed, liminal subjects existing across communi- ties, while also living as black people or amongst black people—witnessing mass terrorism on repeat in their everyday lives. Together these voices represent not only broad perspectives, but also offer original and insightful thoughts on the past, present, and future of blackness in these queer times. Scholar-poet-activist Javon Johnson reminds us of the pain–joy dialectic present at the site of anti-black violence and crimes. Taking us a bit away from sorrow songs, he provides poetry and prose that introduce “black joy” as a critical hermeneutic through which to visit scenes of violence. Reuben Riggs, brave activist and undergraduate at Washington University-St. Louis, who spent many days in the thick of Ferguson protests, introduces us to complex scenes where queerness and blackness meet, entangle, conflict, and create emergent knowledges. Jennifer Tyburczy, scholar-curator-activist, draws connection between multiple state violences and draws out the queer use of evidence, while crafting an archive that provides us with new considerations for the possibilities and limitations of the visual in distilling anti-black violence. To this end, Nyle Fort and Darnell Moore provoke new thoughts on anti-blackness through the creative crafting of critical sermons, which utilize the last words of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin to craft a theology rooted in anti-state violence. These contributions illuminate the queerness of blackness, through the performance of critical scholarship committed to justice for black people, the strange inability to write the self in the texts due to the nature of the crimes, and the determination to witness for, against, and with the dead, the injured, and the too often forgotten. Indeed, the blackness of this forum is indicative of the queerness of this moment. Sadly, as I introduce this forum, a new viral video circulates social media: the assassination of Walter Scott. This black South Carolina citizen was shot down by police officer Michael Slager while Scott was running after being tasered during a “taillight stop.” My social worlds are in uproar and rightfully so. However, what is jarring for me is the way in which this man’s run is symbolic of the queer fear that is a part of police– black relations, a constant feeling that one is death-bound. In this America, it seems to stand still, to run, or to acquiesce, all cosign the black contract with death. Likewise, this now-viral video of Walter Scott’s assassination paints vividly the queer position of black people in Ferguson and beyond: as runners from violent authority and institutions; seemingly eternal sojourners of freedom.