Ash Stephens- 02/26/14, Queer of Color Methodologies

Ash M. Stephens, 02/26/14, (4) Queer of Color Methodologies

While reading the article titled, African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality, I felt that Ferguson was very intentional about acknowledging literature that predates the great work of Foucault. I found that in this reading, Ferguson did what some of the other readings for this week did not. Ferguson was able to show an intersectional approach with racialized, gendered, and classed components, in both past and present literature, without reverting to this notion of queer theory. For me, Ferguson’s article allowed me to further problematize What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now, when we can see that authors have already been doing these types of work. Is it that we must title our methodologies queer or intersectional, or is it that we must put these analyses into every aspect of our potential research praxis?

In trying to apply this weeks readings to my own potential research project, I began to reflect on a passage on page three in What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now. That passage states, “That queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclusionary operations has always been one of the field’s key theoretical and political promises”. While considering this passage, I am left wondering how I can use queer theory in my own research in order to discuss the many dimensions of prison tourism and museums. Discussing the different power dynamics between persons confined to prison, to tour participants, to staff members, to tour guides, and so on, also allows for an intersectional approach among the different actors. Also, thinking about the prison industrial complex, that is pumped by mass incarceration, the discussion beginning on page eight of this article about the “war on terrorism” allowed me to switch my lens. Thinking about how the “war on terrorism” name allowed for the United States economy to justify violent racist practices, is also seen through narratives of criminalization as justifications for incarcerating people of color. Thinking about tours and museums as extensions of these justifications (further creating us vs them dichotomies, the death penalty as legal lynchings, and prisons as affirmations about racial differences) I began to see some parallels. 

My question for this week would derive from page fifteen of What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now. The authors discuss issues with much of queer scholarship that is being read and disseminated from the United States around the world. Is this another example of colonialism? How do we work to avoid this in our own research, or should we?

Jody queer of color methodology

This week’s authors ask us to re-examine how we approach both sexuality and power.  As a methodology, queer of color critiques require both the deconstruction of categories and the analysis of how systems of power interpellate us into these categories. Jasbir Puar (2005) argues for moving away from intersectionality, which, “demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time,” (128).  Instead, she theorizes queerness as a Deleuzian assemblage.  “Queerness as an assemblage…instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations [and] enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with representational economies,” (121-22).

            Puar’s “queerness as assemblage” is both a powerful concept and a methodological challenge.  The shift from intersectionality to assemblage shifts the target of analysis.  Instead of focusing on identity constellations, assemblages emphasize temporality, space, bodies, and affect.  Queer assemblage has become increasingly central to my thinking about Grindr precisely because of this methodological challenge.  I entered the field with research questions based in intersectionality.  These questions proved surprisingly difficult to answer.  By focusing on the categories of race and masculinity, I was missing how power really operates on Grindr.  Race and masculinity are absolutely present and hierarchical, but to get at how this app is related to systems of power I had to step back from a focus on intersectional identities and think about space, time, and bodies.  Had I been familiar with Puar’s work prior to starting this project, I may have entered the field with different questions.  Online spaces are contingent, integrate unevenly with physical spaces, are temporally specific, and bring together affect and bodies in new ways that point to futurity and an “always becoming”.  By making these the focus of my analysis, I’m able to get at how Grindr is related to systems of power.

            What role should identity categories play in our research?  How do we structure research around categories while also recognizing their contingency? 

Paige Sweet Week 7

Many of the authors in this week’s readings take up the idea of queer studies as a “subjectless” critique. By this, they mean that queer studies does not have a “fixed political referent” (Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz 2005). There is not a “queer subject” for whom queer studies is the voice. Rather, queer studies is “subjectless” in its constant contingencies and movements, refusing to represent anything or anyone in particular. David Eng calls queer critique a “political metaphor” (2010), which is useful for de-linking queer critique from a particular identity or subject position. Other queer scholars have suggested that queer studies takes a “queer angle” on common sense, meaning that it looks at knowledge or culture in new and different ways and that it deconstructs heteronormativity in that same glance. I think this “subjectless” position of queer studies is incredibly useful for thinking through how to apply it to my own research. In this sense, looking at discourses of trauma and domestic violence from a queer studies perspective would allow me to expose the dominant formations that move in and around these “therapeutic” and “recovery” models. Using this framework, I can also ask a critical question: who has been the “fixed referent” of anti-violence work? Is this still a white victim who calls the police every time she is hurt? In the spirit of Jasbir Puar, I can also examine what new kinds of normativities begin circulating once the old ones are destabilized. If it is no longer the white, middle-class woman who is the “ideal” domestic violence victim, what new subjectivities are anti-violence discourses built around and against?

At its core, this “subjectless” critique that queer studies engages is a reaction against identity politics. Just as Roderick Ferguson deconstructs the very idea that sexuality could be a liberatory identity (because that identity is produced as an effect of power), I need to be attentive to what kinds of identities are produced and nurtured within the anti-violence movement. Part of the work of the anti-violence movement has been to claim and “empower” the status of survivor, to “speak out,” and to champion a particular notion of survivor-dom. Queer critique teaches me to ask, what kinds of power and knowledge categories are in operation here? Are the discourses of the psy-sciences implied in this “survivor” and “confessional” paradigm? How can I excavate the foundations of this paradigm without implying that it is meaningless, without leaving us with nothing as anti-violence activists? For example, Ferguson shows that the very notion of sexuality is developed through and against the immoral and primitive black subject. We might decide, based on this analysis, that sexuality is no longer a useful identity category. We might decide that we need to abandon sexuality as a framework, and yet still take up arms against heteronormativity and the violence of the conjugal family norm. The question becomes, how can we do the latter without the former? How can we critique the violence of patriarchy without recognizing survivors as a group of people, as a type of subject produced within racist and sexist and heterosexist social worlds?

Indira Neill Hoch

Puar sets assemblage apart from the notion of intersectionality noting that the former is “attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency” (p. 128). Intersectionality, on the other hand, “privileges naming, visuality, epistemology, representation, and meaning” (p. 128). She goes on to argue that assemblages work against the “us vs them” logic of “the War on Terror,” because classification systems are undermined by the fluidity of the assemblage. In this statement, Puar is perhaps assuming that “the War on Terror” is itself a stable object in its adherence to the “us vs them” logic. Interviews with journalists indicate that few were able to define “the War on Terror” and many even denied using the term in their own articles, when they clearly had, on multiple occasions (Lewis & Reese, 2009). One excuse rendered was that “the War on Terror” was the administration’s term, and thus the one replicated in their articles. Others admitted that the phrase was imprecise, but as writers from USA Today, they had very restricted word counts for their articles and the term as a catch-all was important for maximizing information in a minimal space. Still, when given time to reflect, few could produce substantive definitions for what they meant when they used the term.

Norris, Kern, and Just (2003) argue that “the War on Terror” frame is as much about redefining allies as it is about defining enemies. With the dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of the “Cold War” frame, the media gained considerable opportunities for producing counterframes against the US government’s handling of foreign affairs (Entman, 2004). However, the introduction of “the War on Terror” frame reconsolidated framing power in the administration’s hands. Part of this reshuffling was that Russia was now the US’s ally against terrorists. So was Pakistan. So were a number of countries to which the US had formally been hostile or ambivalent towards. “The War on Terror” was as much about “accept these countries as our friends” as “these states harbor terrorists.”

In Puar’s argument, the frame is about the queer terrorist assemblage, but it is also about who becomes newly normalized. If the Sikh turban is part of a contingent queerness in the post-9/11 world, someone formally marginalized benefits, moving towards normalization. (Echoes of Andrea Smith here, as one pillar oppresses a group, another oppressed people is complicit in that oppression and may well benefit from it). Western, middle-class “queers,” those with access to the “queer liberalism” frame, can adopt the mindset of cultural exceptionalism in the face of backwards Middle Eastern identities and sexualities. But the benefactors of this rearrangement of normalcy, who counts as “us,” is not limited to those within the US or even “Western” borders.

In a project I started last fall, I assess photographs from terrorist attacks and compare them to the textual accounts that they accompany on The New York Times website. Even though I rarely take on projects as outwardly serious as terrorism (“Indira, I thought you studied video games…and pornographic fanfiction?”), I was drawn to this project because of the photographs that came out of the Westgate Mall attack in Kenya. These images were so powerfully discordant from the photographs normally associated with sub-Saharan Africa: the anthropologist’s photographs of natives, the armed militias, or densely packed urban centers with street merchants or the like. My rugby team had begun planning a tour in Kenya a few months earlier and our coach, who is Kenyan, had been sending us photographs of rugby pitches at dusk with lions walking through the frame. But the Westgate Mall photographs were of just that, a mall. Bodies were dressed in jeans and button down shirts. The building was brightly lit with linoleum floors and they sold frozen yogurt while people could have been browsing familiar chain stores. But they weren’t participating in consumerism just that moment because they were hiding behind faux stone pillars, peaking around corners. This was a terrorist attack occurring in a familiar middle-class consumer space, and that was so much more salient than that all the bodies were black. In that mall, with their middle-class lifestyles, those African bodies were visually rendered as belonging to “us.” That could have been “us” in one of “our” shopping malls. I don’t think the interest in Westgate continued very long her in the US, but maybe it didn’t have to. It was a visually arresting event at the time of its occurrence. Maybe as time passed, as the assemblage came apart, the blackness, the African-ness of the bodies reasserted itself and the middle-class consumerist affect dissipated. Still, the fact these images assumed prominence for any time at all attests to the conditional malleability of who may be included on which side of “us vs them,” and the tenuous position we occupy on either side.

Entman, R. (2004). Projection of power: Framing news, public opinion, and US foreign policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lewis, S. C., & Reese, S. D. (2009). What is the war on terror? Framing through the eyes of journalists. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 86(1), 85-102.

Norris, P., Kern, M., & Just, M. (Eds.). (2003). Framing terrorism: The news media, the government and the public. London: Routledge.

Michael's Queer of Color Methodologies Post

            This weeks readings were all so wonderful. Each of them sparked something inside of me. I particularly want to focus on the pieces by Puar and Ferguson.  Specifically, I found Puar’s concept of “assemblages” and Ferguson’s emphasis on the insight women of color feminism provides us particularly relevant for my own theoretical approach. I admire the way their work really pushes the edges of academia.

            Puar (2005) contrasts assemblages with the more common “intersectionality”. She notes, “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” (127-8). If we problematize the uses of terms like race, gender, sexuality, which often reinforce bounded, static categories, then we have to move away from intersectionality. Assemblages is a viable option. What I really appreciate from this concept is that it pushes me to challenge all taken-for-granted understandings when working with individuals. Complicating what I mean by “Latina” will now be a central part of my dissertation project. Using assemblages, I will look at the ways that “Latina” involves intensities, emotions, energies, affectivities, and textures that “inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities” (Puar 2005:128). Without Puar’s insight, I would have likely fallen back on common understandings of the category. This would have contributed to what Puar calls, “a tool of diversity management” and “a mantra of liberal multiculturalism” that “colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state” (2005:128). This is completely antithetical to my goal of critiquing the state.

            I appreciate Ferguson’s (2005) claim that women of color feminism provokes “new considerations around the natures of culture and capital” (p. 85). Women of color feminism leads us to ask questions about the ways that so-called categories, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, undergo processes of differentiation, rather than identities that people have. It is this understanding of women of color feminism that made it so attractive to me as a theoretical approach. Additionally, it influenced my decision to focus on Latina artists. In order to best understand the women I will work with, I need to take a theoretical approach that is closest to what they live. As a result, women of color feminism will be a strong influence on my work. The idea of Latina being an specific, static identity that individuals possess largely comes from a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal epistemology. I need to find better ways to better understand the lives of Latinas. Additionally, Ferguson says, “I have presumed that sexuality is not an object that belongs in one particular field of inquiry but is a network of relations that constitute knowledge and sociality” (2005:87). Women of color feminism requires us to be undisciplined, which I fully agree with.

Lex's Queer of Color Methodologies Post

Puar’s “queerness as assemblage” provides a methodological approach that combines epistemology with ontology. By discussing how “bodies, such as the turbaned Sikh terrorist, interpenetrate, swirl together and transmit affects to each other” (2005, 122), Puar foregrounds several qualities of queerness (dissent, resistance and alternative) while acknowledging the continued presence of dominant structures within assemblages. 

I found Puar’s piece to be helpful in thinking how to approach my own work. By investigating parents’ and physicians’ experiences with a new form of prenatal technology, I hope to explore how the cultural meanings of “disability” (or, we could use Puar’s preferred term, debility) are expressed and produced through clinical interactions about prenatal testing. One sticking point for me is how to contextualize my work within “disability” when most of the research participants/informants will be nondisabled. Puar’s work gives me a way to talk about this, both by utilizing the theoretical concept of an assemblage, but also by talking about the ways in which bodies and epistemological positions impact one another.

If I take the sets of cultural meanings of disability as its own queer assemblage(s), by thinking through the points at which it departs from normativity and is complicit with it, this methodology will help me in making sense of the relationships and breaks in the data I collect. Even though my work will not explicitly direct “disabled embodiment” (or non-normative bodies) it will become important, I think, for me to account for the ways in which the embodied and epistemological temporality and expectations of pregnancy will potentially play into the decisions about whether to have the testing done, and whether to terminate on the basis of disability or not.

Puar goes on to describe the merits of assemblage over intersectionality, and in many ways, Puar’s emphasis on emotions, information, tactility and feeling very much line up with the kinds of data I anticipate collecting. Puar’s work here gives me a framework for how I might account for and contend with this kind of data, rather than edging it out of a more formulaic grid. Additionally, the assemblage’s “espousal of what cannot be known, seen or heard, or has yet to be” (Puar, 2005, 128) is particularly salient for my project, in that disability, in this particular context, is often that which remains to come, and represents both a futurity and, very often, a futility.

At the same time, examining disability as a queer assemblage also allows me to interrogate where there is complicity with state power, including white supremacist heteronormativity. Is it a surprise that I will have to seek out gay and lesbian couples (arguably a good example of queer liberalism!) to interview? How will I contend with the presence of compulsory normativity within these encounters? Puar helps me begin to think through these dynamics, not as demographic components but as affective components.

Something I'd like to discuss in class is the politics of queer politics. All of the theorists this week point to queer studies as a metaphor without a fixed referent, demonstrating its potential usefulness beyond and disruptive of the "queer/not-queer binary," as Puar (2005) suggests. At the same time, queer liberalism demonstrates the fulfilled potential for co-option of queer politics by the state. Are there limits to the uses of queer studies methodologies? How might we be aware of possible pitfalls? 

Rannie Queer of Methodologies

This week, I found the reading by Puar particularly interesting, especially its discussion of US exceptionalism and queerness. Puar describes how narratives of Muslim sexualities by the West cast Muslim culture (really, the prisoners at Abu Ghraib) as simultaneously repressive and perverse. The US, by contrast, is seen as the beacon of freedom and self-determination. What this process is ultimately doing, is othering the Muslim culture and the prisoners. This reminded me strongly of research of violence against women in developing countries. Many scholars and policy makers only focus their efforts on developing countries, trying to understand how and why domestic violence and sexual assault happens there. However, what often ends up happening is just reification of differences and othering of the culture of these women.

Puar discusses how the queer narratives surrounding Abu Ghraib actually other Muslim culture and blame it for how prisoners react to torture. The same process can be seen for violence against women in the third world. Somehow, culture only becomes an explanatory variable when doing with other and exotic cultures. One clear example of this is how many studies in the United States focus on psychopathology to understand violence. In this way, men who batter their wives are seen as sick individuals and women who don’t leave abusive partners are either weak or sick for staying with them. However, when similar studies are done in developing countries, cultural processes and norms are often used to explain violent behavior. In  a way, women in other cultures are blamed less for being victims, but their culture is also othered and their autonomy is undermined. Of course, there are cultural factors in the US that enable violence against women, such as privacy of the home, but these are rarely discussed. Puar also discusses how the West has effectively taken an Orientalist view of Muslim culture and problematizes its relationship between queer identities and queer behaviors. When pointing out problems in other cultures, you end up ignoring your own problems.

Puar also put forward the idea of necropolitics by Mbembe, but how it has been focused on the male and Universal suicide bomber. That suicide bomber has no context given to his life and his motivations may seem pure. However, when a woman assumes the role of a suicide bomber, her behavior and attire must both be feminized as well as some emotional distress or irrationality used to explain her behavior. Why is it that the female suicide bomber requires a motive and is portrayed as somewhat broken and frail, when that is not the case for a male bomber? 

Emily Ruehs - Queer of Color Methodologies

I am interested in exploring Ferguson’s engagement with Foucault’s understanding of governmentality, heteropatriarchal family, and the sexualized management of familial resources as part of a theoretical basis for my own work. While many of the readings this week can speak to the idea I am discussing here, I am focusing on Ferguson as I found it to be the easiest to conceptualize in my topic. Ferguson’s initial critique of Foucault is that he takes “psychoanalysis and medicalization as racially denuded procedures” (86). Ferguson’s intervention, then, is to include race into the understanding of governmentality and sexual management. For my work (again, human smuggling across the US-Mexico border), I think I can bring all of these aspects into conversation, as well. The border is an important area of government control and power, and issues of race and sexuality become obvious in the individual’s struggle for full citizenship in American society.

Ferguson suggests that women of color feminism has already offered several postulates regarding sexuality: 1) the study sexuality cannot be confined to one discipline; 2) sexuality intersects with other social locations; and 3) sexuality studies can help transcend differences between disciplines and “discursive fields.” Roderick then suggests that another important intervention is that racialized sexuality is “a mode of racialized governmentality and power” (89). He is able to support this using the history of the black middle class to demonstrate Foucault’s suggestion that the government initially controlled families and now controls populations. This is where my research intersects perfectly. I have already done some research regarding this theory and border crossings: what I have found is that while the border is meant to control for citizenship, it also controls gender and sexuality: sexual violence at the border lessens the likelihood of female crossing, maintaining male dominance over the crossing space and, as an extension, male dominance in the family unit as the primary breadwinner. Furthermore, sexual minorities have long faced severe consequences when caught on the border, particularly by government officials. One story of a transwomen, in particular, has been cited numerous times as an example of how governmentality and population control reach into areas of sexuality (and gender expression), too. Border control, then, like Ferguson’s analysis of Black history, is the result of intersecting areas of control, over citizenship (population), sexuality, and heteropatriarchal family.

Ferguson goes on to suggest that African Americans citizens who wished to embody American ideals were intentional about pursuing the white heteropatriarchal ideal (94). Similarly, Latino immigrants in the United States find their citizenship questions coinciding with questions of sexual behavior; a primary example, here, is the national “threat” of the “anchor baby.” This idea infuses stereotypes of Latina hyper-sexuality with fears of the browning of American citizenship. In this case, we cannot extrapolate the heteropatriarchy from citizenship or from sexual behavior.

Finally, Ferguson suggests that along with “sexual normativity,” war, too, was used to “be able to draft African Americans into citizenship and humanity.” While I have not yet looked into this idea, I wonder if “war” in my own research might be Latino and naturalized citizens’ participation in border politics and the militarization of the border. Perhaps along with sexual morality, participation in closing the border is what solidifies one’s acceptance into American society—although this in and of itself seems like an oversimplification, and I imagine that other social locations could still interfere (and perhaps forever prohibit) full integration into the current American system.

I appreciate the insight that Ferguson’s engagement with Foucauldian theory brings to the theoretical development of my dissertation. However, I have trouble understanding how these theories apply to methodology, and I would like to discuss this more in class.