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?