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.