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.