Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color CritiqueThe sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture--sexual difference--can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology--Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson--has measured African Americans' unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans' culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories--the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture--works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story--one in which people who presumably manifest the dys-functions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery--a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way thatcomplicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse--which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis--that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology. A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture. |
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aesthetic African American culture African American literature African American nonheteronormative African American racial African American sexuality agency American Dilemma argues articulation Asian Asian American Baldwin Bigger black lesbian feminist black matriarchy black women canonical formations canonical sociology capital's capitalist Chicago citizenship civil rights coalition color analysis color feminism context contradictions discourse of black disruption economic Ellison emergence epistemological ethical exclusion Foucault gender gender and sexual global Go Tell hegemonic heteronormative heteropatri heteropatriarchal heterosexual homosexual Ibid ideals identity immigrants industrialization intersections James Baldwin labor lesbian feminist liberal capitalism liberal ideology literature Marx marxism matriarchy migration modern Moynihan Report Myrdal narrative national liberation nationalist negation Negro nonhetero nonnormative nonwhite novel Park pathologies perversions political postnationalist American studies practices produced prostitute queer of color race racial difference racial formations regulatory revolutionary nationalism Richard Wright sexual normativity sexual regulation sociologists sociology's subjects Sula theory tion transgressions urban women of color Woodridge Wright