Racism and Sexism Questions

Cathy J. Cohen’s “Punks, Buldaggers, and Welfare

Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer

Politics?” AfAm & WMNST 103

April 13, 2021

Cohen on Queer Politics

+Reflecting on the limitations of a civil rights strategy while also maintaining an aim to address racism in LGBTQ communities and spaces

+Civil rights strategy, for Cohen, relies on the goal of assimilation which replicates dominant institutions and structures

+Moving away from a focus on integration into dominant structures, “but instead seeks to transform the basic fabric and hierarchies that allow systems of oppression to persist and operate efficiently.”

+Challenge to traditional gay and lesbian politics offered by the idea of queer politics

Emergence of Queer Politics and a New Transformation + Queer politics inspired Cohen and others ”a potential movement

of young antiassimilationist activists committed to challenging the very way people understand and respond to sexuality.ӈ engaging in struggles that would disrupt dominant norms of sexuality, radically transforming politics in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities

+Thesis: “Despite the possibility invested in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, I argue that a truly radical or transformative politics has not resulted from queer activism.”

(Queering) Queer politics + Cohen argues that (normative) queer politics– even insofar it has destabilized

assumed categories and binaries of sexual identity” has served to reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything “queer.”

+ “An understanding of the ways in which power informs and constitutes privileged and marginalized subjects on both sides of this dichotomy has been left unexamined.”

+ We have yet to understand the potential that stems from queer activism to construct a new politics.

+ ”A politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades. I’m talking about a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, is the basis for progressive transformative coalition work.”

Transformational political work

+… has yet to begin

+For Cohen, the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics would seem to be located in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms.

+Potential, transformational work, located in the in-between: parallels the “different conceptualizations of sexuality (emerging in the 90s)… one which sought to replace socially named and presumably stable categories of sexual expression with a new fluid movement among and between forms of sexual behavior.”

+ “Queer theory stands in direct contrast to the normalizing tendencies of hegemonic sexuality rooted in ideas of static, stable sexual identities and behaviors. In queer theorizing the sexual subject is understood to be constructed and contained by multiple practices of categorization and regulation that systematically marginalize and oppress those subjects thereby defined as deviant and “other.””

+ ”And, at its best, queer theory focuses on and makes central not only the socially constructed nature of sexuality and sexual categories, but also the varying degrees and multiple sites of power distributed within all categories of sexuality, including the normative category of heterosexuality.”

+ “… first and foremost [queer politics] recognizes and encourages the fluidity and movement of people’s sexual lives. In queer politics sexual expression is something always entails the possibility of change, movement, redefinition, and subversive performance– from year ot year, from partner to partner, from day to day, even from act to act.”

Queer Politics (continued)

+”Thus queer politics, much like queer theory, is often perceived as standing in opposition, or in contrast, to the category-based identity politics of traditional lesbian and gay activism. And for those of us who find ourselves on the margins, operating through multiple identities and thus not fully served or recognized through traditional single-identity based politics, theoretical conceptualizations of queerness hold great political promise.”

A Left Framework of Politics

+ “… unlike civil right or liberal frameworks, [a left framework of politics] brings into focus the systematic relationship among forms of domination, where the creation and maintenance of exploited, subservient, marginalized classes is a necessary of, at the very least, economic configuration.”

+ Strategies built upon the possibility of incorporation and assimilation are exposed as simply expanding and making accessible the status quo for more privileged members of marginal groups, while the most vulnerable in our communities continue to be stigmatized and oppressed.

+ Left theorists tend to provide a more structural analysis of oppression and exploitation (addresses homophobia and heterosexism and topics of sexuality)

+ Subverts contradiction of adherence to a heterosexual norm running through feminist analysis and action.

Cohen touching on the history of anti-blackness against the context of heteronormativity

+ The ideology of slave societies which denied the legal sanctioning of marriages between slaves and further reasoned that Blacks had no conceptions of family (think about David, Morgan, and Roberts)

+ ”Mid-nineteenth-century class and sexual beliefs reinforced racial beliefs about Afro- Americans. As slaves, after all, their marriages had not been sanctioned by the civil laws and therefore “the sexual passion” went unrestrained…. Many white abolitionists denied the slaves a family life or even, often, a family consciousness because for them [whites] the family had its origins in and had to be upheld by civil law.”

+ “Marriage and heterosexuality, as viewed through the lenses of profit and domination, and the ideology of white supremacy, were reconfigured to justify the exploitation and regulation of black bodies, even those presumably engaged in heterosexual behavior. It was this system of state-sanctioned, white male, upper-class, heterosexual domination that forced these presumably black heterosexual men and women to endure a history of rape, lynching, and other forms of physical and mental terrorism” (454).

Loving v. Virginia

+ In 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia. The Lovings returned to Virginia shortly thereafter. The couple was then charged with violating the state's antimiscegenation statute, which banned inter-racial marriages. The Lovings were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail (the trial judge agreed to suspend the sentence if the Lovings would leave Virginia and not return for 25 years).

A. Leon Higginbotham: “Colonial anxiety about interracial sexual activity cannot be attributed solely to 17th century values, for it was not until 1967 that the US Supreme Court finally declared unconstitutional those statutes prohibiting interracial marriages. The Supreme Court waited 13 years after its Brown decision dealing with desegregation of schools before, in Loving v. Virginia, it agreed to consider the issue of interracial marriages.”

+ Cohen: “It is this pattern of regulating the behavior and denigrating the identities of those heterosexual on the outside of heteronormative privilege, in particular those perceived as threatening systems of white supremacy, male domination, and capitalist advancement that I want to highlight. An understanding of the ways in which heteronormativity works to support and reinforce institutional racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation must therefore be a part of how we problematize current constructions of heterosexuality.”

Analysis: -Queer politics is necessary to think about how categories of heterosexuality reinforce itself as ”pure,” visible in terms of “whiteness,” and homogenous. - In Loving v. Virginia, we can understand how inter-racial desire posed a threat to law and power

through the law’s own objective to segregate (inter-racial) desire and sexual relations as such - Inter-racial relationships were prohibited after the de-segregation of schools speaks to the ways

in which a queer analysis is necessary to think about how sexuality plays a role in institutional power and power-making.

- Queer politics--> to think about how inter-racial sexuality (when outside of the privileges of heteronormativity) faces conflicts across class, race, ability, etc.

Conclusion from both texts

+Destabilization of radical coalitional work;

+Critical reflection on the language of both academia and activism (what is a politics (queer or otherwise) without potential of transformational change?

+ Requires thinking about the limits of every dimension to coalitional work (relationships and relationality, language, sense of being, etc.)

+Fighting against the policing and criminalization of identities;

+Respective and not analogical-– yet share the call for a rigorous commitment in consciousness and paradigm shift…