On Queer Theory: Critiquing Ferguson's Aberrations in Black
Overview
Piggybacking off the work of women of color feminism in general and black lesbian feminism in particular, Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique advocates a “queer of color” analysis making use of an intersectional approach to theorize black identity and (black) queer subjectivity in spaces where it is often silenced and altogether elided. By identifying the ways in which historical materialism, liberalism, canonical sociology, and revolutionary nationalisms are linked and collude to pathologize black culture, his text makes a necessary intervention in contemporary sociology, black cultural studies, and queer studies.
In noticing the agential possibilities of cultural forms, such as the novel, his work evinces various nonhetero-nonnormative identities in an attempt to recover experiences of black culture that coalesce around labor and sexuality. It also gestures toward the available opportunities of resistance that are often neglected or undercut by assumptions of universality and heteronormative agents that regulate, subordinate, and relegate to the margins racial and sexual minorities and black populations in particular.
Ferguson problematizes black culture’s relationship to the heteronormative by looking at black cultural difference, and specifically sexual difference, through the lens of white sociology, legal history and government policy, black cultural producers, and black cultural form. Thus, through his reading of intertwining racial, class, gender, and sexual politics, he aims to reassociate and reconcile queer studies to analyses of cultural studies. He analyzes the symbol of the prostitute to reveal how disruptions in capitalist expansion converge and conspire via sexual transgression under labor to produce, discipline, and locate the racialized Other, who always remains outside of heteropatriarchy, and, thus, by extension, outside of capital.
This effect also complicates notions of citizenship through technologies of liberalism—i.e. discourses of progress; notions of liberty and equality; and the very technologies of citizenship, race and ethnicity, sexuality, statistics, and canonicity—that hail universality as a condition of possibility “promised” to the black subject and black “community.”
Owing to sexual difference and moreover to purported “pathologies” of black culture, however, universality can never be accessed by blacks because of the variegated positions (that critical race theory vis-a-vis black feminism tries to locate through intersectionality) stand in opposition to universality. On this point, he notes: “[t]he universality of the citizen exists in opposition to the intersecting particularities that account for material existence, particularities of race, gender, class, and sexuality” (12).
He points to the black prostitute specifically to emphasize how racialized sexuality operates under capital. While Ferguson deploys Althusserian Marxism to critique bourgeois capital, he effectively gestures to the theory of historical materialism that Althusser argues should not be dismissed but rather “disidentified” (as he cites the late Munoz’ term) to extend and make useable the theory for the purposes of those categories and positions that classical Marxism does not account for, namely: race, gender, and sexual identities. To be sure, Ferguson suggests: “Disidentifying with historical materialism means determining the silences and ideologies that reside within critical terrains, silences and ideologies that equate representations with reality” (5).
Furthermore, Ferguson draws on Foucault’s work to link “multiplication of racialized discourses of sexuality and gender” to the “multiplication of labor under capital” (12). He makes this move to demonstrate that critiques of capital must not only always account for gender and sexuality but also for race and class. Indeed, invoking Foucault’s well-known work, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Ferguson contends “[t]he sexual formation of nonwhite subjects coheres with but also departs from, the model presumed by Foucault’s theory of confession. This departure makes it apparent why the critique of sexuality must be wedded to critiques of state and capital” (78).
For Ferguson, this departure is necessary because while confession and psychoanalysis conjure interiority as a means to locate the “rational” subject, or Man, sociology is preoccupied with exteriority to articulate the sexual truth of racialized subjectivity. This contention is especially significant in a discussion of the black subject owing to the materiality of the black body that is always already sexualized in the Western imagination, particularly due to the work of canonical sociology and other epistemologies, such as cultural work.
Much like other black sociologists, Ferguson challenges canonical sociology and the myriad ways historiography of race in America establishes racial knowledge for sociology, cultural studies, government policy, and even black culture too. Examining “the material and discursive productions” of black culture he notes how “nonheteronormativity provided the interface between the gendered and eroticized properties of African American racial formation and the material practices of state and civil society” (21). He asserts “epistemology along with politics and economics composes the cultural terrain” (24). For Ferguson, then, culture enacts a dialogic relationship, or in the very least—opens up a space for contradictions in a dialectic—between the hegemonic and the counterhegemonic.
To rebut established racial knowledge gleaned through canonical sociology, he juxtaposes sociology's canonical authors—e.g. Conrad Bentzen, Gunnar Myrdal, Robert E. Park, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—with black novelists/novels—e.g. Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Toni Morrison’s Sula—to illustrate how black culture and black cultural form(s) repudiate widespread sociological assumptions.
Ferguson addresses also the other side of the coin, however, in that through black culture’s “idealization” of the heteronormative, such as Richard Wright’s nationalism and endorsement of classical Marxism and/or the revolutionary nationalism of the Black Panther Party among other national liberation political platforms, he postulates if (and how) black cultural forms can actually facilitate liberal ideology. By privileging the articulations of the black heteronormative and through silencing other nonnormative voices, black women and black queer voices, for example, black culture has affiliated with and perpetuated the very liberalism it intends to challenge.
Critical Engagement
One set of problems arise in part from the fact that Ferguson is a sociologist who produced a work of sociology. While this is certainly not a problem unto itself, point of fact is that his interdisciplinary approach leaves something to be desired as it pertains to literary criticism. In the article “Black Cultural Studies,” literary scholar David Marriott explains why exactly Ferguson’s methodology is problematic:
Ferguson writes as a sociologist, that is, he consistently fails to address questions of aesthetics and literary form as meaningful or cogent to his argument. The result is a thematics [sic] which reduces the literary to the role of a contra-sociology. A more nuanced style of reading would have avoided this inflexible and mechanical binary between literature and sociological rationality. (267)
Concomitant with this undertheorization of the novel, and the black novel more particularly, his analysis of black literature seems slight and peripheral to his study. His argument apropos the literary is particularly underdeveloped in his readings of Wright’s and Baldwin’s work.
For example, in chapter 1, Ferguson references Cedric J. Robinson’s pathbreaking Black Marxism to position and assail Wright’s relationship with classical Marxism. Ferguson critiques the fact that “Wright’s nationalism called for a specifically masculine revolutionary agency to oppose” what Wright noted as “feminization” of the race (45). However, Ferguson fails to contextualize a number of important details here. He fails to cite Robinson or Wright for that matter, on the political nature and content of his novels. Doing so would have provided more of a substantial theoretical engagement with the black novel and appropriately contributed to the reader’s overall understanding of why Ferguson chose the novel form over every other literary or cultural form.
Additionally, Ferguson seemingly selectively overlooks the contentious relationship that the novel Native Son had with classical Marxism as Wright’s characterization of Bigger surely suggests. Nor does Ferguson acknowledge the fact that Wright renounced classical Marxism and left the communist party shortly after Native Son was published—within one’s year time—also a fact pointed out by Robinson in Black Marxism.
Moreover, Ferguson’s reading of race through class is a questionable move and largely inadequate as constructed in its attempt to theorize black oppression because class consciousness does not supersede racism as an ideology. Elsewhere, in 12 Million Black Voices for example, Wright acknowledges that all of us suffer class oppression, but he also insinuates that class oppression does not explain our deep psychological sense of alienation.
On this score, in a discussion of the failures of Marxism for the black political subject, Afropessimist theorist Frank B. Wilderson states in an interview: “It [class oppression] certainly does not explain why the corpus of violence does not treat us [blacks] as middle class.” Had Ferguson’s analysis included these counterpoints and provided a critical space for other theories of oppression—as Cornel West and Angela Davis and Manning Marable and others have, alluding to its necessity because they view Marxist thought as “indispensable yet insufficient,”—his argument might have been a more nuanced and therefore more tenable.
Additionally, Ferguson pays fleeting attention to queer black politics. That there is a lack of critical space devoted to black queer male and female voices, as well as the experiences of other nonwhite, nonblack queer folks, renders ironic and myopic this work of queer of color critique as emergent discourse. Moreover, in that vein, Ferguson’s reading of James Baldwin’s famous debut novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, is problematic apropos of its perceived sexual politics. For example, Ferguson begins his literary analysis noting that the protagonist’s homoerotic tendencies locate him in the realm of nonnormativity via John’s admissions of masturbation to the thought of older boys.
However, John’s confession is the most Baldwin discloses to readers about the protagonist’s characterization as a “closeted” homosexual. Ferguson submits John as a black, queer subject to support his claim that the novel depicts sexual nonheteronormativity. Without requisite evidence to support this reading, such a fallacious rhetorical move seems to be a logical stretch at best. Baldwin’s novel, Another Country—a text that problematizes more clearly and substantially racial, sexual, and national politics—would certainly have served Ferguson’s argumentative purposes more effectively.
Furthermore, Ferguson inexplicably conflates and moves somewhat seamlessly between the extremely political and highly contested terms “black” and “African American” throughout the text, but especially in chapters 1 and 2, without offering any clarification on which term he prefers. This no doubt is a curious and uncharacteristic move for a sociologist to make. Also problematic is that in chapter 3, he suggests that Baldwin’s work is representative of “Black diaspora cultures,” but fails to outline how he makes this connection. Baldwin, his work, and particularly this novel are not a part of the “Black diaspora” in the ways Ferguson means, primarily insofar that Baldwin was a “black American” in the sense that there is no other place to which he belongs—one of the many dilemmas that face the black American. Wilderson and other scholars have challenged the term diaspora in relation to blackness, as no more a homeland than a slave estate.
To this point, Wilderson elaborates on the work of Achille Mbembe that locates Africa (and its diaspora) as a “big slave estate.” It is in this context Baldwin formulates elsewhere his relationship to America as a nominal Americanness and revises DuBoisan double consciousness to explain his fractured identity. This particularity of experience is unique to the black American, not to the other experiences of those of the African diaspora—as Baldwin himself points out in various works throughout his literary career.
Moreover, it should also be noted that Baldwin was an expatriate who lived most of his life in France and in Turkey and produced most of his oeuvre abroad, including the novel under consideration, Go Tell it on the Mountain, which he completed in Switzerland. Thus, in my view, these realizations do not make Baldwin or this particular novel, set in Harlem, applicable to the Black diasporic tradition.
Additionally, Ferguson spends a fair amount of space teasing out the problems of canonical formation. Nearly halfway through Ferguson’s text, for example, he cites John M. Reilly on the novel: “While canonical formations promise normalcy to the racialized nonwhite subject, such promises are techniques of discipline rather than vehicles toward liberation” (65). Yet Ferguson rather ironically (or perhaps, non-ironically?) employs hypercanonical black writers and novels (the aforementioned works of Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison) to counterpoise sociological texts and the racial episteme they produce.
Readers might wonder, is it not specious and somewhat utopian to argue that novels can accomplish this work? These writers all have extensive bodies of work that contain—what is in my view—much more effective, political nonfiction (Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, Black Power and Black Boy, etc.; Ellison: Shadow and Act; Baldwin: The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, No Name in the Street, Nobody Knows my Name; Morrison: Playing in the Dark). Ferguson might have produced more cogent analysis had he drawn on works of nonfiction such as these.
Finally, I reject both the tendency of minority scholars and the oft advanced proposition that minority groups in general and blacks in particular can replicate or engage hegemony by merely endorsing a heteronormative position through counternarratives. For Ferguson, the heteronormative is constituted by systems of power that sustain itself through material and discursive formations and operate via exclusion of marginalized communities based on race, class, gender, and sexual locations. Then, if we accept his premise, it seems implausible and illogical that mere rhetorical, symbolic gestures might grant the marginal access to the hegemonic.
In support of this logic, Ferguson deploys two controversial figures, Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver founders of the Black Panther Party, to discuss what he calls the “facilitation” of liberal ideology owing to their heteronormative stances on black women and homosexuality within the party. However, I find uncritical and fallacious the assumption that simply by the virtue of Newton’s and Cleaver’s articulations—which both later renounced—that they managed to “collude” with hegemonic and heteronormative liberalism. In my view, this seems to be overinflating the agency of marginalized groups.
Furthermore, to read the Black Panther Party as a model of the heteronormative when several of their well-documented practices critiqued and reversed normative gender roles is not only inaccurate but intellectually lazy. The Black Panther Party's “Free Breakfast for Children” program, for example, implemented a specific gender role reversal in its politics, in which male Panther leaders cooked breakfast while female Panther leaders “manned” local offices with rifles.
To refer to the Panthers as a heteronormative national liberation party shortchanges and undermines their lasting ideological and rhetorical impact. One can look so far as Netwon’s theory of “intercommunalism” as an example of the Panthers’ theoretical and coalition politics to counteract Ferguson’s misreading of the Panther legacy. Lastly, the Panthers’ theory of “Third Worldism” and the promotion of women in leadership roles (e.g. Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, Afeni Shakur, among others) may serve as another meaningful site of resistance on which a queer of color critique might ultimately capitalize.
