For “the Children” Dancing the Beloved Community
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10999940903088945
ISSN1548-3843
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoAbstract This essay offers the underground Black queer dance club as a key site for an exploration of not only individual desire and autonomy, but also community. Based on auto-ethnographic experience within clubs in the U.S., and close readings of Black lesbian and gay literature and theory, this intervention is made within a particularly "queer time"—past and present, futures yearned for and denied; and "queer place"—the club, the Black queer page, stage and canvas of everyday life. Beyond encouraging an orientation toward a Black queer studies that is at once about material effects and resonant affect, I also hope to sketch some ways we might re-think recent debates on the Child, relationality, and futurity in Queer Studies, which have proceeded without the voices of "the children." Keywords: blackdesirenostalgiaqueersociality This essay is lovingly dedicated to my friend James Andrew Jefferson (December 31, 1969–July 2008), who made all the difference. An earlier version was presented at the 2008 L.A. Queer Studies conference, where I was influenced by resonances with the presentations of Gayari Gopinath, Jack Halberstam, Juana Maria Rodriguez, and Rinado Walcott. I am grateful to Shaka McGlotten and Vanessa Agard-Jones for their kind guidance and keen editorial eyes. Notes J. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Sexual Cultures) (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 7. Essex Hemphill, "Tomb of Sorrow," in Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (New York: Plume, 1992). R. L. Caserio, T. Dean, L. Edelman, J. Halberstam, and J. E. Munoz, "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory," PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–828. I will not rehearse here arguments of subjection and paradigmatic racial terror already theorized from Frantz Fanon through Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, Joy James, Saidiyah Hartman, and Frank Wilderson, for example. Hortense J. Spillers, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2003), 152–175. Cathy J. Cohen, "Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for African American Studies," DuBois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45. Hortense J. Spillers, "'All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother': Psychoanalysis and Race," in Black, White, and in Color, 376–427. See Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). Edelman writes, "Since spatial limitations preclude my rehearsing and responding to each of the papers, I'll dispense with the queer utopians at once…not to dismiss their position but simply to suggest that I've already addressed that position." Edelman, "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory," paper presented at the MLA Annual Convention, December 2005. José Esteban Muñoz, (CRUISING THE TOILET: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 353–367. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5. See M. Jacqui Alexander "Not Just (Any)Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad, Tobago, and the Bahamas," Feminist Review: Sex and the State 48 (1994): 5–23. Donald Woods, "We Be Young," in Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men (Redbone Press), 70–73. Audre Lorde, "School Note," in Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 16–18. Samuel Delany, "Coming/Out," in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 67. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987). Personal Communication at Redbone Press Writing Workshop (2006). Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang, "THEORIZING QUEER TEMPORALITIES: A Roundtable Discussion," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13(2007): 177–195. Octagon has closed, holding a few special events only intermittently after 1999. E. Patrick Johnson, "Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community," Callaloo 21, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 399–416. In "Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves," in her Pedagogies of Crossing (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), M. Jacqui Alexander offers another way to see the wide-ranging processes of friendship between women. It offers an archeology of experiences and knowledges that seem to ineluctably connect to this consideration of friendship in the life. This appears in Dancing (PBS Television, 1993). Beyond the clientele of any one place, the circuits of race, desire, and belonging found Black and other men of color interacting across class (with the fewer middle-class and upper-class men having the most mobility in these circuits, of course). Alexandra Juhasz, "Video Remains: Nostalgia, Technology, and Queer Archive Activism," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 319–328. Mr. Fingers, "Can U Feel It," backed with Martin Luther King, "I Have A Dream" (Trax Records TX-127, 1986). José Esteban Muñoz, "Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts," Women and Performance (Queer Acts) 8, no. 2 (1996): 6. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Muñoz critically takes up the work of the cadre of cultural workers of the late 1980s and 1990s who, he reminds us, retold "elided histories that need both to be excavated and (re)imagined" through "powerful and calculated set of deployments of ephemeral witnessing to Black queer identity" (57). Reginald Harris, personal communication, 2007. G. Winston James, "At the Club (for Ronald Lemay, Daniel Revlon, Grace, Moi Renee and All the Legends of Old)," in The Damaged Good. (New York: Vintage Entity Press), 94–97. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Ibid., 4. Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 51–63. From a statement by the Combahee River Collective. While the future needs of the Symbolic Child he poses are held above the present needs of adults who fall out of heteronormative time and place, in the real world of queer-headed families of color, family figures in the recognition of interdependence between, for example, queer children and parents or extended family members in need, biological and adopted children, and kids in need. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 85. The necropolitics referred to here is echoed by Black activists and artists. Essex Hemphill emphasizes in "The Tomb of Sorrow," "everyone wants a price for my living." As Matt Richardson has observed, scripts of participation in the time and space of Black life, or any other space other than that which they make for themselves, are never extended to Black transpeople, who exist as spectral presences haunting [these and other] margins. Thomas Glave, "Fire and Ink: Toward a Quest for Language, History, and a Moral Imagination," Callaloo 26, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 215. Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 76. Marvin K. White, "A Letter that Looks Like a Poem for a Dance Floor that Feels Like an Altar," in Last Rights (Washington, D.C.: Redbone Press, 2002), 69–72.
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