I’m headed to the American Studies Association Conference in Alburque New Mexico the day after tomorrow. For those of you that are unfamiliar, the "ASAs "are a fancy-smansy conference where many of cultural studies’ most notorious insurgent intellectuals convene for a weekend of intellectual mischief making. This will be my first trip to the conference.
I’ll be presenting a paper in a panel moderated by Northwestern University’s E. Patrick Johnson. I’ll be joined by three fantastic colleagues: Marlon M. Bailey of Indiana University-Bloomington (a graduate of UC Berkeley’s African Diaspora Studies Program), Jeffrey Q. McCune of the University of Maryland-College Park (a graduate of Northwestern’s Performance Studies program) and Christina Hanhardt, also of the University of Maryland-College Park (and a graduate of NYU’s American Studies program). The description of our panel is below (its a little lengthy, sorry, you know us academics like to get wordy sometimes).
If you have a moment you can stop and check out the complete list of papers and panels being delivered at this year's conference. The link is available here.
"Back Down To the Ground: Race, Structural Inequality and the Violence of Everyday Queer Life"
Presented at the 2008 American Studies Association Conference
Panelists:
E. Patrick Johnson (Chair), Christina Hanhardt, Marlon M. Bailey, Frank Leon Roberts and Jeffrey Q. McCune
"The changing geopolitical landscape of the United States in the age of neoliberalism has facilitated an increasing climate of violence towards racialized queer bodies. We know this story well: it is manifested in the widespread spatial-political displacements of people of color in urban centers in the name of improved “quality of life” (as in the case of New York City with its spatial remappings of neighborhoods such as the West Village and Chelsea); in media-driven demonizations of racialized queer cultural practices (as in the extensive media frenzy over African American men “on the down low”) and in certain state sanctioned conditions of unequal access which have exacerbated biomedical injustice (as in the continued rise in HIV/AIDS prevalence among queer men of color in urban areas).
In what ways might American Studies work toward a truly liberatory explication of what these conditions actually look like and feel like on the ground, between and amongst the communities which are suffering from the daily results of such routine disenfranchisements?
The four papers brought together in this panel attempt to pose a critical conceptual intervention in American Studies. These essays work towards a new understanding of the constitutive nature of violence in framing, producing, and articulating what an elusive category like “queer of color” actually look likes and feels like in everyday experience. Cross-disciplinary and multi-methodological, these papers together ask what happens to our understandings of “violence” when it indexes that which is ideological as much as that which is embodied? E. Patrick Johnson, co-author of Black Queer Studies, will provide a response.
In “Double Time: Queer Violence, Dis-Ease, and Danger” Jeffrey Q. McCune draws from his fieldwork among African American men in Chicago, Illinois to explore the ways in which the “down low” as a cultural practice functions to protect racialized subjects from racial-sexual-class surveillance. He sets this analysis alongside a critical reading of the film Brother to Brother by Rodney Evans.
Frank Leon Roberts, in “The Ethics of Affection” looks at what he identifies as a “perverse ethics of kinship” practiced among queer men of color living, dying, and negotiating the AIDS pandemic in one of New York City’s most deeply impoverished/infected neighborhoods (Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn).
Similarly, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Detroit and Oakland, Marlon M. Bailey delineates how Black queer communities (particularly those engaged in subcultural practices such as the “ballroom scene”) utilize performance as praxis in their quotidian struggles against the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Finally, Christina Hanhardt, in her paper “The ‘Particular Task’ of ‘Integrated Analysis’” draws on the foundational work of the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” to provide an alternate genealogy for contemporary activism against anti-gay violence. In doing so, she also excavates the history of never-before-studied grassroots organizations dedicated to understanding the links between racism, homophobia, and institutional violence, such as Dykes Against Racism Everywhere in New York and Lesbians Against Police Violence in San Francisco.
Taken together, these four papers highlight grounded sites of cultural production and everyday forms of activism by queers of color in order to push American Studies towards an engagement with theories “in the flesh”— engagements which might move the field towards a truly radical conceptual reordering of the theory/practice divide. "
