by Michael Hames-García, Professor, UO Department of Ethnic Studies
Last fall, I was asked by the editor of Feminist Studies to write a review essay on four recent books in the broad field of queer studies. I titled the forthcoming essay “What’s after Queer Theory? Queer Ethnic and Indigenous Studies.” The question might as easily be asked about “women’s studies” or even “feminist studies.” Indeed, it has been asked in various ways over the years, with answers ranging from “third wave feminism” to “gender studies” to (disingenuously) “post-feminism” to (ironically) “queer theory.” Often, such questions posed of feminism imply that contributions by women of color and antiracist feminists are crucial to whatever new configuration might follow, suggesting that feminism up to that point has not adequately addressed race and racism. However, the scholarship and activism of those working to dismantle racialized gender hierarchies are most often understood as an addition, a new limb to be grafted on to the feminist trunk. This grafting process will produce a new fruit, one that draws from the best characteristics of each of the original plants, one supposes.
My own scholarship and the books I have just reviewed for Feminist Studies break with the logic of a botanical graft. To give a sense of how that break has taken shape, let me reproduce here the two epigraphs I use for my review essay:
The decision to exercise intellectual sovereignty provides a crucial moment in the process from which resistance, hope, and most of all, imagination issue.
To what historical trajectory would queerness attach itself, so that it could be legible to itself and to others? Which geographic locations would be meaningful for queer theory’s central inquiries?
The first of these come from Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions; the second from Sharon Holland’s The Erotic Life of Racism. These lines suggest, shockingly perhaps, that queer ethnic and indigenous studies need not be grafted onto the trunk of an intellectual tradition that did not have queer people of color in mind when it first established itself. The call for intellectual sovereignty suggests that it might not be necessary to figure out how to make Julia Kristeva or Judith Butler antiracist. One might simply ignore them altogether and look for different historical trajectories than modernism-postmodernism, different geographic locations than Europe and North America. One can hear echoes of earlier calls by Egyptian economist Samir Amin for “delinking” or Tanzanian revolutionary Julius Nyerere’s call for an “African socialism.”
Does this break represent the end of coalitional politics? The end of any engagement with, for lack of a better term, “white” feminist and queer theorists? I don’t think so. What I see in these polemic calls for independence of thought and tradition is an end to dependence on intellectual traditions that at best have nothing to say about their own whiteness and at worst perpetuate ethnocentric and Eurocentric bias. To the extent that some scholars continue to find value in Eurocentric intellectual traditions, they should work to graft them on to a trunk more thoroughly grounded in liberationist concerns. That trunk, however, cannot itself be Eurocentric.
Aztec codices and African folktales may not be any more liberatory for women than classical Greek philosophers, but they are arguably no worse. However, the effort to shift our attention away from (exclusively, relentlessly) European origins for knowledge production can have a profoundly democratizing impetus that will make feminist and queer studies better and more relevant to a wider number of people. One of the things that I love about Roderick Ferguson’s 2003 Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique is his assiduous avoidance of any citation to Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler—theorists whom graduate students of my generation were taught to revere as the founders of queer theory. Thinking about the politics of sexuality and culture without them was believed to be impossible. They supposedly enabled the very possibility of critical thinking about sexuality. What their constant invocation actually made very difficult, however, was what Ferguson achieved in his book: a thorough engagement with the complex legacies of sexuality for African Americans.
The future of feminist studies—if it has one, and I fervently hope that it does—will be a future in which feminist studies are antiracist and anti-imperialist studies. Not some of the time, or even most of the time, but all of the time from beginning to end. For those of us trained in the Euro-American feminist canon of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, this might mean learning to let go of our cherished
foundations.
—Michael Hames-García is professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the author of Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2011) and Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He also coedited three books, including the Lambda Literary Award winning Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader with Ernesto Martínez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). He is set to become the new director of CSWS in AY 2014-15.