Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Prison abolition, earth and environmental studies, American studies
-Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)
Ann Laura Stoler
- Stoler examines the relationship between colonialism and the policing of intimacy. She posits that more than being a “discursive symbol, instrumental in the conveyance of other meanings” the policing of intimacy was vital to creating the power structures underlying colonialism. The way intimacy was policed was also highly mutable, as the acceptance of concubinage by colonial authority varied depending on what would be beneficial to European identity. The policing of intimacy was the mechanism by which colonial racial and national identities and roles were created in order to benefit colonizers. Stoler’s work connects with our themes of Racialization/Gender Construction and Racial Capitalism.
"...increasingly acknowledges the extent to which race is not an independent given on which LAW acts, but rather a social construction at least in part fashioned by law."
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John Calmore
- Prof. @ UNC Law
- taught CRT
- Civil Rights Leader
Ian Haney Lopez
- White by Law
- Whiteness and Citizenship
- Involved in variety of court cases
- Legal construction of race
White by Law:
"...scholarship recognizes that race is a legal construction."
Whiteness:
Concept of "Ideal whiteness" = "...the 'natural' supremacy of those ideals over all others."
Sexual education
Citizenship
Norms
Racialization/Social Construction of Gender/Race
Kimberle Crenshaw
- Demarlginalizing the intersection of race & sex
- "... tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis"
Intersectionality
Gerald Torres & Kathryn Milan
- legal concept of "tribe" on Mashpee of Massachusetts
- tribe had to prove existence of tribe in legal terms
Absence of legal tribe definition led to the "nonexistence" of Mashpee people
existence depended on particular definition of race and tribe
Capitalism requires hierarchy, and racism enshrines it
Which is to say, all capitalism
Capitalism requires hierarchy/inequality, uses race to produce, entrench, and normalize it.
Pre-existed "modern" ideas of race
Elaborated in context of:
- Enslavement
- colonialism
- Land theft
Exists even in "multicultural" liberal modernity
"Capitalism requires hierarchy, racism enshrines it."
Citizenship
"...the dual movement in which certain homosexual constituencies have embraced US nationalist agendas and have also been embraced by nationalist agendas."
- Inclusion of some queer subjects in order to better entrench US nationalism and imperialism
Patriotism
War
Torture
Security
Death
terror
Terrorism
Detention
deportation
NEOLIBERALISM
White-Race Consciousness: that there exists a tendency among Whites not to see themselves in racial terms. Prof. Flagg identifies this tendency as one of the defining characteristics of being White, and labels this the “transparency phenomenon.” “The most striking characteristic of Whites’ consciousness of whiteness is that most of the time we don’t have any.
Avery F. Gordon
-Ghostly Matters
Jasbir K. Puar
- Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2009)
- Rutgers... WGSS
- PhD from Berkeley
- Queer geography, south Asian cultural studies, homonationalism
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Henry Giroux
Requires heterosexuality, and whiteness enshrines it.
Power
Julian Carter
- The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America
Norma and Normman
Biopower
Self Evident
Racialized
Power evasiveness
Stuart Hall
- Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices; The Great Moving Right; Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History; Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse
- Jamaican scholar, instrumental in founding the field of Cultural Studies
- Heterosexual white couples= America.
- Represented "what is" (representation of a "typical" white man and woman body).
- White ppl used civilization as a way to maintain power
Marriage
See this everyday, whether it be in TV, movies, readings, etc.
Sex education didn't (doesn't) outwardly state that white heterosexuals is the norm but it also didn't speak of other sexualities
Foucaultdian disciplinary power
Foucault
- Major Work: The History of Sexuality, “Society Must Be Defended” (1976), Discipline and Punish (1975)
- French philosopher celebrated for his theories concerning knowledge and power.
- Discourse refers to “the systems of thoughts, composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs, and actions”
Jodi Malemed
Cedric Robinson
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983): used racial capitalism as a way to understand “the general history of modern capitalism”. Racialism and capitalism evolved together (“slavery, violencce, imperialism, and genocide”)
Contain roots in eugenics
- "...the contemporary US
heteronormative nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation of queerness".
“What’s distinctive about haunting is that it’s an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known” (xvi)
Achille Mbembe
- Cameroonian political theorist
- Time, necropolitics, post-colonial studies
- On Postcolony
- Necropolitics (2003)
In chapter one of Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Hall traces the conception of language from “semiotics to discourse.”
- Introduces Foucault’s theory of discourse, writing “What concerned him was the production of knowledge (rather than Just meaning) through what he called discourse (rather than just language)” (43).
- Introduces Foucault’s power/knowledge. Power/knowledge acknowledges that power and knowledge are inextricable. Knowledge is not only a form of power, but power is always being negotiated within knowledge.
Rodrick Ferguson
- Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique (2004) and The Reorder of Things (2012)
- Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University
- Focuses on the study of race, queer studies, and the feminism of women of color.
- Challenges Marx’s historical materialism, promoting a Queer of Color critique.
Instead of assuming a narrow approach that overlooks the influence of race, sexuality, and gender, Queer of Color critique seeks to interogate the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender within “nation-states and capital”
Analyzes surplus populations in particular
Critiques hegemony, liberal ideology, liberal capitalism, and canonical sociology.
Critical Race Theory
Foucault's 3 Modes of Power
1) Perpetrator/ Victim Power
- “...thinking about power in terms of repression or subtraction has been inscribed in law. This model has generated a number of critiques because it fails to account for many of the problems that face groups on the losing end of systems of distribution...the perpetrator perspective prevents us from looking at the unequal conditions that entire populations experience because it focuses on the intentional actions of individual discriminators.” (51).
Dean Spade:
- American lawyer, writer, and trans activist.
- Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.
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“Citizenship is a status whose definitions are always in process. It is continually being produced out of a political, rhetorical, and economic struggle over who will count as ‘the people’ and how social membership will be measured and valued." (Lauren Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington City p. 20)
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Gender/Sexual nonnormativity is understood and policed through the register of race. Racism operates through the language of gender/sexual nonnormativity.
Hate Crimes
“whites only” signs at private businesses
firings/refusals to hire because of particular identities
2) Disciplinary Power
- The disciplinary mode of power refers to how racism, transphobia, sexism, ableism, and homophobia operate through norms that produce ideas about types of people and proper ways to be. These norms are enforced through internal and external policing and discipline.
medicine
social sciences
education where standards of healthfulness, proper behavior, and socialization are established and taught
3) Population-Management Power
- Idea of othering, using this power to create interventions that impact the population as a whole through the logic of promoting health and security of the nation. “The programs that constitute the nation by pacifying the territory and producing population-wide regimes of authorized, standardized practice produce and require the identification of "othered" populations.”(pg. 58)
Welfare queens
latin american immigration
war on drugs
Taxation
military conscription
criminal punishment
Judith Butler:
- Undoing gender
- “false forms of universalism that service a tacit or explicit cultural imperialism.”
“Is there very much that follows from the fact of an originating sexual difference?” (10)
"the early twentieth century emergence of the "normal" American, through which a particular kind of person came to be perceived as uniquely modern, uniquely qualified for citizenship, uniquely natural and healthy"
Queerness for profit
Norms
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Construction of "normal" represents the ability to teach white racial meanings without appearing to do so.
- “Reddy suggests that the decisive intervention of queer of color analysis that racist practice articulates itself generally as gender and sexual regulation, and sexual differences variegate racial formations” (Abberations 3)
- “Queer of color analysis, on the other hand, eschews the transparency of these formations, and opts instead for an understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the ide of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation” (Abberations 3)
-Introduces formations of "Queerly radicalized terrorist populations"
Homonationalism
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Eithne Luibheid
Luibheid illustrates how the U.S. border is a site for the construction and regulation of nonnormative sexualities. By asking the question "How would they know?" she explores how U.S. immigration services constructed categories of nonnormative sexuality.
Marx and Historical Materialism
Social constructions
Racial Capitalism
Five “methodological precautions” that further trouble power
To approach power from its extremities
To analyze power’s production of the subject
To understand that power circulates and “is exercised through networks” (29)
To acknowledge that power is not centralized
To recognize that power cannot function without knowledge
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racism “is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (254).
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Dual edged sword of racism and misogyny
Critique of single axis frames that fail to hold people with multiple intersecting identities.
Both discourses of feminism and antiracism fail women of color “by not acknowledging the ‘additional’ burden of patriarchy or of racism, and are often inadequate in articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism”
Soibhan Somerville
- the emergence of “new” sexual identities and the reconfigiration of racilazed identities in the late 19th century and early 20th were not singular events through which those meanings were simply established once and for all but rather ongping processes of contestation and accumulation. Essentially both racial identities/categories emerged in tandem with sexual idenities and understandings...ie race informed gender informed sexuality and vice versa.
Racial and sexual hierarchies are implicit in the “normality”
Emerged from court cases that failed to regonize the discrimination uniquly expierenced by black women in the work feild
- Courts argued they were not racist nor misogynistic b/c they hired black men and white women
Wendy Brown
#SayHerName
Borders are constructed alongside race, sexuality, and class
U.S. immigration system as a site for the construction and regulation of sexual norms, identities, and behaviors since 1875
Race as mutable
1) constructed by law
2) socially constructed
CRT as an academic field > Legal Studies
Borders are a site of the construction of normative and non-normative sexualities
Heteronormativity
Heteronormativity ascribes heterosexuality as a defining norm. It is articulated largely through a proximity to whiteness as well as the pathologization of queerness. Heteronormativity enables white communities to perpetuate their racial values while disavowing racial hierarchy.
Queerness is policed/read through the language of race, race is policed/read/made through the language of sexual and gender nonnormativity
Race and gender are both socially constructed. In fact, the social construction of race and that of gender emerge immanently. As Judith Butler writes “we are not simply oppressed but produced through these discourses, a production that is historically complex, contingent, and occurs through formations that do not honor analytically distinct identity categories” (87). Racializition and the social construction of gender inform one another’s production just as they converge to produce subjects.
Critical Race Theory examines the articulation of race through law. Professor Ian Haney Lopez observes that Critical Race Theory "...increasingly acknowledges the extent to which race is not an independent given on which LAW acts, but rather a social construction at least in part fashioned by law."
Homonationalism is a deeper exploration of the connection among sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity in relation to the tactics, strategies, and logistics of war machines. Homonationalism emerges from the folding of queer national subjects into the biopolitical management of life for the purpose of serving and maintaining the U.S. empire. This was enabled by America’s expansion of its heteronormative imagined community to incoperate queer national subjects in an effort to consolidate national sentiment for its war on terror.
Intersectionality emerges from the failure of both anti-racist and feminist consideration of the location of women of color. the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender makes their experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively different than that of white women. Crenshaw’s consideration of how gender domination changes across racial differences is limited however because it assumes it doesn't account for how sexuality already is inscribed with racism.
“All capitalism is racial from its beginning and will continue to depend on racial practice and hierarchy no matter what” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore). Racialism and capitalism cannot be disconnected because capitalism strips social and economic value from races (excluding white people), causing society, specifically marginalized groups of people, harm.
“The early twentieth century emergence of the “normal” American, through which a particular kind of person came to be perceived as uniquely modern, uniquely qualified for citizenship, uniquely natural and healthy” (Julian Carter). Since normality can be deflected as mere observation of how things are, it is easy for the way that norms reflect and enforce power structures to be hidden. Confusion around what is and what is being pushed as ideal allowed “normality” to be used as a model of how to be.
Legal System & Race are interconnected
Wendy Brown
- Brown problematizes the concept of “women” being the center of women’s studies. With a Foucauldian understanding of the mechanisms by which identities are produced as well as an understanding that those are identities are produced simultaneously and can’t be separated from each other, it becomes impossible to create a field of study where the center of study is “woman” without also including analysis of race, class, sexuality, etc. Despite this, what Brown describes as happening in the 90s is greater demarcation between these studies: where Critical Race Theory, Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism continued to be seen as specialized disciplines. Brown also describes how having “woman” at the center of academic discipline creates a barrier to challenging the definition of “woman”, because that is seen as cheapening the political impetus behind women’s studies. This inherently limits the scope of the study, and more importantly further hampers a more universal understanding of how categories and hierarchies are produced, as it relies on an understanding of gender that transcends race, sexuality, class, etc, which is simply not the reality. This also gets in the way of making connections with other disciplines and political movements, as well as centering a white eurocentric view of womanhood. When studies and frameworks of the same systems of oppression are fractured, that destroys solidarity. Brown’s work connects with Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality, though Brown seems somewhat critical of the term the ideas behind her work are essentially the same, and builds of a Foucauldian understanding of how identities are produced.
The movement of #SayHerName, as the name denotes, demanded us to say the names of Black women who were victims of police brutality. The emphasis on saying her name, was to acknowledge the gender-specific ways in which Black women are disproportionately affected by fatal acts of racial injustice was necessary because of reductive public perceptions that victims of police brutality and anti-Black violence are predominantly male
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Eugenics are a pseudo-science that seeks “racial improvement of ‘desirable’ elements of the population” (Carter 6). Both heteronormativity and eugenics normalize and favor whiteness as desirable.
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Norms maximize race through gender and sexuality and maximize gender and sexuality through race
Romantic and sexual relationships are discussed as if contained within white heterosexual relationships
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Solidifying white power
Disciplinary power explains how racial and sexual forms of oppression produce ideas about how to be in life (“the white way”). The norms produced from this are enforced through policing and discipline
Racial and sexual hierarchies are implicit in “normality"
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The normality of America is whiteness, and it is evident in every aspect of life (education, jobs, housing, etc.). Everything that becomes normalized for white americans becomes normalized for the entire country because america = whiteness
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Heteronormativity recalls both Foucault’s use of discourse and his use of norms. Heteronormativity is determined through discourse and functions through norms that exercise disciplinary power
Stoler shows how the categories produced by the policing of intimacy are flexible to the needs of the colony, the gender categories produced change to suit the interest of the system that produces them. Homonationalism is virtually the same process, with the sexualized categories of the nation being expanded to suit nationalist needs.
Heteronormativity is articulated through proximity to whiteness, which necessitates racialization, which operates and entrenches racial capitalism.
capitalism requires exploitation and hierarchy, racism entrenches it, but racism INCLUDES heteronormativity
The U.S. border is another site through which sexualit(ies) are discursively constructed and produced in service of nation-making and imperialism. This calculated management of life via sexuality is an effective locus for the production of disciplined individuals. Lupheid and Paur both talk about the ways sexuality is regulated as part of maintaining a heternormative empire. Both queers and migrants buy citizenship and acceptance by simulating heteronormative paternity and mirroring reproductive technology; the return to kinship and family norms.