On Possibility

It was done from a desire to live, to make life possible, and to rethink the possible as such.
– Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

I keep re-learning queer theory. More precisely, I keep learning from Judith Butler. I came to queer theory seeking a method through which to live. It offered one of the few spaces that something named as “me” could be, lost in wonder, amazed by the possibilities, the infinities of thinking beyond what was around me. Abstraction opens spaces, creates new worlds that can be thought and inhabited. I have stayed with queer theory because the “not yet” of the “could be” anchors a way of “being here.” (This impulse drives José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia.)

What might it mean to think about possibility? What is possibility between and across lifeworlds?

Despite my best efforts—and perhaps because of them—the lifeworlds I imagine tend to be off-balanced, away from certain worlds I can’t inhabit. “Gay” is a lifeworld I can’t imagine or inhabit. And so I struggle to imagine what possibility might be for that particular lifeworld and those adjacent to it.

That struggle matters, if only so I can acknowledge the limits of my desire for other possibilities, my desire for thriving to happen in lifeworlds I do not know how to imagine.

I have been thinking about my reaction to Jason Collins coming out: I don’t get it. I sincerely do not get it. Partly, this is because I don’t follow sports and so I don’t really know much about sports culture. Partly, this is because the lifeworlds that interest me rarely intersect with those in the public eye: I’m interested in forms of unintelligibility and precarity that barely register as “living.”

Because of where my eyes turn, because of how my ear is tuned, because of the peculiar tracks my mind follows, I do not know how to think about “mainstream” U.S. life. I don’t know how to think about celebrities and their effects on young people. I don’t know how to think about the kinds of possibilities Collins has opened for others. And I’m not even sure I know how to value them.

This is a limit: there are places my imagination cannot go. There are worlds and possibilities I cannot imagine. And, perhaps, dare not.

If I had the ability, perhaps I could trace how illegible, unvalued, and undesirable lives and bodies have made Collins’s coming out possible. And I could also trace a story about the gay and lesbian celebrities in sports and entertainment whose lives in the spotlight have made Collins’s life possible. There are, of course, aspects of his decision to be public that are lubricated by the convention of coming out: truth to self, truth with the world, freedom from silence. Convention performs valuable labor.

Because, for better or worse, “gay” now marks a convention, even “black gay,” and because I don’t know how to inhabit that particular lifeworld (I’ve never learned its rules, languages, practices, habits, conventions, desires, imagination), I can only react to Collins’s announcement as an alien might experience on being told how to react to an unintelligible convention.

I write this because what I wanted to write felt too conventional, too automatic, too ungenerous in the mode of a certain predictable queer critique.

Learning from what I take to be the best impulses of queer thinking, what I now recognize as the difficulty of queer ethics: I’m grateful for the lives that Collins’s announcement has made more possible, including his own.

Confession (draft)

I tried to write something tonight. In sentences that seem knowing. It felt as it should feel: cold. But I don’t want to feel that. So now I’m thinking about you. Always with a sense of something I dare not call regret.

I saw a picture of a man who reminded me of you. And I looked for more and more pictures of him. Lingered over them. In a way I cannot linger over a picture of you. I wondered about his living and his loving. As I cannot permit myself to wonder about your living and your loving.

I think you are still in my phone. But if I allow myself to check, I might call you.

I could re-write this to sound like a bad pop song written by an unimaginative lyricist. I could re-write this to make feeling seem less desolate, less predictable, less banal. And I might re-write it to emphasize the disorganized I who is writing – the I who is not me. Maybe once was. Maybe slips through every so often.

Something is anarranged.

I have been experiencing seasonal hunger pangs, but with a particular bite this time. For a long time I knew that the choice had been the right one. But the rightness of the choice does not diminish the tax burden. Nor is hunger assuaged by knowing the rightness of what had to be done.

I no longer say your name.

I speak of phantoms.

Feelings are not waves. They pulse in odd moments, appear as pangs, seek recognition. Perhaps I am just hungry. Lust is always a convenient misrecognition.

Something had become unbearable in the collapse of then and tomorrow, a bridge that now made forever impossible. You saw futures and I saw metaphors. Narrative came so much easier to you—it still does.

I spoke mellifluously to escape the chasm between sentences. Leaping from word to word to avoid falling into the fractures your sentences created. I could not be in your story.

And so I asked you about flowers and tea and shared indifferent sex.

And, in the language available said something that would break you, thinking it would free me.

A pang remains.

Queer Disposability

I do not know if William Ruto, Kenya’s possible new vice president, genuinely dislikes homosexuals. I suspect that as a mostly cosmopolitan Kenyan, one with lots of money and influence, he probably travels in the same circles as some wealthy homosexuals. I suspect some wealthy homosexuals might consider him a friend: a shared interest in economic profitability and political power creates “friends.” I suspect he’s even shared a drink with a homosexual or two. In fact, I would hazard that he does not spend much time, if any, thinking about homosexuality, and that he has no strong feelings about homosexuality either which way.

During Kenya’s vice presidential debates, Ruto found it politically expedient to compare homosexuals to dogs. He used the powerful politics of disgust to create affiliation. No one contested his claims. Homophobia became a social glue and a political lubricant.

In casual conversations and elsewhere, I have been arguing that we should think of how homophobia creates affiliations between groups with diverse interests: some Christians of various denominations; some Christians and some Muslims; some anti-racist and some anti-capitalist groups; some feminist and some male rights groups; some political progressives and some political conservatives. More broadly, I am interested in how “the intimate,” most especially what Audre Lorde terms “heterocetera,” lubricates social interactions, making possible worlds and affiliations.

To be disposable, in this instance, is to be available as a figure, body, life, who/that can be used to lubricate socio-political and other kinds of interactions, to be available as a shared subject/object of affect: the thing that can be agreed upon and whose availability to be agreed upon creates a shareable social.

I’m not yet sure if the consensus created by shared homophobia—as performative—will ever have the weight of the consensus created by shared heterocetera. I suspect it will not. So I am interested in the brief, moment-by-moment work accomplished by performances of expressed/expressive homophobia. What happens in the 1-2 seconds, the 3-5 minutes, the 10-15 minute clips in which homophobia is produced as a shared object? What projects take shape? What affiliations become possible? What rivalries are forgotten? What conflicts smoothed over? What good feelings are created that can then be used to negotiate and re-negotiate positions? I am less interested in critiquing homophobia—others do that far more effectively—than I am in understanding how it works. I want to understand its persistence, its intensification, in part because I want to understand how the social and the political and the cultural take shape and move through brief temporal interruptions and increments, moment to moment, minute to minute, micro to micro.

Disposability names a temporal-affective-materiality: one is “trashed.” Something is made possible. While much political commentary focuses on that trashing, I continue to learn the Foucauldian lesson:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces. It produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production (Discipline and Punish).

It is in the spirit that power is “productive” that I have sought to ask what homophobia makes possible, what it lubricates, what it enables, what it fosters, what it feeds, what it nurtures, what realities it makes realizable.

On Queer Violence

I had been invited to participate in an event for International Women’s Day. For reasons that are at once too banal and complex—tokenism, hierarchy, anti-intellectualism—I have withdrawn from the event. But I had written some notes for it, so I’ll post them. I was supposed to be discussing “violence against lgbti East Africans.” Here’s what I came up with.
*
What do queer people experience?
What do queer people want?

I was asked to say something about violence against lgbti East Africans, and I was intrigued by the question. It seemed to assume

a) that to be lgbti in East Africa was to experience violence

b) that even if one did not experience violence the expectation of violence dominated one’s existence

c) that activism from the global north was most useful or effective when it addressed the experience or expectation of violence

I must confess that I am also part of the global north. I have lived in the U.S. for 18 years and my undergraduate and graduate training has been located in the U.S. In many ways, East Africa is as foreign to me as it might be to some of you.

It strikes me that we face two related problems.

One is empirical. What do queer people experience?

To answer this question requires time and patience and the ability to listen. If queer people talk about sex, pleasure, clubbing, dating, and fantasy, we need to value those just as much as we value stories of pain, hurt, neglect, abuse, and discrimination.

The second, related problem is one of the imagination.

An empirical problem-solution model dominates global activism. In the brief time I have spent reading activists reports, problems are named, solutions proposed, and action points developed. But the social, as James Baldwin reminds us, is not a problem to be solved. And especially not a problem to be solved through what Audre Lorde terms “uncreative solutions.” So I want to advocate for fantasy and imagination, not as escapes from the social, though an occasional vacation from it is nice, but as crucial tools for survival, as what Kenneth Burke might term “equipment for living.”

If we are to pay attention to “experience,” if we are to listen to queer East Africans, we need to ask about the roles of fantasy, desire, and imagination in creating livable lives, to ask about how lives have been imagined, about how futures are envisioned, about how presents are fantasized, about how pasts are made possible. We need, in other words, to pay attention to the psychic strategies of daily life.

We in the global north, and I include myself here, must question the arrogance that presumes we can provide imaginative solutions–indeed, imaginations–that will “solve” the social problems of over there. I am interested in how we think about the imagination as a resource. We might ask whether how we imagine livability and thriving from the global north necessarily extends to other spaces. More than that, we need to ask how those in the global south imagine their lives, imagine their futures, imagine their daily lives and their activist futures.

We need to listen to the person who craves better and more sex just as much as we do the person who craves help writing a grant proposal, because these are not distinct worlds: they bleed into each other all the time, and to think of the relationship between grant proposals and good sex requires flexibility and inventiveness and patience, a willingness to listen that dominant problem-solution models do not permit.

I think about the violence of imagining that those we want to help in the global south have not imagined ways to address the violence they face. A violence that refuses to grant others the power to imagine or fantasize, and a violence that refuses to believe imagination and fantasy matter in creating livable lives.

And it is, perhaps, appropriate that we in the global north question the fantasies we nurture about ourselves in relation to the global south. Right now we have such powerful fantasies about queer life in the global south that we are incapable of imagining that many queers in the global south develop innovative, creative, supple, and flexible ways of inhabiting the world, as more than simply objects of our benevolence.

As I have been thinking about imaginative labor—the roles of fantasy, desire, longing—I am wondering about the kind of labor necessary to bridge dreamworlds, the kinds of co-thinking and co-dreaming, and co-fantasizing that create more livable lives.

Jela si Pahala

We make concealment happen; it is not natural but rather names and organizes where racial-sexual differention happens.
—Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things?
—Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness”

I have been watching and re-watching KTN’s special report on sex in Kenyan prisons, especially from 5:10-6:45: Sakina’s testimony. Kind friends have transcribed her testimony and it appears below, untranslated.

SA: Sakina
R: Reporter

SA: Jela si pahala kwa sababu sisi wenyewe sisi mashoga twaonewa, nimekataa, na kutandikwa na kufanyiwa unyonge wa unyama na kuumwa hivi maalama hizi maalama chungu mzima zimenijaa, asema kwa sababu wewe ni shoga, utajiju, ukienda ukimwaambia askari, askari mimi mbona naonewa hivi ama kwa sababu mimi ni shoga ndio naonewa hivi, askari anakwambia lipa deni mimi usiniletee ujinga kama huo, nendeni huko mkaongelee huko mkamalizianie huko, saa nyegine moyo-roho yangu haitaki, wajua saa ingine wataka saa ingine hautaki, sasa wajua naye vile nafsi naye inaamka, saa ingine wataka saa ingine hautaki

R: Naam, we kwako-

SA: Na sasa venye mtu sasa, sa venye wewe wataka ndio mtu naye hakutaki basi, na saa yenye hutaki ndio mtu anakulazimisha

Interval

SA: Anakwaambia kama unataka kula hapa chakula vizuri vizuri paka nilale na wewe ndio niku-nikupe

R: Unakumbuka umelala na wanaume wangapi?

SA: Haa-watu elfu mbili na-(Laughs)-wanakupa chakula, kwa mfano ukipewa paka hivi mapeni, askari jela ashakuja kukuny’anga’nya, amekupokonya, ameshakuny’anga’nya, anakwambia mbona huku, mbona wafanya biashara hii, huku pesa watoa wapi, hebu leta hii pesa ama tukutandike, sasa wewe ukiskia hivyo wampa yeye zile pesa

Asked about the possibility of AIDS infection

SA: Roho yangu iko juu yaani naogopa nashikwa na stress nasema sasa hapa nikijipata ninao ndio basi itabidi niambukizane chungu mzima nitafanya nini, kama ni kufa nife na wengi nisife mimi peke yangu

And another version:

Sakina – Jela si pahala, sababu sisi weneywe sisi mashoga twaonewa. Nimekataa na kutandikwa na kufanyiwa unyonge na unyama na kuumwa hivi maalama hizi maalama chungu nzima zimenijaa.

Wanasema ooh, sababu wewe ni shoga utajijo. Ukienda ukimwambia askari, askari mi mbona naonewa hivi, ama kwa sababu mi ni shoga ndio naonewa hivi. Askari anakuambia lipa deni, mimi usiniletee ujinga kama huo. Endeni huko mkaongee huko mkamalizanie huko.

Saa nyingine roho yangu haitaki, wajua saa nyingine wataka saa nyingine hautaki. Sasa na unajua na yeye vile nafsi nayo inaamka. Saa nyingine wataka saa nyingine hautaki. Mhmmm.

Lulu – Naam we kwa …..

Sakina – Na haswa vile mtu, saa enye wewe wataka ndio mtu hataki basi. Na saa enye hautaki ndio mtu basi yuakulazimisha.

Anakuambia oooh, kama unataka kula hapa vyakula vizuri mpaka nilale na wewe ndio niku- nikupe.

Sakina – aaah, watu elfu mbili na.

Wanakupa chakula, ale ukipewa mpaka hivi mapeni. Askari jela ashakuja kukunyang’anya. Amekupokonya, ameshakunyang’anya. Anakuambia huku mbona wafanya biashara hiii, huku pesa watoa wapi, hebu lete hii pesa ama tukutandike. Sasa wewe ukisikia hivyo wampa zile pesa.

Sakina – roho yangu iko juu, yaani naogopa nashikwa na stress nasema sasa hapa nikijipata nina do inabidi basi niambukizane. Chungu nzima ntafanya nini? Kama ni kufa nife na wengi, nisife mi pekee yangu.

Here’s what was offered in English subtitles. Three statements.

“Prison is not a good place . . . we homosexuals are denied our rights . . .”
“ . . . if you want to live well you have to sleep with somebody . . .”
“ [I have slept with] about 2,000 men . . . I have to do it everyday . . . but I don’t care whether I get infected or not . . .”

I’m hoping, first, that the sheer physical distinction in word count—how much space it occupies on the page/screen—will tell one kind of story about how queer testimony is unheard, made concealed, rendered ungeographic, to use McKittrick’s wonderful concept. We know prisoners are “disappeared.” This distinction between what Sakina says and what is made available as translated testimony illustrates part of this disappearance.

What is disappeared matters.

As the report opens, the reporter frames the story as one about “men” who went into jail “normal” and emerged completely changed, unable to be “men” anymore. While gender seems to be the focus here—Sakina is clearly female-identified in the report—sexuality cannot be far behind. It is suggested (the passive matters) that prison turned Sakina into Sakina: a queer gender-bender. The threat of prison, then, is that it unmakes masculinities, renders gender unstable.

This framing is only part of the violence of the report.

The report says, “we homosexuals are denied our rights”

Sakina says (pardon my inexact translation):

we homosexuals (“washoga”) are victimized; I have refused, and been beaten, and been brutalized, and been bitten. These marks, these marks [on my body] have been caused by (and cause me) excruciating pain. . . . When I seek help from the prison guards, they dismiss my complaints and tell me to deal with the situation myself . . .

Sakina reports rape and violence and abuse: her scars record this violence. The subtitles translate this report of pain into an inadequate, sanitized language of rights.

But the report wants to make sure we don’t sympathize with Sakina, and this becomes clear when the subject of HIV/AIDS comes up.

Here’s the English subtitle: “I don’t care whether I get infected or not.”

Here’s what Sakina says, courtesy of another kind translation:

“My heart is racing. I’m afraid. I’m stressed out. Now, here, if I find out that I have it, I’ll then start to pass it on to others. What else would I do? If I’m to die I’ll take others with me. And not die alone.”

As the translation indicates, Sakina worries about infection, a lot. “I’ll take others with me.” It’s a curious way to position prison economies of sexual violence and sexual negotiation. The tv report wants us to hear callousness: the terrible queer who runs around infecting others. This terribleness is not absent from Sakina’s story or demeanor. Revenge fantasies abound: you raped me, you forced me, if I die, you die. We die together. Part of me would like Sakina not to be the potential death-carrying, avenging queer. I realize I want her to be “likable” so a certain argument can take shape. I want Sakina to be “relatable.”

Jela si pahala.

Sakina is appetite and survival: saa ingine wataka, saa ingine hutaki. Sakina is desire and its violation: saa nyingine wataka, saa nyingine hutaki. Sakina is the impossibility of translating from an un-place, an un-time, an un-becoming.

Two statements come together in this un-making: jela si pahala and mimi ni shoga, the ungeographic of prison and the unbeing of queerness. How else to read “jail is not a place” and “I am [a] queer.” How does what is not allowed to exist live in an ungeography?

I am uneasy about the turns I am making here, about the violence of abstraction, even as I understand that abstraction to enact a labor of re-enfleshing. I want to hold on to the “we” that McKittrick gives, “We make concealment happen,” even, and perhaps especially, when we try not to. So I will attempt to do something quite wrong. A redemptive turn, if you will.

Nisife mimi peke yangu. I will (mis)translate this through Hemphill into a different kind of wish: “Don’t let it be loneliness / that kills us.”

Conjugal Rights: Prisoners’ Rights: Prison Homo-sex

Saturday 27 [October 1984]: No woman. No sex. As months develop into years, the desire for sex becomes almost unendurable. The deprivation of sex, of a woman’s love, becomes the greatest sense of torment, next to the everpresent, anguished longing for freedom.
—Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ, Kenya: A Prison Notebook

Kenyan prisoners are not granted conjugal or partner visits. Nor are they provided with condoms. The two issues are related, but not the same. A recent report by KTN news broached this issue through the backdoor: by framing conjugal rights in relation to prison homo-sex, defined, variously, as “homosexuality,” “sodomy,” “rape,” “secrets,” “sin.” The argument for conjugal rights, which is approximately two minutes out of the fifteen-minute video, was a thinly-veiled excuse to peer into the “secret” world of male-male prison sex.

This world is, of course, not so secret. It features prominently in several Kenyan prison narratives by authors including John Kiriamiti, Wahome Mutahi, and Maina wa Kĩnyattĩ. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to read a contemporary Kenyan prison narrative without encountering some version of homo-sex. Readers of Foucault will recognize the structure I am describing. An “explosion of discourse” is framed as a “secret” to create what Foucault terms “the speaker’s benefit”: those who “break” the “secret” of sex imagine their acts as transgressions, modes of resistance. And, in the KTN video, what can be more “transgressive” than a woman discussing homo-sex with prisoners?

Prison homosexuality has a relationship to prison sodomy and prison rape and prison love and prison intimacy and prison hate and prison resentment and prison survival and prison suicide. And on it goes. It has a relationship to the structural conditions of Kenyan prisons, to their histories, their presents, and their futures. It has a relationship to the worlds brought in to the prison from diverse geo-histories and psycho-socialities. It is not one thing. It is, as Binyavanga might put it, a many-thing.

This many-thingness is evidenced in the obvious disjunction between the English-language report with its sparse translations from Swahili and the rapid-fire Swahili and bodily movements of those interviewed, especially the two figures who identify as queer. As one says, “sometimes you want it, and sometimes you don’t want it,” going on to add, “the prison guards are indifferent to how queers are treated in prison.” An eloquent bodily testimony emerges of prison brutality: bite marks linger as scars, a body ravaged by a system that does not protect its queer prisoners. But “sometimes you want it, and sometimes you don’t want it.” That’s important.

Whereas one version of the narrative that KTN wants to promote seeks to collapse all prison same-sex encounters into “rape,” “sin,” and “perversion,” alternate narratives emerge of desire and negotiation, of prison economies where sex is a form of currency. In pointing this out, I do not mean to overlook the very real sexual violence in prisons. That would be irresponsible. Instead, I want to register the complexities in prisoners’ testimonies that are erased through bad and absent translations into English (for those who don’t understand Swahili) and through equally bad and misleading framing by KTN.

I am interested, as well, in how the figure of the homosexual becomes legible within Kenyan media and the uses to which this figure (as metonym and sediment of/from prison sex) is put in political discussions. Against the logic suggested by the KTN report, which argues that conjugal rights should be provided to “prevent” the scourge of prison sexual violence and prison sexual activity and sodomy and homosexuality (these are not the same things), I would suggest that one can be for prison reform, for prisoners’ rights, for conjugal and partner visits, for queer prisoners’ rights, and for prison health reform. These are not all compatible, of course: in my ideal world, prisons would not exist. Humans should not live in cages. Nor should animals. And so when I think about “prison reform,” I’m really thinking about abolishing prisons.

In the here-and-now, the durative present, I can be, must be, for prisoners’ rights, conjugal and partner visits, and queer prisoners’ rights. To be more precise, I can be, must be, for prisoners’ sexual rights, regardless of taste, desire, orientation, or preference. I have insisted on conjugal rights and partner rights because if prisoners are going to have consensual sex with non-prison populations, it should not be dictated by marital status or relationship longevity.

I am happy to support conjugal and partner visiting rights and to support prisoner sexual health and to advocate against prison sexual violence. I am delighted that the Kenyan parliament is discussing prison sexual rights and prison sexual health, albeit at a pace that is much too slow. And I think it’s way past time to have a national conversation—and activism against—prison sexual violence.

But prison sexual violence should not become the metonym, the figure, for male same-sex intimacies or homosexuality. And it’s troubling to see a news report that so easily, casually, and lazily uses “homosexuality,” “rape,” and “sodomy” as synonyms, implicitly suggesting that “homosexuals” are the biggest threats to decent Kenyans. Toward the end of the video, a prisoner (we assume) is interviewed. Unlike many others in the video, he is dressed neatly in new-looking clothes, a far cry from the many other rag-clad prisoners the camera has shown us. And he proclaims his (voyeuristic) disgust at prison sex, because he is a Christian. The camera—and interviewer—invite us to identify with this man who, though in prison, has turned to religion. He is, in fact, what a certain Kenyan Christian imaginary hopes will happen to prisoners: not that they will be released or granted rights, but that they will find religion, atone for their sins, and accept imprisonment as a just consequence.

This Christian prisoner can represent “decent” Kenyans because he looks the part. And, through an imaginative act that erases his materiality, one fostered by the camera, we can identify with him: we are “all prisoners” on this ungodly earth, the narrative goes. This (misguided) identification enables a further one: his disgust at prison same-sex acts (all conflated as sin and deviance) is supposed to mirror and represent our disgust. He is, through a sly trick, the “decent” Kenyan we claim to be. The Kenyan who must be—and should be—defended against prison sodomy. His reassuring masculinity is juxtaposed against, and comes after, the disturbing gender-bending presented earlier in the video which, it is suggested, repeatedly, both precedes and emerges from imprisonment.

Conjugal rights will save good Christian Kenyan men from turning into fags. Good Kenyan masculinity is decent, Christian hetero-masculinity, and it must be saved.

The Kenyan prison has been—and will continue to be—important to how we understand Kenyan sexual cultures and, in particular, same-sex cultures. Reforming prison sexual cultures to provide health and care and comfort should begin from a prisoner’s comment. And I give this comment the last word: saa ingine waitaka, saa ingine hautaki.

Queer Fragment (and a laugh)

An arbitrary place to start, as all beginnings must be:

John had argued with N’Komo [a native guard at a mental asylum] about the abnormal ways of love-making practised by many of his patients in the asylum. N’Komo had used them as proofs of madness, but John laughed, declaring that if this were true, hundreds of natives in the compounds and in the crowded city yards would need to be put in asylums, for in such places love-making between men was quite usual, as it was between women also.

“I tell you, Doctor. You think only mad people do these things. Listen! I was walking along the street in Johannesburg, not far from Doorfoontein Station. It was about eleven at night. I saw the pick-up van standing by the pavement. Then a native girl ran out of the yard with a white policeman after her. My heart was sore for the poor girl. She looked so frightened as she ran past. Presently the policeman came back. He had the girl. Some other men joined me. The policeman said to us: ‘Have you ever seen a man dressed like a woman?’ And it was true. He showed us the hair under the doek, straw in the dress for breasts, blue paint under the eyes, red paint on the cheeks and mouth. Yes, the man made such a good girl that only the sharp eyes of the policeman had seen this.” (Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet)

This tiny fragment is part of an eclectic, eccentric queer archive I have been assembling. Eccentric because it focuses on small textual moments in a range of texts that do not add up to what might be called “evidence.” They live, more suggestively, in the realms of gossip, anecdote, speculation, fantasy, aside. And they are so minor—a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph elsewhere—that they require a speculative method grounded in fragments. And a belief that such fragments can be meaningful interventions, even and especially when juxtaposed against more empirically rich methods.

First published in 1937, Black Hamlet is the first full-length psychiatric case study of a black South African, John Chavafambira, by the Jewish psychiatrist Wulf Sachs. It is unique in African histories of psychic labor because, as Megan Vaughan argues, colonial psychiatry understood black subjects as aggregates, not as individuals: archives speak of “the African mind” or “African abnormalities,” rarely, if ever, about individual subjects. Introducing the 1996 edition, Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose emphasize that the book is “of its time,” a nod to its complicated racial and developmental politics.

To the fragment.

In forthcoming work on McKay’s Banana Bottom, I argue that sexual modernity was a contested project. Within the colonies, Arnold Davidson’s wonderful question of whether psychiatry or psychoanalysis won encounters a world(ing) where other frames multiply the options. The fragment above hints of these other frames.

While the fragment is recorded (and edited and framed) by Sachs, it depicts an encounter between two “natives” (to stay within the frame) in which sexual modernity, as a mode of knowing, is at stake. N’Komo buys into a symptom-pathology model of sexuality, where same-sex intimacies register as a mark of deviance-disease (criminality always meets medicine). To be responsible and more precise, N’Komo objects to the “abnormal ways of love-making.” While the text too-quickly resolves that “abnormal” into “same-sex,” we can invoke a more capacious sense of sodomy, understood as all non-procreative forms of sex. In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta insists that only face-to-face (missionary) styles of love-making are “normal.” In any case, same-sex intimacies incarnate “abnormal love-making.”

John laughs.

The “native” laughs.

I want to hold on to this laughter, because it is very important. Not as a sign of native foolishness, as some might claim (“the native is easily amused,” colonial records read), but as a mode of epistemological disagreement. The theory is foolish. Unwarranted. The ostensible link between symptom and pathology is laughable. I will appropriate this: it is a queer and queering laugh, at the level of knowledge production. This is not about “native ignorance.” It is about competing frames of knowledge.

Then I get even more excited: look at Chavafambira’s examples!

At this point, the expected turn would be for the “native,” and Chavafambira is a traditional healer, a nganga, so native+, to invoke the village or tradition or a fantasized pre-colonial past. But that is not the turn. Instead, he says, look at the “compounds” and the “city yards.” Look, in other words, at the world we have created under colonial modernity. We are not mad. Instead, we have innovated modes of intimacy under colonial modernity. Chavafambira redirects us away from ongoing searches for authority in the past to the creative resources with which we engage the present.

And then, for me, it gets even more interesting: he offers, as an example of normality, an anecdote featuring a cross-dressing “native girl.” This would appear to be a strange place to indicate “normality.” But the normality is predicated on at least three elements. First, on the affective reactions of the “native girl” and the sympathy she elicits as she runs past him. She is “frightened” and this fright marks her encounter with colonial modernity, as it registers the racial terror that defines race relations within such a system. (It’s worth noting that this incident takes place before the formal institution of apartheid in 1948.) Second, this normality is predicated on the native girl’s reaction to white policing: she runs away. The relationship between natives and the police sets the frame within which something known as “normality” is distinguished from “pathology.” Third, and perhaps more interestingly, normality is based on the native girl’s ability to pass as a girl: “the man made such a good girl that only the sharp eyes of the policeman had seen this.” Here, what colonial records take as evidence of African lack, the ability to “imitate,” demonstrates, for Chavafambira, the native ability to inhabit colonial modernity—to invoke Butler, imitation as gender insubordination and colonial subversion. Chavafambira admires this native girl because she has figured out how to exist within sexual-colonial modernity.

From one perspective, his examples do not make sense. He offers as evidence of “normality” what some might dismiss as evidence of colonial modernity’s destructive effects on African forms of life. No less a figure than Wole Soyinka implies that gender dissidence registers pathology: “African males . . . take their masculinity for granted, just as women do their femininity” (On Africa). Yet, Chavafambira refuses to privilege a particular sex-gender-sexuality order as the order of things. And this matters.
*
What is the place of such a fragment within African thought and African histories of sex-gender-sexuality? Chavafambira was a native healer, a nganga, uneducated, or, at the very least, nowhere close to Kenyatta and Soyinka in terms of education and privilege. Indeed, he is an African Dora, but not even that, because Dora is legible and privileged. Chavafambira is not a name adduced as evidence of African philosophy or politics. He’s a guy who saw a psychiatrist and was written about. A case study. And it’s tempting to dismiss what he claims. Because, and here’s the dirty little secret: while we really seem to want to hear the subaltern speak, we’re really more interested in our translations and transcriptions and analyses. NGO folk talk to NGO folk, academics to academics, activists to activists, all in the name of a subaltern who enters our speech as a necessary absence to be deciphered.

From one perspective, Chavafambira lacks the authority to speak about sexuality: his examples are too local, his experiences too insignificant, his frameworks too limiting. Kenyatta studied anthropology with Bronislaw Malinowski.

Which “native” voice should one fetishize?
*
In a wonderful essay on Harlem Renaissance poetry, Mike Chasar muses on black laughter. In a reading of Sterling Brown’s poetry, he argues that Brown “situates the sound of laughter not as a sign of humor or comedy, but as a series of public, bodily noises competing in the modern soundscape.” Langston Hughes figures “black laughter as an elemental force connected to black power.” Chasar offers a way to return to Chavafambira’s laugh that situates colonial modernity as a series of competing bodily noises. Black Hamlet is set in urban(izing) South Africa and the two scenes above take place in a mental asylum (surely a place of competing noises and epistemologies) and a street in Johannesburg, respectively: colonial-era epistemology is figured as part of the competing noise, not as unassailable authority. Even when asserted as authority—symptom+pathology—the laugh challenges this interpretation.

Laughter stages an epistemological interruption.

To the question of queer provenance, Chavafambira offers a unique, unexpected, and absolutely necessary answer: look around you. Let the now direct your future.

Take Me to Your Queers!

On Saturday, December 1, I was part of a roundtable discussing African Same-sex stuff at the African Studies Association conference (#ASA2012—yes, American Studies, we will fight over this hashtag) held in Philadelphia. I’m going to weave in and out of what I wrote and also reflect, a little, on the session, beginning not from what the panelists said, but from what the audience seemed to want. During question time, an older gentleman who identified himself as Kenyan cautioned us that people around his area (the Rift Valley, Nandi) did not talk about sex or sexuality. He warned us to be very careful about what we were doing. This desire for respectful silence contrasted with another strong desire in the room to find the African homosexual. Repeatedly, the roundtable panel heard variations of, “was there homosexuality in pre-colonial African? Does the word homosexual appear in African languages? Where is the African homosexual?” In contrast to silence, a desire to know, to mark, to tag (think wildlife conservation).

In part, this desire to know and tag is about method: simply, the African homosexual has become an object of knowledge, the subject of an ever-proliferating number of books, articles, documentaries, reports, interventions, and is as much a creation of these forms as an object to be discovered. In a later session, Kathleen O’Mara from SUNY Oneonta pointed out how NGO funding strategies and reporting requirements (“we will fund transgender and lesbian activists,” for instance) provide categories for African subjects to assume. I bracket, for the moment, the global circulation of knowledge, practice, and culture that provides strategies for legibility and self-consciousness for a group I call, fuzzily, African queers.

Fuzziness matters.

Here’s some of what I wrote:

One: What is the relationship between the history of homosexuality and the history of the queer African? Phrased otherwise, what is the relationship between the Foucault-inspired project we have come to call the history of homosexuality, which takes religious, medical, and juridical discourses and practices as its points of departure, and the long histories of gendered and engendering, bodied and embodying encounters, within Africa and between Africa and other spaces, that situate African bodies, practices, and lives as, variously, normal and abnormal, proper and improper, legible and illegible?

Two: What is the relationship between Queer studies and African studies? Over the past decade, scholarship on Africa has appeared within Queer studies and, albeit to a lesser extent, scholarship on the Queer has appeared within African studies. Yet, both fields have approached each other timidly, afraid to ask how their engagement might fundamentally reshape assumptions foundational to both fields. How are Africa and the African produced and understood in African studies and in Queer studies? Are we ever talking about the same figures, bodies, geographies, or practices?

Breaking the frame:

My second question stems from how scholars who work on Africa from a “queer” perspective fail to engage the rich body of scholarship by African feminists that tracks contingent and unstable gender:sex:sexuality formations. I return, as always, to Amadiume, Oyewumi, Kanogo, White, and Nzegwu (many other names can be added here), all of whom track the changing meanings and practices of “womanhood” in African histories. These scholars do not give us “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals.” Instead, they track women who moved across space and time and emerged as different kinds of gendered:sexed:sexualized subjects under the regime of colonial modernity. I am interested in these moments of subject-making and subject-unmaking.

Philip Brian Harper reminds me why I moved toward queer studies:

The great promise of queerness . . . lies in its potential to conceive and mobilize modes of social subjectivity not accounted for in advance by the structures entailed in ideological narratives—that is, to render effectively negotiable the “open” of the public arena, not by simply conceiving the latter as a site for the free play of multiplicitous subjectivities but by consciously deploying it as a constitutive element within subjective identification itself. (“Gay Male Identities, Personal, Private, and Relations of Public Exchange”)

Harper was on my mind as I moved toward the third question of my presentation.

Re-enter Frame:

Three: What is the relationship between Queer theory, especially its attention to modes of precarious and emergent being, and Queer African studies, which, at the moment, is sustained by an empirico-historical fantasy in which researchers show up “somewhere in Africa,” intone, “Take Me To Your Queers,” and subsequently write up their results.

Break Frame:

In moving to “”Queer theory” in this final section, away from “Queer studies,” I wanted to shift the intellectual terrain of my talk. Over the years, I have told my students that Queer theory can go places that Queer activism can not. This allows me to engage with Edelman’s No Future, Bersani’s Homos, Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, and Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City without asking that these books act as guides to living and acting. This seeming distinction between “thought” and “action” is unsustainable: “theory” is action in a different register. I wanted to enter this “different register” to ask about how we construct our objects of knowledge and how we pursue those objects and to what end.

Re-enter Frame:

The still-nascent field of “Queer African studies” suffers from two tendencies: the first tendency is empirical. The African queer registers as a variation on a type already conceptually organized through a Euro-American, and, more specifically, U.S.-based theoretical imagination. The questions posed of the African queer rarely, if ever, extend to asking how a notion of queerness in Africa complicates assumptions that govern U.S.-based categories. While scholars will offer some new, “local term,” say something about whether or not African queers live in some version of a queer ghetto, the assumption is that the African queer is an always legible variation on a type. This legible type fulfills a liberal ahistorical fantasy that “we are everywhere” and suggests that there is nothing new or strange to be encountered in Africa, nothing that has not already been thought about before.

This empirical problem is compounded by how Queer theory travels to Africa. I suggested that Queer theory attends to emergent and precarious being: when the queer lens turns to Africa, it is often more focused on precarity than emergence. In a long-repeated trope, the queer African incarnates that which requires intervention, care, protection. Here, the language of conservation meets that of human rights, and the queer African is further queered as a spectacle in the zoo of human sexuality. I do not want to suggest that we should abandon precarity as a lens through which to approach the problem of queerness; indeed, doing so would compromise, if not damage, the intellectual and political stakes of any queer (African) project. However, the disproportionate attention paid to precarity effaces the equally important role of emergent being that is central to queer theorizing.

Let me attempt to specify what I mean by emergent being. I am interested in those figures, bodies, lives, and practices produced at the seams of time, when forms of collectivity shift under new social, political, cultural, and economic changes. When, for instance, ethnic groups assume new configurations under the regime of colonial modernity or when new socio-cultural collectives emerge through religious conversion or through modes of socio-political domination or mixing. At such moments, certain figures, bodies, lives, and practices become, variously, illegible or unabsorbed, unaccounted for by terms such as “family,” “household,” “man,” “woman,” “African,” or “human.”
*
I went on to suggest, briefly, that the figure of the loner in African texts and contexts might provide a different way to think about queer African studies and, indeed, African studies in general. I am interested in thinking beyond claims central to how we conceive African societies as “communal” and “social” by asking how such designations and claims produce practices inimical to certain bodies, lives, practices, and desires. Queer is a placeholder for such illegible, invisible, and disavowed figures, even as I want to insist that sex:gender:sexuality form the inter-articulated nodes around which recognition is granted and withheld. I have also been thinking about the “refugee” and the “IDP” as particular figures who slip in and out of recognition and illegibility—I would never term these figures “queer,” but they form part of my ongoing critical archive. Indeed, a project that thought through the Kenyan queer, the Kenyan refugee, and the Kenyan IDP would be richly productive. (Perhaps this is where I have been heading all along over the past few years.)

Also, because I’m trained as a literary scholar, I am interested in representation and figuration, in thinking through fantasy and imagination and desire. Learning from Foucault, I want to resist the “African homosexual” as an empirical figure waiting to be discovered or, through NGO and international interventions, to be created and saved.

To repeat something I’ve claimed before: we know very little about African sex and sexuality. Very little. And premature injections of “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “bisexual,” and so on into discussions of African sex and sexuality foreclose the possible kinds of knowledge we might gain.

I would not give this paper within a more explicitly activist context. I understand my participation within activist spaces differently: I am there to learn and to plan, to ask what can be done in the present to advance a particular project, to create or imagine a livable future. I want to emphasize this point because portions of my presentation seemed to slam scholar-activists interested in advancing African sexual rights causes. We need such scholarship. I also think we need a kind of scholarship that works more explicitly in a figurative and theoretical register, scholarship that troubles the empirical register that dominates in African studies.

Cruising the Black Maze

I cruise a black maze.
—Essex Hemphill

The “emergence” of black gay men in the academy was marked by a curious confession: I have a white lover or I have sex with white men, as though intellectual legibility within a predominantly white academy was predicated on a desire “for whiteness.” (See foundational work by Isaac Julien, Darieck Scott, Reginald Shepherd, Melvin Dixon, Phillip Brian Harper, Robert Reid-Pharr, Samuel Delany. I take desire for whiteness from Langston Hughes.) Desiring white bodies was deemed “transgressive,” evidence that black gay men had moved “beyond race,” which is to say, beyond “racial resentment,” that dangerous legacy from the 1970s, and could safely participate in queer studies. Black gay intellectuals demonstrated their cosmopolitanism, their participation in global circuits of feeling beyond the resentments of nation-feeling and nation-history, by confessing their still-transgressive desires for white flesh.

It seemed, from a certain perspective, that one needed to articulate this desire to join the small group of black queer intellectuals. To admit one’s desire for another black queer did not merit academic scrutiny. Thus, a too-polite academy enamored with transgression across color lines—and dedicated to maintaining those color lines by naming movement across as simultaneously transgressive and liberatory (see Robert Reid-Pharr on this)—rendered black-on-black queerness invisible, illegible, un-queer, even as the interracial acquired the paradoxical status of normatively queer, that is, legibly queer.
*
I wanted to give you
my sweet man pussy,
but you grunted me away
and all other Black men
who tried to be near you.
Our beautiful nigga lips and limbs
stirred no desire in you.
Instead you chose blonde,
milk-toned creatures to bed.
But you were still one of us,
dark like us, despised like us.—Essex Hemphill
*
There is something embarrassing about the claims I have made, something that feels “unreconstructed.” As though I’m stuck in a polyester groove. Resurrecting old resentments. To think about the intra-racial, to use “intra” to compete with or complicate a focus on the “inter,” feels Shameful.

Black-on-black queerness is much too banal or uninteresting. Against Joseph Beam’s claim that black men loving black men is a revolutionary act, the queer academy has yawned, deemed interest in black-on-black love as too voyeuristic (we are too polite) or simply not interesting because (and here I get mean) black queer men are only interesting when they profess their desire for whiteness as good post-racial subjects.
*
I’m writing an essay on Essex Hemphill. In doing so, I am returning to the wave of scholarship I read in the 1990s by black gay scholars, to questions that have been rudely simmering, to the particular and peculiar ways black queerness becomes “interesting” as a post-racial formation, rarely as an intra-racial scene. To be fair, the inter-racial is more regulated, more monitored, as Nayan Shah’s work demonstrates. Black-on-black love is interesting when it transgresses a normative claim about black deviance. Yet the transgression of normativity against deviance becomes tricky for the black queer who wants to name something “revolutionary.”

My sentences are snarling.
*
I’m writing an essay on Essex Hemphill and wondering about what it means to write an essay on him. In a future project, I argue that he bridges black arts affect with black gay feeling, a clumsy formulation, but rooting his work in the 1970s yields a richer picture than queer deracination provides.

Yet, I offer an incomplete story.

A fuller story would note the many discussions about black-on-black love that were taking place in non-academic spaces, on email lists where terms such as same-gender loving (SGL) marked points of departure for POC. As a latecomer and sometime participant in some of these discussions, I learned to cherish the fecundity of these discussions, to note the worlds they were building, the possibilities they created for thinking and acting, even as I mourned their absence from the academic spaces I wanted to occupy.
*
When I started writing this post, a day ago, the first few paragraphs came easily, fueled by the urgency I always feel when I read Hemphill. I wanted to tell a story about queerness and race, to nag.

As always, the urgency of the moment comes up against the habit of training. Writing creates a space for thinking—I think most effectively when I write. Writing also creates a space where “nuance” shades so easily into cowardice. Where the question of “what will those with power over me think?” meets “do I dare risk sounding retrograde?” and, worse, “do I dare risk sounding stupid?”

Thus, the genre of the endlessly qualified essay, the overly diluted claim, the overly specialized argument that moves from focusing on the world to counting commas. My first inclination is to revise the previous sentence, to make it more “nuanced,” which is to say, to blunt its edge.

We are, let me qualify that, I am not much given to “ass-splitting truth,” much as I love Hemphill. Habit. Fear. Anxiety. Careerism. These all-too-real facets of existence. Compounded, also, by a finely tuned ear for what is expected and what I am not ready to give—anger, rage, outrage, answers, solutions, absolution, emotional labor. (An unwritable essay muses on the affective labor of black academics.)

I wonder whether “writing on Hemphill” consists of endlessly qualifying him, turning him into a cup of tea brewed from a thrice-used teabag.

Is it a new language we must learn?
Is it a miracle sign that foretells of us
speaking in tongues and finally understanding?
These are the elusive questions that foil me.

And also, always, the problem of desire in Hemphill:

I want to court outside the race,
outside the class, outside the attitudes —
but love is a dangerous word
in this small town.
*
A note:

The original cover of Ceremonies, the 1992 Plume edition, features two black men on the cover, Hemphill and another man standing in shadow behind him. The most recent edition, the 2000 Cleis Press version, features a beautifully sculpted model standing alone. I don’t have my copy handy, so I don’t know whether the model is identified.

Between 1992 and 2000, queer studies had emerged as a “force” that included a number of black queer men among its numbers. It had also foregrounded deracination as the price black queers had to pay to participate in the queer academy.

These are coincidences.

Signs taken for wonders.

“What We Have Now”

If a certain kind of queer theory, emanating primarily from the English departments of elite universities, is dead, we need not mourn. What we have now is a plenitude of promiscuous engagements across disciplinary and institutional boundaries now remaking fields and politics in ways the queer theory of 10 years ago could not have imagined.—Lisa Duggan

During a recent encounter, shall we call it queer, I mused about the anxiety expressed by a recent book about the “state” of queer theory: it was, this book claimed, in need of “revival.” Coincidentally, this book’s leading chapter focused on Frankenstein. What, I wondered, was this object that needed to be revived? I am, I must confess, not a student of Shelley’s novel. I am more familiar with its multiple adaptations or, more precisely, mutations. More in tune with what “it’s supposed to be about” than “what it’s about.”

From the rough assemblage in my head, Frankenstein is about rough assemblage: the putting together of available parts to create something not-quite-new. This version owes more to Disney than Shelley, but I want to use it irresponsibly to ask about the “new” of queer theory and politics, the territories of reach and grasp and gaze, what feels, increasingly, less like transfer and contagion and more Eliotian, a gathering of “fragments” to “shore” against “ruin.”

Where Duggan’s privileged metaphor is “promiscuity,” a metaphor I like very much, I would amend that to read velvet rope promiscuity: guaranteed by bouncers who are always on the lookout for the “new,” the “fashionable,” the “interesting,” the “trendy,” and the “retro.” One envisions a 70s club filled with trend-spotters, or whatever the term is now. Curiously much recent work in queer studies focuses on the 70s.

It is, perhaps, that I am genuinely wary of “the new.” And I am even more wary of how the “new” is enfolded into a project of “newness.” Melvin Dixon haunts me: “You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” What is the memory-work of the “new”?

A lesson from the past.

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark represents the most significant engagement with the possibilities of poststructuralism (as claim, as method, as ambition, as strategy) in African American studies. How, Morrison asked, could one speak of the Africanist presence in texts that appeared indifferent to race, that featured no black subjects? How, in other words, could the normatively raced subject of literary studies—still white, still male—be embedded within the logic and practice of race from which he benefits by fading into the background, as, to invoke Derrida, the center that is both inside and outside of “structure”?

I invoke Morrison’s use of poststructuralism to counter less responsible uses of it around race. While Morrison was teaching us to attend to the ethical and political possibilities of poststructuralism for race-based labor, which is all labor, other very smart critics were intent on proving that race “did not exist,” that the opposition between white and black was a “fiction,” and this potentially interesting move meant that the critics did not have to think about blackness at all: for to deconstruct the opposition between black and white, or to perform an operation designated as that, left us with a racelessness that defaulted to whiteness. Thus, one read articles “against race” that were conveniently blinded by their own “race,” convinced, somehow, that “racelessness” had no ideological value. One witnessed the return of universal man, celebrated as man beyond race.

Interested in poststructuralism, indebted to it, I struggled against what I intuited as the rightness of minority critics who warned against its dangers: the system we inhabit, they said, will do its best to erase us. I thought, then, that cracks and crevices would provide enough space. That sneaking into a party through the service entrance still allowed one to smell the staleness of expensive colognes. That this was enough. That saturating my clothing with the smell of stale cigarettes would prove belonging. Or attempt it.
*
The most recent issue of GLQ announces a certain arrival: Black/Queer/Diaspora. We are back to slashes. And platform shoes. Jaffari Allen provides a lovely introduction, a mapping of fields, an invitation to think along with. A bad-mannered guest, I pause at endnotes.

Despite our best efforts [to solicit work from non-U.S.-based contributors] logistics, language, limited networks, and disparate measures of “quality” and “appropriateness” across different types of borders, as well as limitations of space and time (of would-be participants and of this publication) all proved formidable [obstacles].

One reads this nodding and wondering about the thick realities of “queer time,” “queer materialities,” “queer forms,” even “queer failure.” About the boundaries of our legibilities, our capacities, our incapacities. Our still-limited idioms. The discipline of “quality” and “appropriateness.”

Would it be queer to risk illegibility? Or is that beyond the possible? And, how strange that an issue on black/queer/diaspora dares not to risk the illegibility of blackness: black ink on a blackboard.

I ask for the impossible. Forgive my desire. My appetite has yet to master the right idioms.
*
And still I wonder about the extravagance of our claims, our claims to newness.

I learned to think queerly from Melvin Dixon, Audre Lorde, Assotto Saint, Amos Tutuola. And I want to stay with them for a while. Just a little longer. I am not yet “over” them.

The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.—Audre Lorde, “The Black Unicorn”
*
In an early issue of GLQ, Lee Edelman proclaimed that queer studies could never be “home,” arguing,

Opening spaces, reclaiming them, may be central to the enterprise of queer theory as it proliferates, but defining a space or a state of our own, insisting that we recognize and collectively accede to some common territorial boundaries, this is a fantasy, though enabling for some, that is profoundly dangerous in its reproduction of the exclusion—and of the motivating logic of exclusion—on which the heterosexual colonization of social reality is predicated.

Edelman reminds me that queer studies has always been possibility—a space for dreaming and visioning, that it never coalesced into a body that now needs reviving having become moribund, in one version, or an expansive colonizing force, claiming more fields and disciplines, in another.

And, perhaps, I register unease about reach and grasp, about the uses of “promiscuity” to describe queer labor, especially as people of color now populate the fields where that labor takes place. Fanon continues to warn me about the spectacle of black labor and pleasure.

And because the queer theory I learned is so ten years ago, I want to suggest that its imagination was more expansive than we might now allow, that if, to use Adrienne Rich’s terms, it “had not imagined us” in our particular fleshly incarnations, it had imagined. Beyond reach, and grasp, and gaze.
*
Beyond reach and grasp and gaze because I’m itchy about “what we have now,” the language of reach and grasp and gaze, the language of ownership (collective?), the language of accumulation, the library of orgies.

Stubbornly, 20 years after it fell out of fashion, I continue to question “we” and “our,” even as I use them, because I continue to find myself un-welcomed on page 27, or chapter 5, or on footnote 33, when a particular claim is staged. Invitations are endlessly rescinded in this “our” queer world.

At the end of heavy breathing
the dream deferred
is in a museum
under glass and guard.
It costs five dollars
to see it on display.—Essex Hemphill
*
I register, here, what feels like a non-specific allergic reaction. I am itchy and red-eyed and sniffling, trying to figure out how the air in the service entrance can be so radically different from that in the grand parlor. Worrying about my still-naïve belief that the faint scent of stale smoke will be enough of a disguise.