Search the archive.

Moreover, union membership can also strengthen democracy, at a time when working families in the United States need equitable and just representation in the nation’s highest political offices. Beyond their role as an active counterbalance to corporate power,18 unions represent one of the few interest groups whose positions line up with the interests of the middle class.19 Research shows that lawmakers representing strong union districts are more responsive to working-class constituents,20 and unions have been shown to increase voter turnout among both members and nonmembers.21

Years of de-unionization have harmed the middle class

But these facts say less about the deficiencies of democracy than they do about about the insufficiency of elections — by themselves — to produce popular self-rule. The alternative to naive faith in the omnicompetence of the individual voter need not be an equally naive faith in that of unelected technocrats. The most vital mediating institutions in a liberal democracy are not those formed by elites to check the irrational appetites of ordinary voters, but rather, those formed by ordinary voters to check the avarice of elites. Democracy asks too much of the individual. But if individuals organize collectively, they can force democracy to give them a better deal.

Which is a fancy way of saying: To repair American democracy — and fortify it against future threats — Democrats must not only bring more Americans into the electorate, but also, more American workers into labor unions.

It is certainly important to situate psychoanalysis in its historical and cultural contexts, and Bhabha’s use of psychoanalysis is largely uncritical leaving his readers with the impression that psychoanalysis is a useful but largely neutral and ahistorical theory. Much of the compelling work being done by psychoanalytically-influenced scholars like McClintock and Walton has demonstrated what careful attention to the history of psychoanalytic thought can produce. In McClintock’s case, her work has produced a useful critique of the sexism written into psychoanalysis together with a new model of psychoanalysis sensitive to the lives and experiences of women, especially those who lived and worked through the practices of colonialism. Nevertheless, I suggest that this cannot by itself answer the question of psychoanalysis’ suitability for colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. Such an approach continues to assume that the Eurocentric, racist, sexist and homophobic tones of psychoanalysis can be removed from the theory without radically altering the theory’s explanations. The proposed solutions suggest that attention to contexts and details will produce a modified tool more appropriate to the study of colonialism, non-Western peoples and non-Western nations. But what if consideration and investigation of the racist, sexist and homophobia currents in psychoanalysis disrupts the entire theoretical framework? If these currents are not incidental aspects of psychoanalysis but fundamental to its logic and practices then the use of psychoanalytic theory as a tool in postcolonial theory must be entirely reconsidered. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that, far from facilitating colonial analysis, psychoanalysis should become an object of postcolonial critique itself.

Settler-colonial societies produce new conceptions of gendered heteronormative sexualities that are enforced on indigenous populations where these settler-colonies exist. They proliferate these ideologies through punishment and regulation of indigenous sexualities that are seen as perverse by the settlers. This sexuality is relegated to the private sphere, and non-heterosexual (and more contemporarily, nonheteronormative) sexual practices were outlawed and regulated through a system of biopower by the state. In the 20th century, this settler colonial sexuality transformed in one way to include gay and lesbian sexualities as the latter came more into the mainstream, but only selectively. Only white, cis, and heteronormative gay and lesbian bodies were accepted into the mainstream, where queer people of colour and their demands were relegated to the periphery. To a large extent, even women are excluded from this discourse. In the context of South Africa, this manifested itself in a predominantly white and cis hegemonic sexuality that excluded queer Black people from its spaces under apartheid, and in Israel/Palestine, masculine, Jewish, European, gay men are taken as the default by which Israeli and Palestinian queers need to abide. Israel uses this image of the Israeli gay man to market itself as progressive in the face of “harsh” and “backward” Arab regimes around it, a rhetoric that excludes and demonizes Arabs and erases queer Arab experiences. In this way, the exclusionary and two-dimensional politics of settler-colonial sexualities do not take into account intersections of race or class. In the words of Fahad Ali (2014): “I am an Arab, I am a Palestinian, I am gay. My gay haven is not a glittered parade in Tel Aviv. It is a liberated Palestine.”

Gay Shame’s insistence on thinking both these iterations of racialized anti-trans/queer violence together is also the methodological commitment of this book. Araujo’s tragic murder might be primarily understood to be that of intersubjective violence, the phobic eruption of a personal relationship that became unbearable, and Akbar’s might function as a generic expression of the violence of the state form, once again levied against Blackness. Bringing them together, then, builds an analysis that is attentive to the scale of direct attack that is always staged within the language of the state that demands it. By tracing these edges, not only does an analysis of anti-trans/queer violence appear, but these connections allow for, or more pointedly order, a reading of normative power—modernity’s common sense—where Enlightenment’s dreams become our nightmares.9

This antagonism melds the spectacular murders of Jihad Alim Akbar and Gwen Araujo with the quotidian desires for destruction, including the sterilizing glares that rob one of the ability to sink into comfort. Besieged, the threat of harm reverberates in the fleshiness of the everyday, producing a kind of death-in-waiting lived as what Frantz Fanon called a “feeling of nonexistence.” Catastrophically, this imminent danger constitutes for the trans/queer that which is the sign of vitality itself, as possibility and limit are collapsed into one.

KMG: One of my favorite quotations is from D.L. Smith’s essay, “What is Black Cul- ture?” where he writes, “Perhaps in losing ourselves, we will find ourselves.”11 We are made into subjects through processes of imprint upon bodies, identity; race, gender, class, and/or sexual orientations. Without these identities, we fear that we will lose some sense of ourselves that is bound to history, so we carry it (history), sometimes by choice and other times, identities are placed upon us from the world around us and we have no real choice in how others choose to perceive us or our embodied histories. The fact of the matter is that we know that just because you are poor doesn’t mean that you will have radical anti-capitalist politics. Just because you are Black doesn’t mean that you will somehow have an affinity towards or with other Black people. These identities are scripts and the people who carry these scripts in their body, or rather those who embody evidence of particular identities, constantly prove how categorical labels are always already, they be, incapable of articulating the fullness of we (subjects) who endure, challenge, reinforce, despise, love, and sometimes encourage the naming. This limit does not exist simply because of a failure to acknowledge intersectional identities that many people carry, that is, a Black transgender working class woman—we could continue to add on here bisexual, college educated, Latinx, Republican—all of these identity claims start to help you understand the fullness of a subject, but none of these give you the full subject even if we keep listing out all of the identities we hold, we will only ever be approaching the fullness of a being or subject as said being changes in and over time. So I think the fear that we will lose ourselves without these categories is a trap that keeps us holding on to categories that we know fail us. There is a bind though because these identity categories prove useful in garnering state recognition, and also in creating a sense of community or group affinity. Think of the notion of a “protected class” that describes persons who are supposedly protected by the law because of their identity, but these anti-discrimination laws don’t always work to protect the people they set out to protect. While most hate crimes are still committed on Black bodies, it is LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] (white) folk who are most evoked when thinking of hate crimes and we are usually thinking about white queer bodies.12 For example, a recent episode of Law and Order SVU, “Transgender Bridge,”13 centers on the story of a white transgender teenage girl who is taunted by high schoolers from another school, a Black school, and an altercation ensues on the bridge after school. The Black boy pushes the girl and she falls over the bridge. She survives the initial fall, but later dies because of complications from the fall. Over the course of the episode, the Black boy keeps being reminded that he didn’t just hurt anyone, but someone from a “pro- tected class.” The viewer isn’t supposed to be able to see or hold that the Black boy is also a part of a class that needs protecting. This kind of nuance would disrupt and make unstable the position of the white transgender girl as the proper “protected class.” The Black boy is sentenced to 7 years, 3 years in a juvenile facility, and upon his 18th birthday he’ll be transferred to an adult prison to serve the remainder. In order to be able to view the nuance of the above situation it requires what I call a trans* positionality or lens. For me, there is a difference between trans and transgender. Transgender people are all very different so there isn’t one thing that I can say about Black transgender people. Being Black and transgender doesn’t give a person the ability to redeploy strategies of feminism. There are Black transgender people who do that work, but there are others who do not. I think what is more useful is to think about the ways in which trans*, like blackness, can be embodied, but it actually marks a certain kind of orientation in the world, it is not fixed though always precarious. It is important to make this distinction between transgender and trans because many transgender people do not identify as transgender, but rather identify as man or woman, not asking to remake or add a new gender category, but rather fit into one that already exists. In this case, I would not say that transgender people are actually undoing the categories that produce the boundaries of a gender binary, though changing one’s location on the binary does challenge the notion that gender is fixed, because some people are able to change genders. I think what might be more useful in this conversation is to think about gender non- conforming bodies, bodies that do not fit and actively refute a binary legibility. Not because these people are necessarily more radical, but their existence often poses a critique to the gender-binaried-order of the land. I believe it is necessary to cultivate a politic that is able to view the ways in which certain bodies are made more vulnerable to certain kinds of violence, but to also note that vulnerability changes depending on time, place, and condition. In the latest essay I published I propose trans*: We must listen for the fullness embedded in the silences and gaps, the moments of existence before the name or the category came to do its work upon the body. We must be more attuned to the present absences which calls for a Trans* method. One of the ways in which Black Queer Studies scholars have challenged us to engage black sexuality and gender is through simultaneous black and queer acts of (re)membering. Black Queer Studies staged this work in the gap and in the silence of Queer Studies and Black Studies who articulated themselves as mutually exclusive. Black Queer Studies helped us to call out the missing, the ones who are with us, but neglected. A Trans* method further names the work of charting the present absences in multiple sites of intersection by demanding a moment of criti- cal presence. A Trans* method is a tool that helps us to embark upon the work of listening, understanding, and reading as both intellectual and political practices. It allows us to see certain things that might not normally be seen. It also helps us to understand how that seeing is being shaped. As the T in LGBTQI becomes more apparent in popular culture, it is important that we still hold fast to a Trans* analytic, knowing that representation is not enough. We know that it is not enough, for just as Laverne Cox and Janet Mock have become the popular beautiful women of color representing the transgender movement, there have been countless other unnamed (and named, but names we are not familiar with) transgender women and men who have been harassed, violated, and murdered in the streets. At the heart of black feminist praxis is a push to make the lives of disappeared black women matter.14 In order to make that argument, black feminists showed us how the category of woman failed to account for the unique experience of black women. This critique both challenged and clung to the category itself. I consider the identities that have yet come to cohere as nameable, yet are ever present with us. How do we carry those not as simple additions to an ever growing acronym, LGBTQI, but instead hold them up as future Trans* operations that will come to do work and further open us up to new possibilities. This is the charge of a Black Queer Studies for now; and by now I mean in this current historical moment, but I also use for now to imply the temporariness of this method as one that is unfixed so that we might always be open and ready for a name changing considering what is necessary for now is not necessary for always.15 MB: I like the distinction you’re making between transgender people and gender nonconforming bodies. One can identify and be identified as transgender and yet do little to subvert and disrupt the gender binary. I imagine, maybe, you’d say something similar about those who are epidermally read as Black? That is, one can identify and be identified as Black and do little to undermine white supremacy. We can name a whole host of racially and gender marginalized folks who do not do Black feminist or trans feminist work, as it were: suffragists who said that they’d “cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman”; Hotep dudes pontificating about their “African Queens” and demanding babies, babies, babies because birth control is “genocide”; Southern African American men with swastika tattoos and confederate flags on their pick-ups; far-Right transgender women who buttress the gender binary; African American women who chastised “their” men for not being “manly” enough to defend “the race.” Surely subjectivity is complex and perhaps we all harbor instances of hegemonic practices. I think I want to maintain, though, that the Black/trans/feminist work to be done rests not in what we purportedly are but in how we mobilize ourselves and our politics in subversion of power. The terms at hand, then, come to be tied, for us, to relations to power and a willingness to enact the political forces behind these terms. In other words, we must choose Black and trans and feminism; we must make these things mean and matter in politically liberatory ways. I think I yearn for the thing that flows from the meeting of Black feminism and trans feminism as gendered fugitivity. The Blackness and transness of feminisms are not distinct phenomena to be hierarchized, nor mutually exclusive modes of subjectivity; Blackness and transness both engender animacy, act as analytical sites of disruption, and imbricate one another to the end of excavating the interstices of categorization. And I want to be clear that the political valences of the language I choose to deploy with respect to the Blackness and transness of feminisms must be handled with care. This conversation is testament to the fact that we care a great deal. And it is because we care a great deal that we are asserting these positions. We care about—nay, we love—the deviant, the marginalized, the fugitive, the renegades, the rebels, the gender-benders, the queer. These are the ones with whom I want.

And yet I can never truly move on. At least not for long. As we are co-constituted beings (Brouwer, et al., Fasset and Ruddick, Pineau, Toyosaki “Communication,” Warren). I am made up of me and you and them and us. As we are interdependent. We are made up of the past, present and future. Our bodies, our memories carrying the memories, carrying the stories of all the people we interact with and all the people who interact with them, and back again. adrienne maree brown asserts, “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale” (52). I tend to start at the small scale. I tend to start with myself. But/and, I believe the small is indicative of the large. Like paperson, my sense of self is always a we, an assemblage, interdependent, connected within, connected beyond an individual sense of self. An interdependent sense of self, a scyborg, “a queer turn of word” that serves to signify the “structural agency of persons” (paperson xiv). And one might resist, on might feel tension, one might be hailed by a colonial or liberal inclination to turn away from our interdependent reality. The inclination I refer to here is the impulse to hold onto independence, from a colonial ontology, as in separate, as in self-sustaining, as in codified (paperson, Sprague, “Ontology”). An inclination that whispers that you are the only one. The large scale, our institutions, they function to keep us here, keep us independent, holding onto this illusion of ownership, of pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps, of the wonderous, idealistic invention of man (Gaztambide and Angod, Hall, “Cultural Studies,” paperson, LeMaster and Mapes, Love, Nicolazzo, Prendergast and Jones, Wilderson, Wynter, Yep “Pedagogy”).

Thus, together, interdependently, we can do something differently. We can do everything differently. And by we, I do mean we. I mean you and I, them and us. And anyone in between. We can consider our bodies, our stories, our communities, as sites of knowing, or as a text to be read or understood or analyzed or situated in relation to (Brouwer et al., LeMaster and Terminel Iberri). Let’s start small. Let’s start every day. Our present moments are indicative of our past moments. Our we is an assemblage, an interdependent sense of self, connected within and connected beyond the individual (paperson). From this vantage point, mundane interactions function as cultural performances or “reiterations of multiple, intersecting cultural ideologies” (LeMaster, “Embracing” 10). Subsequently, mundane performances create possibilities, both, all at once – opportunity to secure the status quo and opportunity to disrupt. The mundane is often characterized by mindlessness, an everyday utterance we don’t think twice about. Critical self-reflexivity functions to disrupt this mindlessness, through purposeful conscious reflection, we can examine our own complicity in hegemony and normativity, in our mundane performances. Writing offers a space for reflection, a pause in the present moment in time. On this page, we deploy our counter-stories as tools of epistemic resistance (Baszile, Smith, Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex”). We write to love ourselves (Anzaldúa). We write to talk back (hooks). We write to research back (Smith). We seek to wrestle with angels (Hall, “Cultural Studies”). Moving with reflexivity we seek to explore the temporal, corporeal, and spatial realities of our bodies, made and unmade by cultural sites of power, the classroom, the academy, and institutions writ large, we seek to survive, and we long to become. And we become through love.

Twentieth Century America" (2023). Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses. 52.

)

You know, I think that joy is not a feeling that one inhabits. Joy is a disposition. It is a kind of mood that one must work daily to affirm and attempt to inhabit. Growing up, I remember hearing a lot about joy in sorrow, which seems to be deeply contradictory. How could one have what we presume to be a simple feeling? I think that is an imprecision, it’s a misunderstanding of what I understand the saints to have meant and mean when they talk about having joy. Which is not primarily an ephemeral feeling that is fleeting and goes away. It is actually a kind fundamental recognition that the simplicity of our breath and our being and our becoming is itself celebratory. Joy as the desire to cultivate or to really attempt to be tender with our fragility as human creatures. Joy for me is the recognition of that complexity and the desire for a kind of posture that is about letting that complexity happen.

I think that academia, if we’re going to think about it as a kind of institution that has a set of practices, is deeply worried about joy and Black joy. Because it is a kind of force that recognizes the terribleness with which we exist, that the terribleness is not part of an existential dilemma, but it is a creation, and I know lots of my theologian friends would probably disagree with me on this point. I say it’s not an existential dilemma only insofar as the dread that we are supposed to feel—about being overtaken by police, for example, and violently acted upon, because we are trans or we are queer, or we are all of that and also Black—that the dread that we are supposed to feel is not actually the dread of the fact of your existence and breath. It is a dread that is produced, because of a political economic context, under which existence has to be negotiated.

At a moment when queer studies has gained momentum in the academy and forged a space as a legitimate disciplinary subject, much of the scholarship produced in its name elides issues of race and class. While the epigraphs that open this essay suggest that the label ‘‘queer’’ sometimes speaks across (homo)sexualities, they also suggest that the term is not necessarily embraced by gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color. Indeed, the statements of Mack-Nataf, Blackman, and Cohen reflect a general suspicion that the label often displaces and rarely addresses their concerns.4 Some queer theorists have argued that their use of ‘‘queer’’ is more than just a reappropriation of an offensive term. Cherry Smith, for example, maintains that the term entails a ‘‘radical questioning of social and cultural norms, notions of gender, reproductive sexuality and the family’’ (280). Others underscore the playfulness and inclusivity of the term, arguing that it opens up rather than fixes identities. According to Eve Sedgwick, ‘‘What it takes—all it takes—to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person’’ (9). Indeed, Sedgwick suggests, it may refer to pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or [. . .] people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such. (8) For Sedgwick, then, it would appear that ‘‘queer’’ is a catchall term not bound to any particular identity, a notion that moves us away from binaries such as homosexual/ heterosexual and gay/lesbian. Micheal Warner offers an even more politicized and polemical view: The preference for ‘‘queer’’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. For academics, being interested in Queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the public from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform. (xxvi) The foregoing theorists identify ‘‘queer’’ as a site of indeterminate possibility, a site where sexual practice does not necessarily determine one’s status as queer. Indeed, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that queer is ‘‘more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a history’’ (344). Accordingly, straight identified critic Calvin Thomas appropriates Judith Butler’s notion of ‘‘critical queerness’’ to suggest that ‘‘just as there is more than one way to be ‘critical’, there may be more than one (or two or three) to be ‘queer’ ’’ (83). Some critics have applied Butler’s theory of gender to identity formation more generally. Butler calls into question the notion of the ‘‘self’’ as distinct from discursive cultural fields. That is, like gender, there is no independent or pure ‘‘self’’ or agent that stands outside socially and culturally mediated discursive systems. Any move toward identification, then, is, in her view, to be hoodwinked into believing that identities are discourse free and capable of existing outside the systems those identity formations seek to critique. Even when identity is contextualized and qualified, Butler still insists that theories of identity ‘‘invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc’.’’ (Gender 143). Butler’s emphasis on gender and sex as ‘‘performative’’ would seem to undergird a progressive, forward-facing theory of sexuality. In fact, some theorists have made the theoretical leap from the gender performative to the racial performative, thereby demonstrating the potential of her theory for understanding the ontology of race.5 But to riff off of the now popular phrase ‘‘gender trouble,’’ there is some race trouble here with queer theory. More particularly, in its ‘‘race for theory’’ (Christian), queer theory has often failed to address the material realities of gays and lesbians of color. As black British activist Helen (Charles) asks, ‘‘What happens to the definition of ‘queer’ when you’re washing up or having a wank? When you’re aware of misplacement or displacement in your colour, gender, identity? Do they get subsumed [. . .] into a homogeneous category, where class and other things that make up a cultural identity are ignored?’’ (101–102). What, for example, are the ethical and material implications of queer theory if its project is to dismantle all notions of identity and agency? The deconstructive turn in queer theory highlights the ways in which ideology functions to oppress and to proscribe ways of knowing, but what is the utility of queer theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of trauma? Beyond queer theory’s failure to focus on materiality, it also has failed to acknowledge consistently and critically the intellectual, aesthetic, and political contributions of nonwhite and non-middle-class gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people in the struggle against homophobia and oppression. Moreover, even when white queer theorists acknowledge these contributions, rarely do they self-consciously and overtly reflect on the ways in which their whiteness informs their critical queer position, and this is occurring at a time when naming one’s positionality has become almost standard protocol in other areas of scholarship. Although there are exceptions, most often white queer theorists fail to acknowledge and address racial privilege.7 Because transgendered people, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals of color often ground their theorizing in a politics of identity, they frequently fall prey to accusations of ‘‘essentialism’’ or ‘‘anti-intellectualism.’’ Galvanizing around identity, however, is not always an unintentional ‘‘essentialist’’ move. Many times, it is an intentional strategic choice.8 Cathy Cohen, for example, suggests that ‘‘queer theorizing which calls for the elimination of fixed categories seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional social identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to one’s survival’’ (‘‘Punks’’ 450). The ‘‘communal ties’’ to which Cohen refers are those which exist in communities of color across boundaries of sexuality. For example, my grandmother, who is homophobic, nonetheless must be included in the struggle against oppression in spite of her bigotry. While her homophobia must be critiqued, her feminist and race struggles over the course of her life have enabled me and others in my family to enact strategies of resistance against a number of oppressions, including homophobia. Some queer activists groups, however, have argued fervently for the disavowal of any alliance with heterosexuals, a disavowal that those of us who belong to communities of color cannot necessarily afford to make.9 Therefore, while offering a progressive and sometimes transgressive politics of sexuality, the seams of queer theory become exposed when that theory is applied to identities around which sexuality may pivot, such as race and class. As a counter to this myopia and in an attempt to close the gap between theory and practice, self and Other, Audre Lorde proclaims: Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. [. . .] I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch the terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. (112–13, emphasis in original) For Lorde, a theory that dissolves the communal identity—in all of its difference— around which the marginalized can politically organize is not a progressive one. Nor is it one that gays, bisexuals, transgendered people, and lesbians of color can afford to adopt, for to do so would be to foreclose possibilities of change.

Because much of queer theory critically interrogates notions of selfhood, agency, and experience, it is often unable to accommodate the issues faced by gays and lesbians of color who come from ‘‘raced’’ communities. Gloria Anzaldu´ a explicitly addresses this limitation when she warns that ‘‘queer is used as a false unifying umbrella which all ‘queers’ of all races, ethnicities and classes are shored under’’ (250). While acknowledging that ‘‘at times we need this umbrella to solidify our ranks against outsiders,’’ Anzaldu´ a nevertheless urges that ‘‘even when we seek shelter under it [‘‘queer’’], we must not forget that it homogenizes, erases our differences’’ (250). ‘‘Quare,’’ on the other hand, not only speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well. ‘‘Quare’’ offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges. My project is one of recapitulation and recuperation. I want to maintain the inclusivity and playful spirit of ‘‘queer’’ that animates much of queer theory, but I also want to jettison its homogenizing tendencies. As a disciplinary expansion, then, I wish to ‘‘quare’’ ‘‘queer’’ such that ways of knowing are viewed both as discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned. This reconceptualization foregrounds the ways in which lesbians, bisexuals, gays, and transgendered [LGBT] people of color come to sexual and racial knowledge. Moreover, quare studies acknowledges the different ‘‘standpoints’’ found among lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered people of color—differences that are also conditioned by class and gender.3 Quare studies is a theory of and for gays and lesbians of color. Thus, I acknowledge that in my attempt to advance quare studies, I run the risk of advancing another version of identity politics. Despite this, I find it necessary to traverse this political mine field in order to illuminate the ways in which some strands of queer theory fail to incorporate racialized sexuality. The theory that I advance is a ‘‘theory in the flesh’’ (Moraga and Anzaldu´ a 23). Theories in the flesh emphasize the diversity within and among gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of color while simultaneously accounting for how racism and classism affect how we experience and theorize the world. Theories in the flesh also conjoin theory and practice through an embodied politics of resistance. This politics of resistance is manifest in vernacular traditions such as performance, folklore, literature, and verbal art.

One issue with allyship is that allies seem to be able to turn their allyship on and off when convenient, which not only highlights their fundamental difference with the minoritized individuals with whom they ally, but also expresses a lack of commitment to these people and their needs. So, allyship becomes a tool of expression and individualization rather than a commitment to solidarity. It becomes an easy choice not an endless struggle. One may define themselves as an ally to gain social capital in minority social circles, while remaining silent against racism in socially-dominant spaces. The ally’s privileged status allows them to abandon the fight when necessary or even when not, as they need not oppose oppressive systems or individuals’ actions to go about their day. This practice degrades both those with whom the allies ally and the participation of allies in movements meant to dismantle such systems, as these actions are oriented not at supporting marginalized groups but more toward providing the already privileged ally with the social status or internal gratification of the ally label (Ostrove & Brown, 2017). One need only scroll through Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter for a few minutes to find aggressive claims of allyship paired with ambiguous photos, inspirational quotations, and confusing statements in support of some version of social justice followed by a week’s worth of silence about the issue.

Allyship allows privileged populations to attempt to cleanse themselves of guilt for participating in oppressive systems while failing to require any action to dismantle that system or the necessary reflexivity important in social justice praxis. At present, one can claim the identity of ally to allow themselves to feel participatory affiliation in movements while never actually participating in protests, boycotts, picket lines, or for that matter activist writing and presenting in the academy and community. It is easy to be an ally in one’s Twitter profile and by reposting on Facebook, but much harder allying oneself through engagement. Slacktivism has become a status symbol online and in college dorms, assuaging guilt, but doing little to assist or support minority populations advocating for and realizing change.

Linguistics plastically integrates queerness into criminalized subjection/signfiers based on the act of violence against queer folk

Queer folk’s dehumanization strips them of their being/existence

To create a blueprint, the Kritik-Focus Model must have a purpose. Proponents of Kritik debate argue that it creates opportunity for epistemological growth that students do not experience elsewhere because they are incentivized by ballots to research a wide variety of arguments that challenge their understanding of the world *1. This is consistent with Roger Solt’s (1995, p. A9-10) claim that decisions in any debates represent provisional judgements that produce, “our moral and political belief system[s]”. At the end of a season or a career, each person is fundamentally transformed by the conversations they have been a part of. Alternatively, defenders of the PFM argue that competitive equity and a fair decision is the only thing each round should represent. However, the competition for its own sake is unacceptable in an educational activity. Tiffany Dillard-Knox, Director of The University of Louisville Malcolm X Debate Society and former participant in “The Louisville Project” *2 warns us against such a mode of competition: “Competition at all costs is dangerous…Our argument was that people wanted to win and would do anything to win regardless of the dehumanizing effects of particular strategies… like the Malthus argument…it was all about winning... Competition at all costs creates harmful effects because we’re not thinking about the people we are debating against…” Prior to Kritik debaters pushing back on competition at all costs, judges would allow students to make racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory arguments because, as Director Dillard-Knox explains,” … literally anything went”. Today, judges are willing to penalize debaters for creating a hostile environment because competition is no longer our sole priority. To avoid this pitfall, KFM will prioritize that the educational environment and the growth of students over any marginal benefits of improved competition. The Kritik-Focus Model starts with the Affirmative team. It is their burden to choose a critical/cultural perspective based, at least partially, on academic research and apply it to the Resolution. Perspectives run the gamut from Critical Race Theory, Womanism, Latinx, and Marxist perspectives to broader theories of Ontology, Epistemology, and Cosmology. From their critical/cultural understanding of the Resolution, the Affirmative must advocate a Method of change that departs from the status quo. The Negative team has the burden of rejoinder—they must prove that the Affirmative Method is not desirable. To prove that the Affirmative is not desirable, the Negative must choose a critical/cultural perspective, evaluate the Affirmative, and respond. After a year of Kritikal debates on the Resolution, a single student would have been exposed to dozens of critical perspectives and would have a deep understanding of forgotten or sublimated histories that they do not learn anywhere else. By the end of a debate career, competitors would be incentivized to be proficient and well-read across all parts of the academy. The NDT champion, CEDA, or TOC champion would represent the team with the best ability to evaluate, apply, and articulate critical/cultural theories and methods to global problems.

KFM Smith 20 [Elijah Smith is the Director of the Rutgers University–Newark Debate Team, which is housed in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark. “The Kritik-Focus Model of Debate” Proceedings of the Tokyo Conference on Argumentation, Volume 6. August 2020. ] bfinzer

College Policy Debate finds itself at the convergence of many ripples in the pond of the American Academy over the last 40 years. Argumentative innovations, the growing complexity of academic scholarship, the and the advent of Urban Debate Leagues, are among the factors that brought us an era in which students can “hack” the rules of debate by reading an Affirmative advocacy indicting the activity of Policy Debate in the finals of a national championship and win (Kraft, 2014). The advocacies are known as the Kritik. Teams that have won national championships by using the Kritik, such as Towson, Georgetown, Rutgers, and Emporia owe their success to a long-legacy of scholars, coaches, and supporters who created cracks in the door of Policy Debate and set the stage for the modern era. Proponents of College Policy Debate (CPD) have traditionally vaunted what I call the PlanFocus Model of Debate (PFM). Within the PlanFocus Model, the Affirmative team proposes a Plan of action to solve an inherent problem in the status quo that is causing significant harm. The Plan is as an example of the larger Resolution, or topic, that debate organizations craft and vote on for a year of debate. Resolutions almost exclusively center on what the United States federal government should do about problems ranging from immigration, to democracy assistance, land use, and alternative energy. The PFM is argued to provide competitors with longterm research, decision-making, and critical thinking skills by debating both sides of the Resolution with well-reasoned arguments (Freeley & Steinberg 2013). Alternatively, proponents of the Kritik do not believe that the debate must center on a Plan of action by the government. Instead, Kritik debaters introduce arguments linked to philosophical questions raised by the Resolution, the debate community, and the norms and procedures of debate. These two competing camps are engaged in an ongoing culture war known as the Clash of Civilizations which segregates the community along pedagogical, and often racial, lines (Dillard-Knox, 2014, Pg 6). Those who sit in the traditionalist camp have been regularly accused of avoiding, rather than engaging, the arguments presented by teams that read the Kritik by objecting to the content of Kritikal arguments as a distraction from the Resolution (Odekirk & Reid Brinkley,2012). The culture war intensified in 2013 when Emporia SW “United the Crowns” of CPD by winning both the Cross-Examination Debate Association and National Debate Tournament championships in the same season with two different Kritik Affirmatives. While this affirmed efforts to diversify debate and to validate the Kritik, it also shattered the glass ceiling over Kritik arguments and minority success in debate at-large. Uniting the Crowns spilled over to other evidentiary debate like Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum, and some forms of College Parliamentary Debate. Moreover, representatives of the debate community, including recent National Debate Tournament Champions from traditionalist and predominantly white institutions, publicly denigrate Kritik debate and scapegoated it for a decline in participation. Others have made this same claim even though the biblical end of the event has been prophesied since at least the early 1980’s – much earlier than any modern debaters or Kritiks were even thought of (Herbeck, n.d.; Parson, 1996; Louden,1997). The American University remains under fire and will face renewed financial and political pressure because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The CPD community is not exempt from these concerns and will face increased visibility due the upcoming season of online debate. Together, all these things serve as a reminder to justify the learning community we have created. A reasonable fear of we who are” diversity-enhancing” is that the traditionalists who disengage from us and our pedagogical goals now will not defend our programs tomorrow. Kritikal debate does not have a direct and singular academic defense of our model. Extant literature on the Kritik is focused on recording history, creating and documenting important theoretical and cultural justifications for Kritikal arguments, engaging in rhetorical criticism, responding to racial hostility , or discussing Kritik innovations (Mitchell, 1998;Haig, 2005a; Haig, 2005b; Reid-Brinkley, 2008; Polson, 2012; Reid-Brinkley, 2012; Smith, 2013; Vincent, 2013; Alston, et.al. 2014; Dillard-Knox, 2014; James, 2017; Kelsie, 2019) My research into this question shows that the CPD community, and proponents of the Kritik specifically, spend insufficient time describing pedagogical value to those outside of our community( Llano, 2014). A priority must be to mount an internal defense of the Kritik-Focus Model (KFM) of debate. A second priority must be translating that defense to external actors. This paper will serve both goals, in part, as an addition to the literature on the Kritik that explicates some of the pedagogical benefits of the KFM.

In addition to engaging with the heart of the resolution, rev v. rev debate and critical debate more broadly might be thought of as an engagement not with any particular social movement or revolution, but rather with the question of what moves the social. In McGee’s (1980) essay on the rhetoric of social movements, he draws a distinction between perspectives that approach social movement as “phenomenon” and social movement as “meaning.” The essence of this distinction is that while prior scholars have often treated social movements as discrete, self-contained entities that in reality scholars of communication ought to address social movements not as a noun but as a verb. He contends that social movements are not clearly delineated phenomena but instead are processes that develop as collective and impact the world through rhetoric. Thus, the question for him is not what a social movement is, but instead what moves the social. Similarly, instead of examining a single self-contained policy action, or considering a hypothetical activist action, much of critical debate considers questions of ontology, language, orientation, and representation. Contrary to the idea that these debates do not think about material action (Solt, 2004), we suggest they shift the paradigm of debate from a particular policy phenomenon to think critically about what moves the social. As Happe (2013) suggests, racism continues not simply as an overt idea or discriminatory action, but through the ritualistic performance of material-discursive practices in media, legal, academic, and everyday settings. Thus, in considering the ways in which language practices, political orientations, and performative expressions impact race relations in debate, critical debate confronts the material terrain on which race and domination are enacted and reenacted. Taking rev v. rev and critical debate seriously thus requires reconceptualizing how we approach social change, and this viewpoint is supported in social movements literature.

Evolving scholarly debates over social movements, critical theory, race, and rhetoric have the potential to provide fruitful scholarly grounds upon which rev v. rev debates might draw on. As we contend in this section, these debates not only constitute rhetorics of agitation that challenge the hegemony of white-dominated establishment politics but present a model for considering clash between two strategies outside of government reform. Although traditional debate considers the hypothetical imagination of government reform to be the natural stasis of debate writ-large, this stasis is justified through social construction, not inherent limits on the scope of the topic. As Robert Krizek and Thomtas Nakayama (1995) highlight, whiteness functions as the unspoken, universal standard of communication, in which the ideas, identities, and experiences of white people are presumed as a “neutral” consensus. Sylvia Wynter (2003) speaks to the “overrepresentation of Man as human,” in describing how white people stand in as the metaphysical referent point for what it means to be human itself. Similarly, the white traditional policy debater stands in as the rhetorical, intellectual, and practical referent point of debate par excellence, framing critical challenges forwarded by Black and minority debaters as peripheral, threatening, and unpredictable.

This is not to say that only white debaters advance policy arguments and only Black and minority debaters advance critical arguments. Nevertheless, traditional debate continues to overrepresent white debaters while critical debate has largely been responsible for increasing Black and minority participation. More importantly, critical debate has been racialized through Blackness because much of the anxiety surrounding its inception associates critical debate with questions of identity, privilege, and personal experiences of racial domination. Much of this anxiety surrounded Louisville in particular and race-based performance and critical debate writlarge. In her examination of the Los Angeles Riots, Tamara Nopper (2006) argues that despite the participation of Latino/a/x people in the riots, the riots themselves are associated with Blackness as a signifier for criminality in the American cultural imagination, and therefore the Latino/a/x rioters were understood through this racializing frame. Similarly, one can understand how the supposed threats posed by critical debates are associated with the threat of Blackness, insofar as Blackness stands in for and gives coherency to threats to the civility, stasis and sovereignty of white policy debate as its constitutive outside (Kelsie, 2019). That Solt identified the shift from “culture war” to “clash of civilization” speaks to the way in which these forms of debate were considered particularly threatening to the activity – likely in no small part due to underlying antiBlackness

As with the sticky alchemy of all disciplinary lines, the canon has power because it accumulates to produce formations of knowledge. Given that some lines more than others are lines of privilege, it becomes possible to write off race, gender, queer scholarship as that “identity politics” stuff and, in turn, to define identity politics as distracting, divisive, infuriating. Lumped together and made synonymous with fragmentations in the field, critical race studies of media and communication emerge as a problem created by practitioners who emphasize “peripheral” rather than “core” issues, whose unfamiliarity and disinterest in knowledge “beyond their particular niche” ossifies to form “hyperspecialized” areas of expertise that are “of interest, mainly, to scholars also located in the same niches” (Pfau, 2008, p. 599). No doubt, for some, it is convenient to have white people do the speaking for brown and black people, and best when they do what Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo identify as “drive-by race scholarship” (2018). But, as Gilroy notes, these economies also turn on reifications of “ethnic garb” that critical race studies of Communication must don—the more exotic and adventurous the cultural practices being studied, the more enthusiastic their reception within the academic institution (1993, p. 5; see also, Melamed, 2011). As institutional incentives for “diversity” and inclusion work in powerful ways to “determine whether we are hired or promoted” (Christian 1988, p. 67), some race or gender scholars now must be recognized as “experts” and “authorities,” rewarded with status and recognition. But within the terms of racial neoliberalism, it becomes possible to also say without facing much reproach: wait (...) we already have one of them. Do we really need another? I have been compelled, for most of my career, by questions about the architecture, politics, and power of knowledge. In various ways, my work tends to loop back to the ways that raced and gendered formations are baked into established grammars and canonical knowledges. Much of what I have written has focused on the ways that dominant discourses assume the characteristics and formidable power of “truth,” parading about as universal, even though they always speak from a particular point of view, centering a specific historical subject. Certainly, part of what the #CommunicationSoWhite preconference organized was a way to collectively refuse this racial order of things, these habits, as Kimberlé Crenshaw puts it, of wishful thinking and studied denials (1997, p. 97), that invariably imagine the historical subject as a white, western, hetero-patriarchal male, and which assume, with breathtaking certainty, that his experiences are always applicable and fully generalizable to the rest of us. Confronting the canon’s deliberate tendencies to not see race or to see race in only this or that way, part of our challenge is to find ways to unlearn the canon, to speak without constantly having to explain the formidable power of difference and alterity as it marks everyone’s lives—not just our own. Indeed, part of what I witnessed at #CommunicationSoWhite was a concerted collective effort to figure out how not to follow the official paths laid out for us. To quote Ahmed again, citation is how we leave a trail of where we have been and who helped us along the way. While writing her recent book, Living a Feminist Life (2017), Ahmed adopted a very strict citation policy. She did not cite any white men. By “white men,” she explains, she means “an institution, as well as the mechanisms for reproducing an institution.” In this light, the project that #CommunicationSoWhite highlights entails the critical work of decoding who is or is not part of this institution called “white men,” of being attentive to who we ourselves cite, which voices we let in and who we leave out. A sizable number of critical race scholars have spent years doing the work of tracking and correcting the continuing and conspicuous absence of Latinix, black, women of color, queer of color theories and historiographies within Communication and Media Studies.1 In just over a decade, we have seen set sail a veritable armada of special issues, published forums, and scholarly anthologies2 that attempt, precisely, to bring silenced voices in and, in so doing, to shake the canon up and out of its myopias and strategic ignorance. Let us remember that much of this work did not exist, indeed, it could not have existed, only a few years ago. These developing literatures have opened doors, bringing together a new generation of media and communication scholars invested, in a range of ways, in exposing the myth of whiteness, outing it as visible and specific, as one ethnicity among others and, thus, as a construct located in history, culture, and power. These efforts have also revealed how, as an institution, whiteness is quick to absorb, corral, and contain the impact of such outings and exposures. We see over and over again how the old guard slips back into old habits, easing itself, not by accident or mere oversight, to the comfort of the old boys’ club. We see, similarly, their persistence in positioning us as an add-on, an optional extra, a kind of appendage to the field. We are, as a consequence, always just arriving, and our arrival always precipitating one or another kind of disciplinary rupture—a ferment in the field, an epistemological crisis—always enacting a messy departure from what remains, steady and silent, at the center of the Communication canon. It is this eternal arriving, the “always newness” of race (Corey and Nakayama, 2012, p. 18), its alleged eccentricity and exogeny, that I wish to examine in this article. In light of the sheer volume of critiques that critical race scholars have offered against the whiteness of the canon, we cannot but conclude that the field remains so white because something/someone is deliberately keeping it so. In this light, I am interested in understanding the institutions as well as the mechanisms for reproducing those institutions, in the sense of Weheliye’s (2014) profoundly racialized and racializing assemblages, by which some works are assimilated into the canon and others left outside. I want to engage these questions through a counter-intuitive reading that takes us into the presumed white center of the canon. I offer an outline of a critical race archaeology of the field to consider some of the ways that questions of racism and prejudice are, in fact, inscribed into the DNA of the field. In order to work, this archaeology must connect points of motivated silence, deliberate moments of erasure, in order to reveal not the absence of race but, instead, what Charles Mills has termed “an epistemology of ignorance” (2007, p. 16). The idea, if you will indulge it, is to re-orient given accounts of the canon so that what comes into focus is a terrain of ethno-racial encounter, deliberate and strategic, which, I want to suggest, has marked the intellectual histories and institutional architectures of Communication as a field from the start. I do this heeding Chávez’s caution that “crafting intellectual history is always precarious” (2015, p. 162). Indeed, my training in Communication at a large midwestern research university in the late 1980s and early 1990s means that my take on intellectual history, any intellectual history, is necessarily whimsical, personal, arbitrary. There are things graduate school gave me and things it did not, lines of inquiry I stumbled into and others I did not. These accidents are part of what and how I know, and the particulars of my training mean that any intellectual history I am equipped to tell will gloss over some details and mangle others. I share the outline below, thus, in the spirit of a provocation, a starting point for a conversation, rather than a last word.

That white policy debate remains overrepresented as debate writ large does not point to its inherent center of any given resolution. Consider for example, Lisa Flores’ (2016) consideration of racial rhetorical criticism in the discipline of communication. She contends that despite the fact that minority scholars and scholarship concerning race remain marginalized in the canon, that rhetorical studies at its core is bound up with questions of race. This is because rhetoric is concerned with politics, publics, and cultural discourses, and race is central to all of those aspects. We suggest scholars ought to consider the ways in which race lies at the core of every resolutional question in different ways, as each year the resolution typically considers topics relevant to political publics and social change. One may object that by design, the resolutional question is meant to change the surrounding scholarship every year so that it is topic specific and thus allowing scholarship on race to be at the heart of every topic is problematic. However, this does not discard the fact that different areas of scholarship on race might be connected to each topic, just like each year policy debate continually draws from the disciplines of international relations, political theory, and legal theory, even though their particular cases vary with each resolution.

Proponents of a traditional policy interpretation of the topic often contend specifically that the mechanism, or the actor, in the resolution is necessary to make it predictable. However, as we have been arguing throughout this essay, traditional policy debate’s overrepresentation of debate is not neutral consensus, but a normalized process informed by racialized assumptions. Traditionally, the words in the resolution are assumed to describe fiat, or hypothetical imagination. Yet none of the words in any given resolution can be described definitively as meaning hypothetical imagination. A team could read a plan text and then describe the affirmative case as irony. They could also read a plan text as a metaphor. These would technically conform to the words in the resolution, and thus reveal it is not the words that limit out “unpredictable” mechanisms but a community norm. In this regard, fiat is, technically speaking, an arbitrary, extra-topical inclusion. It does not gain authority from the words in the resolution, instead it informs how debaters and coaches ought to interpret those words. Put differently, fiat is not inherently predictable based on the resolution, but only predictable based on a tradition. However, as Louisville and other Black and critical teams have pointed to, that tradition is steeped in the overrepresentation of white debaters, their interests, their desires, and their claims to what the activity ought to look like. When this aspect is taken into consideration with our aforementioned point that the topic selection and resolutional wording process is itself informed by racialized archival processes, new conceptualizations of clash beyond this restrictive framework become necessary.

Critical argumentation is an argumentative constellation and all critical arguments in the 21st are indebted to Black radicalism in the activity. And whether or not individual debaters recognize it, all critical arguments compound on one another. One set of arguments in the expanse of critical debate is what I will be describing here as trans argumentation. Trans argumentation is not static nor complete—it is continually unfolding in the classroom spaces of intercollegiate policy debate. Trans argumentation’s edges are jagged and its history holds complexities that shape the methodological choices of this essay. For instance, many times trans argumentation is not posted online in full transparency due to the risks of outing students that are running it in round, which also influences whether or not students want their debate rounds to be recorded. Furthermore, what is recognized as trans argumentation is racialized: Black critiques of gender imposition often are not optically situated within the vein of trans criticism, despite theorizing dualistic gender normativity and working to uproot violence against gender deviance. Wrestling with these questions, I have chosen to speak of trans argumentation broadly in terms of the conversations, questions, positions, interventions and strategies it often pursues instead of isolating a singular debate or debate duo as a case study to survey the field. At the core of trans argumentation is the idea that trans people are not merely a singular counterpoint to transexclusionary feminism or queer theory or but rather deserve foregrounded political attention, in particular to the ways in which surpassing the permissible limits of gender is scripted as a threatening deception and being identified or identifying oneself as trans accrues surveillance and attack. As I explain, in some instances this means that white and non-Black trans arguments end up isolating transphobia from other vectors of violence, namely white supremacy, settlement and capital accumulation. These veins of trans criticism foreclose on their debt to Black radicalism. But as I proffer, trans argumentation has and can instigate modes of argumentative relationality that compounds on and with Black intellectualism(s) to assemble alternative political blueprints and challenge the limitations of single-issue frames. Trans argumentation, like most trans scholarship and study, wrestles with its own subject matters, definitions, and limits. A key characteristic of trans argumentation is the problematization of the prevailing conception that there is a fixed, isolatable and identifiable population of transgender subjects and that the terms trans/transgender/transsexual, when used as self-descriptors, retain universal meanings. Trans argumentation queries: what is violence against gender transgression and what does it mean to face it and perpetuate it? How do we reckon with the fact that gender outlaws hold a variety of perspectives, politics and experiences? What does it mean to be cis and aspire to cisness? How can gender transition teach us about political transition? What trans pedagogies should we pass down (and up and across)? Why do so many people adhere to embalmed gender and sexual scripts that in so many ways, work to dictate and control our words, bodies and actions? How do trans phenomena assist us all in rethinking what is construed as impossible? These questions guide political and social demands against trans disenfranchisement and themselves are entangled with the questioning practices of Black radical criticism. Trans arguments present legal analysis of the reverberating consequences of criminalization of cross-dressing, sodomy and prostitution in and out of the United States. Trans argumentation presents negative criticisms and affirmative cases that ask their opponents to encounter and respond to trans pedagogies, theories, writings, poems, manifestos, films and music. In order to engage in this mode of study, trans argumentation turns back to the archive to present trans figures and collectives, such as the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) spearheaded by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and trans insurgencies against police and corporate repression such as the 1959 Cooper Do-Nuts riot, the 1965 Dewey's Sit-In, the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot, and the 1969 Stonewall rebellion (Stryker, 2008). Analyzed in round, students debate about the ways in which the collectives and insurgencies of trans political organizing should be analyzed and regarded. Instead of positioning trans insurgency in an isolated vacuum, debaters committed to interdisciplinary analysis situate trans resistance amid the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s. This includes the unintentional omission and intentional sacrifice of trans people from emerging feminist, lesbian and gay movements that in their own ways are also indebted to Black radicalism whether it with tactics (consciousness-raising and sitins) or slogans (gay is good).