queer theory as an analytic of sociality juxtaposes blackness as conservative – the aff cannot account for the ways that gender and sexuality are scripted differently onto black flesh – at best the aff is a restructuring of western Man around the white, queer subject – the impact is fungibility

In the nether regions of the indigo plantation, Black bodies may merge/ mate with plants and create the commodity dye. Black bodies as hybrid plant bodies assume another level of nonnormative and nonhuman sexual excess when situated within the context of the emergence of modern sexu- ality. Black open, porous bodies both traffic within discourses of sexuality as slippery, wet, and always open and transgress the purview of the sexual. The Black enslaved body embedded within ecotonal processes that tropi- calize the landscape of the plantation present new racial and sexual coordi- nates of human alterity. Black bodies (at the place of the pore) are gender- less, sensual, penetrable, sexual, fecund, and boundless in ways that queer theory cannot give an account. Attending to flesh/pores at their encounter with the pores of indican moves into proximity with the ways that Spillers “breaks” the gender speci- ficity of Black flesh under enslavement. The ostensibly male slaves who par- ticipated in indigo processing were susceptible to the same kind of stain- ing, abjection, and sometimes death (likened to cancer) related to toxic exposure as “female flesh unprotected.” At the level of pores, the Black bodies in Dash’s movie and those working the indigo on the map are un- gendered by their capacity for porosity and functioning as sites of tran- sit for chemicals. In fact, gender ambiguity and genderlessness (or the un- gendering of the captive) is part of the reason that Blackness gets scripted out of coherent human genres.47 These indigo Black bodies are also sites of open and unbounded exchange and entry at their pores. These kinds of fluid and open bodies become signs of sensuality, movement, and ex- change and often metaphors for the sexual. While the stained Black pore as a sign of sensuality, movement, and transit runs alongside the sexual, its penetrability is not solely linked to the genital-anus complex. Nor do Black bodies achieve nonnormative status primarily through sex and the sexual metaphors proffered by queer theory. Homosexual/queer subjects (contemporary LGBT individuals) and theory begin in and with the new genres of the human that emerged in late nineteenth-century sexology. During this era of White sexual differen- tiation and particularity, Dash’s characters contend with the generational poisoning and staining of their pores as sensual and, therefore, deselected beings. I stress this point for a few reasons. One reason is that mainstream queer theory does not do an adequate job of conceptualizing how Blackness re- configures Western gender and sexuality. Furthermore, queer theory arro- gantly assumes that Western gender and sexuality—and their modalities of nonnormativity—can be mapped onto the corporeality of Blackness. For example, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s assertion in the introduction to Beauti- ful Bottom, Beautiful Shame that the work of antiracist Black literature has led to a congealing of Blackness is an example of this kind of arrogant mis- reading. Moreover, Stockton argues that Blackness truly becomes a con- tagious and spreadable matter only on the back of queerness. When con- sidering the speculative and imaginative work of Dash and of other Black diaspora scholars (particularly those focusing on the Atlantic, oceanic, fun- gible, and the fugitive), I question Stockton’s reading of Black literary and cultural production. If anything, Blackness enters Western modernity from a place of spreadability and boundarylessness made possible by the Middle Passage and various processes that render it outside of coherent and con- tained human coordinates. It is also from within this place of spreadability, diffuseness, abjection, and nonhumanness from which Black people seek an alternative mode of being human.48 As Spillers suggested in 1987, as cap- tives turned into malleable “territories of political and cultural maneuver,” the community of ex-slaves had “nothing to prove.”49 Stockton attempts to establish the foundations for an argument that the Black literary and cultural imagination needs to be queered and made a spreadable contaminant. Before Stockton can have White queer theory make this intervention or augment the Black antiracist literary tradition, she must read Blackness as congealed. Stockton confidently reads Black antiracist and queer literature as rigid or solid(ly) afraid of its own spread- ability as a contagion.50 In contrast, queer (read White) activists and theo- rists (e.g., Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edel- man, Joseph Litvak, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner) “have worked to restate ‘queer’ as ‘strange,’ to break against any scripted iden- tities for ‘gays’ or ‘homosexuals’—to break with congealment, as it were. And yet, in a sense, they would willingly, gladly, spread contamination. They would make supposedly ‘normal’ sexualities confess their strangeness and, therefore, their queerness, lending ‘normal’ sex a whiff of their slang.”51 Celebrating the queer and contaminating nature of White queer strangeness and its embrace of the nonnormative, Stockton juxtaposes Blackness as conservative, normative, and fearful of leaking out of bounds. Stockton observes, “As for ‘black’ there’s a different dynamic. A dynamic nearly opposite. . . . The range of contaminating significations sticking to ‘black,’ even so, has led, in rather remarkable fashion, to politically sensitive forms of congealment on the part of some anti-racists advocates.”52 Rather than rehearse the “antiracist” traditions that have refused the politics of respectability and used Black otherness and nonhumanness as a resource, I challenge Stockton to make this claim stick. Stockton is clearly reading outside the interdisciplinary tradition of Black studies that has already em- braced Black deviance and nonnormativity as a mode of life outside liberal humanity.53 Before Black queer theory emerges, Black literary criticism already con- strues Black diasporic movement, migration, cultural production, and self- making as boundaryless. Black cultural studies in particular traces Black diasporic lifeways among Paul Gilroy’s rhizomorphic oceanic flows of the Black Atlantic that exceed and spread beyond normative units such as the nation-state. Gilroy traces this history of Black oceanic and spreadable cul- tural flows even before the nineteenth century. Black spreadability was an essential, if not constitutive, part of Black diasporic and Atlantic episte- mologies before the advent of White queer theory. Black studies has not had to reach for or enact spreadability and contamination in the way that nonintersectional queer theory has had to exert itself to take up the con- tamination of nonnormativity. In fact, Black studies, as a social field both within and beyond Black queer theory, has argued that both LGBT identity claims and queer theory work from a space of normative identity. Greg Thomas traces how the “be- yond” in Wynter’s work takes us beyond humanist aspirations and the in- ternal epistemic revolutions of the West and how Wynter attributes the “specific articulations of both heterosexuality and homosexuality to the Darwinian reinvention of Man (2) in 19th century Europe.”54 As Wynter tracks the emergence and reproduction of Man, she scrutinizes how the reconfiguration of the nineteenth-century human reshapes itself through the inclusion of queer or homosexual diversity. Marx’s worker as subject in the nineteenth century can also be a rational wage-earning homosexual (or female) proletarian. The laborer as woman or homosexual knows itself as a free wage laborer (with the choice of sexual expression and identity) through the captivity of the fungible slave who also labors. The European White proletarian who has achieved sexual liberation and identity (hetero- and homosexual) through the individuating power of the wage becomes an intensified Foucauldian individual and subject in relation to the en- slaved, nonwage work of Blacks, who are expelled from the boundaries of the rational human wage worker and sexual subject.