Blackfemmephobia DA. The aff instrumentalizes black women’s scholarship while shaming them for theorizing resistance.

Puar posits a reformulated radical queer subjectivity as a counter and corrective logic to black feminism and black political tactics more broadly. Staging a critique against formulations of intersectionality, Puar asserts:

For while intersectionality and its underpinnings—an unrelenting epistemological will to truth—presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond or without being (Puar 2007, 216).

While intersectionality is a broad encompassing theory, its underpinnings as alluded to in this passage, are again realized in the bodies of black women, as the subjects of black feminism, who come to stand in as Puar’s unspoken opponents. By assertion critical theory as the genealogy, which Puar is, writing into, like critics of Fanon, have already made an objective determination about where gender that is black specifically stands in relationship to narratives of liberation and that relationship is theorized into obsolescence. That is to say while the intellectual labor performed in Terrorist Assemblages is insidious and exemplary in its own right, in displaying the contentious relationship between radical politics and blackness, it is not exhaustive in its task. The formulation of the terrorist assemblage brings to the forefront an insistent framework that disavows black articulations of suffering at the same time as it posits a new revolutionary subjectivity that is in theory more dynamic than blackness. The concept of “blackfemmephobia” articulated by Sharpely- Whiting (1989) as indicative of the impulses of Capécia’s writing, is structurally linked to the conceptual maneuver Puar makes in arguing that the underpinnings of intersectionality, black feminists, disavow futurity through a supposed reliance on the permanence of what is termed “identity,” crowding out the possibilities of being and becoming, politically, those things that are simply unknown.

By drawing out what undergirds the push to “re-think” intersectionality, this argument is not insisting on a strident recuperation of its modes of theorizing and its premises for defining systems of oppression, as an oppositional strategy to the terrorist assemblage. Instead I am most concerned with why it is assumed that theory emerging out of a black gendered space has nothing to offer the political orientations of those situated seemingly outside of the bounds of blackness. What is it about black gender that disallows theory to sit within the optimism of positivist reinvisionings of subjectivity? My contention is that, these newly emerged theories makes very visible old standing relations of power that exist between blackness and the theoretical mobility of other subjects. This tendency demonstrates the manner in which theorists that attempt to problematize black subject theories as demonstrating an unrelenting focus on objective relations of power, also in the same breath use black bodies as objective proof to support their claims, and thus reify why theories of objectification continue to centrally figure in critical black theory. The question that demands engagement is, why then are we confronted with the figure of the black woman, why is this trope called upon?