Starting Points: Queerness as liminal subject vs. Blackness as object-status

My analysis is predicated on the belief that ‘queerness’ is an experience of unfreedom and not an ontological position. Jackson rightfully critiques identity and argues, instead, for a rigorous examination of ‘identification.’ She argues that “queerness” exceeds identity and that queerness could be thought “as the ontology of blackness” (361). We might ask how anything could serve as the ontology of blackness? Queerness becomes a synonym for ontology itself (we might also ask, given this synonymity, what is not queer?). It is equated with the object-position of blackness and not the liminal form of humanity within the antagonism. Liminality and object- status are not interchangeable, equivalent, or synonymous. Frank Wilderson insightfully notes that any rider that we attach to blackness is a conceptual fallacy and results in nothing more than a “structural adjustment”—the attempt to incorporate blacks into the fold of humanity through the grammar of another’s suffering. The queer subject is constructed as degenerate and transgressive, but the fundamental distinction between the ‘degenerate queer’ and the ‘derelict black-as-object’ is that one possesses a grammar to express unfreedom and the other lacks communicability altogether.

We can approach this from a different angle: A person understood as “queer” could purchase a black-object from the auction block like his/her hetero-normative counterpart. In those rare instances where the black-asobject was able to participate in this economy and purchase a black-object as well, the black purchaser could, at any moment, become another commodity—if found without freedom papers or validation from a white guardian—the system of fungible blackness made any black interchangeable and substitutional. This movement between object and subject is not a problem for queerness, but is an unresolvable problem for blackness. This is the important difference between the two. Queerness does not inhabit the position of the object—which is the ontology of blackness. Blackness is much more than deviance; it is the object that allows the distinction between deviance and normativity to have any meaning at all. To equate blackness with queerness because of shared discourses of deviance, transgression, and perversity misses the “existential negation” of blackness. While we can talk about the non-normativity of liminal subjects, blackness does not travel within the Symbolic the way queerness does and must be conceptualized with different terms.

What, then, is queer about blackness? Nothing. In using the grammar of queerness to explicate the structure of blackness, we equate fungability with the repertoire of non-normative sexualities that constitute conditions of human suffering. In this sense, we get a nuanced interpretation of Hortense Spillers’s profound suggestion that under captivity “the customary aspects of sexuality, including ‘reproduction,’‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ are all thrown into crisis” (221). Blackness does rupture sexuality and gender in that it is (mis)applied. This creates something like personification, but in this case, it is the application of human qualities to a sentient object. Sexuality is dubiously appropriate because it belongs to the human, and the signifier “queerness” cannot sidestep this fact or resolve this problematic—despite its desire to exceed identity, sexual practices, etc. We do not have a proper grammar outside of humanism to describe the domain of “pleasure,”“desire,”“sexuality,” and “gender” for the socially dead object. This is part of the torment and dereliction of blackness; it is placed outside of life and its customary lexis. And this is what it means to inhabit the position of the “unthought” and the incommunicable.