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Assignment 09

In his book, “Aberrations in Black; Toward a Queer of Color Critique”, Roderick Ferguson distinguishes the connection between property, capital, and prostitution. This connection holds a link to his analysis, which in his words is known as “queer of color”. He beings to talk about the history of race in the United States of America, specifically the history of the exclusion of African American men, including their lack of rights as not just citizens, but even humans. Their lack of rights as humans was shown in the clear discrimination of them in the economic and racial settings (vii). The author pulls this all from an image he analyzed in the preface of his book. He further explains the meaning of this picture, connecting it to the sexuality behind racial exclusion. Such exclusion promoted the sexual purity and mobility of white women and white men (viii). As we move into the introduction, Robert Ferguson fixates his analyzing skills on Marlon Rigg’s “Tongues United”, where an African American drag queen prostitute is shown. The author depicts the individual as a feature of urban capitalism. It could be argued that she is displaying the many, as the author would like to say, socially disorganizing effects of the capital and political economy. In such an argument, it would mean that she represents a much larger black culture for her racial difference, which leads to a big connection with her sexuality, gender, and class. But the confusion would lie in characterizing her as a heterosexual or a homosexual, due to her “conflicting” role as a prostitute and a drag queen. This makes her not so liked by those of the African American culture and those not, as they want to present the black culture to be about everything that she is not. Simply put, such mindsets want the culture to be universally accepted as normal (2). Now, this is where the queer of color analysis comes in. The author describes it what is used to study what cultures can produce in the name of identifications and how it handles the unwanted “baggage” that comes along with it (3). Adding on to that, queer of color analysis believes that liberal ideology stops the crossing of race, gender, sexuality, and class in forthcoming social customs.