Queering The Color Line

The interconnected constructions of race and sexuality at the turn of the century.

A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture—sexual difference—can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology—Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson—has measured African Americans’s unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans’s culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology’s regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories—the narrative of capital’s emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture—works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story—one in which people who presumably manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery—a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison’s project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson’s work introduces a new mode of discourse—which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis—that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology.

This collection of lively and insightful essays traces the historical development of Ethnic Studies, its place in American universities and the curriculum, and new directions in contemporary scholarship.

Collection of essays that use queer studies and feminism as a lens for examining the relationships between racialized communities.

Award-winning author and artist Mike Curato draws on his own experiences in Flamer, his debut graphic novel, telling a difficult story with humor, compassion, and love. "This book will save lives." —Jarrett J. Krosoczka, author of National Book Award Finalist Hey, Kiddo I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both. I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe. It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.

This significant text employs an intersectional analysis and considers the role of queer frameworks to understand the experiences of Queer People of Color at historically white institutions of higher education in the U.S. By presenting data from student interviews and reflection journals, the book explores what it means to hold multiple minoritized identities, and asks how such intersections are navigated, contested, and experienced on college campuses. Exploring both micro- and macro-level mappings of marginalization and power, the text reveals issues including institutional erasure, pervasive whiteness in college and LGBTQ+ communities, and institutionalized racism and heterosexism, and offers in-depth insights into the material, psychological, emotional, and social impacts on queer students of color. Ultimately, the analysis highlights the necessity of employing intersectional frameworks for addressing interlocking systems of oppression and offers recommendations for the integration and support of queer students of color at historically white institutions (HWIs). This monograph will offer invaluable insights for scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in the fields of gender and sexuality, higher education, and issues of educational equity, who wish to realize the potential of intersectionality as an analytic framework for the study of identity and development of affirming educational environments.

Sappho Clark—beautiful, mysterious, Southern—arrives in Boston to earn her living as a stenographer. She lodges with the Smith family and immediately becomes a source of fascination to the them: Ma Smith is impressed by Sappho’s financial independence; Dora Smith admires Sappho’s quiet self-possession; and Will Smith, Dora’s brother, falls madly in love with Sappho. But as Sappho enters the Smiths’ community, it becomes clear that her beauty is a lure to bad actors, including someone who entertains dark suspicions about her past. . . A murder mystery, the story of a friendship, and a romance set in Boston’s thriving, politically active middle-class Black community, Contending Forces is an unjustly forgotten American classic.