Passing and the State in Junot Diaz's "Drown"

Abstract

This essay presents Junot Diaz’s 1996 short story “Drown” as an important discussion of passing that not only spans racial and sexual identities but also tracks state strategies for managing racial and sexual difference. “Drown” describes a post-Fordist overlap between long-standing, ghettoizing state racism and the later, apparently orthogonal state strategy of closeting and homophobia analyzed by Margot Canaday in The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2009). While teachers, the police, and the Army are still glaringly white in this story’s 1990s Dominican immigrant neighborhood, state goods such as higher education and military service have now become the benefits of a “sexual citizenship” (Canaday 256) that premises individuals’ access to modern state benefits and resources on heterosexuality and that defines suspected homosexuals as “anticitizen[s]” (9), beyond the state’s care or concern. The coincidence of these two systems of exclusion means, of course, a doubled burden for the story’s nameless narrator, a ghettoized young Dominican American man with some queer sexual experience. However, it also demonstrates the state’s appropriation of passing for its own biopolitical ends. Passing-for-white was an interstitial tactic of African American resistance to state-sponsored racism, but in the homophobic “straight state,” passing-for-straight becomes the normal condition of full citizenship for everyone. Moreover, for racial minorities, the imperative to pass for straight reinforces existing spatial and geographic forms of institutional racism. “Drown” responds to “sexual citizenship” with a “move to guard the margin” (Spivak 132), marking and maintaining a gap between state and self, discourse and speech. The narrator’s calculated silences preserve ethical possibilities that the state cannot enact, predict, or regulate. I begin here with a prologue recounting Canaday’s major claims, her use of the term passing, and the potential I see for expanding her analysis beyond its original, white-normative conditions of existence. I go on to close-read “Drown,” explicating its narrator’s (self-aware) collaboration with state strategies of racist ghettoization and homophobic exclusion, and then explore theoretical means for imagining an end to such collaboration. Finally, I discuss implications, based on Diaz’s and my analyses, for a more general project of reading race and sexuality together.