Undeniable Forensic Evidence

Abstract

What constitutes “evidence?” In exploring how queer studies may be equipped to respond to Ferguson and beyond, especially in light of the verdict to not indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, I want to leave the realm of the legal-juridical, knowing this system has a historic and continuing role in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating the lived realities of racism. I wish to conceive of other modes of evidence as prompted by the genealogy of speculative thought and utopian aspirations of queer theoretical scholarship. To do so, I revisit three trailblazers of (queer) critical race critique before I make a “sideways reading,” to riff on Siobhan Somerville’s tactic for unsettling the too-often segregated discussions of homophobia, sexism, and racism, to make a geographical move from Ferguson, Missouri, to Columbia, South Carolina, where I witnessed three separate but interlocking events in the lead-up to the decision on Michael Brown’s murder that demand to be counted as proof. In moving sideways across race, gender, and sexuality, and regionally from the Midwest to the South, I intend to continue the work of dislodging sexuality as the only privileged site of queer inquiry and to cast the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, and Columbia, South Carolina, as synchronic, pertinent, and interconnected. In 1991 Julie Dash’s avant-garde film Daughters of the Dust introduced the “speculative fiction” of South Carolina as the turn-of-the century setting for queer Gullah counter-communities. For Dash, “speculative fiction” describes a narrative mode with the capacity to promote deeper, more complex, and yet truer understandings of black queer populations and their precarious position in North American cultures. I want to return to Dash’s term, to nod at the historic