Value and world making: Notes on the materiality and impossibility of global subjectivities Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023; 256 pp. $25.95 (paperback), Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1942-8.

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

Queering China in a Chinese world Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus, Durham: Duke University Press, 2023; 256 pp.$25.95 (paperback), Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1942-8

What's After Queer Theory? Queer Ethnic and IndigenousStudies Michael Hames-Garcia The decision to exercise intellectual sovereignty provides a crucial moment in the process from which resistance, hope, and most of all, imagination issue. —Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions1 To what historical trajectory would queerness attach itself, so that it could be legible to itself and to others? Which geographic locations would be meaningful for queer theory's central inquiries? —Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism2 The Emergence of a Field Reading contemporary work in the field of what, for the pur poses of this essay, I will call queer ethnic and indigenous studies generally gives me a feeling of great satisfaction.3 In the works that comprise this still-emerging field, I see the fruition of conversations I remember taking place among queer graduate students of color in the 1990s. To be more precise, many of the conversations that I and many other graduate students (queer, of color, and queer of color) had during the 1990s—whether in the hallways of our graduate pro grams, or over drinks after watching the latest Spike Lee film, or FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Michael Hames-Garcia 384 Michael Hames-Garcia 385 Books Discussed in This Essay Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. The Erotic Life of Racism. By Sharon Patricia Holland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Edited by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Queer (Injustice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. By Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. sitting around someone's apartment living room on floor cushions discussing Kobena Mercer or Coco Fusco in a queer theory reading group, or while puzzling through a challenging passage by Jacques Lacan or Frantz Fanon in bed on a Sunday morning — have turned out to be the seeds from which the orchard of queer ethnic and indig enous studies has grown. In addition to the women of color and les bian of color feminisms that were already available to us in the 1980s and 1990s, the early sentinel trees in this forest appeared during the last decade of the millenium: including Kobena Mercer's 1994 Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies; Evelynn Hammonds's 1994 article "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sex uality" in differences; Kevin Mumford's 1997 Interzones: BlackjWhiteSex Dis tricts inChicagoandNew York intheEarlyTwentieth Century; Cathy Cohen's 1997 article "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" in GLQ; David Eng and Alice Horn's 1998 collec tion Q & A: Queer inAsian America;José Esteban Muñoz's 1999 Disidenti fications:QueersofColorand thePerformance ofPolitics;and Emma Pérez's 1999 The Decolomal Imaginary: Writing Chicanas intoHistory}This trickle of books and articles transformed into a torrent in the following decade as the 386 Michael Hames-Garcia floodgates opened for scholars informed by the critical scholarship from ethnic studies, critical race theory, indigenous studies, queer theory, and feminism. Without wanting to suggest any absolute sepa ration among these fields, I would like to briefly tease out a few of the things that distinguish this emerging body of work from (1) women of color feminism and (2) queer theory, before going on to consider how the four texts under review here contribute to the field. It may be that the work of tracing continuities—particularly between this field and women of color feminism, as suggested by Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson in their introduction to StrangeAffinities—is a generally more important project, but for the moment I am going to take the continuities for granted and see what can be learned from the discontinuities. In thinking about what distinguishes queer ethnic and indige nous studies from women of color and indigenous feminisms, the first,most obvious, answer lies in their relationship to queer theory. In other words, if women of...

Martin Duberman and other social historians claim that the “series of riots” that took place at the Stonewall Inn (Manhattan’s West Village) in late June 1969 have become “the emblematic events in modern lesbian and gay history” (Duberman 2002). The emblematic status of those events has also created an emblematic narrative, under whose terms the Stonewall moment dispelled darkness, secrecy and silence and inspired liberation, visibility, public, political engagement. The emblematic narrative also equates language before Stonewall with secret codes, private messages, and in-group argot. This book argues that secrecy and concealment were a small part of the connections linking language and sexuality before Stonewall. And this book uses a Queer Historical Linguistics (QHL) rather than the assumptions of the emblematic narrative to examine what language and sexuality before Stonewall entailed. This chapter introduces the method and theory associated with QHL and demonstrates QHL’s usefulness for studies of language before Stonewall. QHL builds on the idea that queerness is a “mesh of possibilities” (Sedgwick in Tendencies, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993) and a messy formation (Manalansan in Radical History Review 120:94–106, 2014), and refers to practices and subject positions located “on the edges of logics of labor and production …” (Halberstam 2010). QHL depends on an assemblage of data (an archive) gathered through a scavenger methodology (Halberstam in Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998), and analyzed through the work of close reading (Freeman in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010; Levine in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015), and through the framework of homohistory (Menon in Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film, Palgrave, London, 2008). Unlike in historical studies where “meaning succeeds as replacing itself-as itself- through time” (Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004), QHL refuses to “…take the object of queering for granted” (Goldberg and Menon in PMLA 120(5):1608–1617, 2005). Several examples conclude the chapter to illustrate what QHL-oriented inquiry entails.

About the Contributors

Book Review| June 01 2012 Maybe Midlife, But No Crisis: Queer Theory in Its Third Decade After Sex? On Writing since Queer TheoryHalley, Janet and Parker, Andrew, editors Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 336 pp. Sylvia Mieszkowski Sylvia Mieszkowski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2012) 18 (2-3): 407–409. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1472962 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sylvia Mieszkowski; Maybe Midlife, But No Crisis: Queer Theory in Its Third Decade. GLQ 1 June 2012; 18 (2-3): 407–409. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1472962 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Books in Brief You do not currently have access to this content.

EVERYWHERE ARCHIVES

Reviewed by: Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare Helen Deborah Lewis Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by Madhavi Menon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Paper $27.95. 512 pages. Shakesqueer, edited by Madhavi Menon, is an impressive anthology of scholarly essays that seeks to unite Shakespearean studies and queer theory, and provides new readings of the entire Shakespearean dramatic canon. In her introduction, Menon offers the anthology’s forty-eight essays as important challenges to conventional interpretations of Shakespeare’s body of work and vehicles for prompting discourse [End Page 229] in the two fields. It is Shakespeare’s position as the untouchable, idolized “Bard” that prevents many scholars from delving into unexplored and potentially erroneous scholarly territory, Menon argues; the marriage of Shakespeare and queer theory is most often prevented by scholars’ feelings of inadequacy—that one must be an “expert” to write about Shakespeare or Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre—or the sense that “queering” Shakespeare or examining his plays through a queer lens is anachronistic and/or poor scholarship. Menon refers to this tendency for scholars to shy away from critical analysis of Shakespeare as “Shakesfear” (5–6). In order to avoid falling into this trap, Menon asks that we question not only our deification of the Bard but also the ways in which we define “Shakespeare” and “queer.” Does “Shakespeare” refer to the playwright himself, his plays, or the ideas behind the plays? When we argue that “queer” is undefined and unlimited in its challenge of normativity, does this extend past sex, gender, and desire? Focusing on three concepts commonly connected with both Shakespearean studies and queer theory—language, identity, and temporality—Shakesqueer challenges the conventions of queer theory in order to enhance and expand upon queer readings of Shakespeare. The anthology’s essays cover the entire Shakespearean canon as well as the so-called “lost plays,” Love’s Labour Won and The History of Cardenio, and are arranged alphabetically by the title of the play they address. The majority of the anthology’s contributors are queer theorists rather than Shakespearean or Renaissance-era theatre scholars. Without the constraints of historical or biographical contexts, these scholars apply queer theory to Shakespeare and vice versa, opening up discussion about the “blind spots” in scholarly discourse that have prevented connections between the two disciplines. Menon states that the abundance of queer scholars is intentional, and insists on the necessity of this choice in order to “keep with the volume’s emphasis on Shaking queerness”: welcoming all ideas; not simply subverting heteronormativity; and not being confined by chronology, nationality, historiography, or philosophy (24). Indeed, Menon believes that for the framework of “queer” to work, the term must be undefined, anti-normative, and unrestricted. The anthology’s most admirable quality is the diversity of its authors’ theoretical frameworks. The essays often provide fresh perspectives on works that many theatre scholars might believe have been exhausted. Unhindered by the pressure of reconciling new interpretations with existing scholarship, even the most famous of Shakespeare’s dramatic works are revisited and deconstructed. In her essay “Milk,” Heather Love deems Lady Macbeth the queerest character in the Scottish play because of her impulsivity and desire for immediate gratification without any consideration for motherhood or womanly empathy. Love argues that Lady Macbeth’s detached, reluctant role of mother and disinterest in familial lineage is inherently queer. In another essay, “Shakespeare’s Ass Play,” Richard Rambuss [End Page 230] considers the erotics of bestial relationships as the central queer element in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In “Fuck the Disabled: The Prequel,” Robert McRuer addresses the queer, erotic potential of Richard of Gloucester’s anti-normative physical disability as imagined in the 1995 film version of Richard III starring Sir Ian McKellen. More historiographic analysis than theoretical interpretation, Sharon Holland’s essay on Twelfth Night assesses the all-male production of the gender-bending comedy at the Globe Theatre in 2002. Framing her discussion around this particular production, Holland posits that Shakespeare’s “gayest” play reinforces the dominance of heteronormative romance, all the while appealing to queer audiences with single-gender productions that suggest homoeroticism. The overarching themes...

This essay examines the institutional construction of “queer theory” as a field in the United States and its translation and subsequent failure outside the U.S. Despite presenting itself as a critical field of inquiry, queer theory has been centered in the most privileged institutions in the global North, primarily in the U.S. I investigate how U.S.-centric queer theory has built upon the international division between “theory” and “case,” rooted in colonial science and knowledge production, particularly in relation to sexuality and race. To address these issues, I analyze the controversy surrounding the publication and translation of the edited volume, Queer Korea, from Duke University Press’s acclaimed Perverse Modernities series, focusing on research ethics and hegemonic whiteness. I argue that this controversy demonstrates how contemporary U.S.-centric queer theory appropriates and capitalizes on the language of “decentering,” “provincializing,” or “decolonizing” at the expense of marginalized queer lives, struggles, and knowledge outside the U.S.

Reviewed by: Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare Danijela Kambasković-Sawer Menon, Madhavi, ed., Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2011; paperback; pp. 512; 18 illustrations; R.R.P. US$27.95; ISBN 9780822348450. In the Acknowledgments to Shakesqueer, the editor, Madhavi Menon calls this book a labour of love. I believed her. The love shows not only in the quality of the idea itself, but also in the way the book has been put together, which is a recipe for success. Take forty-eight smart and interesting thinkers working in the field of queer theory – some of them Shakespeareans and early modernists, some not – that is one for each of the forty-five works by Shakespeare, plus three for the Sonnets. Get them to write – more or less reluctantly – their observations on the individual work of William Shakespeare allocated to them. Precede their musings with an Introduction which defines things that the reader is likely to have been thinking about, but did not dare to ask: what is ‘queer criticism’, how it is distinct not only from gay and lesbian criticism, gender studies, theory of the other, and deconstruction theory, but also from twentieth-century queer theory, even the way our expertise and academic jobs are defined? Then, in a deliciously hip anachronistic move, apply the notion of queerness to Shakespeare’s opus in order to uphold the idea of its continuing relevance. By rearranging the pixels on the icon of Shakespeare, turn him into an altogether different, modern, fresh, re-thought kind of icon; yet an icon nevertheless. Or, as the Bard himself puts it: one must be cruel only to be kind. ‘Privilege’, argues Menon in the Introduction, ‘is not all that it appears to be, and being canonized … deprives the text of agency … If canonizing Shakespeare protects our idea of ourselves, then not engaging the canonical Shakespeare allows that protection to continue unimpeded’, and this is not [End Page 225] a good thing. But any shaking of Shakespeare must also shake queer theory and rethink two main assumptions: ‘that queerness has a historical start date [which Menon argues is the nineteenth century]; and that queerness is a synonym for embodied homosexuality [which Menon argues is a post nineteenth-century phenomenon]’ (pp. 2–4). Rather, the question proposed as being at the heart of this project is: ‘Can Shakespeare be regarded as a queer theorist, or is he always the object on which queer theory acts in a one-sided relationship?’ It is proof of its impeccable academic credentials that the book also acknowledges the fundamental problem with this question: that ‘Shakespeare … lies beyond the pale of acceptable chronology, so to extend queerness to him is to play fast and loose with academic credibility’ (p. 5). In response to this, Menon proposes queer theory that is ‘a hybrid, an amalgamation of several different theories and texts that thwarts our desire to pin down its essence’. In essence, then, this is a theory which explores itself and its relationship with the unusual, weird, unorthodox, unexpected, surprising, and, above all, self-interrogating types of self-expression, then applies the result to the works of William Shakespeare. It was good to see in the volume the likes of Bruce Smith, Lee Edelman, Stephen Bruhm, Ellis Hanson, Stephen Guy-Bray, Kathryn Schwarz, Alan Sinfield, and others associated with a study of sexuality and otherness, both in and out of the field of the Renaissance Studies (though Stephen Orgel is conspicuous by his absence), as well as some unfamiliar names. As it is impossible to discuss all forty-eight contributions in a review, I offer here a small and personal selection. Bruce Smith’s ‘The Latin Lovers in the Taming of the Shrew’ is a light-hearted and highly incisive piece on the relationship between the vagaries of (Latin) grammar and generation of sexual meaning (no pun intended here): it is characteristically informative and pleasurable. Lee Edelman’s ‘Hamlet’s wounded name’ is also an exploration of language, but written in a denser, Derrida-esque style. Edelman casts Hamlet as a ‘personification of too-muchness beyond the grasp of...

Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films. By Katherine A. Fowkes. Wayne State University Press, 1998. The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject. By Juliet Flower Maccannell. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, edited by Ellis Hanson. Duke University Press, 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. By Laura U. Marks. Duke University Press, 2000. Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic. By Rachel O. Moore. Duke University Press, 2000.

Reviewed by: How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time by Carolyn Dinshaw Robert S. Sturges Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 251 pp. Carolyn Dinshaw, author of two of the most influential theory-inflected books in Middle English studies of the past twenty-five years (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics [1989] and Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern [1999]), is, in addition, one of the few medievalists—perhaps the only one—who is also influential among Queer Theorists, a group, by and large, with little direct interest in the Middle Ages or medieval literature. Queer Theory’s recent turn to questions of temporality has led thinkers such as Judith/Jack Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place [2005]) and José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia [2009]) to cite Dinshaw’s pioneering work on queer historicity approvingly, especially her classic essay “Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer” (Exemplaria 7 [March 1995]: 76–92) and Getting Medieval. It thus seems appropriate that the blurbs on the back cover of Dinshaw’s new book, How Soon Is Now?, come both from medievalists and from Queer Theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton. How Soon Is Now? is a fascinating, clearly argued, and beautifully written book that will be of considerable interest to both constituencies, medievalist and queer-theoretical, as well as to those of us whose professional lives dwell in their intersections. As the 1995 essay’s title suggests, Dinshaw throughout her career has been interested not only in temporality, but in the interactions of temporality and affectivity, another longtime concern of Queer Theory. Linking the past and the present through desire (modernity’s and postmodernity’s ongoing desire for the Middle Ages, for example) is one way to demonstrate the fallaciousness of linear, developmental conceptualizations of time; Queer Theory’s alternate temporalities, in their resistance to narratives of reproduction and development, also challenge straight time. It is this kind of understanding that connects Dinshaw’s work with recent developments in Queer Theory, and that is also the subject of How Soon Is Now? Dinshaw views this queer, affective resistance to linear time through the lens of certain “amateur” medievalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medievalists who stood at a tangent to the period’s professionalization and institutionalization of medieval studies as a discipline, that is to say, of medievalists who did it for love. Dinshaw never forgets that one sense of “amateur” is “lover.” Following [End Page 350] the theoretical introduction outlining this potential queerness of time, each of the book’s four chapters (and an epilogue) takes up one or more medieval texts explicitly concerned with non-linear, asynchronous time, and examines both the text itself and its afterlife in the work of an amateur medievalist, suggesting that the amateur’s affective relation to the asynchronous text creates a related asynchronous, queer present, a “now” whose temporality is multiple and non-linear. Thus Chapter One, on “asynchrony stories,” centers on narratives about time slowing down and/or speeding up: the exemplum of “The Monk and the Bird,” drawn from the Northern Homily Cycle, the story of the Seven Sleepers as found in Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend, and Walter Map’s story of King Herla in De nugis curialium are all stories in which a character experiences a magical or miraculous reorientation in time, one that forces the reader to hold two or more temporalities in tension simultaneously. These medieval stories in turn are invoked by amateur medievalist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century, who retells “The Monk and the Bird” in his own medievalizing Golden Legend. The result, for Dinshaw, is that for Longfellow, “reading and recounting medieval texts foster a productive asynchrony, bringing the past into the present” (68). This temporality is also queer in that Longfellow’s story addresses male homosociality “to express attachments and ways of being that were obsolescent in his present world”; thus “the dissolution of temporal boundaries serves as imaginative and affective—serves, that is, as queer—resource” (71). Succeeding chapters are concerned with further links between medieval challenges...

Reviewed by: Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer" Magdalena J. Zaborowska Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 271 pp. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paperback. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s book is a welcome contribution to studies of race and sexuality in literature and visual culture and especially to the field whose cutting-edge name echoes in its subtitle – black queer studies. The defining collection of essays that sealed that field’s name comes from Duke University Press too; and, like Stockton’s book, its cover features a nude black male body. While both the essays in Black Queer Studies (eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson [2005]) and Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame assume the crisscrossing and intertwining of discourses on race and sexuality, the latter takes full advantage of its monograph length to focus intensely on the tropes, rhetoric, and often paradoxical imaginaries of abjection, shame, and humiliation. Stockton’s book argues forcefully that there are no “purely black” or “queer” forms of debasement, only “blended forms of shame” (23). This well researched and provocatively designed study deploys a rich toolkit of literary and psychoanalytic theory, critical race and cultural studies, and semiotics and queer theory. [End Page 379] Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame explores “low” spaces of human interaction, or the meeting places for socially debased and degraded individuals and groups–black and queer people, or those marked by AIDS–in novels, film, photography, and popular culture venues like TV shows and news media. Stockton also shows that shame can be a thing of beauty in instances where abjection fosters self-scrutiny and uplift, where its certain manifestations are linked to desire and attraction, or where they enable production of knowledge and create possibilities for aesthetic expression, including “dark camp” (See, Conclusion). Her analyses of diverse, often purposefully divergent cultural texts privilege conceptual, thematic, and tropological synchronicities over chronology. Such an approach allows for “a circuitry of switchpoints” (4–5), a design that Stockton calls a “composite form” (23), one that helps to spark “point[s] of connection” between her two key signs–“black” and “queer” (5). The switchpoints help to organize the chapters around the moments of intense crossings of these key signs in relation to non-normative bodies whose diverse representations and productions Stockton studies throughout her book. The introduction sets up the emergence of popular representations of “DL” or Down Low culture as the first of these switchpoints and argues for “probing the value of debasement as a central social action” (2). The richness of Stockton’s primary and secondary sources is both inspiring and challenging. To manage it, she loops back and forth through historic contexts to demonstrate how shame forces us to examine the complex workings of abjection and debasement that underlie mainstream American culture’s violent attractions to bodies of color and non-normative sexualities. This is also true, she shows, in the work of theorists, from Freud, Barthes, and Fanon to Lacan, Bataille, and Sontag, as well as in diverse American and European literary and visual representations. In chapter one, which links Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Leslie Feingold’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), and Jean Genet’s Querelle (1947), Stockton explores “cloth wounds” or the workings and implication of sartorial shame on queer bodies, assuming that, like skin, “clothing raises the question of a surface to which shame attaches” (39). Moving from epidermal surfaces into the body, as it were, and across the bodies’ economic and social attachments to other bodies and communal settings, Chapter Two continues the examination of unexpected critical conversations. Proposing a specific “debasement” of “critical theories” (79), it demonstrates the limits of Freudian thought for reading Toni Morrison’s vision of black masculinity and femininity in Sula (1974). In a bold move that goes against some readings of Morrison’s text as seemingly homophobic, Stockton argues that this writer’s possibly riskiest engagement with anality undergirds Sula’s focus on homosocial bonds between lower-class black women. The following chapters link the pain and yearning inherent in racialized and gendered homoerotic desire as they move between the material and the metaphorical...

632 Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nikki Lane Bringing Flesh to Theory: Ethnography, Black Queer Theory, and Studying Black Sexualities As Dorothy Hodgson tells us, the most common features of an ethnographic project involve “talking to, participating with, and observing the people who produce . . . texts, exploring the contexts of their ideas and actions, and often studying how their situations, ideas, and actions change over time.”1 Practically, this often involves spending months, and more often years, in a particular field site, where one develops relationships with members of the group, community, or institution being studied . Ethnographers are positioned in a place to observe, but also place their bodies on the line—participating, when possible, in the quotidian practices of the group. This observation and participation is captured in the form of “field notes” that may relay in the form of “thick description,” what the ethnographer sees as she observes and participates in various cultural and social practices.2 As such, ethnography requires reflexivity because the ethnographer must constantly consider how her body is affecting and is effected by the communities and institutions in which she is embedded. The benefit of this reflexive ethnographic approach is that, as Faye Ginsburg notes, it “has the capacity to reveal the fault lines in 1. Dorothy Louise Hodgson, “Of Modernity/Modernities, Gender, and Ethnography ,” in Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Dorothy Louise Hodgson (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 17. 2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Nikki Lane 633 communities, social movements, and institutions, which frequently run along class, race, and generational lines, and that might easily be missed by more deductive and quantitative methodologies.”3 MarlonM.Bailey’s ButchQueensUpinPumps, Jafari S. Allen’s ¡Venceremos ?, Mignon Moore’s Invisible Families, and Mireille Miller-Young’s A Taste for Brown Sugar represent an exciting trend within an interdisciplinary body of research that I am referring to as Black sexuality studies. What links these projects is their use of ethnographic methodologies to understand how Blackness informs racialized gender and sexuality in the everyday experiences of their interlocutors. In relying on ethnography, to varying degrees, they are in conversation with and expand upon methodological trends within Black feminist studies and Black queer studies . Further, the Black sexuality studies projects reviewed here question the (hetero)normative bent within the field of African American studies, the normatively white subject position that exists within queer theory, and the lack of attention to issues of sexual pleasure within Black feminist theory. They also challenge theorists of race and sexuality to move 3. Faye Ginsburg, “Ethnography and American Studies,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 3 (2006), 492. Books Discussed in This Essay¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba. By Jafari S. Allen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. By Marlon M. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women. By Mignon Moore. Oakland: University of California Press, 2011. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. By Mireille Miller-Young. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 634 Nikki Lane in the direction of interrogating the flesh, because they go to the site— the place where the body acts, feels, and engages the world—asking the simple question articulated best by E. Patrick Johnson: “What is the utility of queer [or feminist] theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of trauma?”4 In my discussion of these texts, I will focus on how each utilizes ethnographic methodologies in distinct ways. I will argue that regardless of how they employ ethnography’s methods, they make two very important contributions to fields of Black feminist theory and Black queer theory. First, they add information about the lived experiences of Black sexual subjectivity to the ethnographic record. By adding these experiences to the record, they become part of the limited but growing body of available knowledge about the everyday experiences of Black people within the African...

632 Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nikki Lane Bringing Flesh to Theory: Ethnography, Black Queer Theory, and Studying Black Sexualities As Dorothy Hodgson tells us, the most common features of an ethnographic project involve “talking to, participating with, and observing the people who produce . . . texts, exploring the contexts of their ideas and actions, and often studying how their situations, ideas, and actions change over time.”1 Practically, this often involves spending months, and more often years, in a particular field site, where one develops relationships with members of the group, community, or institution being studied . Ethnographers are positioned in a place to observe, but also place their bodies on the line—participating, when possible, in the quotidian practices of the group. This observation and participation is captured in the form of “field notes” that may relay in the form of “thick description,” what the ethnographer sees as she observes and participates in various cultural and social practices.2 As such, ethnography requires reflexivity because the ethnographer must constantly consider how her body is affecting and is effected by the communities and institutions in which she is embedded. The benefit of this reflexive ethnographic approach is that, as Faye Ginsburg notes, it “has the capacity to reveal the fault lines in 1. Dorothy Louise Hodgson, “Of Modernity/Modernities, Gender, and Ethnography ,” in Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Dorothy Louise Hodgson (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 17. 2. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Nikki Lane 633 communities, social movements, and institutions, which frequently run along class, race, and generational lines, and that might easily be missed by more deductive and quantitative methodologies.”3 MarlonM.Bailey’s ButchQueensUpinPumps, Jafari S. Allen’s ¡Venceremos ?, Mignon Moore’s Invisible Families, and Mireille Miller-Young’s A Taste for Brown Sugar represent an exciting trend within an interdisciplinary body of research that I am referring to as Black sexuality studies. What links these projects is their use of ethnographic methodologies to understand how Blackness informs racialized gender and sexuality in the everyday experiences of their interlocutors. In relying on ethnography, to varying degrees, they are in conversation with and expand upon methodological trends within Black feminist studies and Black queer studies . Further, the Black sexuality studies projects reviewed here question the (hetero)normative bent within the field of African American studies, the normatively white subject position that exists within queer theory, and the lack of attention to issues of sexual pleasure within Black feminist theory. They also challenge theorists of race and sexuality to move 3. Faye Ginsburg, “Ethnography and American Studies,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 3 (2006), 492. Books Discussed in This Essay¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba. By Jafari S. Allen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. By Marlon M. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women. By Mignon Moore. Oakland: University of California Press, 2011. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. By Mireille Miller-Young. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 634 Nikki Lane in the direction of interrogating the flesh, because they go to the site— the place where the body acts, feels, and engages the world—asking the simple question articulated best by E. Patrick Johnson: “What is the utility of queer [or feminist] theory on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or anyplace where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed—indeed, where the body is the site of trauma?”4 In my discussion of these texts, I will focus on how each utilizes ethnographic methodologies in distinct ways. I will argue that regardless of how they employ ethnography’s methods, they make two very important contributions to fields of Black feminist theory and Black queer theory. First, they add information about the lived experiences of Black sexual subjectivity to the ethnographic record. By adding these experiences to the record, they become part of the limited but growing body of available knowledge about the everyday experiences of Black people within the African...