What's After Queer Theory? Queer Ethnic and Indigenous Studies

Abstract

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...