Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (review)

Abstract

McBride, Dwight A. 2005. Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on and Sexuality. New York: New York University Press. $60.00 hc. $19.00 sc. xvi + 251 pp.In Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, Dwight A. McBride synthesizes black, feminist, and queer to interrogate black male in political, popular, and academic arenas. The collection, comprised of ten essays, marks another entry in slowly growing corpus of scholarship dedicated to integrating sexuality and into black and queer studies, respectively. This is a pressing and timely cause to be sure-one that cannot be achieved through glancing gestures to quartet of race, gender, sexuality, and (8). Instead, McBride argues that risks must be taken, disciplines transcended, and personal experiences revealed for, in phrasing of Essex Hemphill, the ass-splitting truth to be told (qtd. in McBride 37).Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch does indeed transcend disciplinary genres, with rhetorical styles ranging from scholarly to confessional. Written in three sections, essays are organized around Queer Black Thought, Race and Sexuality on Occasion, and Straight Black Talk. The essays in Queer Black Thought, including provocative title essay, demonstrate ways of reading cultural texts within black queer theoretical framework McBride lays out in preface and introduction. The four brief commentaries in Race and Sexuality on Occasion focus on political issues where race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect. Finally, Straight Black Talk examines how academic rhetorics of obscure black gays and lesbians.Inspired by Robert Reid-Pharr's Black Gay Man (2001) and Gary Fisher's Gary in Your Pocket (edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1996), McBride discloses his own personal experiences of and sexuality throughout most of these essays. In most revealing essay of collection, It's a White Man's World, McBride theorizes his sexual encounters with white men to measure currency of black men's bodies in marketplace of (104). Connecting these experiences to gay pornographic films and personal ads, McBride argues persuasively that black men's bodies are objectified and that black men are valued when they fulfill white fantasies of stereotypical black sexuality and masculinity.The essay works so well because, in politicizing desire, McBride redresses one of his major disagreements with queer theory-that the realm of desire for queer theorists seems to represent possibility for a kind of idealized freedom and liberality (101). This is an important point for queer scholars interested in theorizing how sexual subjectivities are structured by and privilege. But while McBride's offers insight for queer theory, he unequivocally frames himself as a race man, personally and politically invested in transforming African American studies (2). As current chair of African American at Northwestern University, McBride's perspectives as an administrator and faculty member reveal persistent institutional and ideological obstacles to black in academia.The ideological qualms McBride raises with old paradigms for work stem from its blindness towards black gays and lesbians (3). For example, McBride argues in Straight Black Studies that scholarship on James Baldwin has tended to reduce him to one identity, rather than understand his racial, sexual, and other identities in concert with one another. McBride's reading of Baldwin scholarship advances his claim that a black queer critical sensibility is urgendy needed to challenge monolithic representations within African American that often collapse differences of gender, class and sexuality into a homogenous, hegemonic black subjectivity (39, 57). While this monolithic representation may have, been politically expedient to institutionalization of African American within white academia, it now restricts a diverse representation of black in academy. …