“This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space”. Queer use of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institution of family, heterosexuality and reproduction. They also develop according to other logistics of location, movement and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding of Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a way of life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather then as a ‘way of having sex’...”
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
“1.A body’s material. It’s dense. It’s impenetrable. Penetrate it, and you break it, puncture it, tear it. 2. A body’s material. It’s off to one side. Distinct from other bodies. A body begins and ends against another body. The void itself is a subtle kind of body. 3. A body isn’t empty. It’s full of other bodies, pieces, organs, parts, tissues, knee-caps, rings, tubes, levers, and bellows. It’s also full of itself: that’s all it is. 4. A body’s immaterial. It’s a drawing, a contour, an idea.”
“Can we conceive of blackness as a non-epitaphic discourse? If so, what kind of writing would that entail? What would it mean to make black life into a thing that matters? And lastly, what is this material afterlife that blackness seems to have won for itself in critical theory?”
“Over the intervening decades, inter- sectionality has proved to be a productive concept that has been deployed in disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, philosophy, and anthro- pology as well as in feminist studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and legal studies. Intersectionality’s insistence on examining the dynamics of differ- ence and sameness has played a major role in facilitating consideration of gender, race, and other axes of power in a wide range of political discussions and academic disciplines, including new developments in fields such as ge- ography and organizational studies."
“The world too is inherited as a dwelling. Whiteness might be what is ‘here’, as a point from which the world unfolds, which is also the point of inheritance. If whiteness is inherited, then it is also reproduced. Whiteness gets reproduced by being seen as a form of positive residence: as if it were a property of persons, cultures and places. Whiteness becomes, you could even say, ‘like itself’, as a form of family resemblance. It is no accident that race has been understood through familial metaphors in the sense that ‘races’ come to be seen as having ‘shared ancestry’ (Fenton, 2003: 2).”
Between television, the movies and top 40 lists, ballroom culture was appropriated by pop culture decades ago. With the spectacular support of a team of dancers, community leader Ronald Murray reclaims the subculture's narrative for queer communities of color.
