Collier- The Feeling of Kinship

Eng looks at queer liberalism through a reading of legal cases, in particular Lawrence and Garner v. Texas.  He describes queer liberalism as, “a particular confluence of political and economic conditions that form the basis of liberal inclusion, rights, and recognitions for particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects willing and able to comply with its normative mandates”(24).  He uses this reading of Lawrence to examine how queer incorporation into respectability politics and legal recognition functions through the forgetting of race and complicity with the domestic, heteronormative family. Eng examines how queer liberalism is innately tied to neoliberalism and nation-building, where the production and incorporation of liberal citizens justifies the exclusions of other, typically racialized, non-heteronormative subjects.  This situates his examination of the intersections of racial and sexual hierarchies in case law, and the explicit and unspoken histories that shaped the Lawrence case.  He poses the question: “how does the contemporary emergence of queer liberalism depend upon a constitutive forgetting of race—on the racialization of intimacy”(36)?  The interrelationship of sexual freedoms and racial histories reveals the neoliberal shift to understanding race through color-blindness and cultural difference, and racial equality as an already realized, historical, liberal freedom.  Eng destabilizes the notion of liberal “progress,” and insists upon an intersectional reading of race and sexuality to better examine the contradictions of queer liberal freedoms and the persistence of racial oppression. He notes how intimacy enables queer recognition with the state, as this concept is connected to whiteness, racialized histories of property, and heternormative family forms.  Finally, Eng’s section on global frameworks links queer citizenship to justifications for US imperial expansion, and reflects Puar’s analysis of US exceptionalism.

This week’s queer of color critiques week reveal the intersections and co-construction of race and sexuality as they relate to nationalism, liberal citizenship, and imperialism.  These analyses are particularly useful for drawing attention to sexuality, even when it is not operating in overt ways, and as Ferguson demonstrates, this, “has significance for how we might understand sexuality as a mode of racialized governmentality and power”(89).  The readings allow for a broad definition of queerness, connected not just to sexual identity, but a variety of non-heteronormative subjects.  Ferguson and Eng offer convincing historical readings to develop the connections of race, sexuality, and nation.  They also provide an interesting look at the ways in which normativity and incorporation into citizenship is premised on the exclusions of others, revealing the violence of liberal inclusions and the structural conditions and contradictions of neoliberalism.  The discussions of liberal recognition brought to mind Simpson’s work, and although the readings this week do not address the specifics of settler colonialism, there is some overlap in the critiques of liberal rights, as well as the way this can be linked to US imperialist projects. 

I’m interested in what liberal recognition forecloses and Eng’s discussion of queer assimilationist politics.  Eng asks, “does this turn to marriage make it more difficult to imagine and live alternative kinship structures”(57)?  I find it interesting to think through these potential foreclosures, and how they might relate to racialized, non-heteronormative kinship structures.  How might queer subjects resist modes of recognition and incorporation into liberal citizenship, and can these negotiations be reflected in a queer of color methodology?  

I also have a clarification question and would like to talk more about Puar’s use of assemblages, as well as her reading of intersectionality, and what assemblages can offer as a methodological tool.