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ON MAKING SENSE

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................xiIntroduction: On the Practice and Politics of Intelligibility.....................11. Morrison and Butler on Language and Knowledge..................................232. Dying to Know in Baldwin's Another Country.....................................453. Queer Latina/o Migrant Labor...................................................774. Shifting the Site of Queer Enunciation.........................................1125. Cho's Faggot Pageantry.........................................................137Notes.............................................................................161Bibliography......................................................................183Index.............................................................................195

Chapter One

Language remains alive when it refuses to "encapsulate" or "capture" the events and lives it describes.... The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Toni Morrison, The Nobel Prize Lecture in Literature

BEYOND "RACE FATIGUE": A PROLOGUE ABOUT OUR TIMES

"Everything that I am about to say in this essay has already been said." This is the strategic concession deployed by the literary critic Hiram Perez in his courageous 2005 critique of Euro-American queer theory, a subversively bifid acquiescence gesturing toward what we may want to call the phenomenon of "race fatigue" operating within feminist and queer theory circles today. This race fatigue comes in at least two forms. On the one hand, there is the fatigue of a certain kind of feminist or queer academic who feels, as Perez notes, "disgruntled" about the persistent appeal to be in conversation with intellectuals and writers of color, to not misuse their ideas, and more importantly to elaborate antiracist, non-Eurocentric scholarship. This disgruntlement can have various manifestations, as is the case when queer theorists like John Champagne dismiss such perceived injunctions as theoretically naive and emotionally manipulative or when early feminist scholars like Mary Daly simply do not respond to the perception that women of color have been misused. On the other hand, there is the fatigue of primarily intellectuals and writers of color who, faced with a laundry list of erasures and distortions, express grief and anger at the persistent lack of reciprocity, not to mention a profound sense of exhaustion at having to perform, time and time again, the spectacle of the angry person of color obsessed with questions of race and racism.

What is striking about Perez's performative utterance is that it registers a record of exhaustion for which there are at least two seemingly incommensurable understandings. Yet, how do we resolve the problem for which "race fatigue" is, perhaps, only a symptom? If scholars are indeed tired (albeit for significantly different reasons) of concerns being raised about race and racism in the work of white feminist and white queer scholars, how do we move productively through such differently justified exhaustion? What tools are at our disposal in order to address a problem that is as pervasive (according to many scholars) as it is unsubstantiated (according to many others)? Will "theory" remain a "racialized" domain, with the obvious privileges of Eurocentric whiteness in American society limiting our capacity to say what we mean and to be heard clearly?

Feminist theorists of race have been especially conscious of these questions, reminding us that if assertions of advancement (with regard to race and racism) often rest on the "inclusion of racial difference," then as a matter of critical assessment the methods and circumstances of incorporation "need to be carefully scrutinized." In the context of struggle over the role of minority intellectual production in feminist and queer theory, I argue that closer attention should be paid to the use of writers of color in projects that employ antirealist assumptions regarding language, identity, and knowledge. I utilize as a primary case study a prominent scholar who straddles feminist and queer theory, Judith Butler, and reflect upon her peculiar misuse of Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture in Literature. By contrasting the theories of language and narrative developed by Morrison in her Nobel lecture with their misappropriation by Butler in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, I show how Butler selectively cites Morrison to support claims about the indeterminacy of language that are curiously at odds with Morrison's understanding of language and social reference. In fact, as I argue, Butler's use of Morrison is a form of aggressive theoretical misappropriation that is symptomatic of a certain antirealist tendency in contemporary scholarly culture.

My discussion of Morrison and Butler builds on Roderick Ferguson's "queer of color critique" as a critical reading practice—turning toward African American literature as a crucial archive of negotiation and launching from that nexus a new interrogation, not of liberalism and Marxism, as Ferguson does, nor of canonical sociology and the distortions of African American lived reality that Ferguson argues it accomplished, but of some of the most taken-for-granted approaches in feminist and queer theory today, antirealist approaches that proclaim antiracist intent and applicability, but converge with racist logics. Deploying queer of color critique in this manner suggests a recalibration of our most basic presuppositions regarding identity and language, not the least because we can now point to several ways in which antirealists distort, in the most predictable manner, some of our writer's most important and nuanced decolonial contributions.

Echoing an extensive record of apprehension and critique expressed by feminists of color such as Barbara Christian and Deborah McDowell, bell hooks and María Lugones, Chandra Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander, and Linda Martín Alcoff and Paula Moya, I raise questions with respect to how racialized minorities are represented in antirealist projects, especially those projects informed both by poststructuralist theories of linguistic reference (particularly the belief in the radical indeterminacy of language) and by postmodernist skepticism toward identity categories. I argue, drawing on feminist theorists Paula Moya and Shari Stone-Mediatore, that these projects have recurring interpretive limitations (not to mention regulatory effects) that cannot be overcome without relinquishing some core antirealist commitments. Moya has pointed out that "women of color are often called on in postmodernist feminist accounts of identity to delegitimate any theoretical project that attends to the linkages between identity (with its experiential and epistemic components) and social location." To demonstrate her point, she examines the work of Butler and of Donna Haraway, showing not only how these two theorists misuse Cherríe Moraga's words "without attending to her...