The Nightmares of the Heteronormative

Author: Ferguson R.

Source: Cultural Values, Volume 4, Number 4, 1 October 2000 , pp. 419-444(26)

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Abstract:

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African-American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African-American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African-American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African-American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African-American racial difference and worked to exclude African-Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African-American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African-Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.

Language: English

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University of Minnesota

Publication date: 2000-10-01