Chapter 3 - Convergence, Dissymmetry, Duplicities

Summary

Queer of color critique emerged from within and across the epistemic fractures created by a set of late twentieth-century projects – such as queer studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and feminist studies – that forcibly made visible the western settler-colonial white-male heterosexual social order that both liberal and radical critiques privileged, perpetuated, or ignored. It contributed to these interdisciplinary fields by stressing the co-constitutive weave of normalizing power, examined by post-structuralist queer critiques, with social and state dominative powers, which have been the focus of women of color and third world feminist critiques of heteropatriarchy, the “feminization” of transnationalized labor, and state/carceral management of de- and post-industrialization. Queer of color critiques identify aesthetics and politics that defy liberal and radical conceptions of engaged social critique and the (hetero)normative field of the “political” they enfranchise, secure, circulate, and expand through state apparatuses that violate and stigmatize our varied relatedness.