# Queer of color critique

Queer of color critique is an analytical framework that insists on the role of racialization in establishing normative gender and sexuality as an organizing principle of capitalism. Queer of Color critique is an analytical framework that centers race, gender, sexuality, and class in its critique of politics, history, and mainstream gay rights movements. Expanding on women of color feminism, Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique, Roderick A. Ferguson declares queer of color critique as an analysis of race, gender, sexuality, and class within and in resistance to liberal ideology, the nation-state, and capital. In Ferguson’s words, “Queer of color analysis disidentifies with historical materialism to rethink its categories and how they might conceal the materiality of race, gender, and sexuality.” Through disidentification, queer of color critique voices the silences of marxism that inscribe heteronormativity. In critiquing liberalism, queer of color critique problematizes the single-issue orientation of gay politics and historical narratives. Exercised by activists, organizers, intellectuals, artists, care workers and community members alike, queer of color critique builds an analytic for political world building.

## Historical context

The origins of Queer of Color Critique are traced back to a cultural studies reading group of doctoral students Roderick Ferguson, Chandan Reddy, Gayarti Gopinath, Grace Hong, Danny Weidner, Victor Viesca, Victor Bascara, and Ruby Tapia. Ferguson, Gopinath, and Reddy questioned “what would an intersectional, queer critique of political economy look like?” after attending a talk at UC San Diego in 1999 on Martin Manalansan's essay, “In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma.” There had yet to be an established methodology that provided a global critique of homonormativity, interjecting queer political analysis into critical theory.
Queer of color critique was a concept long before it was an established framework coined by Roderick Ferguson in The Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique in 2004, and by Jose Esteban Muñoz in Disidentification: Queers of color and performance politics. Ferguson argues that the queer of color critique “interrogates social formation as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” Ferguson draws a connection between the capitalist nation-building and the state's regulation of gender and sexual eccentricities of non-white populations. Muñoz offers disidentification as a strategy of resistance that defies assimilation and challenges dominant ideology that associates queerness with whiteness, a concept that Ferguson then builds on further by challenging the universality of sexual heterogeneity. Without universality, it is possible to see differences as a source of strength and create new categories that are not fixed, but are experiencing constant change and reformation. Furthermore, without a "normal" or "natural" state of being, Ferguson states "queer of color analysis can be another step in the move beyond identity politics and toward what Angela Davis calls "unlikely and unprecedented coalitions."" The queer of color critique illuminates the ways that queer theory has been historically influenced by dominant ideology by treating the queer white experience as universal and failing to center the voices, needs, and bodies of those who exist at the margins of margins. Both Muñoz and Ferguson build on the scholarship of activists and intellectuals, whose ideas and contributions are explained below.

## Notable Scholars
### Audre Lorde

In her speech The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Audre Lorde, a black feminist lesbian intellectual and activist, calls attention to the racism entrenched in the mainstream white feminist movement. Speaking at the New York University Institute for the Humanities conference, Lorde expresses disappointment at the absence of writings and voices of women of color and the paradoxical reliance on the few Black women, who were in fact invited to the conference, to explain how patriarchy is being reproduced within the feminist movement and how white women's experience is not universal and should not be valued as most important. In response, white women justified silencing marginalized narratives by advocating the importance of a unified message of women’s empowerment that could be all-encompassing. Lorde contends that within this color blind and assimilationist approach, transformative change is not possible. Lorde challenges all feminists to defy patriarchy by leaning into the idea that differences are sources of strength and power. Lorde imagines alternatives to change-making within the feminist movement: “In our world divide and conquer must become define and empower” because “refusing to recognize differences makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.” The concept of defining difference to empower extends to queer theory and rejects lesbian separatism. If queerness is only associated with whiteness, it is impossible to clearly identify the different problems affecting the queer community as a whole.
In The Uses of the Erotic, a separate essay in Sister Outsider, Lorde provides a strategy for sustainable long term liberation work that has contributed to the queer of color critique by encouraging theorists and activists to seek joy, connection and pleasure from the work of change-making. Lorde writes "For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing [...] how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?" Lorde highlights the importance of loving the experience of doing the work- and not solely valuing the work itself- as an act of resistance to capitalism and a way of creating genuine change. "Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society." This approach allows individuals to bring their whole creative selves to their activism and seek joy in the process of doing, thereby expanding, sustaining and queering the movement for change by distancing it from the capitalist notion that gives value only to the finished product. Queer theory is not just about dismantling heteronormativity, it is also about dismantling white supremacy and seeing how these different forms of oppression overlap.

### Combahee River Collective

The queer of color critique was also influenced by the Combahee River Collective Statement, written by a group of Black feminist lesbians in 1977 in Boston Massachusetts. The statement aimed to advance liberation for all people by identifying the interlocking nature of oppressive systems and laying out a blueprint for Black feminist organizing. The collective was also committed to long term struggle and built community a space that nurtured creativity, culture and care. Barbara Smith, Demita Fraizer and Beverly Smith were among the contributors to the statement, in which they recognize the activists that came before them- including but not limited to Angela Davis, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell- and articulate their political beliefs and approach to change-making. The Combahee River Collective statement calls for “the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.” Although the contributors identified as feminists and lesbians, they rejected lesbian separatism: "we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race [...] we struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism." This framework of holding both interlocking identities, and advocating for the destruction of both oppressive systems of racism and patriarchy, extends to the fight against heteronormativity. While the term queer of color critique had not yet been articulated, the Combahee River Collective alludes to the idea that sexuality exists in the bodies and lived experiences of people that hold other marginal identities. Queerness cannot be extracted as its own experience separate from race and class, thus queer theory must acknowledge how race and class oppression affect queer people of color.

### Gloria Anzaldua

Gloria Anzaldua, a Chicana lesbian author and activist, contributed to the queer of color critique by documenting and theorizing how queerness and sexuality interact with culture and language. In her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldua challenges readers to understand "borders," not merely as physical barriers that divide nation-states, but as an articulation of identity- invisible boundaries that exist inside the body. Anzaldua writes of her Chicana lesbian experience: "We're afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows [...] We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face, discern among its features the under-shadow that the reigning order of heterosexual males project on our Beast. Yet still others of us take it another step: we try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us." Anzaldua articulates herself always stuck at a border, attacked and rejected by both native culture and white culture for holding the truth of her lesbian identity: "Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; when the males of all races hunt her as prey. Alienated from her mother culture, "alien" in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can't respond, her face caught between, los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits." This account of queer experience illuminates how different forms of oppression manifest in the body. Anzaldua provides a narrative that explains "dual consciousness" of having to understand both dominant and non-dominant cultures to live in two worlds, both rejecting certain aspects of identity. Gloria Anzaldua draws on this narrative in an anthology titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which she coedited with Cherrie Moraga. This Bridge Called My Back challenges the whiteness of mainstream queer discourse and uplifts and centers the political voices of marginalized women in an attempt to build international solidarity across difference: "We each are our sisters' and brothers' keepers; no one is an island or has ever been. Every person, animal, plant, and stone is interconnected in a life and death symbiosis. We are each responsible for what is happening down the street, south of the border or across the sea." This provides a global perspective to queer theory and shows how individual liberation is bound to the international collective.

## Trans of Color Critique
### Coloniality of Gender

One concept used by trans of color critique is the concept of gender being a colonial construct. That is, the dominant way of viewing gender as a binary between men and women has been formed because of the forces of European colonialism and racism. Scholar PJ DiPietro says "The coloniality of gender framework makes sense of a paradigmatic shift, the rendering of Native, Indigenous, and Black flesh into modified versions of 'gender'..."