Mel Stanfill

I’ve written before about Ferguson’s exposing of strange bedfellows around the discourse of “black matriarchy”; he argues that black nationalists and cultural conservatives—who in virtually every other way were antithetical—both pointed to this as the problem at the root of poverty and other social ills in African-American communities.

What I noticed on this second reading of Aberrations in Black, however, is the sheer variety of unexpected connections and contradictions he articulates between institutions and groups. As I think that, ultimately, this is the book’s greatest contribution, I’d like to elaborate them here.

To enumerate the connections in the order that Ferguson does, he first shows how Marxism is complicit with bourgeois liberalism. He argues that Marx, in taking “normative heterosexuality as the emblem of order, nature, and universality, making that which deviated from heteropatriarchal ideals the sign of disorder,” was making the same argument as the bourgeois thinkers of his day when they condemned the working class for their sexual deviance, such that ultimately “both liberal reform and proletarian revolution sought to recover heteropatriarchal integrity from the ravages of industrialization” despite the fact that Marx blamed capital and the bourgeois blamed the working class’s lack of self-control (6, 10).

Second, Ferguson demonstrates how what he calls “canonical sociology” is implicated in state practices of exclusion, despite the discipline’s pretensions to objectivity. Like Marx, sociology identified nonheteronormative behavior as “dysfunction,” and in articulating normativity as the way out of the problems experienced by the African-American community the discipline “aligned itself with the regulatory imperatives of the state” (18, 20)—meaning that surveillance of black populations’ sexual habits, whether by ADC social workers, “vice” squads, or sociologists, could thenceforth be figured as being for African Americans’ own good.

However, Ferguson also elaborates the ways in which ideas or institutions that we typically imagine to be working toward a common purpose are actually fundamentally incompatible.

In his argument that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, he goes beyond the standard critique of neoliberalism (that the refashioning of society such that everything runs on market processes is undemocratic, which implies that running some things through the market is okay).

Rather, Ferguson argues that capital produces nonnormativity through both recruiting certain kinds of labor and not others—creating homosocial work environments, separating families, etc.—and its reliance on inequality between groups to drive down the price of labor.

This is all in complete contradiction to liberal democracy, which both requires universal, interchangeable subjects stripped of particulars and (at least in its U.S. iteration) valorizes heteropatriarchy.

Finally, Ferguson articulates points at which the state acted at cross purposes to itself. For example, African-Americans were judged insufficient as citizens due to nonconformity with patriarchal ideals of a “providing” husband and a wife who managed the house rather than working, which rendered them ineligible for some features of state aid. However, the state encouraged this very “deviance” by denying Social Security benefits to jobs disproportionately occupied by black men and treating black women who stayed at home as shirking work.

The common thread between all these convergences and divergences, of course, is the ways in which nonheteronormativity—whether the result of racial difference, alternative gender formations, sexual nonnormativity, or, usually, some combination—is grounds for exclusion, but what is interesting and useful is the ways in which Ferguson traces the consequences of this through so many institutions and uncovers so many unexpected relationships.

Gay marriage advocates, as it turns out, are complicit with the people who want to privatize Social Security.

This is no nefarious scheme, but rather the consequences of buying in to a certain kind of political logic that has become the standard language of politics in the United States.

Though David Roediger discusses in his 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, discourses circulating at the time of the American Revolution that “thoroughly conflated opportunity to accumulate and secure productive property with the ‘pursuit of happiness’” and taxation with slavery and therefore unfreedom (p. 28), in the era typically known as neoliberalism this equation of economic with political liberty has become orthodox—and in the mainstream at least it is verging on becoming unquestionable doxa.

It is this (strange) unquestionability of the equation of property and freedom that animates contemporary activism around gay marriage. That is, though in 2003 Wendy Brown pointed out in Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy  points out that political liberalism can “lean more in the direction of maximizing liberty (its politically ‘conservative’ tilt) or maximizing equality (its politically ‘liberal’ tilt)” (sec. 6), and the demand for equality of marriage rights from the state is clearly the latter, the ways in which the demand for state recognition for one’s marriage is about inequality with respect to things like inheritance and taxes indicates that this “tilting” is within a relatively narrow orbit of economic laissez-faire liberalism.

Kevin Floyd‘s 2009 book The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism makes this argument quite explicitly, arguing that “neoliberal efforts to limit the horizon of struggles against ‘homophobia’ to the right to get married and own property” function “to assimilate homosexual practices not only to a heteronormative model of monogamy and ‘commitment’ but to a related, uncritical identification of privacy with property” (p. 68).

This contention is also implicit in Mary Gray’s description in her 2009 book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America of the successful framing of gay rights as “special rights” in Kentucky—“rural voters who reject recognition of LGBT rights,” she argues, “telegraph their own feelings of economic vulnerability, lack of access to social-welfare benefits, and reliance on the material more than symbolic preciousness of marriage to span the gaps in a woefully threadbare social safety net” (p. 179).

“Guarantee us the right to accumulate property with and bequeath property to whomever we choose,” the activist attention to marriage seems to say, but it’s only a segment of the population (gay or straight) who can take advantage of those benefits of marriage.

The idea, then, that “my ability to get married is my property and I should be able to do with it what I want” points right back to the logic that “my Social Security contributions should go into an account for me, and yours should be for you, and if you don’t have enough when you retire then tough.”

Most gay rights activists would be horrified at the latter statement, so why is the former their organizing principle?

An idea that has been at the forefront of my thinking of late is of the strangeness of bedfellows: some

people are in bed together and don’t realize it, others are in bed together and probably shouldn’t be, and still others are could or should be in bed together but aren’t—in short, the bedfellows idea helps make sense of why it is that typical modes of identity-politics organizing don’t really work.

To begin with those who have radically different commitments but operate from and support the same premises—those who are in bed together and don’t realize it—the connections are surprising. In his 2003 book Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique Roderick Ferguson usefully points out the ways in which “the discourse of black matriarchy” brought together very different groups as, “in addition to seducing black nationalists, that discourse facilitated a conservative blockade of social welfare policy in the United States” (p 124).

This is to say that the Black Panthers operated from a position that, like the so-called Moynihan Report (Officially called The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and available here), saw racism as emasculating and figured its correction as revolving around seizing manly agency, and this stance made them complicit with “U. S. nationalism, cultural nationalism, and the civil rights movement”—people they would never have though themselves like—due to their common “beliefs in heteropatriarchal discourses and practices”(Ferguson, 2003, pp. 115, 113).

Moreover, the black matriarchy discourse construction of the African American family as not only pathological but incompatible with achievement in the American system justified welfare reformers’ refusal to “sanction” it by financially supporting said matriarchs, thus making the Black Panthers in a sense also complicit with neoconservatism (Ferguson, 2003, pp. 124-5).

Similarly, Andrea Smith, in her Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (2008) points out the ways in which leftist causes often appeal to the same values as rightist premises—for example, “choice” in the case of abortion presumes universalized choosing subjects just as the conservative personal responsibility ethos does (p. 241).

Moreover, though Clinton was generally perceived as a pro-choice president, Smith  notes that the welfare reforms passed during his presidency, in increasing pressure on poor women of color not to have children, acted to restrict reproductive freedom in much the same way (though the opposite direction) as the pro-life camp seeks ton (p. 243).

In this way, race-based nationalism or choice-based reproductive rights organizing, in taking on only a piece of the structure, fundamentally misregognizes the mutual constitution of the whole and renders one’s stated goals unachievable.

Alternately, some groups think they’re in bed together but aren’t, assuming commonality where in fact it does not inherently or transparently exist. Smith notes that “Native identity is itself a form of coalition politics” (p. 204), which illustrates the ways in which identity-political groups—in general, though some more than others as this example shows—have to elide intragroup difference so that the particular organizational principle becomes the defining feature.

That is, not every member has the same interests, and particularly there are differences in resources and what are the most pressing issues between subgroups, as Smith demonstrates with the difference between urban Indians and those who live on the reservation ( 209).

Similarly, the Combahee River Collective Statement (1981) traces out the ways in which feminist organizing assumed the primacy of gender and excluded race and Black nationalist organizing assumed the primacy of race and excluded gender; in this, each group assumed that Black feminists would join them because of their stake in the issue it prioritized, disregarding as irrelevant (or at least of lesser importance) other issues of vital interest to African American women.

In this way, it is clear that, as Smith argues, we cannot assume who our allies are in the way that typical organizing has traditionally tended to do (pp. 202, 252-3).

However, Smith also notes that we should not assume who our allies are not; the third category of strangeness in bedfellows comprises groups who could or should be in bed together but can’t see it because of how they conceive of what constitutes commonality with their cause.

Thus, Ferguson clearly articulates the links between “the devaluation of African American labor” and globalization (p. 135), showing how African Americans and anticapitalist activism have a stake in the same issues, yet in practice this tends to be obscured by perceiving race and capital as separate systems. Similarly,

pathologizing women of color immigrants as wild reproducers [ . . . ] became a way of justifying cuts to public spending and obscuring the ways in which the United States needed immigrant labor. The theory of black matriarchy, in other words, helped to generate discourses about other nonheteronormative racial formations, legitimating the exploitation of nonwhite labor and devastating the lives of poor and working-class communities of color” (Ferguson, p. 136).

These different nonwhite labor populations, then, have a common stake in contesting heteronormativity, yet are frequently at odds with one another due to operating with a race-based understanding of oppression—as in, for example, Black vs. Asian tensions demonstrated in Los Angeles in the early 1990s and elsewhere.

“The key to developing a mass movement,” Smith contends, “is to convince people to exchange their pursuit of short-term interests (such as the maintenance of their white-skinned, economic status or gender privileges) for their long-term interest in creating a world based on social equality and justice for all” (p. 253).

This is to radically rethink who our bedfellows are, to move beyond organizing around identity-based categories (or, at least, essentialist understandings of them) to frame issues in ways that pull people across traditional boundaries—racial, gender, economic, or ideological.

I went to a lecture on Nietzsche a while back that I found very useful in conceptualizing the contradictions of universality and inequality (and also, incidentally, why capitalism is incompatible with Christianity, though I don’t think Michael Moore argues it quite that way in Capitalism: A Love Story). According to the lecturer, Nietzsche argues that there was, at a certain point, a shift from “good vs. bad” morality to “good vs. evil” morality.

In both cases, those who make the rules set themselves as the norm and treat those who don’t match it as deficient, but in a “good vs. bad” morality those who make the rules define themselves as superior precisely because there is a weak to their strong, a cowardly to their brave, etc. In a “good vs. evil” morality, however, those who embody the norm hold everyone to their standard and want people to change to meet it.

Universality is a “good vs. evil” morality, in which a norm is instantiated and everyone is compelled to live up to it; however, at the same time there persists a “good vs. bad” morality, in which those same people who expect everyone to live up to the norm simultaneously require a constitutive Other to produce their own superiority—that is, they require inequality.

In the context of the creation of desire for the universal position, this is produced through what Emma Pérez aptly characterizes in her 1999 book The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History as a “Hegelian notion” (p. 20), a teleological narrative in which everyone should and must and will eventually get to the norm if they work hard enough—and if they fail it’s their own fault.

It thus becomes easy to see how the male, heterosexual subject becomes the organizing principle for cultural nationalism. Heterosexual men of color closely approximate the subject of universality, occupying a position of “the other as the same,” of almost but not quite (or white) (Pérez, 1999, p. 20).

Using this figure for a movement makes it much easier to argue for the rights enjoyed by the dominant group; after all, it allows activists to construct their group as differing in only one respect, which is of course then framed as a minor difference.

However, discussing activism in this way positions the turn to universality as a cynical decision, calculated against a reckoning of social tradeoffs, and there’s no reason to suspect that it truly is. Instead, it is essential to recognize that arguing for recognition by the liberal state comes from within the structure itself.

When people turn to the state to make them equal under the law, they have already subscribed to the belief that everyone should be perfectly interchangeable under the law, and consequently have also subscribed to the definition of what interchangeability looks like—white, male, and heteronormative, among other things.

Cultural nationalisms can’t take this entire, but they can change only the part that is obviously incompatible with their perceived goals and identities by excising whiteness. In doing so, they misrecognize the ways in which all of the parts of the universal subject are mutually constitutive and “failing” on any account renders one definitionally ineligible for full citizenship.

In light of this trap of liberal universality, zoot suiters’ resistance through racialized masculinities and delinquency, as described by Robin D. G. Kelley‘s 1994 Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and Linda España-Maram’s 2006 Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture in the United States, begins to look like a good idea. Rather than applying to the state for relief, African American and Filipino men who found themselves corralled into subservience in their daily and working lives used zoot suit culture as a means of reasserting their control over themselves.

The two cases are also structurally very similar—both groups of young men were even newer migrants to the city environments who had conflict with longer-established people of their respective ethnic groups. The existence of this gap between youth culture and the larger racial communities to which the young people belonged does point to some of the limitations of this mode of resistance (the ill-treatment of women in African-American zoot suit culture being another glaring problem).

As a way of pushing back against dominant culture, it was limited, it was disorganized, and it didn’t necessarily produce broad-scale social change, but it shows one way one might conduct activism without relying on “we’re just like you” rhetoric or appealing to the state.