Autonomy/desire/community
Jafari Sinclaire Allen
For some time now, I have been interested in chronicling and theorising everyday agency among those who find themselves the targets of state oppression and more general forms of approbation on grounds of gender, sexuality and race, and therefore strategically use or recast their interpellated otherness, or deviance. In her essay ‘Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics’, Cathy J. Cohen (2004) critiques African American studies’ politics of respectability and suggests that the reputed deviance of queers, single mothers and state aid recipients – in the eyes of policymakers, but also scholars and civil society leaders – makes them multiply vulnerable, not only as unruly subject-citizens, but also outside of cultural boundaries.
In a similar vein, M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) has argued that some bodies, such as those of the lesbian and the ‘prostitute’, cannot be included as citizens in former colonies of the Caribbean precisely because they embody sexual agency and eroticism radically out of step with the aspirations of the nation to advertise itself as independent, developed, disciplined and poised to join in the number of putatively ‘civilized’ states. Resonant with Cohen, Alexander pushes us to be mindful of ‘whether such bodies are offered up … in an internal struggle for legitimation’ (2005: 36). She observes that not only is the Third World subject denied voice in narratives of sexual encounter, but also that state interpellations of the subject’s identity are constructed precisely at the interstices of potential struggle. Alexander has shown that like the USA, postcolonial states in the Caribbean and Latin America may also [re]deploy violently heterosexist policies and pronouncements that underscore the patriarchal control of women, sex workers and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and queer individuals. My own recent research in Cuba and experiences at home in the USA (Allen 2007, 2010) impel taking seriously her entreaty to attend to how ‘not just any body can be a citizen [anymore]’ (Alexander 1994: 5).
In thinking of the state’s sexualisation (racialisation and gendering) of particular bodies, we should not aim to paint the state with a brush so wide that distinctions between socialist and liberal, or between (post)colonial and imperial, north and south are effaced. There are crucial distinctions that condition and structure the ways in which a state – any state – attempts to regulate particular bodies, and as Roderick Ferguson observes in his queer of colour critique, ‘both bourgeois and revolutionary practices were conceived through heteropatriarchy’ (2004: 10). These related insights of black feminist and queer of colour critique: first, that heteropatriarchy is left in place in Marxist and otherwise revolutionary societies, and, second, that the state – all states, at least in the Americas – depend on racialised heteropatriarchy to constitute and maintain themselves in the global hierarchy of states, are key to understanding the current situation and to theorising spaces beyond it.
These questions go to the heart of larger questions of subjectivity: who is recognised as a person within a nation-state; and with what rights, privileges and expectations? Moreover, In the USA and the Caribbean, non-state actors like families, religious, cultural and even feminist organisations often make strange bedfellows in their support for these projects of respectability. Their shared interest is to discipline individuals, but also their nations’ putative racialised unruliness, relative to the north and the west. This presents both a set of political problems across black diaspora, and a theoretical puzzle. Is there any place where (the benefits and recognition of) citizenship can accrue to the unruly – the ‘prostitute’, the homosexual, the transgender person or the black? And what calculus emerges when these raced and sexed categories of, for example non-national, deviant, non-ethnic racial subject or merely ‘other’ are compounded? Failing inclusion as a properly hygienic citizen or subject, where is the place for the black queer, for example?
Perhaps most pressing, however, is the question whether, if in fact blacks and queers, for example, cannot be full citizens in the neoliberal sense, can they at least be free? While anthropologists typically attend to the particularities of place and difference, the concept of diaspora – connection, movement, self- and world making – helps us to think about historically global structures of dominance and resistance, possibilities afforded or not by individual states, and therefore allows us to highlight and imagine spaces of freedom beyond these constraints.
Moving away from the falsely dichotomous rights debate, for which in any case, work by Bell and Binnie (2000) and others have already provided insightful reviews, the challenge here lies in identifying within these contexts prospects for sexual citizenship and erotic autonomy. While sexual citizenship refers, generally, to notions of positive rights secured by states within in an international human rights context, Alexander’s (1997: 1) notion of ‘erotic autonomy’ suggests a belonging to oneself which is beyond state interpellations, inscriptions and exclusions. Such a notion is connected to Lorde’s (1984) idea of deep longing or erotic subjectivity, which is at once self-possessed or personal, and interdependent, connected and committed to enlarging human capacity for social justice. This is especially important to people of African descent – particularly those of minority sexuality – due to the (at least) double bind of putative deviance and the instability of rights, citizenship, participation and inclusion in formal decision making. Black lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and queers must at once challenge discursive and material practices, through organised legal and political work, but also look beyond state and civil society.
Throughout the black diaspora, practices of loving friendship and erotic connection may offer a powerful tool toward healing from the multiple and compounded traumas of race/sex terror. This constitutes, for example, what Kempadoo and Doezema (1998) and others (e.g. Piedra 1992) look for when they talk of Caribbean ‘sexual resistance’. It evidences Joseph Beam’s (1983: 230) famous assertion that ‘black men loving black men is the revolutionary act of the 1980s’, and instantiates what I theorise in my book, ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Self-making in Cuba, as a ‘larger freedom’ (Allen 2010). Here, I argue that gendered, raced and sexed self-making within the sites I investigate in Cuba is impelled not only by interaction with global discourses and foreigners, but also most pointedly by erotic desire of individuals and group desire. Before there can be discussion about sexual rights, subjects and (erotic) autonomy of African and African descended subjects, or we enjoin this proposal to attend to both sexual citizenship and erotic autonomy toward a larger freedom, articulated through on the ground friendship networks of same-gender loving1 black people, we must first confront the logics of value that inhere in arguments of sexual deviance or unruliness that makes some potential citizen subjects ineligible or inappropriate, relative to a so called ‘universal’ subject.
Among people of African descent, poor people and otherwise under-siege populations, sexuality is putatively always in a state of crisis – most often interpellated as deviant, dangerous, unnatural (e.g. Moynihan 1967; Frazier 1966, 1967; Carby 1987) and un-national (e.g. Ortiz 1987; 1995; Lubiano 1997). Given, on one hand, the real experience of sexual repression of Africans and their descendants – legalised kidnapping and torture, forced reproduction, rape, coercion, for example – and, on the other, material, historical and behavioural patterns that have been deemed deviant, such as female-headed households, extended families, age and class egalitarian relationships, early sexual behaviour, for example; I want to suggest that to be black is to be always already seen as ‘queer’, relative to an understanding of subjectivity based on Western ideals of property, gender and sexual propriety.
Not only are black subjects always already queer relative to normative western ideals of the person , but also, same-gender loving people from the global south who negotiate but do not wholly capitulate to what Cymene Howe (2002: 237) has called the ‘universal queer subject’, discursively fall, in both time and space (Boellstorff 2007), outside narrowly western and northern middle-class gay constructions of family, lesbian, gay and queer, and of gay rights. One may ask, for example, if homosexual Cubans exist (and, of course, they do) what do we make of the fact that a gay tourist cannot attend a gay bar or tea dance in Havana – rainbow flags waving in the Caribbean breeze? Is the absence of gay political and cultural organisations in Cuba proof positive of repression of homosexuals by the Cuban state? Is this a reflection of machismo or evidence of Third World underdevelopment?
Roger Lancaster points out that we must not look for ‘obvious equivalents to the North American experience’ (1997: 192) in the experiences of same-gender loving people in other locales. This would betray ethnocentrism that arrogantly positions ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ identity as the only or most appropriate way to express samegender loving erotic subjectivities, and by extension, ‘proper’ – read liberal – political subjectivity. Looking for obvious equivalents or arranging experiences in an evolutionary trajectory starting with ‘pre-gay’ (Altman 1996) and progressing forward, positions gay rights as the singular trajectory through which political subjectivity of same-gender loving people can be appropriately expressed. However, the yearning expressed by black same-gender loving people in black queer literatures, on stage, in political organising and at the club, is for autonomous – not isolated or separatist – spaces of black queerness, in which we begin to make sense of the complexity and singularity of black experience. This often does not always neatly conform to gay rights paradigms or coming out narratives in which the family of origin is traded in for another set of necessarily antagonistic affiliations.
For example, while as Chauncey (1994) and others point out, gay enclaves were constituted in the Castro in San Francisco and West Village of New York City in postwar USA, signalling a separate gay, largely male community, politics and culture, this has not been the case for people of colour. The politics of these communities are intersectional – concerned with issues of economic advancement, healthcare and racial discriminations, for example, as much or more than struggle for gays in the military or gay marriage. Black queers largely retain not only affective ties to extended families of origin, but also economic ties and residential proximity to black and people of colour neighbourhoods institutions and issues (Battle and Cohen 2003; Dang and Frazer 2005).
As we heed Alexander’s (2002: 91) eloquently warning to ‘become fluent in each other’s histories’, we must also attend to the ways this crucial project of mutual literacy is in danger of being rendered a platitude of multiculturalism in which ‘diversity’ – silently colouring within the lines of the status quo – comes to stand in for social justice, without the historical memory, hard work or honest dialogue that Alexander advocates. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, important ruptures took place, across the globe. This was the beginning of Reaganism and Thatcherism’s longue durée, the encroachment of neoliberalism and spectacularisation of the global marketplace heralding the postmodern moment. During this moment in the USA, during the onset of the HIV epidemic, black lesbian and gay political organising, literatures and other expressive practices emerged, pushing notions of the erotic beyond hetero sex and reproduction. Examples include the historical connections forged between the black feminist movement and black gay and lesbian organising and critique (Allen 2007; Ferguson 2004; Smith 1998); depictions of black gay and lesbian life that forcefully stressed the importance of families of origin and families of choice; and black queer activism that symbolically and substantively reinforces notions of black belonging (Allen op. cit.). Early and still existing black queer organisations in the USA, such as African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change (AALUSC, founded as Salsa Soul Sisters), Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), Affinity (Social Services), ADODI and others, emphatically insist on being part of black communities within the USA, and extend in many cases – rhetorically or materially – to other sites in the African diaspora.
Still, rather than encourage work that takes up and pushes this cross-cultural, intergenerational and cross-genre entreaty to, as Foucault asserts ‘use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships’ (1996: 135), recent influential work in queer studies is characterised by its anti-relationality and its stance against futurity. Lee Edelman’s (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive offers a forceful and eloquent example of this. Although Edelman elegantly recaptures some of the innovative potential of queer theory by tracing cultural shifts of white middle-class gay men toward the so-called mainstream, he proceeds without an analysis of the experiences and intellectual production of people of colour and women, who face co-constitutive racial, sexual and gender hierarchies. Further, following Lacanian theory, in which the real is an effect of language and not to be confused with reality, everyday suffering and death is of little concern in No Future. Indeed, No Future betrays a brand of scholarly refusal to recognise the complexity of the lifeworlds of those for whom sexual liberation alone will not guarantee freedom, and at the same time, for whom rights discourses hold great symbolic value, but seem to have had limited material purchase since the 1960s. To extend Alexander’s theorisation of the state’s simultaneous sexualisation, racialisation and gendering of particular bodies, not every child – and almost no black children – resemble The Child in Edelman’s polemic.
My own work suggests that black queer writing, support groups and other liminal spaces of survival and potential, like the underground black queer club, are key sites for the exploration of desire, autonomy and community. We take up Cohen’s charge to draw blackprints of collective resistance by those whose lives ‘are indicative of the intersection of marked identities and regulatory processes, relative powerlessness and limited and contradictory agency’ (2004: 28). Collective resistance can sometimes be quite direct, such as the physical resistance of black and Latina drag queens, which initiated the Stonewall Riots against oppressive police practices heralding the gay liberation2 movement, or maroon communities throughout the Americas, in which enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals battled colonial troops. More often, however, challenges are more fugitive. They may occur quickly, silently or incomprehensibly loudly, and in places where no one is looking. Here, Victor Turner’s concept of communitas, an often momentary experience of what Durkheim would call ‘collective effervescence’, or coming together, might be useful. Could the transcendence experienced in moments of communitas on the dance floor move to transgression of hegemonic rule; then in the life, can we actually transform ourselves enough to transform our communities and our world? Considering the pace with which technologies of global capital, the state and powerful cultural institution dehumanise by simultaneously atomising and aggregating individuals throughout the globe, these are significant epistemological, spiritual and cultural transgressions, if not yet community resistance.
A number of scholars, activists and artists have contributed moving narratives and convincing arguments that illuminate and articulate this politics of the erotic. For example, black feminist theorists and creative writers such as Alice Walker (1982) and Dionne Brand (2000) have imagined erotic friendship among black women as a way for them to know they were not crazy, as a salve against the daily onslaught of racialised misogyny, gendered racism and heterosexism, and as a way to go about the work of personal and social transformation. This vision of raising consciousness, mending wounds, moving between one place and another, and making new worlds, is the work of friendship. These visions of interdependence and passion are evident across spaces of the black diaspora, in fiction and non-fiction and also on the ground – in clubs and other sacred circles, on stage and between individuals.
Consider that, at least for black diasporic same-gender loving persons, to be homosexual, or more to the point, to be queer, is to build loving friendships and networks of friends outside not only a symbolic discourse in which they are always already invisibilised or muted, but also once removed from extended heteropatriarchal bio-families, where the violences of racism often echo and reproduce themselves in homes in which protection from concurrent gendered and sexed trauma cannot be assured. One must ‘cross lines’, ‘break backs’ in work, ‘conjure theirselves’ something new (Bridgforth 2004: 49), since heterosexist structures do not fit, or refuse to accommodate them. This work is often done between friends in the life – within marginal spaces like support groups and in the dark of the club – sweat pouring and with pleasure in mind. Those with whom Gloria Wekker (2006) worked used the phrase ‘I had gone to seek my life (mi libi)’ (132) to talk about mati work and networks of people who engaged in it. Here, we can see that the life speaks to facts of blackness throughout diaspora, which condition similar circumstances and set the horizon for a limited number of combinations of action. In my own research in Cuba, respondents and friends easily understood that in the USA, as in Cuba, el ambiente, the scene – the life – is at once used to denote spaces of extra-legality and potential danger, as well as trans, gay and lesbian space. In both Cuba and the USA, these non-mutually exclusive spaces often overlap (Allen 2007). This life in between, constrained as it is by racialised, classed and sexualised violence of the state, of global capital and of the anxieties of desperate in-group elites; is also a site of potential freedom, most centrally, because it has to be.
In Michel Foucault’s essay ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ (1996: 135), he attempts to push the focus of the gay individual to a collective project of sociality. He avers that it would be better to ask oneself:
[W]hat relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated … the problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.
We can also thus think of this mode of life as another facet of Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1999) concept of a troubled but productive point of multiple contact and possibilities, namely, nepantla. What might we learn from black diasporic erotic subjectivities that underscore friendship and communal connection within those interzones? While to be homosexual is pitched as if it is about individuality and ‘coming out’ of established heteronormative structures and logics, but not necessarily into anything at all, what if we think of queer as precisely not about individualism and moving outside, but as a project of constituting interstitial outsider perspectives, as queers of colour have demonstrated in everyday experience, and in literature?
In Cuba, state apparatus attempts to construct particular types of revolutionary practice through political education or indoctrination. But whereas political education asks individuals to memorise, rote, from established texts; consciousness raising, or to conscientise, is to interrogate the living texts of individuals’ lives. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) uses the nineteenth-century US reformer and mystic Sojourner Truth to illustrate a related point. Pointing out that Truth constantly travelled – migrating across geographic, racial, religious and other borders, Hill Collins writes ‘no [T] ruth was possible without a variety of perspectives on any given particularity’ (1990: 23). One night, my respondent Delores ran through a litany of negations of the expectations attached to the cultural, political and national identities interpellated for her, as a Cuban woman of African descent:
I am not the Revolutionary woman who goes to FMC [Cuban Women’s Federation] meetings and dresses the children for Pioneros camp … I am not the Afro-Cuban who wears colares [Yoruba necklaces representing gods to whom the wearer is consecrated] goes to toques [sacred drumming rituals] or does folkloric anything … I am not a stunning mulata fina or a selfless negrita, nor the only occasional lesbian who performs for men.
This practice of disidentification (Muñoz 1999) is a crucial first step, in order to first demystify, then strategically re-articulate parts of the knowledges that each so-called identity position brings. For Delores, this process of raising consciousness began in weekly discussion groups hosted by a black American political exile living in Cuba, then expanded through her participation in gatherings of lesbian and bisexual women.
I am not saying here that Delores learned to become black, or a woman or an out lesbian in these spaces. In fact Delores does not consistently identify as a black lesbian. However, through evaluating her own experience and those of others around her, she reasoned a cogent and supportable critique of dynamic interlocking structures of state, cultural and global power that find her multiply oppressed, but which at the same time offers her a variety of roadmaps toward liberation (or at least moments of ‘liberty’). Through conversations with others, Delores was able to compare what she formerly thought of as her own singular and non-relatable story, to that of others who were similarly situated. Delores’ practice of radical becoming begins at disidentification, but is only enabled or operationalised by the constitution of a space of critical enunciation, in which competing narratives are debated and performed publicly. That is, while the process is understood to be deeply personal and ‘private’ in many ways, it is precisely not individualistic in its politics, motivations and intentions. Individual desire is honoured and at the same time understood to flourish only in the context of a community (building enterprise).
Finally, friendship, Foucault argued, is potentially liberatory because it interrupts that which makes homosexuality ‘disturbing’ to heteropatriarchal sensibilities (and to racialised heteropatriarchal structures):
[T]hat individuals are beginning to love one another – there’s the problem. The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up.
(Foucault 1996: 137)
Such an idea is quite close to my notion of erotic subjectivity, following Audre Lorde. Erotic subjectivity – deeper understandings and compulsions of the body and soul – simultaneously embodying/invoking sex and death, works toward not only transgressing, but transcending and finally transforming hegemonies of global capital, the state and of bourgeois, limited and limiting notions of gender, sexuality or blackness, for example. Here, I am not claiming that this is a sufficient or final step, but rather necessary as a crucial line in the architecture of resistance. To follow Lorde (1983), through friendships and collective discussion, black queers in Cuba, USA and elsewhere ‘evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within their lives’ (82). Instantiating her entreaty to ‘not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe’ (ibid). Especially at this moment in which there is so little ‘safety’.
1 This neologism was coined by the black queer activist Cleo Manago (c. 1995) to mark a distinction between ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ culture and identification, and black men and women who have sex with members of the same sex. While scholars continue to use gay, lesbian and queer, for example, and the US Centers for Disease Control, for example, uses MSM (men who have sex with men), same-gender loving has important resonance on the ground, in urban communities in the USA.
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