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  • Passing and the State in Junot Díaz’s “Drown”
  • Dorothy Stringer (bio)

This essay presents Junot Díaz’s 1996 short story “Drown” as an important discussion of passing that not only spans racial and sexual identities but also tracks state strategies for managing racial and sexual difference. “Drown” describes a post-Fordist overlap between long-standing, ghettoizing state racism and the later, apparently orthogonal state strategy of closeting and homophobia analyzed by Margot Canaday in The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2009). While teachers, the police, and the Army are still glaringly white in this story’s 1990s Dominican immigrant neighborhood, state goods such as higher education and military service have now become the benefits of a “sexual citizenship” (Canaday 256) that premises individuals’ access to modern state benefits and resources on heterosexuality and that defines suspected homosexuals as “anticitizen[s]” (9), beyond the state’s care or concern.

The coincidence of these two systems of exclusion means, of course, a doubled burden for the story’s nameless narrator, a ghettoized young Dominican American man with some queer sexual experience. However, it also demonstrates the state’s appropriation of passing for its own biopolitical ends. Passing-for-white was an interstitial tactic of African American resistance to state-sponsored racism, but in the homophobic “straight state,” passing-for-straight becomes the normal condition of full citizenship for everyone. Moreover, for racial minorities, the imperative to pass for straight reinforces existing spatial and geographic forms of institutional racism. “Drown” responds to “sexual citizenship” with a “move to guard the margin” (Spivak 132), marking and maintaining a gap between state and self, discourse and speech. The narrator’s calculated silences preserve ethical possibilities that the state cannot enact, predict, or regulate.

I begin here with a prologue recounting Canaday’s major claims, her use of the term passing, and the potential I see for expanding her analysis beyond its original, white-normative conditions of existence. I go on to close-read “Drown,” explicating its narrator’s (self-aware) collaboration with state strategies of racist ghettoization and homophobic exclusion, and then explore theoretical means for imagining an end to such collaboration. Finally, I discuss implications, based on Díaz’s and my analyses, for a more general project of reading race and sexuality together.

Prologue: “Sexual Citizenship” and Passing

Canaday describes state homophobia and the modern federal bureaucracy as coeval and mutually constitutive. Her project is at once familiar and strange, requiring that we revisit [End Page 111] not the concepts but the national and institutional premises of the Foucauldian history of sexuality. “Unlike comparable European states,” she writes, “which were well-established before sexologists ‘discovered’ the homosexual in the late nineteenth century, the American bureaucracy matured during the same years [roughly, the late nineteen-teens through the late thirties] that scientific and popular awareness of the pervert exploded” (2). As Canaday explains, amid the hothouse growth of post-World War I, New Deal, and post-World War II federal benefits and agencies, ad-hoc decisions to exclude apparent deviants rapidly engendered standardized, systematically homophobic procedures of investigation and documentation. By mid-century, naturalization, GI Bill benefits, Veterans Affairs’ medical care, and military service all involved submitting one’s sexuality to bureaucratic scrutiny. In other words, just as citizenship began to mean access to an unprecedented range of financial and social benefits, its terms narrowed: it was now a “sexual citizenship,” and the United States itself was a “straight state.” Documented homosexuals were “anticitizen[s]”—those against whom citizenship was defined and those to whom benefits were denied.

But homosexual minoritization was not actually the primary accomplishment of the “straight state”; far more important than the exclusion of a few was the government’s new power to make all citizens acknowledge the sexual contingency of their benefits and privileges:

The closet, after all, was a deliberate state strategy. ... Its brilliance was in inviting people to pass and then suggesting that they suffered no harm because they could hide. Yet the incitement to pass was part of the harm, and so much more effectively did the state shape the citizenry by letting people in under certain conditions than...

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