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Conclusion
- Indiana University Press
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Conclusion I got the 5 hundred year black hostage colonialism never never stops blue-ooze I got the francophone anglophone alementiphone lusophone telephone blue-ooze I got this terminology is not my terminology these low standards are not my standards this religion is not my religion and that justice has no justice for me blue-ooze I got the blue-ooze I got the gangbanging police brutality blue-ooze I got the domestic abuse battered body blue-ooze . . . I got the television collective life is no life to live and this world is really becoming a fucked up crowded place to be blue-ooze I got to ¤nd a way out this blue-ooze From Jayne Cortez, “I Got the Blue-Ooze 93”1 The world put in place by colonialists is not the only world that has ever been. It is not even necessarily the only world that is. It is most assuredly not the only world that can be. To contest this world, it is nonetheless necessary to criticize and contextualize it in ways which it could or would never envision. To replace it also requires collective work in theory and practice that recognizes the extent to which this world has colonized us and continues to colonize us mentally and physically, in so many dimensions. No doubt, such a revolution would require resistance, inspiration, memory, imagination, more resistance, and then some. The movement from one world order to another, more desirable one must involve a spirited movement of bodies and minds. These movements must move against an order of knowledge that articulates and organizes minds and bodies in a fundamentally colonialist fashion. This is a conclusion not to be ignored. We need to plot a way out of the world of social ideas and structures analyzed here, to replace the world put in place by colonialism. This project has been about body politics, but not in the fashion that has become typical over the last several decades. The now institutionalized form of raising questions about gender and sexuality fails to question how such issues might be raised without reinscribing well-established institutions of domina- tion. It avoids facing the very same questions it poses to others, never able to ask why it could not or would not think to interrogate its own basic approach to the world. When questions of gender and sexuality are on the table for discussion , even if sex and eroticism or embodiment in general are not, who asks how they get there? What form should they take or not take? Why do they communicate explicit and/or implicit scenarios of race, class, and empire? Which speci¤c order of knowledge dictates the limited shape and purpose of such inquiries , arti¤cially separating race, gender, class, and sexuality, without recognizing this as a very speci¤c kind of intellectual operation rooted in a very speci ¤c intellectual culture and history? It is as if it were enough to raise the subject, and magically some moral superiority of politics ensues. Since gender and sexuality criticism is not exempt from radical criticism itself, simply because it is about gender and sexuality, it remains necessary to determine what is just, progressive , or radical about any instance of this criticism, particularly if it cannot analyze its complicity with the sexual politics of white Western imperialism— past, present, and, unfortunately, future. This project has been about body politics , but in a mode that aims to retain nothing of that system of domination taken for granted today in the contemporary context of neo-colonialism. It means to disturb the form and content of a series of dichotomies, and it has no desire to leave them intact. This goes for masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, masculinism and feminism, not to mention manhood and womanhood, bisexuality, transgenderism, etc. The same must be said analytically for sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism, as well as their alleged opposites or antitheses. It strives to dismantle all of the above because conventional work on these subjects may problematize sexual oppression , when it ¤ts an established paradigm, but it also preserves the conceptual framework of this oppression. This work moves toward an understanding of the politics of intellectual work on gender and sexuality: how it continues to contribute to oppression, sexual and otherwise, and how it is grounded in historical and contemporary situations of empire. What is necessary, therefore, is a fresh approach to all matters at hand. This approach would not assume that currently dominant concepts...