In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Against the Rules of Blackness Hilton Als’s The Women and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother (Or How to Raise Black Queer Kids) Rinaldo Walcott The title of this essay pays homage in part to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1991 essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay.” Sedgwick’s essay is a reading of revisionary psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the post–DSM III excision of homosexuality as pathology. She argues that the attempt to normalize adult homosexual bodies is simultaneously an attempt to render gay bodies not present, and she suggests that this is done through an attempt to pathologize youthful sexualities. Sedgwick’s critique of “the new psychiatry of gay acceptance” (23) is cautioned by her readings of medical discourses on gender-disordered youth or youth who might be gay. The result of her against-the-rules reading and interpretation is the difficult knowledge that post–DSM III medical discourse finds so-called gender-disordered youth to be abnormal and in need of repair or fixing, even in the era of adult gay recognition. Thus Sedgwick’s reading goes against the commonsensical rules of contemporary understandings, which now appear to assume that there is such a thing as a “normal” and “proper” gay and lesbian body and thus person. The implications of her interpretation are important for making sense of the discomfort with contemporary gay and lesbian bodies and persons that continues nonetheless. For my purposes, such a reading by Sedgwick opens up both the presence and the absence of queer discourses and subjects within the context of black diaspora discourses. Queer discourses in black diaspora studies remain against the rules, out-of-order utterances that trouble the borders of the “normal” and “proper” black body. That “normal” and “proper” black body is an imagined heterosexual black body. But the absent/present dyad that exists in black diaspora studies does not and cannot entirely eliminate what we might tentatively call a black queer diaspora. However, some of us have ventured to consider how such a black queer diaspora comes into being. Or as Sedgwick puts it in a different but related context, “There is 76 Rinaldo Walcott no unthreatened, unthreatening theoretical home for a concept of gay and lesbian origins” (26). In this essay I pursue the absented presence of a black queer body through readings of Hilton Als’s The Women and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother. These two nonfiction texts interestingly intersect with concerns around mothering, queer sexualities, and diaspora circuits and might be said to elliptically probe “black gay origins.” Importantly, these two texts might be read as against the rules of blackness because of the ways in which they attempt to “normalize” queer sexualities within blackness. By this I mean that these texts write against a heterosexual mythic blackness that, when confronted with the evidence of black queers, crumbles miserably in the face of its sexual other. I read these texts as against the rules of blackness because, as Robert Reid-Pharr states, writing about Gary Fisher, “The black gay man is then an object of attack not because he represents that which is horrid but because he represents one location at which the possibility of choosing one’s identity (even within the most oppressive conditions) becomes palpable” (Black Gay Man 16). The absented presence of the black queer body, then, is so because such a body represents a counter to the desired respectability of the heterosexual black body. Both The Women and My Brother are about much more than I read them for, but it is important to note that both texts were published at the height of the Afrocentric debates and both ignore such debates to offer us a different view of blackness. I bring all those conversations into collision. In what follows I attempt to trouble the discourse of black mothering, both actual and symbolic, within diasporic discourse. I do so as heroic black motherhood encounters youthful queer sexualities that exist within and against blackness. Black mothers are endowed with the responsibilities of raising black heterosexual children. But how might we make sense of the context when they fail to produce the proper black subject? I respond to the interconnected discourses of heroic black motherhood postulated by Afrocentrism and the role of Mother Africa contained in such postulations. In particular, I see a link between Afrocentric discourses of motherhood and the veneration of Mother Africa. Significantly such venerations become problematic in the face of queer sexualities, especially for boys, who in...

Share