Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

32. Why We Need to Stop Obsessing Over Obama

32 Why We Need to Stop Obsessing Over Obama Andrea Smith In my involvement in various women of color organizing projects, I have noticed typically two responses to the 2008 presidential elections. On the one hand, many activists have dismissed this campaign, focusing on the limitations of Barack Obama himself. These activists conclude that Obama’s charisma obscures his neoliberal and imperial commitments. Additionally, they contend that the cult of personality surrounding Obama is hoodwinking his followers into supporting positions they might otherwise oppose. Much of this is analysis is based on Obama’s various positions on a number of issues. On the other hand, another response focuses on the exceptionalism of Obama. Many of my friends who were very previously critical of U.S. imperialism say they are now “proud to be American,” and “proud of the flag.” Obama is posited as redeeming the United States from its history of White supremacy. Although these two responses in many ways are opposed to each other, what unites both of them is their focus on the importance of Obama himself. Additionally , both analyses often rely on an identitarian model for articulating racial and gender politics. That is, the focus is on whether or not Obama properly represents the interests of Black people in particular, and people of color in general. This identitarian model contributed to a very simplistic analysis of the Democratic primary in which Hillary Clinton was said to represent the interests of women and Obama the interests of people of color, thereby of course leaving no place for the representation of women of color. However, a race–gender analysis does not have to be limited to the politics of identity. Queer studies has made a critical intervention in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) studies by moving past simple identity politics 233 234 / Who Should Be First? to interrogate the logics of heternormativity. According to Michael Warner. “The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal.”1 Similarly, Native studies is moving beyond representing Native people to interrogating the gendered analytics of settler colonialism within the United States. These intellectual strands bring together a framework for articulating the heteronormative U.S. settler state that can shed additional light of the meaning of 2008 elections. In doing so, it becomes clear that the significance of this election is not so much Obama and the platforms he espouses, but the manner in which his campaign opens opportunities for new forms of movement building. Looking at his campaign through both a queer and Native studies analysis illuminates this importance. Cowboy and Indian Coalitions Many queer theorists, such as Lee Edelman, call on activists to queer “social organization as such” in order to critique the normalizing logics inherent in even radical movements for change.2 They argue that meta-narratives of liberation are built on totalizing foundations that reify social inequities. As Edelman states: “Political programs are programmed to reify difference and thus to secure in the form of the future, the order of the same.”3 Consequently, these theorists call less for a “Great Refusal” and more for the proliferation or resistances. Steven Seidman, for instance, contends the following: I view postmodernism as imagining its politics in terms of multiple, intersecting struggles. Its aim is less “the end of domination” or “human liberation” than the creation of social spaces that permit the widening of choice, the proliferation of social differences and multiple solidarities, and expanded democratization through the deconstruction of naturalized and normalized social norms, the creation of multiple public spheres, and so on.4 As Jose Esteban Muñoz notes, an anti-oppositional politic ultimately opts out of relationality and politics. “Relationality is not pretty, but the option of simply opting out of it . . . is imaginable only if one can frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from a larger social matrix.”5 Furthermore, an anti-oppositional politic can quickly lapse into a leftist cynicism , in which all politics are dismissed as “reproductive” with no disruptive potential. This cynicism then becomes an apology for maintaining the status quo. Instead, Muñoz proposes disidentification as a strategy for queer of color Why We Need to Stop Obsessing Over Obama / 235 resistance. According to Muñoz...