Bill T. Jones, Tupac Shakur and the (Queer) Art of Death
Sharon P. Holland
Part 2: Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies
I will never grow old. My hands will never be discolored with the spots of age. I will never have varicose veins. . . . My shoulders never stooped, rounded, like my mother's shoulders are. I will never need a son to massage my arms, as my father did . . . I am not protected, remember? Old is for people who are protected. The unprotected have to die young.
--Bill T. Jones, Last Night on Earth
The quick and the dead
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.
--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
In Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, the primary definition of the word "body" is "corpse." The secondary definition is "person." The implication of this definition is startling, as the body marks space equally in death and in life; it becomes the bridge between the way others (science/pathology) see us and the way we see ourselves. The dictionary definition of bodies occupying space is queer, if not backward. 1 In any event, what others think of us certainly proceeds how we wish to "be" in the world. Black subjects have often complained of the same enigma--constantly being seen, rather than being heard. The will to stereotype is so powerful, so difficult to circumvent, that it has literally changed the way that "black" culture is produced. The hard edge of hip-hop culture is a prime example of a new kind of black identification; giving up on the idea of being a "person" first and then a "corpse," some black performers have embraced the culture of death as a way to move their bodies out of space and into time. 2 Both Tupac Shakur and Bill T. Jones have challenged death, often miming its culture, sometimes playing the role of the dead. In the spectrum of popular images of black(male)ness--we are constantly suspended between Shakur and Jones. We cannot (or at least we should not) embrace either--one black body "ailing" with dis-ease, fighting the grave with a weapon called [End Page 384] dance, another black body too hard to break, coming at you with the rage of absolutely phallic rhyme and reason.
Cultural anxiety about black subjects like Jones and Shakur manifests itself in the countless journal articles and media attention that both vilifies and embraces such performers. When black artists flirt with the culture of death, or the "space of death" to borrow from anthropologist Michael Taussig, they claim relationship to or kinship with the dead. While Jones and Shakur represent different ways of dying, they nevertheless speak from the same stage--each performing the event of his own death and packaging it as art. Rather than concentrating on their performance of death via their dance or music, respectively, I want to read across their bodies, to begin with the corpse, if you will, before we get to the person. Unleashing the potential of black subjectivity to speak from the dead exposes the end-point of governmental policies and programs which materially and psychically "kill" the nation's black subjects. When black artists flirt with the culture of death, it puts us all at risk, for to critique such a performance would require an admission that blackness has a special relationship with the dead--that the distance between speaking subject and (in)tangible place is not so vast at all. Moreover, if both Jones and Shakur speak from the same stage--each performing the event of his own death and packaging it as art--then there might be room to begin reading, or create a bridge, between two seemingly disparate performances of black(male)ness. In order to do this, I engage (black) community discourse(s) on fatherhood or what I call "fatherlack" and critical discourses on passing. Placing these disparate discussions in dialogue with one another offers a decidedly queer vision of performing bodies.
Death's black mask
The ultimate test of a person's repudiation of racism is not what she can contemplate doing for or on behalf of black people, but whether she herself can contemplate calmly the likelihood of being black.
--Adrian Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black"
On September 14, 1994, dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones premiered "Still/Here" in Lyons, France. The piece (in which Jones does not perform) has been described as "a multimedia dance spectacle about survival" (Gates 112). In the production, dancers of varied hues and body types perform while video screens display images of terminally ill people and their narratives--all collected by Jones during a two-year period in which he conducted "survival workshops" with the dying. In her now infamous New Yorker harangue about Jones's "Still/ Here," Arlene Croce expresses a paralyzing fear of death with comments like "Jones represents . . . something new in victim art--new and raw and deadly in its power over the human conscience" (55). Although in their next issue The New Yorker published several responses to the piece, they were, for the most part parallels to Croce's reading. Marcia Siegel's lengthy and stinging critique of Croce in The Drama Review (TDR) suggests that I'm not too off the mark when I say that Croce's fear of death is legion. Siegel remarks, "It isn't [the health of the media [End Page 385] images in Still/Here] that bothers Croce at all, but the idea that Jones asks us to pay attention to death and dying." To say that Croce is unkind to Jones would be an understatement--her review is crushingly acidic, and for the most part, mean-spirited.
Claiming that "victim art" is "beyond the reach of criticism" (54), Croce finally surmises that in such work "death is no longer the nameless one; we have unmasked death. But we have also created an art with no power of transcendence, no way of assuring us that the grandeur of the individual spirit is more worth celebrating than the political clout of the group" (59). Jones's powerful unmasking of death creates so much anxiety for Croce that her fear seems to move beyond Jones's dance--which she refused to see. Her personal attack upon Jones indicates that her fear borders on a seething hatred of what Jones and others have done to a once beautiful art form. I mark Croce's fear as another kind of recognition and unmasking. The face of death has been unmasked, and the black face staring back at Croce is almost too much to bear. Jones's dance requires Croce to not only identify with her own death, but also represents this process of identification as a simultaneous intimacy with blackness, with black bodies. Croce's remarks about a "nameless" death associated with forms of classical dance assumes that death is enabled by anonymity. For Croce, this anonymity and its attendant beauty is always already achieved in whiteface. Jones's dance and its portrayal of death is no different from early performances of death's power--the transformation is located in the telling of the story, not in its outcome. This might lead me into other ruminations about the psychic life of nations--how these imagined communities, to echo Benedict Anderson, take certain icons such as tombs of unknown soldiers, like black bodies to stand for both national pride and national horror, respectively. Losing either, I would argue, is a deathblow to ways in which the nation envisions itself as (a) whole. 3 Seeing death in blackface requires an impossible identification--seeing black is being black when black bodies perform in the space of death.
Croce's fears are even more pronounced when she attempts to compare Jones to Robert Mapplethorpe. She begins with: "Jones and Mapplethorpe, parallel self-declared cases of pathology in art, have effectively disarmed criticism" and concludes with: "The possibility that Mapplethorpe was a bad artist or that good art could be obscene seems not to have occurred to anyone" (58 and 60, respectively). That both artists remind us of the black body--Jones by being marked by his black body, Mapplethorpe by being obsessed with someone else's black body--are clues that Croce's fear is two-fold: a fear of black(ness) and a fear of death. It is absolutely ironic that the figure--the (borrowed) black body--credited with reviving, if not engendering modernist aesthetics is now at the center of post-modern art forms--in its "unmasked" state it is much more lethal and foreboding than even the disturbing strokes that became Picasso's signature upon the canvas. The presence of this black figure--like the presence of Morrison's Beloved, "thunderblack and visible"--literally disarms an entire field of inquiry. Such a presence is pathological indeed--murderous, cadaver-like.
Sometimes I feel like a (father)less child
Where there is some psychic connection--some confluence--where Jones and Shakur read each other is in their comments about black fathers. Reflecting on his adolescence with Vibe writer Kevin Powell, Shakur reveals: "I believe a mother can't give a son ways on how to be a [End Page 386] man. Especially not a black man. It made me bitter seeing all those other niggas with fathers getting answers to questions that I have. Even now, I still don't get them" (25). Compare Shakur's psychic wound to Jones's comments on being an absentee father in an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for The New Yorker: "[B]eing a gay son, I've felt somehow morally above my brothers. My brothers were gangsters in terms of women's lives. I was superior to that, or so I thought. So how do I feel? I feel irresponsible. Too bad there's another black child in the world without a father" (117). These comments indicate the complex role that ideas of masculinity and black (male) performance of it play in the lives of two contemporary performers. Their dual reflection upon fathers and fatherhood is precisely, I would argue, what makes them identifiably black and male to the other black men around them. Let me explain. We could see Gates's disclosure of Jones's "irresponsible" parenting as a need to connect with what might be less queer, and straighter in Jones. This display of heterosexual bonding however, no matter how perverse, is also evidence of another kind of "interest" in the black body. Both Jones and Shakur mark their participation as black men in African-American culture by sharing the trauma associated with the absence of fathers. Black men are not just endangered by white supremacy; other black men also endanger them. It is through this logic of mutual endangerment that black men share with black women the "condition" of passing on to their children an identity too hard to shake. What we witness in this connection between Jones, Shakur and father figures (or their lack) is a shared masculinity that supersedes the difference of sexuality. For both performers, discourses of racial authenticity are so powerful as to suture the conditions of both fathering (Jones) and being fatherless (Shakur).
What emerges is not a black masculinity in direct competition with notions of the female; rather, we have the complete erasure of the female. Revisiting William Goodell's The American Slave Code (1853), Hortense Spillers asserts that "[i]n an elision of terms, 'mother' and 'enslavement' are indistinct categories of the illegitimate inasmuch as each of these synonymous elements defines, in effect, a cultural situation that is father-lacking. . . . we can only conclude that the provisions of patriarchy, here exacerbated by the preponderant powers of an enslaving class, declare Mother Right, by definition, a negating feature of human community" (479). For Spillers, "father-lacking" appears as important because patriarchy defines Mother Right (and therefore slavery) as "a negating feature of human community." What I argue here is that this condition of fatherlack is not just actualized through slavery's law, but becomes a founding and necessary condition/experience of what it means to be black--a state always already defined through the homosocial rather than heterosocial community. While the condition of the child is to be "father-lacking," it is also therefore, the condition of the community to reiterate this lack as loss in a process of mourning that requires no dead body, per se, but merely the idea of one looming and therefore returning in the not so distant future. Contrary to feminist paradigms of the male-female binary that keeps the patriarchy in place, what makes masculinity virulent, what makes it visible to other men, at least in the example of black experience, is its ability to manufacture for everyone the idea of a dream/nightmare deferred--the fatherlack--the idea of an inevitable and unattainable fatherhood. The process of mourning is based upon a loss that cannot be qualified or recuperated--it is this aspect of the relationship that makes perpetual mourning necessary. Black women's bodies serve as the point of articulation of this loss--rather than being responsible, as the logic of slavery's law (and Moynihan's report) would have it, for passing on a "condition" to her children, she is even more culpable for being the visible representation of a community's fatherlack. [End Page 387]
Several contemporary studies of black masculinities have tried to unpack this logic, if not release its hold on black communities. In his piece, "Can the Queen Speak?" Dwight McBride asks a series of difficult questions problematizing our notion of a black community and its representational--male and heterosexual--leadership. He observes:
When we give "race," with its retinue of historical and discursive investments, primacy over other signifiers of difference, the result is a network of critical blindness which prevents us from perceiving the ways in which conventions of race discourse get naturalized and normativized. These conventions often include, especially in cases involving--though not exclusive to--black cultural nationalism, the denigration of homosexuality and the accompanying peripheralization of women. Underlying much of race discourse, then is always the implication that all "real" black subjects are male and heterosexual. (371)
McBride posits a discussion of black masculinity in the bosom of competing binaries--male/female, gay/straight. In this paradigm black male (homo)sexuality is arrived at by contamination with proximity to or concern with black females. At the heart of all forms of cultural nationalism is the chauvinism of masculinist ideologies. In the same vein, one of the most comprehensive studies on black masculinity, Are We Not Men? finds Phillip Brian Harper reading Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and its references to the feminization of his main character:
The repeated invocation of the mother, here, connotes her dual function with respect to her son, in which she comprises, first, the object of his intense cathexis--she is his "best friend"--and, second, the object of his identification--she is his "greatest influence"--so as to approximate very closely to the function of the mother in Freud's (1922) notorious theorization of the genesis of male homosexuality. (111)
Again, what makes men "queer" is black female influence and/or identification. Nevertheless, following this logic still allows the question of how one participates in masculinity or its project to remain largely unexplored. Masculinity is always already in danger of being corrupted by close proximity to its perceived opposite--the feminine. Examining Jones's and Shakur's performances of masculinity and their embrace of the space of death, exposes other possibilities. Instead of pointing toward the feminine/the female, a la the Moynihan Report, as the root of the problem, they return this critic to a quasi-genesis in the father-lack that is the resounding loss and therefore, authentic site of mourning for African Americans. Black masculinity becomes meaningful, at least theoretically, when it is able to articulate for the culture a participatory system of mourning for us all--while its popular discourse (hip hop culture, for example) locates the problem in the female, its psychic discourse recognizes and repeats a situation where the loss of the father is the most important evidence of what it means to be "passing" for black. In order to demonstrate these connections, I now turn to discourses of passing. [End Page 388]
Queer passing
Continuing his discussion of Johnson's Autobiography, Harper explains that: "[m]y point here is not to suggest the ex-colored man's 'emasculation,' the very notion of which implicates the masculinism that is the object of my critique; it is, rather, to indicate the conceptual limits that govern the novel of racial 'passing' such that it seems inevitably to support a conservative gender politics wherein black masculinity itself is conceived as fundamentally problematic" (112). Harper's conceptualization of the feminization inherent in "passing" narratives critiques the politics of passing but still longs for, if not mourns for, a black masculinity that when freed from its "problematic" nature remains something other than feminized. If masculinity is truly a fiction, a performance, then why long for a reinvisioning of its essence? Discourses of mourning and loss, as they focus on the cacophony of the bereaved, and not the dead, move us away from the space of death, constantly reminding us of our own grief; this paradigm allows death to remain a spectacle. By identifying with death, by passing/crossing, Jones and Shakur participate in a simultaneous embrace and repudiation of death's spectacle. In trying to connect Shakur and Jones's disidentification with life with the "triangular theatre of passing" that Amy Robinson proposes in "It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest," it might be useful here to see another stage emerging--a stage where death, mourning and loss produce a play of their own.
Returning to a scene in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, Amy Robinson surmises that
A study of passing thus poses the question of identity as a matter of competing discourses of recognition. Not only is the passer's "real" identity a function of the lens through which it is viewed, but it is the spectator who manufactures the symptoms of a successful pass by engaging in the act of reading that constitutes the performance of the passing subject. For the in-group clairvoyant, however, the passer stages this impersonation as appropriation. That is, for the reader who knows the passer is black and sees her "becoming" white, the passer "is" white precisely because she is black--because she stakes a claim to the real that makes no claim to truth. (728)
Robinson's last line has special resonance for this project. Passing's project is for the person performing passing to make "no claim to truth." What absolutely enjoins Shakur's performance of death with Jones's is their collective claim to the truth of their own eventual death--Jones will ultimately die from complications due to HIV, and Shakur will die because, statistically, being black and male means that he will die before he lives. Although there is difference in their manner of death, each is marked for death and their embrace of it is taken by witnesses to their performance as a truth of sorts. In addition, in the theatre of death here, the pass need not be recognized by an "in-group clairvoyant"; rather this pass is evidenced not by a third party, but in a space where queer body means straight body, where hypermasculinity speaks to its lack.
I now want to return to earlier observations I made about black masculinity and fatherhood/lack. By bringing mourning and loss into play with death and creating a macabre performance, it is now possible to ask the question, "what is it that we, as mourning African-American subjects, lose?" 4 As a nation within a nation, the body we mourn for, or at least the one that has been chosen for us by the Moynihan report's pernicious logic, is the father's body. [End Page 389] In Freud's landscape women do indeed lack the phallus, but in a racialized Freudian drama, we lack all evidence and therefore understanding of its mere presence--we are waiting for the manifestation of an apparition. Collectively, blackness mourns the loss of the Father and what we lack in our imaginations, we create in the real. Hence, Jones's display of the reprehensible drama of the bad black Daddy, and Tupac's desire to be "hard," to create a masculinity which follows after an imaginary by any means necessary. In a 1994 interview, Shakur reflected on his childhood with the following statement: "All my cousins was like, 'You too pretty.' I didn't have hard features. I don't know, I just didn't feel hard," (Vibe, February 1994, 36). Shakur finds his hardness on the other side and his repudiation of life refracts our pleasure in knowing that certain bodies are in sites we'd rather not occupy.
The danger inherent in Jones's and Shakur's passing flirtation with death is remarked upon in the discourse on passing and its threat to the stability of the larger society. Samira Kawash offers:
While the mulatto challenges the myth of racial purity, the figure of the passing body goes a step further, challenging the stability of racial knowledge and therefore implicitly the stability of the order that has been constructed on that knowledge. . . . the passing body is even more threatening, putting whiteness, blackness and the boundary--in short, the entire basis of social order--into question. In the figure of the passing body, the signifiers of race are unloosed from the signifieds; the seemingly stable relation between representation and the real collapses, and representation is suddenly dangerous and untrustworthy. (131-32, emphasis mine)
Perhaps we can now understand Croce's vehement attack upon Jones's dance with death and politicians' exhortations against the kind of "gangsta rap" that Shakur's music represents. The black figure who dances with death performs in the same arena as the figure who passes--conflating boundaries and flaunting the advent and event of our own death--marking all social space, so say the existentialists, as shared. This passing body also marks gendered space, destabilizing a representational masculinity and exposing its lack and loss that betrays the very boundary and therefore binary established between male and female. In the space of death, passing's racialized performance is disrupted and what emerges is a solidification of masculinity's key--a conversation between men about fatherlack that repudiates the female, marking her as the articulation of a community's condition.
My desire to place "queer" in dialogue with Shakur's and Jones's bodies stems from my conversations with colleagues in the field about "queer" readings and the process of "queering" bodies, public spaces and institutions. In David Eng's essay, "Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies," he calls for a return to the possibilities of the hyphen in the term, "Asian-American." Such a moment, he argues, "might allow scholars in Asian American studies to consider queerness as a critical methodology based not on content but rather on form and style" (40). This re-insertion of the hyphen, of the possibility of "queer," can combat what he historicizes as an overwhelmingly masculinist and therefore misogynistic and homophobic early Asian American Studies. Eng's piece concludes with a reading of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet and the position of the immigrant's "queer and diasporic status" [End Page 390] (43). My query for Eng is whether or not it might have been possible to take Ang Lee's immigrant woman, Wei-Wei (May Chin), as the film's queer subject, rather than the film's more obvious queer representative, (the gay male lead) Gao Wai-Tung (Winston Chao). In other words, is queer space only marked by visibly queer bodies, or can another pass be detected in its performance? Judith Butler has addressed similar questions in her piece, "Against Proper Objects" (1994), where she tackles the question of the appropriate bodies for and therefore discourses to fields of inquiry. Her primary concern is with the gender/sexuality split between feminism and queer studies, respectively, and whether or not disciplines should create territories out of categories that are not so mutually exclusive. But we have to be careful of the violence we do to certain texts when we try to "queer" their subjects. Queering Bill T. Jones might be appropriate, as would an investigation of Ang Lee's gay? character, Wai-Tung, but what price will we pay for our looking when we venture into more sacred categories of the hetero-normative and suggest that Shakur or Wei-Wei become similar proper objects of inquiry? In beginning to ask ourselves what a queer subject looks like, we might begin to see performance theory for the black hole that it is (pun intended).
In their piece, "Queer Nationality" (1992), Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman argue that "the struggle is now also over proper public submission to national iconicity and over the nation's relation to gender, to sexuality, and to death" (151). Death takes a rear seat throughout the rest of their essay, but its importance cannot be overestimated in the politics of queer expression--the nation's attitudes toward death seem to not only inform, but activate queer studies. Is it then possible to say that what makes a subject queer is her/his relationship, both performatively and literally with death and that this relationship is of national concern? Our proximity to death as human beings--to cancer cells that might wage war against our otherwise "fit" bodies, to other forms of dis-ease--might mark the "queer" space in us all, as the possibility of an impending death is something we all share. Let me say here that I am aware of the proximity of marked bodies--black bodies/ queer bodies--to the discourse of pathology, literally the study of death. I am much more concerned with the phenomenon of the space of death however, and the dead who inhabit such space in direct juxtaposition and perhaps contradistinction to our societal notions about what it means to be "living" in the first place.
The place where Shakur and Jones collide--the space where Shakur's performance meets Jones's--is a volatile one. In a chapter entitled, "'The White to Be Angry': Vaginal Davis's Terrorist Drag," José Muñoz employs the term "terrorist drag" to describe Davis's performance of "the nation's internal terrors around race, gender and sexuality" (108). Muñoz's theory builds upon his own work with a modality of performance he calls "disidentification." Using Muñoz's theory in the context of this work on death, I argue that disidentification is not only about other subjects, particularly white subjects, but also about a disidentification with life. Unlike other artists in drag, Shakur is not in the midst of becoming as in Vaginal Davis's performance; he is being--he is in a state of complete identification, not "passing" but already gone. This identification with death/passing into the space of death is often noted by hip-hop culture's various witnesses. In Vibe, Karen R. Good interrupts her article on DMX to reflect:
Some black men, X men, are so absolutely scared of--or familiar with--death and its gradual approach, that they've embraced it . . . so familiar with its formidability, they call on it, challenge it, shadow box. . . . And though there is nobility in confronting fears, living to die ain't noble or fearless. It ain't living. (90) [End Page 391]
His own statements best explain Shakur's movement across the boundary between living and dying: "My music is spiritual. It's like Negro spirituals, except for the fact that I'm not saying 'We Shall Overcome.' I'm saying that we are overcome" (12, Collector's item, fan tribute magazine). The immediacy of Shakur's words is reflected in Jones's autobiographical statement about being "unprotected" that this essay began with. Jones reminds his readers: "The unprotected have to die young." It is no longer that the "unprotected" die, but that they "have" to. It is necessary. Being marked for death is serious business and suggests the kind of immediacy to the situation, and the collusion between being queer and black that is supported by one of the iconographic symbols on Shakur's body: THUG LIFE. Fans at one of his concerts recognized the tattoo and after the fact coined the acronym: The Hate U Gave Lil Infants Fuck[S] Everybody. THUG LIFE represents a coming back from the dead, as black youth recognize not just their relative invisibility in the culture at large, but also perceive an active hatred of them that is systematic (this is what the universal and capital "U" implies). These words etched in the flesh take on a life of their own and resonate even after Shakur's death--Still/Here.
Returning to the opposition between "passing" and "already gone" that I made earlier: Let's consider the essence of queer subjectivity as stated in the prevailing understanding of the literature from the field--a subject without boundaries with the ability to travel in diverse circles, constantly un/marked, absolutely fluid, always already white. 5 Queerness's passing logic implies a release from the visual and any discourse that attempts to mark this inability to pass somehow removes itself from queer theory's origin, from its center. If we are to expand the definition of "queer" to encompass other bodies, then we'll need to do some hard work here. We'll need to focus on what we really mean when we equate the "queer" body/subject with liminal spaces. That this liminal space might be so dangerous as to become death itself, that we might eventually pass (for black?), is more than frightening. It represents an apocalyptic moment for queer studies, and a challenge to read "race" into the equation of its origins. Shakur's and Jones's bodies are emblematic of the queer--refusing to go away, Still/Here, coming at us soft and hard, embracing a host of contradictions. The space of death is marked by blackness and is therefore always already queer.
Sharon P. Holland is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany. She is the author of numerous scholarly essays, Raising the Dead: Death and "Black" Subjectivity in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture (Duke University Press, 2000) and is editing (with Lila Karp) Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Feminist Thought and Criticism from the Second Wave to the Present (forthcoming).
Notes
1. I am reminded here of Sixo's pronouncement in Morrison's Beloved: "Definitions belong to the definers not the defined."
2. See Jennifer DeVere Brody, "Opening Sequences" (Paper given at UC Riverside, "Aesthetics and Difference Conference") and Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) for extensive examinations of the differences between time and space.
3. For a fuller discussion of Benedict Anderson's work, see my argument in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
4. For a parallel discussion about loss in particular, see Victoria L. Smith's "A Story beside(s) Itself: The Language of Loss in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood," in PMLA (March 1999).
5. See Ian Bernard, "Queer Race," Social Semiotics 9.2 (1999), for a discussion of queer theory's relationship to "people of color" and the ultimate staging of "queer theory" as a primarily "white" enterprise.
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren and Elizabeth Freeman. "Queer Nationality." boundary 2 19.1 (1992): 149-80.
Butler, Judith. "Against Proper Objects." differences 6.2-3 (Summer-Fall 1994): 1-26.
Croce, Arlene. "Discussing the Undiscussable." New Yorker (26 December-2 January 1995).
Eng, David. "Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies." Social Text 52/53 15.3-4 (Fall/Winter 1997): 31-52.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Body Politic." The New Yorker (28 November 1994).
Harper, Phillip Brian. Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Jones, Bill T., with Peggy Gillespie. Last Night on Earth. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.
Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
McBride, Dwight. "Can the Queen Speak?: Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority." Callaloo 21.2 (1998): 363-79.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Piper, Adrian. "Passing for White, Passing for Black." Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 234-69.
Robinson, Amy. "It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest." Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 715-36.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus (the 1818 Text). Ed. James Rieger. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Smith, Danyel. "Home At Last." Tupac Shakur. Ed. Alan Light. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998. 129.
Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" [1987]. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 454-81.
Vibe Editors. Tupac Shakur. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.