One-Dimensional Queer by Roderick A. Ferguson (review)

It can prove difficult to draw a cohesive picture of how queer history came to be (and this is, perhaps, the point). Too often, the writing of the history of queerness implies that this history is extricable from other histories: civil rights, racial justice, gender discrimination, ableism. In his new book, One-Dimensional Queer, Roderick A. Ferguson argues that the lines between these histories are purely constructs, damaging ones at that, and that the movement for queer liberation worked as fully part of other liberation movements of the twentieth century. Ferguson's is not just an intersectional approach, but a holistic one: he constructs a method of viewing history that observes all action as coordinated, all people as infinitely faceted. The book begins by positioning Stonewall as a foundational event in the history of intersectionality, moves on to discuss the mainstreaming of queerness (in the press, liberal capitalism, and political discourse), and then moves to discussions of the queer city and queer liberation as a tool to combat violence.

Ferguson adapts his title from Herbert Marcuse's 1964 book One-Dimensional Man,¹ which identified an isolation of the individual in the capitalist state. Marcuse, in Ferguson's description, saw a system that could identify individuals by characteristics, and in doing so, elided nuance, complexity, and community. Ferguson brings this idea to queer liberation: in writing a narrative of the queer movement as fully separate from, say, the civil right movement, powerful voices in history can ignore the contributions of queers of color. More important, in seeing these movements as separate, the activities of queers who are women, queers who are people of color, queers who are disabled are deemed less than, for they are seen as primarily members of this other group. In this system, whiteness, maleness, able-bodiedness, etc., are seen as the default for queers. Ferguson emphatically and successfully provides a theory for refuting this tradition and understanding history in a manner that understands these historical linkages. Gayness can lose its radical roots when offered a spot in the neoliberal method, perhaps, but queer liberation, Ferguson suggests, "attempts to create new modes of human existence" (16).

Ferguson provides his reader with many pertinent examples of what he calls the queer liberation's "cleavage" from "political struggles around racial, gender, transgender, and class equalities" (8). He begins the book with a discussion of Roland Emmerich's brazenly ahistorical film Stonewall (2015),² claiming that the fictional (white, cis, gay) protagonist's shouts of "gay power" celebrate "a category that could only exist because of Black revolution" (1). A narrative that queer politics "came to issues of race, colonization, incarceration, and capitalism later in its development" is not wrong accidentally, but by design. An analysis of Sylvia Rivera's words follows ("We were all radicals," she said of her fellow participants at Stonewall [18]), and this study of Rivera's interpretation of the riots precipitates many such meditations of precipitous moments in queer liberation. An account of the 1971 three-day occupation of New York University's Weinstein Hall by multiple groups, including the NYU Gay Activists Alliance and Rivera's Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries provides a similar strength for Ferguson's theory.

Ferguson's situational analyses, replete with plenteous detail, are delights to read. The discussion of entrepreneur David Goodstein's 1974 purchase of the Advocate and Goodstein's transformation of the paper from a radical rag to what photographer and activist Lionel Biron called a "capitalist manifesto" is particularly scorching. The book's analysis of the ties among homophobia, racism, the carceral state, sexism, and numerous other structural biases condemn the U.S. capitalist state, and at times, I wished for this theory of one-dimensionality to take an international approach, too.

Ferguson opens his last chapter quoting Benjamin: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule" (114). And it fits, too, that this...