“The target of everybody’s fantasies”: James Baldwin’s Quare Race Consciousness

This essay examines James Baldwin’s engagements with and analyses of race, gender-sexuality and class in the United States. What did these engagements mean for his humanity, his art and his politics? I argue his racial and sexual consciousness must be understood simultaneously, as he experienced them in quare terms. His struggle with overlapping identities and political commitments engendered in the communities to which he belonged shaped his art and political analyses, providing understandings of and ways for confronting systemic class-based, racialized and cisheteropatriarchal structures and violence inside and outside those communities with which he identified.