The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience,

Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge

Phillip Brian Harper

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 6, Number 4,

2000, pp. 641-657 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v006/6.4harper.html

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THE EVIDENCE OF
FELT INTUITION
Minority Experience, Everyday Life,
and Critical Speculative Knowledge
Phillip Brian Harper

The following remarks were offered as the keynote address at the

conference Black Queer Studies in the Millennium, held 79 April
2000 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.The Editors

For Jeff Nunokawa

I dont travel much, but as my acquaintances all know, I like to make much of
my travels. Lately in particular, Ive tried to mine my relatively meager experience
along these lines for possible critical insight into the meanings of identity, citizenship, and U.S. nationality.1 These efforts represent an undertaking that is only just
beginning; and yet, in some ways, it has been going on for a long time. For
instance, I remember a journey I took during the 1985 86 academic year (needless to say, thats the way I measure time in academic years), a journey from
Madison, Wisconsin, where I had gone to visit my boyfriend, Thom Freedman,
back to Ithaca, New York, where I was finishing my graduate coursework. Actually,
to be precise, the leg of the journey that concerns me here took me only from
Madison to Syracuse, as it entailed travel by rail, and Ithaca then had and, as
far as I know, still has no train station; I would in Syracuse either be picked up
by a car-owning friend from Ithaca or transfer to a bus in order to finish my route,
depending on the availability of friends with cars.
GLQ 6:4
pp. 641657
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In any case, on the train to Syracuse during this one trip, as I occupied
myself by alternately reading and napping, I was approached by a fellow passenger
a trim and nattily dressed middle-aged white man who indicated to me that
he had won a deck of cards through some contest on the train from Los Angeles,
and he and a few other passengers were going to get up a game back in the dining
car; did I want to join them? No, I did not, but this fact did not at all diminish the
mans friendliness or his interest, as he continued to pursue small talk with me,
being absorbed in particular by the question of where I might be from. Could it be
Sri Lanka? For I looked very much like a good friend of his who was from Sri
Lanka, though I very remarkably spoke perfect English with no accent at all. I
assured him that, to the extent to which this was so, it was so because I actually
was not from Sri Lanka but from Detroit, Michigan, where I had been born and
reared.
His quite notable surprise on learning this would not, I imagine, have
seemed unfamiliar to any number of black people from across the country. It certainly did not seem unfamiliar to me. I had encountered it before, and so I felt
quite sure about what it meant, what bemused and paradoxical message it conveyed despite all the bearers efforts to dissemble it, which, to be perfectly frank,
were not especially extensive. It said, in effect: How can this be so? There is not,
to my knowledge at least, any sizable population of Sri Lankans living in Detroit,
and in any event, this fellow has not indicated that he is of Sri Lankan extraction,
as might well be the case even if he was born and reared in Detroit. On the other
hand, there are, as I know all too well, an overwhelmingly large number of black
people living in Detroit so large a percentage, in fact, that the chances are very
good that any Detroiter picked at random from the municipal phone book will
actually turn out to be black. Come to think of it, this young mans skin tone now
appears to me rather different than on first glance more mundane, somehow,
though I cant quite explain why; and, indeed, ungratefully so, as I had been
entirely willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, to offer it the excuse of deriving
from Sri Lanka, as quite clearly would be the preferable instance, and as it quite
clearly must, if not from some other, similarly distant locale, since, indeed, the
person bearing it speaks perfect English with no accent at all, which is to say that,
all contrary evidence notwithstanding, he most certainly cannot be black, which
he nevertheless seems to be implying he is. In which case, how can this be so?
If, as I have suggested, such surprise would not strike a large number of
black people as at all unfamiliar, this is because it is the function of a continuing
social process that is so widespread and ordinary as to be humdrum;2 moreover,
this process has a name, and we know that name so well that it sounds to us

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quaint, not to say theoretically unsophisticated, as it most likely figures to those of

us working in professional-academic social and cultural critique. But of course,
the precondition of banality is an element of truth so widely accepted that it doesnt
bear repeating, or else why would it register as simplistic and commonplace to
begin with? And so it is with the concept of the stereotype, especially given our
awareness of how much is disallowed by this relatively crude analytic tool, the
extent to which it belies the great complexity of cultural representation. Yet its
continuing operation in our society is a fact that cannot be denied, just as it cannot
be denied that the man on the train was himself engaging in the process of stereotype: the projection of an idea in his mind or, to be more precise, the subscription to an idea in circulation throughout the culture with such abiding force and
intensity that it took on a phantom solidity and thus superseded the reality comprised in the actual personage whose existence it had been marshaled to explain.
Which is why he could not hear me when I said as I effectively was saying,
though I did not actually mouth the words that I was black, for the entity that
would have been connoted for him by that term did not, evidently, speak standard
English, or read the books I was reading, or sit blandly staring out Amtrak train
windows in a manner whose effect must have been rather fetching which I surmised it to be, because I had surmised in the first place that the man was sexually
attracted to me and that this was the reason for his initial approach. Given this, his
surprise at the probability of my being black said something more than I have
already suggested; it additionally said: How can this be so? For you are attractive
and interesting to me, neither of which, as a rule, I find black people to be a
claim he substantiated after registering his surprise by lumbering awkwardly
away; we did not speak again.
Most of what I have related here I do not know to be fact. The train trip
occurred; the man did approach me; we had the exchange I have narrated to you.
What it all meant, though, I cant rightly determine, which is perhaps why the
episode haunts me today. The mans thoughts, in particular, are inaccessible to
me, as he never once told me what ran through his mind. Yet, rather than thwart
my assessment of the event, this fact seems only to have intensified my recourse to
guesswork and conjecture, as is evidenced by the firmness of the conclusions I
have drawn. This is not unique; indeed, I would argue that minority existence
itself induces such speculative rumination, because it continually renders even the
most routine instances of social activity and personal interaction as possible cases
of invidious social distinction or discriminatory treatment. As one lesbian-identified
U.S. woman recently put it while discussing her day-to-day experiences with her
partner and their two children for Newsweek magazine: One of our neighbors has

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never spoken to us. . . . When we go out, he goes in. But we dont know if thats just
the way he is or if its because were lesbians.3
Personally, I find this abiding uncertainty and the speculation it engenders
exceedingly exhausting, which may account for the fact that I dont travel much,
for in my estimation travel only increases the likelihood of ones finding oneself
amid such indeterminacy, incessantly encountering new unknown persons whose
reactions to one cannot be predicted and very likely will throw one yet again into a
state of confusion that, because it cannot be resolved, feels profoundly debilitating. I am convinced that this experience is what Virginia Woolf had in mind when
she wrote of Clarissa Dalloway that she always had the feeling that it was very,
very dangerous to live even one day;4 and if that experience constitutes the
generic state of individual consciousness in the context of modernity, then how
much more emphatically must it constitute the consciousness of the minority subject, whose definitionally nongeneric character itself entails repeated exposure to
indeterminable events? I shall return shortly to this matter of indeterminacy, and
to what I will insist is the hard work of speculation that it necessitates. But first let
me consider the business of being misperceived, as I have suggested I was by the
man on the train, for it seems to me to bear on the question of how we all pursue
work in the field of queer studies.
Before I go too far in a direction that so clearly could lead to tiresome complaint, I should explicitly acknowledge that I have been extremely fortunate not
only in the results of my queer studies work but in my overall professional-academic
positioning and I am very grateful for my indisputable good luck. For a long
time, however, I used to joke to friends that the basis for my success lay in a combination of tokenism and hackwork, forwarded through a sort of intellectual and
professional promiscuity whereby I simply never said no to a particular type of
proposition a proposition that generally sounded something like this, as it came
to my ear from the far end of a phone line: Hi, weve never met, but I got your
name from X, who met you through Y when you were at a conference with Z and
who suggested I give you a call because Im editing a book volume [or special
journal issue] on queer sexuality [or racial politics] thats almost ready to go to
press except for the fact that we dont yet have in it any pieces addressing racial
politics [or queer sexuality], and X said youd be the perfect person to contribute
something, which I hope you can do because it would really round out the collection, and since all the other authors are already finished with their pieces because
they were solicited well over a year ago we really need to have received this essay
by our deadline of last Tuesday but if you absolutely have to have more time then I
can probably negotiate with the press editor for an extra two weeks, but no more,

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and can you do it, are you interested, arent you grateful that I called? And yes,
I always said, yes, oh yes, like some pathetically obsequious version of Molly
Bloom, and cleared my schedule for the next two weeks, and installed myself in
front of my keyboard, and hammered out an essay at such a furious pace that I didnt
have time to worry that it was bad or to double-check the argument or to have second thoughts about submitting it to press and so on and so on, until the next
thing I knew, voil! I had a c.v., I had a publication record, I seemed to have what
we could call a career, and that career, moreover, seemed to implicate a profile in
what weve all learned to refer to as the field of queer studies.
This was not necessarily a bad development, mind you, especially with
respect to my material well-being. Its just that I didnt quite realize that it was
happening or, to be more precise about it, I didnt quite realize what it actually
meant, since I didnt feel at all certain what queer studies or, as it was generally
and much more problematically called at that relatively early date, queer theory
was. But then, who did? We are, after all, talking about an extremely new framework for cultural criticism and social analysis, one that was only just emerging and
consolidatingif, indeed, it has consolidated, itself a questionable proposition
at the time when I first began working in the area in 1988, a mere twelve years
ago. In fact, within the few years after that date, the very definition of the enterprise began to be publicly discussed and debated, with no certain outcome except
contestation itself. This unsettled state of affairs has since been assimilated as a
signal constituent within queer critique, which during the last five to seven years
or so has been characterized by numerous commentators as fundamentally provisional, anticipatory, and incomplete and thus properly irreducible to a coherent
singular project.5 I actually feel no reason whatsoever to protest on this score,
since it seems to me as to many others that it is precisely the indeterminate
character of queer critique that predicates its analytic force. On the other hand,
while that indeterminacy and here I am using the word in its most literal
sense is frequently cited as a positive attribute of queer analysis, it is much
more rarely manifested in the actual critical work that aspires to the rubric, or
and this latter fact constitutes a primary reason for the former in the contexts in
which that work emerges and circulates.
This claim itself is by now a commonplace, and yet this doesnt mean
that its full significance has been adequately elaborated. That significance extends far beyond the objection as valid and urgent as it is that what is currently recognized as queer studies is, for instance, unacceptably Euro-American
in orientation, its purview effectively determined by the practically invisible
because putatively nonexistent bounds of racial whiteness.6 It encompasses as

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well (to continue for the moment with the topic of whiteness) the abiding failure
of most supposed queer critique to subject whiteness itself to sustained interrogation and thus to delineate its import in sexual terms, whether conceived in
normative or nonnormative modes. In other words, to speak personally, it bothers me less that white practitioners of queer critique tend not to address the significance of racial nonwhiteness in the phenomena of sex and sexuality they
explore (though one often wishes they would, and, indeed, some do) than that
they tend not to address the effect of racial whiteness on the very manifestations
of those phenomena and on their understanding of them; for the upshot of this
failure somewhat paradoxically, given the interest of queer criticism in definitional fluidity is an implicit acquiescence to received notions of what constitutes sex and sexuality, however nonnormative, as though the current hegemony
in this regard were not thoroughly imbricated with the ongoing maintenance of
white supremacist culture.7
At the same time (for as I have indicated, I am positing this critical shortcoming as only one example of the practical limitations that queer studies has both
expressed and suffered), it is just as easy and just as valid to note that the
vast majority of work in black studies (and Im confining my observations to that
field both because its the one I know best and because such a focus is demanded
by the occasion) has similarly failed to interrogate how conventional ideas of racial
blackness however variously they may be valued are themselves conditioned
by disparate factors of sex and sexuality, mobilized in myriad ways that may or
may not be recognizable as proper, the consideration of which is crucial to fully
understanding the social and cultural significances of blackness itself.
There was a point and it perhaps hasnt yet ended; I cant be entirely
sure when this latter issue was of primary concern for me in my own critical
work, when it constituted the problem that I felt most urgently compelled to
address and, in my small way, to help redress. This point served as the context in
which in 1988 I began drafting my first professional-critical foray onto the overlapping terrains of gender, sexuality, and African American identity, the essay
Eloquence and Epitaph, on responses to the AIDS-related death of television
news anchor Max Robinson.8 First published finally in Social Text in 1991,
the piece was relatively quickly assimilated to a burgeoning critical enterprise
that was by then already negotiating the theoretical distinctions and methodological differences that might obtain between lesbian and gay studies, on the
one hand, and queer theory, on the other; come to think of it, the essays occupation of the contested overlap of these two conceptual fields might be symbolized by the fact that, in 1993, it was reprinted in two different anthologies whose

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actual sharing of key theoretical concerns was belied by the notable difference
between their two titles: The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry
Abelove, Michle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, and Fear of a Queer
Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner.9 It might
be; and, indeed, it might also be interesting to explore the tensions regarding
both the name and the practice of queer critique and the latters relationship
to other modes of critical inquiry that were evident in the very introduction to
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, with the aim of discovering what they
could have signified in what now appears to be the watershed year of 199310
but to follow up on either of these propositions would actually take me far afield
from my primary point, for the fact is that, while I obviously did not eschew the
attention the essay was gaining among exponents of either queer theory or lesbian and gay studies, nor did I gainsay its being apprehended in terms of those
fields, I had actually conceived of Eloquence and Epitaph as an intervention
into the field of black studies and, to be more precise about it, African American
studies, which seemed to me sorely in need of remediation as far as discussion
of sexuality, let alone AIDS, was concerned and only slightly more so at the
end of the 1980s, alas, than it does today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
This doesnt mean that I was completely uninterested in contributing to
conversation about the direction of either queer politics or queer critique, and in
fact I made an attempt in this regard in a footnote to the essay, in which I explained my repeated use throughout the article of the word homosexual by emphasizing the limited degree to which African American men who have sex with other
men might identify with the terms gay or queer.11 To the extent that my work in
that essay was understood exclusively or primarily as an instance of sexuality
studies per se, however, it was radically and perhaps willfully misperceived,
inasmuch as its accomplishment in this vein could not in any way be separated
from its function as an instance of African Americanist critical analysis.
This probably wouldnt have been clear, however, until yet a few years
later in 1996, to be exact when the essays incorporation into my book on
black masculinity effectively forced readers to recognize its argument as part of a
larger engagement with the very definition of African American identity and thus
to face the potentially uncomfortable question of how homosexual activity might
itself be implicated in the latter.12 After all, while by 1996 the essay had been
anthologized in three book volumes devoted to queer sexuality or to examinations of AIDS conceived in relation to queer sexuality13 it had not, as far as I
could tell from my admittedly unsystematic but nonetheless sustained review,
made the slightest impact in the field of African American studies broadly under-

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stood, where it seemed to meet with a nearly deafening official silence. In fact, it
occurs to me now that only once in my career did the conversation I parodied earlier actually center on my possibly contributing to a volume on race as distinct
from sexuality, and that was in the case of the catalog for the Whitney Museums
infamous 1995 Black Male exhibition, which itself clearly entailed a focus on
questions of gender (with sexuality thus understood as an ancillary effect) and
which quite notably, I think, did not originate in a properly academic context.
Within the latter realm, in the field of African American studies, a profound
silence about sexuality has generally continued to be the order of the day.
Now, please, dont get me wrong. Not only am I not complaining about
some perceived personal slight (I am very lucky; I acknowledge it again), I also
dont mean that individual scholars and critics in African American studies didnt
read the essay in its original Social Text venue and personally indicate to me their
sense of its worth. Just last year I was introduced to an audience at the University
of Pennsylvania by Michael Awkward, who pointedly and graciously cited its value
for him. More illustratively, perhaps, at the 1993 American Studies Association
convention in Boston I ran into Michael Eric Dyson in a crowded hotel lobby, and
he told me how much he had liked the piece; he sounded very sincere, his voice
so understated and muted that it approximated a whisper. Rather, the silence to
which I allude consisted in the fields general failure to meet the challenge thrown
down at the end of the essay, which specifically charged that nothing less than the
very lives of black people depend on our radically changing the discourses that
shape them including the discourse loosely comprised in the academic field of
African American studies, where all too frequently lip service is mistaken for such
substantive transformation, with the result that the fields profoundly heteronormative character has yet to be dislodged to any noticeable degree.
Now, the silence on this score that I perceived within the precincts of
African American studies would not, I imagine, have seemed unfamiliar to any
number of black people who identify even slightly with any of the subject positions
potentially connoted by the term queer sexuality. It certainly did not seem unfamiliar to this particular black faggot. I had encountered it before, and so I felt
quite sure about what it meant, what tense and admonitory message was conveyed
in the very form of implacable muteness. It said: Now this cannot be, for while all
sorts of interpersonal activity might be forwarded by individuals bearing to differing degrees the phenotypical signs of racial blackness and indeed consciously and
explicitly subscribing to the identity, the significance of the deed which may
even be pleasurable in its power must not in all cases be rendered as word
which is undeniably powerful in its punch, which affords us the terms of our life

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and our death, and by which we have strived to wrest our survival from the teeth of
a world that would have us forlorn. Because propriety is requisite for success in
this vein, we simply cannot acknowledge what you would have us acknowledge, as
upon consideration you surely must see.
As a matter of fact, however, I dont at all see, which, as it happens, is very
much to the point, since the majority of what occupies me here concerns the status of that which is not readily perceptible by conventional means. After all, one
of the most intractable and infuriating problems met with by the would-be commentator on dissident sexual practices is the charge that the evidence for our
arguments is not solid which, indeed, it often is not, in literal terms. But what
does this mean, really? It means (for instance) that sex and sexuality are by definition evanescent experiences, made even more so in our sociocultural context
by the peculiar ways that we negotiate them verbally. It isnt exactly that we dont
talk about them, as Foucault famously demonstrated in The History of Sexuality,
vol. 1, but rather that the modes through which we talk about them displace them
ever further from easy referential access:14 we exaggerate; we obfuscate; we tease
and we hint; we mislead by indirection; and in fact we outright lie and I dont
mean merely with respect to our own personal practices, though I do indeed mean
that in part. More than this, though, I mean that we, as a social collectivity, routinely deceive ourselves about the character and the extent of the sexual activity
engaged in by human beings in general, and most especially by those in our own
extended cultural context. In other words, we most certainly do not see dissident sexuality queer sexuality evidenced in the ways conventionally called
for by the more positivist-minded folk whom we encounter in our professional
activity; and it is precisely for this reason that I do not at all see that we should
refrain from discussing it as a thankfully growing number of us are proceeding
to do for we have to take our objects of analysis on the terms that define them,
if we hope to make any headway whatever toward the increased understanding we
supposedly seek.
What this means, it seems to me, for black queer studies, is that we must
necessarily take recourse for the umpteenth time in the history of our extended
endeavor to the evidence of things not seen and, further, to a particular subcategory within this genre, what I call in the title of this lecture the evidence of felt
intuition. Before I elaborate on the character of this latter phenomenon, it is probably worth spelling out explicitly exactly why we are compelled to proceed in this
way, and I can easily do that, because the answer has been so incisively indicated
in an exceptionally valuable instance of the all-too-rare work that has been done
in this regard. I am thinking of Deborah McDowells groundbreaking analysis of

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Nella Larsens fiction, which itself offers the key to our query that McDowell perspicaciously seizes upon; for the nameless . . . shameful impulse to which Larsen
refers in her novel Quicksand and which McDowell suggests she explores even
more fully, if just as tacitly, in the later novel Passing is nameless precisely
because it is shameful.15 Indeed, inasmuch as, in any given moral negotiation
which is to say, in any human activity or personal interaction whatsoever the
name recedes to precisely the same extent that shame waxes, we will necessarily
be forced to attend to the relative absence of the name the relative lack of positive evidence, if you will whenever we seek to reckon with the significances of
queer sexuality of homosexuality, to speak the name bluntly which it would
be foolish to think does not still engender a profound sense of shame in U.S. culture and society and, Lord knows, in a large number of more or less overlapping
African American communities comprised therein.
So, then, how to proceed? (For not to proceed is not an option, unless one
actually approves of the status quo, and given that we are all human and not yet
dead, I assume that none of us does.) How to consider the meaning of an experience no concrete evidence of which exists, and of which we can therefore claim no
positive knowledge? I tried to address this question in my essay on responses to
the death of Max Robinson, in which I admitted flat out that I have no idea
whether Max Robinsons sex partners were male or female or both, explaining that
I acknowledge explicitly my ignorance on this matter because to do so . . . is to
reopen sex in all its manifestations as a primary category for [critical] consideration
particularly in the study of African American culture and society.16 This was an
effective gesture as far as that article was concerned, partly because it came
toward the end of the piece and thus comported perfectly with the essays larger
call to action; and partly because what obtained in the case of Max Robinson was
not sheer unbounded uncertainty but rather uncertainty regarding a fairly clearly
delimited arena of human endeavor namely, sexual activity coupled with an
emphatic dead certainty the fact of Robinsons AIDS-related demise that
made the uncertainty all the more urgent and compelling an object of interrogation, largely because it inevitably propelled critical inquiry in a highly provocative
and controversial direction.
One might well worry, however, that we wont always have the benefit as
dubious as that benefit was in the instance at hand of such a definitive counterphenomenon against which we can gauge the possible meanings of a sexuality that
remains almost entirely unarticulated, and what then? Well, to be quite frank, I
dont think that we are at risk of ever facing that scenario, for reasons that I will
elucidate shortly. Leaving that point aside for the moment, though, let us simply

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consider what might happen in the instances (whose number and frequency will
certainly increase the more we pursue critical consideration of black queer sexuality) where the objects of our analysis are so ethereal that they appear to offer us
no hard evidence at all. Well, in those cases, we will doubtless have to take
recourse in a direction to which I have already alluded and rely on the evidence of
felt intuition. Immediately upon invoking it, of course, I realize that this phrase
may strike some as worrisome, for it seems conventionally to refer to mere instinctive emotion, rather than to the engagement with external factors that is understood to be the rightful province of critical thought. On consulting the dictionary
in order to settle my own fears on this score, however, I discovered that intuition is
exactly the word I want, etymologically speaking, since in its root meaning it connotes precisely such outward engagement, signifying contemplation, or the practice of looking (Latin tuer, to look [at]) upon (Latin in, on) some entity or
another and, by extension, coming to some speculative conclusion about it.
This process seems to me to characterize a significant portion of our lives,
and most assuredly a large percentage of minority experience, given the uncertainty that I have already suggested defines the latter. In fact, I remember a train trip
from Madison to Syracuse during which I rebuffed a white man who approached me.
Hed asked if Id join him in a game of cards, but I surmised that he was sexually
attracted to me. Now, for a long time, from the late 1970s through the early 1990s,
I used to lead educational workshops on lesbian and gay lifestyles in various
institutional settings schools, social-service centers, halfway houses for young
offenders. Like many people, members of these audiences often wanted to know
whether gay men could identify others of our kind by the way they looked; I generally said that I could, but not by the way they looked to me so much as the way they
looked at me, and this is what I noticed about the man on the train the way he
looked at me as he stood over my seat, asking me whether Id like to play cards. I
dont know for a fact that he was attracted to me; I only know that look and the
sensation in my face when Im giving the same look to somebody else.
Does this look and the knowledge of it that I have accumulated over the
years constitute sex? It well might. Does it constitute sexuality? I have no doubt
that it does. Am I ineluctably compelled to speculate about it, so as to arrive at
some judgment that has its own consequences? I believe that I am, or else how
would I get through the day, as fraught as it is with the possibility of danger? The
man might just as easily have been an ax murderer, which would certainly have
put a damper on things had I decided to follow through on what seemed to me his
flirtatious inquiries. Or he might even have been a rather more run-of-the-mill
homophobe, out to victimize gay men by queer-baiting them first. In any case, we

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necessarily adjudicate such situations on the fly every single day of our natural
lives, and some of us much more frequently than others. Precisely because minority experience is characterized by the uncertainty I have already referenced, we
basically stake our lives and we take our chances, hoping that we havent miscalculated the risk. Things could go deadly wrong, as I am frequently reminded; after
all, judging from photographs Ive seen in the news, I probably would have gone
home with Jeffrey Dahmer if hed asked me, and we all know what the result of
that gamble would have been. The point, however, is not the peril, but rather the
fact that we cannot not test it, for not to proceed speculatively is, to speak plainly,
not to live. And it certainly is not to perform critical analysis, which incontrovertibly depends upon speculative logic for the force of its arguments, as we all know
deep down.
This is true, moreover, not only in the case of our actual scholarly work but
also in our metacritical understanding of its effects. Take my account of responses
to my essay, Eloquence and Epitaph. Much of what I have related here I do not
know to be fact. I did write that essay; it was published as indicated; it was taken
up or not in the ways I have sketched. What it all means, though, I cant say for
certain, and so I inevitably recur to speculative habit. Indeed, the whole metaphorics of seeing that I elaborated a minute ago is the product entirely of my
own surmisings, however much it helps me in plotting my next analytic move amid
the critical context that I want to help transform. One hopes my conclusions are
not wholly off mark, for a great deal of what I propose here is predicated on them.
And, of course, that would be the objection to speculative knowledge that it
potentially leads us astray from known data, from the concrete reality of worldly
existence (as if entire disciplines werent based on speculation; as if we didnt
credit those disciplines with the discovery of truth), and indeed it might do so, but
then whats wrong with that?
God knows, I, for one, feel the need for a break, a relief from the stressful
uncertainty entailed by the recurrent exigencies of daily life. As I said at the outset, I find it exhausting, so much so that lately Ive been rethinking my position
and pondering the prospect of a little travel, which might be just the thing to ease
my anxiety. How potentially invigorating, after all, to leave behind the quotidian
contexts in which uncertainty is debilitating, in favor of brand-new situations
where it might serve as a tonic. I imagine myself ensconced in the luxury of firstclass, languidly attending to the scenery about me. A fellow passenger approaches
me and invites me to cards, but I surmise that he is sexually attracted to me, a
young man from Sri Lanka all alone in the world, with perhaps not too firm a command of the language. I look at him looking; I contemplate him; I stake my life

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and I take my chances and I do not rebuff him, for who knows what may happen if
I follow it through? I have the feeling that it is very, very exciting to live even one
day. I could go anywhere, I could meet anyone, anything of great interest could
transpire between us, and wouldnt it be just a bit well deserved? I am tired, after
all; I work far too hard. And yes, I said, yes, I would like that, yes, and why
shouldnt I have it? And so just last month I took a concrete step to make it quite
feasible for the first time in my life: I bit the bullet and took the plunge and I
applied for a passport so I could travel abroad.
A bothersome procedure, this passport application, requiring documents
that I have stored too safely away. But I proceed on my mission, and I rifle through
my belongings, because if I succeed in this endeavor I might actually escape. And
that is my objective, now an escape from my real life, since Ive decided that
there really is nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with evading the brute facts
of routine existence. So, yellowed, and brittle, and torn as it is, I retrieve my birth
certificate from the box where Ive hidden it not the abstracted certificate of
birth registration that I desperately had Thom Fed Ex to me in Toronto when I was
worried that I wouldnt be allowed to recross the border into the United States
after the 1997 Modern Language Association convention; and not the original
document, either, passed directly from the Michigan Department of Health to my
parents to me; but still, a properly stamped copy of that record, issued on the relatively distant date of August 1975, and so emanating an aura of antique officialdom that is substantiated by the information it actually bears. For what appears on
this form, in two noteworthy places first in the all-important section devoted to
information about the father (of primary significance, one presumes, for the establishment of legitimacy, patronym, and lineal propriety, no doubt accounting for its
preeminent position), and second in the rather less prominent section given over to
the mother (smaller than that for the father, of course, since there is no need for
the box which in the fathers case is inscribed with the parents usual occupation,
the very existence of the certificate of live birth itself evidently attesting to what
the mothers occupation must be) but confirmation of the color or race of the
parents, which in each instance is neatly recorded, in crisp typescript form and
with an initial capital letter, as Negro. And that, my friends, was that, by which
I mean not that I forwent the passport application or the plans for travel (God
knows I deserve it; God knows I am tired) but that I dispensed with any illusions
about being able to escape the hard facts of my day-to-day material life.
For even if I left, I would have to return, would have to recross the borders
of the United States, where the significance of the Negro designation is so thoroughly sedimented that it conditions even my attempt to forget what it means. And

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what led me to that realization but the very trajectory of my fantastic speculation,
by means of which I had thought to leave such facts behind? I personally dont
believe that we can ever go very far down the path of speculative rumination without encountering the material realities to which the realm of speculation is conventionally opposed, if only because they shape the very terms by which we forward our speculation in the first place, whether we recognize it or not.
In other words, if speculative reasoning often appears as the only tool we
have by which to forward the type of critical analysis our situation demands, such
reasoning itself is necessarily conditioned by the material factors in which it is
undertaken, and those material factors without exception all have histories that
themselves can serve to guide us in our critical work. To what history (among others) does my birth certificate attest, for instance, but the highly complex one
regarding the very possibility let alone the meaning of precisely that African
American family in rich and tense relation to which black queerness now incontrovertibly stands? What does it signify in its registration of my fathers occupation,
in 1961, as a self-employed attorney but the highly vexed history of the African
American professional classes? a vexedness further attested by the fact that my
mother, who was also a self-employed attorney at the time that I was born, has no
official occupation listed on my birth certificate at all. What do my parents disparate places of birth rural Alabama in my fathers case, Detroit in my mothers
which are also indicated on the document, suggest but the profoundly consequential history of twentieth-century black migration from the South to the urban
North, with all the complexities we know are elided in the too simple characterization of the phenomenon I have just provided? What does the forms presumption
of my parents officially sanctioned marital status (indicated in its stipulation that
the mother of the new infant provide her full maiden name) connote but the long
history of the black familys officially contested character? And what is the fate of
these various histories but that they are borne by and signified in the person whose
birth is certified by this document, who in turn carries them into any situation in
which he speculatively makes his way, for better or worse including such situations as the tantalizingly sexualized one that occurred during my train trip, where
those histories were condensed and effectively activated (whether my interlocutor
knew it or not) in the very instant that my racial identity came to the fore as a
point of consternation in my exchange with my fellow passenger.
The speculation in which I engaged during that encounter, then, was thoroughly bound up with the material factors that constituted my subjectivity within
it, and it is in relation to those factors that my speculative rumination derives its
ultimate meaning, however abstractly theoretical it may appear at first blush. This,

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I guess, explains why I harbor no reservations about theory, because I dont see it
as ever being merely theoretical. Moreover, as far as queer studies is concerned,
theory may in some respects be all that we have, if by theory we mean (to be etymological again) a way of seeing that allows us to apprehend our world in different and potentially productive ways.
To the extent that this meaning of the term does not imply coherence or
exclusionary unity, we can likely even admit it as a way of characterizing queer
critical work, which itself should enable us to see the fissures and inconsistencies
in what conventionally appears as the wholly coherent infrastructure of normative
culture. And the engine most capable of driving our novel perceptions in this vein
is the very social materiality that, on first consideration, might seem to obscure our
view: my own blackness, for instance (or anyone elses), which both predicated and
thwarted my encounter on the train and then propelled my rumination on it along
queer critical lines.
I am hoping that such practice will define the direction of black queer
studies in the new millennium, for I am convinced that its explanatory and
transformative potential hasnt even begun to be tapped. Not that I naively
believe that we will ever resolve all the problems that confront us, by this or any
other means, but I remain fully determined that the task must continually be
pursued, for the sake of the partial progressive change that we indisputably
must make. And its funny, but suddenly that determination, too, seems to be a
function of my blackness itself or at least of the blackness that has historically
been constituted in U.S. society. For I was reminded of that logic when I examined my birth certificate, which, after all, registers my blacknessmy Negro-ness
not as an attribute of my own person (for the color or race of the actual
child whose birth is attested is nowhere recorded on the document) but only as
a trait of the persons who engendered me, from whom I simply inherit it as a
tacit matter of course. Pondering this fact, I couldnt help but note how it seems
to extend and recapitulate the old antebellum rule that a child born in the context of slavery would necessarily follow the condition of the mother. Reflecting
on this, I was unable to suppress an overwhelming sense of perverse pleasure,
even as I considered the difficult critical and political work that confronts us, in
the face of which we might understandably be tempted to leave well enough
alone. But no, I thought, as I worried over this possibility, that sad state of
affairs will never materialize. For in a way nineteenth-century lawmakers could
never have either predicted or appreciated, we really are just like our mothers:
we are never satisfied.

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Notes
My thanks to the participants in the conference Black Queer Studies in the Millennium; to Mae G. Henderson and, especially, E. Patrick Johnson for organizing that
remarkable event; to Carlos Decena for his consistently invaluable research assistance; and to Carolyn Dinshaw and David M. Halperin for the encouragement and
opportunity to publish the comments here.
1.

2.

3.
4.
5.

6.

See my essay Take Me Home: Location, Identity, Transnational Exchange, in

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (New York: New
York University Press, 1999), 125 54; rpt., in expanded form, in Callaloo 23 (2000):
46178.
Indeed, my sense that many black people would find my interlocutors reaction relatively unremarkable is validated by the fact that a parody of such response found its
way into an early-1990s solo presentation by the African American performer Alva
Rogers. In her 1991 one-woman show, Alva, Rogers hilariously lampooned white peoples typically incredulous insistences that the dark-skinned person with whom they
have had any degree of engaging intellectual or social interaction cannot possibly
really be black. Alva was presented on 8 and 9 February 1991 at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston.
Quoted in Pat Wingert and Barbara Kantrowitz, Gay Today: The Family: Two Kids
and Two Moms, in John Leland, Shades of Gay, Newsweek, 20 March 2000, 50.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 8.
In a volume whose objective of providing an introduction to queer theory may
strike us as somewhat paradoxical, given the putative incoherence of the field, Annamarie Jagose actually offers a highly nuanced and helpful account of these various
assessments (Queer Theory: An Introduction [New York: New York University Press,
1996], esp. chap. 7, Queer, 72 100). Of particular value among the works Jagose
cites are Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, What Does Queer Theory Teach Us
about X? PMLA 110 (1995): 343 49; Alexander Doty, What Makes Queerness
Most? in Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xixix, esp. xiiixix; Lisa Duggan, Making
It Perfectly Queer, Socialist Review, no. 22 (1992): 1131; Lee Edelman, Queer
Theory: Unstating Desire, GLQ 2 (1995): 343 48; David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp.
62 67; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press,
1993), esp. the introductory essay, Queer and Now, 120.
See, e.g., the trenchant critique along these lines made by Cathy Cohen, Punks,
Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? GLQ 3
(1997): 43765.

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

16.

In characterizing the U.S. sociocultural context as a site of white supremacist hegemony, I am following the lead taken by bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New
York: Holt, 1995).
Phillip Brian Harper, Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the Homophobic Impulse in Responses to the Death of Max Robinson, Social Text, no. 28 (1991):
68 86.
Henry Abelove, Michle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and
Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer
Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
The passage from The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader that I am referencing here
incorporates the editors note that we have reluctantly chosen not to speak here and
in our title of queer studies, despite our own attachment to the term, along with their
reasons for that decision (xvii). Jagose glosses what she sees as the passages defensive tone (Queer Theory, 4). Regarding the significance of 1993, I have in mind not
only the release during that year of the aforementioned anthologies but also the contemporaneous publication of Sedgwick, Tendencies, and Judith Butler, Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), as well as the
appearance on the critical scene of GLQ, the defining periodical in the field.
See Harper, Eloquence and Epitaph, Social Text version, 85 86 n. 19.
Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of AfricanAmerican Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 338.
See Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier, eds., Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 11739.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990).
See Deborah E. McDowell, The Nameless . . . Shameful Impulse: Sexuality in
Larsens Quicksand and Passing (1986), in The Changing Same: Black Womens
Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
78 97. The referenced passage from Nella Larsens fiction appears in the novel Quicksand (1928), in Quicksand and Passing, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 95.
Harper, Eloquence and Epitaph, Social Text version, 81.

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