104 Reading Response Review - Group 1

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Anthropology

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Oct 30, 2023

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Reading Response #3: Hartman & Stryker A common theme throughout Sadiya Hartman and Susan Stryker’s works is the dehumanization of people who live otherwise. In Hartman’s Beauty of the Chorus , Black chorines and inhabitants in Harlem were othered as vagrants, criminals, anarchists, and queers. She emphasizes that the journalists, anthropologists, and the state all surveilled Black ‘becoming’ in Harlem as an “epidemic of immorality” and a “... race riot of public pleasure” (p. 13). Black queer women and nightlife performers were targets of police brutality and sexual violence for refusing gender scripts of heterosexual marriage and domestic servitude. Refusal to conform rendered chorines and Black queer women beyond the state’s terms of justifying existence through state legibility and state ‘usefulness’. Thus, their lives were not just devalued but demonized because of the power in the possibility embodied by Black queer women and chorines (p. 4). Hartman’s historical narrative chronicles Mabel Hampton’s dance within the enclosure. Her self-expression and performance in multiple arenas of Black Harlem nightlife all resisted the biological determinism of racialized servitude and the gender role of wifehood. For example, the music hall’s erasure of bounded bodies challenged capitalist individualism as the site of dancers’ co-creation of a shared body, space, and rhythm. Additionally, Hartman analyzes the theater and stories like The Captive as a social, public language for expressing queer femme desire and longing. Similarly, the cabaret was a platform for improvisation within the constraining space of the white heteropatriarchal order. The waywardness embodied in Harlem’s Black nightlife was a rebellion against the constraints of the color line, nuclear family structure, and a four-cornered world in favor of radical imagination and hope. Both Hartman and Stryker highlight the arrangement of bodies “... across socially imposed boundaries away from unchosen starting places'' as an embodiment of a different world order and sociality (Stryker p. 1, Hartman p. 3). Stryker’s analysis of transgender history frames the social spotlight on gender variance as a reaction to fears over cultural shifts

away from white heteropatriarchal sociality and nuclear family structure. Stryker emphasizes that gender, gender comportment, and gender roles coalesce in a reductive system of biological determinism to regulate sociality and render people legible to the state. She argues that people struggle to see the humanity in trans and gender variant folx if they cannot classify their gender. Due to dominant bioessentialism conceptions of gender as personhood, transness can “... invoke primordial fears over a loss of humanness” (p. 6). Like Hartman, Stryker draws attention to the function of anti-trans, anti-Black, and anti-queer oppression as a sociopolitical system of division between ‘correct’ and ‘other’. This dualism vilifies the possibility of transformation beyond the scale of personal identity and demonizes the queering of society, culture, and worldview. As illustrated in Virginia Prince’s obscenity court case, the people and institutions with a stake in hegemonic power structures fear transness as a threat to their privilege. According to Stryker, transness embodies liberation from the carceral ideology of essentialism and a Eurocentric world order. Existing ‘otherwise’ –beyond racialization and cisnormativity– challenges the fundamental ways hierarchy and oppression operate. - Wordy, repetitive, not much individual opinion compared to the amount of quotes/paraphrasing -

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