Tongues Untied Summary

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Throughout the so- called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other [on] street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions.” Richard Bruce Nugent, who was considered the “perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement” said, “You did what you wanted to. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”

Slavery was abolished after the Civil War, but the Negro race still was not accepted as equals into American society. To attain a better understanding of the events and struggles faced during this period, one must take a look at its' literature. James Weldon Johnson does an excellent job of vividly depicting an accurate portrait of the adversities faced before the Civil Rights Movement by the black community in his novel “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” One does not only read this book, but instead one takes a journey alongside a burdened mulatto man as he struggles to claim one race as his own.

Queer of color critique is, by definition, intersectional. As opposed to examining domesticity through the lens of a queer person or a person of color, the queer of color critique analyzes the ways that race, gender, and sexuality are built off of each other. Roderick Ferguson’s piece stems off of the presumption that racial non-normativity, or non whiteness and sexual non-normativity,

This week’s reading of Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique offers a queer of color analysis that poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, liberal pluralism and historical materialism, and opts instead for an “understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress and confirmation (3). By challenging some of the main complacent thinking that characterized canonical sociology, Ferguson pushes for an engagement with racial knowledge about African American culture as it was produced by American sociology if one is to fully understand the gender and sexual variations within the African American culture. One of the principle assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of cultural, racial and sexual differences in the process of pathologizing African American culture. By juxtaposing canonical sociological texts from the Chicago School of Sociology with that of African American literature, Ferguson provides a genealogy of this foundational issue of imagining African American culture as sites of polymorphous gender and sexual perversions and how these perversions are in turn associated with societal and moral failings.

By expressing this with the African American society of women who are continuously torched by the demanding words of men, McLune appeals strongly to all American women’s intellect of equality and respect. Women should not have to be judged by men and expect to be treated as if they owe anyone something, let alone have to be mistreated and belittled, if that were to be the case then men should be treated the same, therefore McLune’s audience, should understand that that is not how you define a black woman in any terms.

In her book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, Siobhan Somerville uses film and literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate the ways in which early models of homosexuality were often embedded within discussions of race, specifically “the bifurcated constructions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” (175). Somerville notes that discussions of sexual orientations emerged at the same time Plessy v. Ferguson, the supreme court case that affirmed the government’s right to determine an individual’s racial identity, was settled. She contends that the development of sexual classifications alongside the U.S. governments “aggressive policing of the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” was more than a coincidence in timing (3). Somerville argues that this new polarization of bodies and focus on sexual desires echoed a similar, simultaneous shift in racial thinking. During this shift, the cultural figure of the mulatto gave way to a new visualization of the races as natural opposites, and increasing numbers of legal and social devices were created to prevent people of different races from engaging in sexual activity with one another. Thus the materialization of new sexual categories paralleled, and was profoundly influenced by, the hardening of the "color line," the division of Americans into racially segregated categories.

Throughout America’s history there have been many struggles with equality amongst the many racial identities that live in this “melting pot.” Acceptance of the many races is a continuous goal in the war on racism in America. Once accepted, many racial identities go under huge scrutiny by the media, society, and their other racial counterparts, etc. Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins is a critical analysis of blacks in America and blacks as a race. The book analyzes this race on various levels, and these levels include, but are not limited to the following: the concept of “new” racism, gender ideology within the race, and the potential for progression of

The life of African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries has been a truly storied past. One of the most astonishing aspects of African American life, in this period, is the degree to which it was heterogeneous. The experiences of African Americans differed widely based on geographic location, class, gender, religion, and age. Despite a high degree of variability in the experiences of Blacks in America, if one were to consider the sociopolitical fact that Black people as a group in America were a subordinate caste in dominant society, then it becomes possible to make certain overarching connections. One such connection is the presence of secretive subversive ideologies and actions. The existence of these secretive subversive activities is apparent if one examines the labor tendencies, the folklore, and the outward societal projections of black people. By briefly examining the labor practices of Black women in Atlanta during the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, The Uncle Remus tales, and cultural icon Louis Armstrong, one can deduce that secretive subversive actions and beliefs were an integrated aspect of Black existence during this period.

Despite the dearth of available literature due to censorship and the passage of time, this period was characterized by flourishing deviant—and provisionally—queer sexuality. The unstable times, cultural changes, and political turmoil all lent themselves to a shift in discussions and understandings of sexuality. The Civil War remains a period of incredible upheaval that profoundly shaped culture and society. This period saw the reshaping of gender and sexuality norms while also instigating the codifying of existing gender-based oppression and violences (Bronsky, 81). While the lexicon of sexuality has changed in the intervening years, the Civil War (and the circumstances it produced) remains a condition of emergence of queer pre-history, as well as a crucial site for interpreting and reclaiming historical

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in 1858 to two free-born blacks with white ancestry, a circumstance that caused him to appear more white than black. An analysis of his story “The Wife of His Youth”, shows how much of an impact coming from a mixed-raced family affected him. During his time, those who were of mixed-race were called “mulattos.” Chesnutt’s experience of being a “mulatto” (which gave him the body of his work) made him question what really defined someone’s race, which he wrote about in many of his stories, like “The Wife of His Youth.” Having a label for those in-between white and black facilitated even more separation between people of color and whites, because there was now a new group which did not entirely belong to either side. Chesnutt,

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. (hb). ISBN: 0-226-35471-7.

Author Lee Maracle’s 1993 novel Ravensong doesn’t centre around queerness or lesbian sexuality or two-spirit identity in the way that you might expect in a book reviewed here. It’s a beautiful and powerful novel about settler and Indigenous relations regardless, but its main character Stacey, a young Salish woman living on a reserve in the 1950s, isn’t explicitly or implicity queer (although she is potentially queer, I would say, given Maracle’s take on sexuality). There is, however, a lesbian couple who feature as secondary characters in Ravensong, and I think their inclusion is really significant, for a few reasons. Mostly, I find the way that the novel deals with queer sexuality in relation to its politics of decolonization fascinating. In fact, I think honing in on how the novel deals with queerness is a great way to understand what it’s trying to do in terms of decolonizing. The absence in Ravensong of an explicit assertion of queerness, the fact that it doesn’t “come out,” as it were, as a queer text, is no failure at all but rather indicates an entirely different method of interrogating issues of queer sexuality. Let me explain:

On June 13th, 2016, 49 people were killed and 53 were injured in an anti-LGBTQIA+ shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Following the shooting, many queer and trans* people of color demanded media coverage to specify that that shooter targeted Latino, Indigenous, and Black people. However, while doing so, other queers and allies took to attacking Islam -- claiming that religious extremism motivated the attack. But, amidst demands of looking at the identity of both the shooter and victims, the perspectives of LGBTQIA+ Muslims were erased. Such noted, in this paper, I hope to investigate other instances how Queer Muslim narrative have been erased by American mass media. To build my argument, I will be relying on Raham’s theory of ‘queer intersectional identities’ and Hoodfar’s meditations on the theoretical construction of ‘the Muslim woman’ and ‘the veil’. Moreover, (methods - comparative historical analysis). This is to ultimately argue that assumptions of incompatibility between various Muslims cultures and LGBTQ+ identities are responsible with erasing Queer Muslim American narratives.

The article has three sections that it focuses on; first, it introduces intersectionality and reconceptualizes heteronormativity, then offers a review of research on the black family given an intersectional context, and lastly it discusses how the intersection of black and queer identities functions within a modern context. First, they redefine heteronormativity to include race, class, gender and sexuality. They posit heteronormativity as inherently racist and cite that literature up until now has mainly offered a stagnant, rather than fluid, dichotomy of “the heteronormative and the queer” (MAIN 1). Secondly, they argue that there are two main schools of thought when analyzing the black family, that of pathology and that which

“The Woman Identified Woman” is likely what the writers of A Black Feminist Statement would call “lesbian separatism”, which it rejected (Eisenstein, 214). The text was an example of radical white feminism, which tries to unite the struggles of all women and places them into the single category of the “woman”. Because this view on feminism tends to view all women as the same, the cause tends to advocate for what society views as the default woman, which is a woman who is white and middle class. As “A Black