In “Quare Studies, Or Everything I Learned About Queer Theory I Learned From My Grandmother,” E. Patrick Johnson describes John Champagne’s critique of Essex Hemphill’s act of crying publicly during a speech. Champagne chastises Hemphill for being emotionally manipulative and ineffective, and is dismissive of the fact that Hemphill’s act was itself an expression of bodily experience as a black man. The idea that Champagne’s misunderstanding of Hemphill’s act stems from Champagne’s own position of privilege as a white man is troubling. Given that many queer theorists are and have been white, how much of queer theory has been written from a place of power that distorts actions and beliefs of people of color, and how does this white gaze upon black bodies infiltrate not only our theory and rhetoric, but our consumed media?
Johnson compares Champagne’s presumptuous interpretation of a person of color’s intent and motivation to that of an “overseer,” of black cultural practices, a description that suggests internalized racism on the part of any white person who takes it upon themselves to study black and queer theory without first taking the time to acknowledge one’s own position in society. This therefore begs the question; is it appropriate for white people (or other oppressors) to analyze the motivations of oppressed people if they are so deeply shaped by their own privilege? Of course, educating privileged people on their own advantages may be a positive action that leads to better understanding of power structures by more people. However, is it ever acceptable for white people to assume they understand the intent of people of color without the experience as evidence to truly understand oppression regarding race? Perhaps not.
The issue of the white gaze upon black queer bodies permeates theory and media. This can specifically be seen in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning. In the film, Livingston, an openly queer white woman, follows the lives of Latin@ and African American transgender, gay and cross dressing queer people who participated in the drag balls of New York in the 1980s. The content of the film expressed a race commentary that Judith Butler regarded as white-supremacist, stating that the “drag performances deploy denaturalizing strategies to reidealize whiteness...the drag balls themselves at times produce high femininity as a function of whiteness” (Butler 74). However, outside the content of the film, the creator, Livingston, also faced became involved with a race debate. After the movie was released, Livingston faced criticism for “exploiting” people of color, to which she responded, "If they wanted to make a film about themselves, they would not be able. I wish that weren't so, but that's the way society is structured" (Green).
What does it mean that this defining generational queer artifact is about people of color, but created by a white woman? Livingston insists that she is not part of the privileged population, saying “I'm white, yes, but I'm an openly queer, female director, and I can't think of anything more out of the mainstream. I'm sorry, but I do not think I have the same relationship to the ruling class as a straight man” (Green). This example of using one aspect of identity to declare solidarity while dismissing that white people and people of color experience very different levels of power erases the experiences of the people Livingston claims to care about. This issue is further expanded by the fact that Livingston was not being told that she was privileged by other white people, she was being told by the people she had filmed, yet she still insisted that she did not benefit from her position of power.
After the film was released, Livingston was also criticized for exploiting the people featured in it by misleading them about how much they were to be paid for their participation. When confronted about this, Livingston stated that she too did not make very much money from the movie, only enough to “pay her rent on time” (Green). This response, in which she likens herself to the subjects of her movie by projecting her own state of poverty, while in the same sentence asserting that she is able to pay her rent on time is indicative of a white supremacist line of thinking. These inaccurate ideas on power allowed her to take on the identity of the subjects in her movie for entertainment and for the sake of art, but then easily cast it off in order to pay her bills, something she mentions so casually while the transwomen from Paris Is Burning are killed while prostituting themselves. It should be known that the ability to pay one’s rent is not barely scraping by when compared to the state of constant semi-homelessness much of the LGBTQ community of color lives in.
An artistic analysis of Paris Is Burning also reveals film direction that uses black subjects but is shaped by white narrative. It is significant to notice that Livingston is never shown in the film, and her voice is only heard minimally. In not showing herself as the creator of this work of art, Livingston presents Paris Is Burning as a film that stands on its own, with no context. By removing herself from its creation, Livingston makes a statement that the film is organic, that it documents lives exactly how they are, with no bias or filter that it is being filmed through. Yet the audience is duped, given that every interview conducted started from a question that Livingston chose, was edited by Livingston’s crew, and was filmed by Livingston’s crew. Livingston created the narrative that was told by Paris Is Burning because she was the person who made the film (Davis). She once again problematically aligns herself with a culture she is not a part of by attempting to remove her whiteness from the film’s presentation.
It is significant that Jennie Livingston made a movie about queer people of color and then removed herself from the project because this represents a way in which white people, who are oppressors in the context of our culture (and arguably any culture), have taken on the task of representing people of color, and effectively objectify them instead. While Livingston attempts to represent people of color in a positive way, she is following Champagne’s footsteps by assuming that she not only able, but also the most appropriate authority to define black culture and explain the intent of black actions. This type of entitled behavior is ultimately indicative of the white gaze upon black bodies. This objectification of black actions and lifestyle leaves the intent and meaning up to white minds to decide upon, while the black body stands in as an empty vessel to be used to express whatever the oppressor deems worthy of representation.
This is seen again in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography of black male bodies. In a society that has “stereotyped, criminalized, and rendered (black bodies) invisible by the white gaze,” Mapplethorpe attempted to create pieces of media that presented the black male body in a positive way (Yancy). However, Mapplethorpe uses homoeroticism again to align himself with a group of marginalized people when he himself does not face the same oppressions. As Kobena Mercer explains in “Looking For Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe And Fantasies of Race,” that Mapplethorpe’s use of sexuality in order to present black bodies is ultimately damaging; “the photographs are very much about sexual investment in looking, because they disclose the tracing desire on the part of the I/eye placed at the corner of representation by the male gaze.”
Mapplethorpe’s signature photographic style in The Black Book, his collection of representations of queer black male bodies, is to amputate parts of the model and present a focus on one body part at a time, often time sacrificing the head, in a symbolic decapitation that has been criticized as the removal of the most human aspect of a body.
The intense scrutiny of body parts can be interpreted as a study on the body, but Mapplethorpe’s photographs, especially of people, were usually sociopolitical. Mapplethorpe chose to represent black bodies in passive, still positions. Most pictures show a black man holding a still pose, not engaging with objects or performing an action. Mercer believes that this lack of movement, in comparison with the white models who are shown engaging in sexual activities, is dehumanizing: “whereas white gay male sadomasochist portray a subcultural sexuality that consists of “doing” something, the black men are defined and confined to “being” purely sexual and nothing but sexual, hence hypersexualization” (Mercer). It is also noteworthy that Mapplethorpe photographs exclusively in black and white, a technique that has been commonly criticized for whitewashing people of color. In his representation of what is supposed to be the perfect black male body, Mapplethorpe uses an effect that lightens the skin of black people.
Perhaps Mapplethorpe’s interest in sadomasochistic sex play relates to his choice to photograph black models. In a colonialistic type fetish, Mapplethorpe was able to manipulate these photographs and create their message and aesthetic appeal. This places Mapplethorpe at the controls and gives him the power to “recreate” the image of black men, even though he has no experience or understanding of black identity.
Once again, a white artist has used their position of power to make what they believe to be an empowering or powerful statement about people of color. In their eagerness to unify under their queerness, white people have disregarded the fact that they are not qualified to make statements for queer people of color. When Jennie Livingston suggested that queer and trans people of color are not currently in a position to create media representing them themselves, she continued to perpetuate the idea that people of color need white people in order to make progress, showing a profound discomfort with the truth, which is that people of color do not need white people’s permission in order to represent themselves, and therefore do not need their representation done for them. Jennie Livingston revealed herself not only as a poor ally to communities of color, but as an oppressor herself by asserting that only white people can change social ideologies.
The representation of marginalized groups by their oppressors is present in media, and therefore present in all aspects of organized thought and rhetoric, and therefore also present in queer theory. Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cathy J. Cohen and E. Patrick Johnson all write that queer theory lacks intersectionality. Queer and feminist theory, much of which was written either during or shortly after the emergence of second-wave feminism, often lacks attention to race issues and how they affect sexuality and gender oppression. Johnson goes so far as to create a new identity, “quare” studies, which is an exclusively black queer identity, in order to represent himself and his culture in a way that is not using the limiting labels created by white people to categorize desire.
If “quare” is an identity that is intersectional, that does not disregard race, and welcomes people of color, what is left of “queer?” Johnson states that “quare studies grants space for marginalized individuals to enact “radical black subjectivity.” Quare works as a way for black people to represent their own non-normativity, instead of being forced to use terms created by the oppressor. However, if quare is a space that is intersectional as opposed to queer spaces which are not, how do white people who are not a part of quare spaces become more aware of intersectionality, given their place of privilege? I believe it is the responsibility of white queer theorists of the future to make intersectionality a top priority, so as to make queer spaces into places where privilege is constantly being checked and acknowledged. As Ruth Goldman is quoted, “ (we) leave the burden of dealing with difference on the people who are themselves different, while simultaneously allowing white academics to construct a discourse of silence around race and other queer perspectives” (Johnson).
“Quare” as an identity that both describes sexual non normativity and is linguistically rooted in black culture makes sense. The use of a word that is not based in white speech suggests that this is an identity which is not based in whiteness. It suggests that this is a sexual identity that is removed completely from the appropriated “queerness” that has come to mean “white, cisgendered, homosexual, male.”
Johnson writes this essay not only to assert that “quareness” might be good for people of color, but to insinuate that perhaps “queerness,” in its current state is not good for people who are not highly privileged; while the highly educated can wax philosophical on the state of oppressed people, Johnson is saying that there is a disconnect between them and those not in the ivory towers. “If social change is to occur, gays, bisexuals, transgendered, and lesbian people of color cannot afford to be armchair theorists, they need to be on the streets, enacting the quare theories that we construct in the safety of the academy” (Johnson).
Queerness is not doing anyone, black, white, or otherwise, any favors by being depoliticized and used as a casual term for “gay.” The best way to interpret this essay is to realize that the lack of intersectionality within queer theory is effectively killing queer theory (Sedgwick). Where black queers now have “quare,” we must also acknowledge the other oppressed minorities now. How does “queer” fail to recognize the struggles of trans people, and especially trans people of color? Johnson’s analysis of the incredibly damaging lack of intersectional identities in regards to race reveals the ways in which privileged people within the community must take it upon themselves to change queer theory to include people whose identities are currently erased, but must do so through enabling the oppressed, not speaking for them.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer." The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013): n. pag. Print.
Cohen, C. J. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013): n. pag. Print.
Davis, Kimberly Chabot. "White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in "Hoop Dreams" and "Paris Is Burning"" JSTOR. South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Winter 1999. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
Green, Jesse. "Paris Has Burned." The New York Times. The New York Times, 17 Apr. 1993. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
Johnson, E. Patrick. ""Quare" Studies, or (almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother." Text and Performance Quarterly 21.1 (2001): 1-25. Print.
Mercer, Kobena. "Looking For Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe And The Fantasies Of Race."Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (1996): 278-86. Print.
Paris Is Burning. Dir. Jennie Livingston. Films Incorporated, 1991. Film.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013): n. pag. Print.
Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2008. Print.
Johnson compares Champagne’s presumptuous interpretation of a person of color’s intent and motivation to that of an “overseer,” of black cultural practices, a description that suggests internalized racism on the part of any white person who takes it upon themselves to study black and queer theory without first taking the time to acknowledge one’s own position in society. This therefore begs the question; is it appropriate for white people (or other oppressors) to analyze the motivations of oppressed people if they are so deeply shaped by their own privilege? Of course, educating privileged people on their own advantages may be a positive action that leads to better understanding of power structures by more people. However, is it ever acceptable for white people to assume they understand the intent of people of color without the experience as evidence to truly understand oppression regarding race? Perhaps not.
The issue of the white gaze upon black queer bodies permeates theory and media. This can specifically be seen in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning. In the film, Livingston, an openly queer white woman, follows the lives of Latin@ and African American transgender, gay and cross dressing queer people who participated in the drag balls of New York in the 1980s. The content of the film expressed a race commentary that Judith Butler regarded as white-supremacist, stating that the “drag performances deploy denaturalizing strategies to reidealize whiteness...the drag balls themselves at times produce high femininity as a function of whiteness” (Butler 74). However, outside the content of the film, the creator, Livingston, also faced became involved with a race debate. After the movie was released, Livingston faced criticism for “exploiting” people of color, to which she responded, "If they wanted to make a film about themselves, they would not be able. I wish that weren't so, but that's the way society is structured" (Green).
What does it mean that this defining generational queer artifact is about people of color, but created by a white woman? Livingston insists that she is not part of the privileged population, saying “I'm white, yes, but I'm an openly queer, female director, and I can't think of anything more out of the mainstream. I'm sorry, but I do not think I have the same relationship to the ruling class as a straight man” (Green). This example of using one aspect of identity to declare solidarity while dismissing that white people and people of color experience very different levels of power erases the experiences of the people Livingston claims to care about. This issue is further expanded by the fact that Livingston was not being told that she was privileged by other white people, she was being told by the people she had filmed, yet she still insisted that she did not benefit from her position of power.
After the film was released, Livingston was also criticized for exploiting the people featured in it by misleading them about how much they were to be paid for their participation. When confronted about this, Livingston stated that she too did not make very much money from the movie, only enough to “pay her rent on time” (Green). This response, in which she likens herself to the subjects of her movie by projecting her own state of poverty, while in the same sentence asserting that she is able to pay her rent on time is indicative of a white supremacist line of thinking. These inaccurate ideas on power allowed her to take on the identity of the subjects in her movie for entertainment and for the sake of art, but then easily cast it off in order to pay her bills, something she mentions so casually while the transwomen from Paris Is Burning are killed while prostituting themselves. It should be known that the ability to pay one’s rent is not barely scraping by when compared to the state of constant semi-homelessness much of the LGBTQ community of color lives in.
An artistic analysis of Paris Is Burning also reveals film direction that uses black subjects but is shaped by white narrative. It is significant to notice that Livingston is never shown in the film, and her voice is only heard minimally. In not showing herself as the creator of this work of art, Livingston presents Paris Is Burning as a film that stands on its own, with no context. By removing herself from its creation, Livingston makes a statement that the film is organic, that it documents lives exactly how they are, with no bias or filter that it is being filmed through. Yet the audience is duped, given that every interview conducted started from a question that Livingston chose, was edited by Livingston’s crew, and was filmed by Livingston’s crew. Livingston created the narrative that was told by Paris Is Burning because she was the person who made the film (Davis). She once again problematically aligns herself with a culture she is not a part of by attempting to remove her whiteness from the film’s presentation.
It is significant that Jennie Livingston made a movie about queer people of color and then removed herself from the project because this represents a way in which white people, who are oppressors in the context of our culture (and arguably any culture), have taken on the task of representing people of color, and effectively objectify them instead. While Livingston attempts to represent people of color in a positive way, she is following Champagne’s footsteps by assuming that she not only able, but also the most appropriate authority to define black culture and explain the intent of black actions. This type of entitled behavior is ultimately indicative of the white gaze upon black bodies. This objectification of black actions and lifestyle leaves the intent and meaning up to white minds to decide upon, while the black body stands in as an empty vessel to be used to express whatever the oppressor deems worthy of representation.
This is seen again in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography of black male bodies. In a society that has “stereotyped, criminalized, and rendered (black bodies) invisible by the white gaze,” Mapplethorpe attempted to create pieces of media that presented the black male body in a positive way (Yancy). However, Mapplethorpe uses homoeroticism again to align himself with a group of marginalized people when he himself does not face the same oppressions. As Kobena Mercer explains in “Looking For Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe And Fantasies of Race,” that Mapplethorpe’s use of sexuality in order to present black bodies is ultimately damaging; “the photographs are very much about sexual investment in looking, because they disclose the tracing desire on the part of the I/eye placed at the corner of representation by the male gaze.”
Mapplethorpe’s signature photographic style in The Black Book, his collection of representations of queer black male bodies, is to amputate parts of the model and present a focus on one body part at a time, often time sacrificing the head, in a symbolic decapitation that has been criticized as the removal of the most human aspect of a body.
The intense scrutiny of body parts can be interpreted as a study on the body, but Mapplethorpe’s photographs, especially of people, were usually sociopolitical. Mapplethorpe chose to represent black bodies in passive, still positions. Most pictures show a black man holding a still pose, not engaging with objects or performing an action. Mercer believes that this lack of movement, in comparison with the white models who are shown engaging in sexual activities, is dehumanizing: “whereas white gay male sadomasochist portray a subcultural sexuality that consists of “doing” something, the black men are defined and confined to “being” purely sexual and nothing but sexual, hence hypersexualization” (Mercer). It is also noteworthy that Mapplethorpe photographs exclusively in black and white, a technique that has been commonly criticized for whitewashing people of color. In his representation of what is supposed to be the perfect black male body, Mapplethorpe uses an effect that lightens the skin of black people.
Perhaps Mapplethorpe’s interest in sadomasochistic sex play relates to his choice to photograph black models. In a colonialistic type fetish, Mapplethorpe was able to manipulate these photographs and create their message and aesthetic appeal. This places Mapplethorpe at the controls and gives him the power to “recreate” the image of black men, even though he has no experience or understanding of black identity.
Once again, a white artist has used their position of power to make what they believe to be an empowering or powerful statement about people of color. In their eagerness to unify under their queerness, white people have disregarded the fact that they are not qualified to make statements for queer people of color. When Jennie Livingston suggested that queer and trans people of color are not currently in a position to create media representing them themselves, she continued to perpetuate the idea that people of color need white people in order to make progress, showing a profound discomfort with the truth, which is that people of color do not need white people’s permission in order to represent themselves, and therefore do not need their representation done for them. Jennie Livingston revealed herself not only as a poor ally to communities of color, but as an oppressor herself by asserting that only white people can change social ideologies.
The representation of marginalized groups by their oppressors is present in media, and therefore present in all aspects of organized thought and rhetoric, and therefore also present in queer theory. Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Cathy J. Cohen and E. Patrick Johnson all write that queer theory lacks intersectionality. Queer and feminist theory, much of which was written either during or shortly after the emergence of second-wave feminism, often lacks attention to race issues and how they affect sexuality and gender oppression. Johnson goes so far as to create a new identity, “quare” studies, which is an exclusively black queer identity, in order to represent himself and his culture in a way that is not using the limiting labels created by white people to categorize desire.
If “quare” is an identity that is intersectional, that does not disregard race, and welcomes people of color, what is left of “queer?” Johnson states that “quare studies grants space for marginalized individuals to enact “radical black subjectivity.” Quare works as a way for black people to represent their own non-normativity, instead of being forced to use terms created by the oppressor. However, if quare is a space that is intersectional as opposed to queer spaces which are not, how do white people who are not a part of quare spaces become more aware of intersectionality, given their place of privilege? I believe it is the responsibility of white queer theorists of the future to make intersectionality a top priority, so as to make queer spaces into places where privilege is constantly being checked and acknowledged. As Ruth Goldman is quoted, “ (we) leave the burden of dealing with difference on the people who are themselves different, while simultaneously allowing white academics to construct a discourse of silence around race and other queer perspectives” (Johnson).
“Quare” as an identity that both describes sexual non normativity and is linguistically rooted in black culture makes sense. The use of a word that is not based in white speech suggests that this is an identity which is not based in whiteness. It suggests that this is a sexual identity that is removed completely from the appropriated “queerness” that has come to mean “white, cisgendered, homosexual, male.”
Johnson writes this essay not only to assert that “quareness” might be good for people of color, but to insinuate that perhaps “queerness,” in its current state is not good for people who are not highly privileged; while the highly educated can wax philosophical on the state of oppressed people, Johnson is saying that there is a disconnect between them and those not in the ivory towers. “If social change is to occur, gays, bisexuals, transgendered, and lesbian people of color cannot afford to be armchair theorists, they need to be on the streets, enacting the quare theories that we construct in the safety of the academy” (Johnson).
Queerness is not doing anyone, black, white, or otherwise, any favors by being depoliticized and used as a casual term for “gay.” The best way to interpret this essay is to realize that the lack of intersectionality within queer theory is effectively killing queer theory (Sedgwick). Where black queers now have “quare,” we must also acknowledge the other oppressed minorities now. How does “queer” fail to recognize the struggles of trans people, and especially trans people of color? Johnson’s analysis of the incredibly damaging lack of intersectional identities in regards to race reveals the ways in which privileged people within the community must take it upon themselves to change queer theory to include people whose identities are currently erased, but must do so through enabling the oppressed, not speaking for them.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer." The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013): n. pag. Print.
Cohen, C. J. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013): n. pag. Print.
Davis, Kimberly Chabot. "White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in "Hoop Dreams" and "Paris Is Burning"" JSTOR. South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Winter 1999. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
Green, Jesse. "Paris Has Burned." The New York Times. The New York Times, 17 Apr. 1993. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
Johnson, E. Patrick. ""Quare" Studies, or (almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother." Text and Performance Quarterly 21.1 (2001): 1-25. Print.
Mercer, Kobena. "Looking For Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe And The Fantasies Of Race."Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (1996): 278-86. Print.
Paris Is Burning. Dir. Jennie Livingston. Films Incorporated, 1991. Film.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013): n. pag. Print.
Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2008. Print.