Shaka McGlotten

ORDINARY INTERSECTIONS: SPECULATIONS ON DIFFERENCE, JUSTICE, AND UTOPIA IN BLACK QUEER LIFE1
Abstract
This essay speculates on three scenes from Black queer life: the murder of J.R. Warren, a young Black gay man in rural West Virginia; a startlingly concrete encounter with online racism in a gay chat room; and the incipiently erotic relationship that forms between two girls in a play about racial haunting. These speculations draw on recent articulations of aective ordinariness and reorient Kimberele Crenshaws notion of intersectionality toward the heady conuence of uneven and banal imaginings, forces, and longings that make so much of ordinary life signicant, including, especially, an animating if also incoherent sense of hopefulness. I argue for more nuanced theoretical conceptions of intersectionality and of the ordinary as an initial, tentative, and partial eort toward doing justice to the complexity and the promise of the lives we as anthropologists attempt to document. [Black, queer, anthropology, aect, intersectionality] rather than telescoping Black queer life as an accumulated series of injured eects of structural forces like racism or homophobia, these scenes oer insights for conceiving and rendering Black queer life as immanent, emergent, and hopeful. In particular, I look to the ways an aective attention to ordinary life complicates theories of intersectionality and the everyday, oering principles for engaging Black queer life that look to categorical mixing and blurring, what I call the bleed, as well as to the promise and failure that inhere in virtual worlds and aesthetic contexts. In this essay, I use weak theory,4 a mundane voice,5 and eclectic and nontraditional ethnographic archives, to cultivate a greater openness6 in our materialist imagination7 and that might be applied across the interdisciplinary study of gender, sexuality, and race. I argue for more nuanced theoretical conceptions of the intersectionality of everyday life not out of a desire for new and improved or more robust (that is, strong) theories of racial and sexual dierence, but as an initial, tentative, and partial eort toward tracking the ways Blackness and queerness are experienced as meaningful through the ways they are felt; doing justice to the complexity and the promise of the lives we as anthropologists attempt to explain; and attending to the immanence of hopefulness even in scenes of traumatic violence. This essay is divided into two parts. In the rst, I explore some of the intellectual genealogies and theoretical terrains I suggest might be especially useful for the still (and I would argue, necessarily futurally) inchoate formation called Black queer anthropology. In particular, I consider speculation, intersectionality, and aective ordinariness and the possibilities and limits that constellate around these approaches. In this rst section, I am especially concerned with ways we might recongure our arguments about dierence and simultaneity, how growing alternative ethnographic modes of attention can help us render yet more complex and expansively possible the lives

INTRODUCTION Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging aects, impacts suered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things. It grows wary and excited.2 This essay examines theories of intersectionality, ordinary life, and aect to speculate on three seemingly disparate scenes of Black queernessa murder, an online chat, and a playthat perform moments of often-violent interracial contact that are simultaneously shocking and banal. Against expectations, these scenes do not conrm the certainty of categorical distinctions, injustice, or the impossibility of utopia. Instead, using lateral reasoning and reparative reading,3 I suggest that

Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 20, Number 1, pp. 4566, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01146.x.

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we engage as anthropologists. Here, I suggest that while notions of intersectionality and the everyday have performed powerful analytic work for scholars of culture, they falter precisely when they attempt to make coherent the heady conuence of uneven, disruptive, and banal imaginings, forces, and longings that comprise ordinary life. I oer aective ordinariness as one way of framing and grappling with the hopefulness that propels so much of the everyday art of making do and to the forms of experience and material life that stubbornly resist epistemological capture. Aect, like the bleed or virtuality, indexes the challenge of describing turbulent8 states and capacities that inconstantly cleave to the words we use to represent the world. Emotions, especially those related to attachment, are especially illustrative here: they jump in and between bodies and public and private social strata, tend toward internal inconsistency and ambivalence rather than certainty and closure, and are simultaneously sites for the agentive and structural exercise of power.9 In the second part of the essay, I elaborate these themes through three case studies in which I labor to render scenes from Black queer life, including my own, in which Black queerness emerges not as a congealed eect of particular forms of racial or sexual identications or practices, but as glimpsed snapshots of dynamically interactive processual movement and entangled moments of encounter. In these scenes, I use aective ordinariness as one strategy to breath Black queer life dierently.10 THEORIZING BLACK QUEER ANTHROPOLOGY Speculating Black, Speculating Queer (Routes, Genealogies) Speculation provokes and makes space, suggesting modes of critical practice that approach matter and materiality as interrogative rather than merely obdurate.11 That is, speculation asks questions, and it makes room for theoretical and methodological (and attendantly ethical) treatments of worlds and embodied senses as relations that come alive insofar as they ask questions of one another. Etymologically, of course, speculation is intimately tied to seeingto speculums, spectacles, and the spectacular, as well as to mediation, exposure, and risk. In the context of this essay, speculation therefore represents a sustained eort to see or, more apropos, to feel, things (life or anthropology) differently and, in a more unruly register, to resist 46 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

the impulse to settle down too quickly into various intellectual postures, disciplinary positions, or institutional sites. Risky and promissory, speculation moreover nestles the failure to deliver alongside the promise of a return. And, as one refraction of several imbricated weak theories I outline in this essay, speculation overreaches. Indeed, part of my task here to make promises I cant deliver on, but which nonetheless cultivate interest12speculation asks, what if? What if speculation oered a useful point of view for drawing together or, as the editors to Black Queer Studies put it, how Black and queer epistemologies interanimate13? What if these connections went beyond observing the ways Blacks and queers are both subject to the violent eects of a wide eld of normalization14 that materializes as site[s] of social violence15 like racism or heternormativity or both? What if speculation helped us to think about the many material ways Blackness and queerness are epistemologically and ontologically tied through the particular ways they are simultaneously open and constrained, sensed and worlded, zones of indeterminacy? What if speculation brought about a range of aective modes of analyses that learned to recognize Blackness and queerness less through seeing and exposure than through feeling those moments saturated with an energetic ontological swishiness or funk? Speculation is a critical mode that does not always get its due, especially within social sciences like anthropology, where we are both sensitive and ambivalent about our relationship to the objectivity implied by the term science. Of course, many of us have come to recognize the ways our work evidences a host of disciplinary and personal biases (of race, gender, and class, among others), the limits of particular methods (oral history, ethnography, or statistics), and the challenges present in what is ostensibly our task as anthropologists: the rendering, typically derived from direct engagement with people in their particular lived circumstances, of social reality and relationships through a close attention to social structures, political articulations, economic ows, and cultural expressions. As a discipline, the reexive and narrative turns of the 1980s and 1990s, and especially the work by many feminists, people of color, and postcolonial subjects, have highlighted many of the lacunae and tensions in such over-arching, if also often implicit, goals, from the gap between the Real and its mediation, to the many layers of interpretive and translative work that goes into encoding and decoding accounts of the experiences of our interlocutors

and our own in the eld, to the ways the knowledges we produce bear on pressing social issues.16 For me, speculation represents one, still underdeveloped, lineage of these contributions. Again, perhaps our sensitivity to our elds complex colonial histories and our desire to talk about things as they really are on the ground have precluded other, riskier sorts of engagements with, for example, other elements (air/re/liquid/ metal), states (actual/virtual, present/absent), capacities (contraction/expansion, agency/constraint), and levels (shiny/dull, textured/smooth).17 Suggestive, promissory, qualied, interrogative, dispersed, speculation doesnt however necessarily represent a willy-nilly embracing of any or all possible theories about life and culture, but rather a reminder that a broader eld of possibility for articulating the disciplines central questions and rendering social life remains available and at least partially unrealized. Or, drawing on the tropes of speculative ction, I might say that speculation oers a way of looking at things in their incipience, at things that havent happened yet, or are only just emergent, that are, for now anyway, largely conned to unrealized futures, futures that might variously be more distant or nearer than wed like, a politics of what Jose Munoz, drawing on a manifesto by the group Third World Gay Revolution and the work of Ernst Bloch, calls the not yet conscious.18 Speculation, then, represents a zone in which the theoretical, methodological, and narrative routes and destinations resist being snapped into what Deleuze and Guattari call ready-made paths.19 It represents, as well, a particular stance or mode of contemplation that belongs to both Black and queer epistemologies. In an essay that overlaps with several of the key concerns of my own eorts here, Phillip Brian Harper argues that the indeterminacy of minority experiences induce speculation and felt knowledges that are contemplative as well as exhausting because [minority experience] continually renders even the most routine instances of social activity and personal interaction as possible cases of invidious social distinction or discriminatory treatment.20 Speculative indeterminacy is also queer (and part of queers promise21), a way of looking at things askance, or backwards, a way of looking at things that dwells too long on the surface of things or gets xated on apparently insignicant details, or that stubbornly oers minor rather than major structural readings. At the very least, to speculate Black, to speculate queer, is to insistently put Black and

queer in tension with themselves and with one another, to unsettle them, to resist their reication and the often predictable meanings that accompany those reications. To speculate Black, to speculate queer is to recuperate meanings that have been lost, abandoned, or forgotten, as well as project onto them meanings that might appear untimely, inappropriate, or incoherent. My eorts in this regard are not particularly unique. Indeed, for many scholars of Blackness and queerness, these fuzzy denitions are foundational Blackness is dialectically produced, historically specic, geographically diverse, dierently embodied, simultaneously referring to lifeworlds, cultural expressions, styles, attitudes, and modes of being.22 In much of this work, Blackness is understood as performatively and dialogically produced and across a broad range of social, political, economic, mediated elds. Likewise, in many of the dening texts of queer theory, queer simultaneously refers to persons who embody and enact forms of gender and sexual nonconformity, to the open mesh of possibilities in which gender and sex do not signify monolithically, and to the unpredictable or novel ways sexuality articulate with race and nationality.23 Speculation animates the discussion that follows, proliferating dierences and modes of conceptualizing them. It takes another register aective ordinarinessas one possible route for making meaningful the creative art of making do the and the signicance of feelings as an authenticating eld for our own liveness, that is feelings, even and especially the ambivalent or dispersed or incoherent ones, animate our sense of being alive and a part of worlds that matter. Speculation imagines worlds and cultivates an astonished contemplation. Aective Ordinariness [T]o have a body is to learn to be aected, meaning eectuated, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans24 This essay is situated in relation to a broader intellectual interest in aect that has cut across the humanities over about the last ten years and, more recently, the social sciences, in a range of critical feminist and queer projects.25 Largely, this body of work has drawn on psychoanalytically inected ideas like trauma, haunting, shame, mourning, and melancholy to highlight the ways emotions and emotionality structure individual and collective Shaka McGlotten 47

psychic and political life.26 Briey parsing this body of literature, I want to point to a handful of key insights that emerge and that matter for critical Black as well as feminist and queer studies: publics and counterpublic spheres are constituted in and through shared forms of address and anities; key debates about gender, race, sexuality and other forms of dierence (e.g., porn, gay marriage, armative action, abortion) are increasingly framed as zero sum games dened by the congealing of opposed emotional elds; trauma, melancholy, and haunting are structuring structures that give lie to notions of self-same subjectivity, rational political discourse, or state or national coherence.27 At rst glance, this aective turn might appear to encourage a shift toward a micropolitics of life, and in a range of formal and informal contexts, it is this reorientation that is variously celebrated and decried. In anthropological contexts, it is celebrated for the ways it recenters the subjective experiences of our interlocutors as at the heart of the ethnographic project and decried as a touch-feely excursus from more pressing global political issues like global trade, the engineered production and collapse of nation states, the implementation of neoliberal social and economic policies, or environmental destruction. However, as work by scholars in the loosely dened Public Feelings group show, aect circulates in and among public as well as private worlds, across levels of politics, culture, and economy. Aect matters because it puts lots of things into movement, not just our own little worlds, as in the jumps from mourning to militancy, shame to pride, or trauma to reparation.28 Much of this work, like much academic criticism more generally, is situated within the rubric of negative critique or what Ricouer called a hermeneutic of suspicion and what Eve Sedgwick wryly described as a paranoid practice of reading. As this very cursory overview demonstrates, there has been much less emphasis on positive aects. When I asked David Eng, who has written about racial melancholia, loss, and haunting, about this trend after a lecture he delivered at the University of Texas, he quipped, in a variation on a famous bumper sticker, If youre not depressed, youre not paying attention. In other, more recent contexts, Barbara Ehrenreich argues against ideologies of positive thinking, suggesting that in part that the conuence of American optimism, religious or New Age hokum, and consumer capitalism reects a collective desire to escape reality, and that skepticism continues to oer intellectual, political, and 48 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

ethical merit.29 Yet the candidacy and election of President Obama, which depended on a real and imagined politics of sincerity and hope, or the success of books like The Secret, or even the utterly irrational speculative optimisms that structured much of the discourse of the Bush era and that appears responsible in no small part for the current nancial crisis, suggest that the power of positive aect matters a good deal and not only because they reect, as in much critical thinking inspired by Marxism or even in Ehrenreichs popular debunking, forms of false consciousness. In this essay and other recent and forthcoming work,30 I approach social events and formations with a critical attention to the ways power generatively transforms, and its mutually intensifying capacity to inuence social and individual aects without overdetermining them.31 I am thereby work toward recuperating positive aects, even through the use of negative examples. Optimism and hopefulness, or pleasure and joy, arent only cruelly permitted or enforced by religious, political, or economic hegemonies, but are sincerely employed and lived. How might a Black queer anthropology do justice to these more utopian emotional phenomenologies, or to the many ones that dont fall far at either end, like habits, dreamy forms of attention, or even boredom? That the ways people feel are important might seem like an obvious point, and most ethnographic work at rst glance seems to incorporate informants feelings, something that might often be more parsed in suitably academic jargon as our informants subjective experiences or desires. But while a body of literature on emotionality exists within anthropology,32 most anthropologists have been slow to draw on the Deleuzian and Spinozian articulations of aect that have become increasingly employed in cultural studies.33 This approach, strictly speaking, distinguishes feelings, emotions, and aects. As Eric Shouse parses these distinctions, feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are socially performed and circulating forms of feelings, and aects are pre-subjective or pre-personal experience[s] of intensity.34 This conceptualization of aect is especially important for the ways it identies the capacity and power to put things into movement, to induce cascading and mutually intensifying changes.35 Currently, Kathleen Stewarts Ordinary Aects is the only ethnographic text centrally organized around aect. In this text, Stewart poetically evokes an argument for an ethnographic mode of attention that closely attends to the ways a range of

aective statesfrom agitation and arousal, to stillness and repetition, to wandering and addiction help shape both the texture of ordinary life and the ways life is made meaningful. As Stewart describes it, The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life.36 For Stewart and for myself, one of the values of aectively saturated conception of ordinariness is the way it can approach but not fully represent or capture some of the aective dimensions of life, that is, the ways feelings as they are privately felt and publicly circulated shape some of the meatiest aspects of our personhood and shared social realities. Attending to ordinary aects does not then see aects, feelings, or emotions simply as the function and eect of things like neoliberalism or globalization or political economy. This is one of the ways an attention to aective ordinariness might be distinguished from the more commonly deployed terms like intersectionality or everyday life, terms that, as I outline below, tend to emphasize the systemic eects of large scale structures rather than the ways feelings erupt and circulate in and through the most intimate and the most public social, economic, and political worlds. As Stewart puts it: the terms neo-liberalism, advanced capitalism and globalization that index this emergent present, and the ve or seven or ten characteristics used to summarize and dene it in shorthand, do not, in themselves, begin to describe the situation we nd ourselves in. The notion of a totalized system of which everything is always already somehow a part, is not helpful (to say the least) in the eort to approach a weighted and reeling present. This is not to say that the forces these systems try to name are not real and literally pressing.37

Ordinary Intersections That life is complicated is a theoretical statement that guides eorts to treat race, class, and gender dynamics and consciousness as more dense and delicate than those categorical terms imply38 Kimberle Crenshaws widely inuential conception of intersectionality helped identify the ways women of color were subordinated through violence and the systems of oppression that explic-

itly and tacitly approved that violence.39 The tacit approval includes those various mechanisms that function to make women of color, and the particular conuence of misogyny and racism that aect them, invisible. Intersectionality has enjoyed widespread use in identifying the ways women of color are subject to multiple forms of oppression in everyday ways and in conceptualizing more broadly the mutual interdependence of social hierarchies in the production of identities and political economy. Intersectionality, represented by the familiar mantra of race, class, gender or the universalizing alphabet soup approach to gender and sexuality, has enjoyed tropic dominance, a short hand for describing the everyday injustices faced by women of color, and especially Black women. Without devaluing the considerable and important work done on intersectionality or on the lives of Black women and the layered patterns of violence they experience, I speculate on whether intersectionality is entirely sucient in making sense of or doing justice to the scope and scale of the dreams and desires, or violence and despair, that seem to me to constitute so much of the stu of everyday life. My disidentication40 with intersectionality has to do with the ways it conceives of identitarian and categorical simultaneity, often telescoping complex lived phenomenologies as the narrow eects of structural forces. Cultural theorists Tavia Nyongo and Jasbir Puar share this skepticism.41 Responding to sociologist Cathy Cohens critique of the ways queer politics failed to incorporate intersectional analyses of race and class, Nyongo uses the encounter between punk and queer to reanimate intersectionality as a heuristic that deconstructs and opens up categorical certainties rather than arm them.42 Nyongo writes, It is not enough, in other words, to take up the simultaneity of race, class, gender, and sexuality . . . [r]ather, we must investigate the subject transformed by law that nevertheless exists nowhere within it, the gure of absolute abjection that is, paradoxically, part of our everyday experience.43 And Jasbir Puar oers up the Deleuzian assemblage as an alternative to intersectionality: As opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes componentsrace, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religionare separable analytics and can be thus disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherence, and permanency.44 Nyongo, in using the metaphor to draw our attention to the abject gure aected by but not Shaka McGlotten 49

included in the formal practices of legal recognition, wryly observes out that in a landscape long given over to automotivity, the intersection is a place of particular hazard for the pedestrian45 (30). I likewise nd the literalization of the metaphor of the intersection compellingly awkward. On the one hand, the image of the street of intersecting dierences is a provocative meditation clearly linked to an urban time and space, an ongoing now in which Black and queer bodies navigate public worlds with a heightened sense of awareness to potential threats, including surveillance technologies, social hostility, and exclusion. At the same time, the metaphor has clear limits are the converging streets the structuring social, cultural, economic categories that produce the subject/pedestrian? The forces that impact her? In a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the key elements of structural and political intersectionality, Crenshaw includes a slide that visualizes an Intersectional Accident in which the streets of postcoloniality, racism, and patriarchy converge on a vague gure in the middle of the road. And the banner ad of an UCLA and Thomas Jeerson School of Law co-sponsored event likewise features the green street signs of racism, classism, ableism, heteroxism and others pointing to the road of intersectionality. If theories of intersectionality work to identify the structural inequalities that shape everyday life as a world of violence, unequal access, and limited or nonexistent resources punctuated by a range of minor resistances, then everyday life comes to refer only to those forms of life lived under the conditions of what bell hooks has famously called White supremacist capitalist patriarchy or, in the dominant critical Marxist perspective, advanced or late capitalism.46 This tends to subsume what I take to be some of the critical stu of life, the something else-ness47 of life the ephemeral, intangible, or incoherent modes of awareness, attunement, stillness, wanting, wandering (or wondering), habits, and dreaming, in short, those aective and phenomenological orientations that are the often unreected upon form and content of daily life.48 Thinking about what matters in my own life or in witnessing and recording what has mattered in the lives of my interlocutors, it is not only the force of dominant social structures but the ways experiencing those forces feel and the ways those feelings infold and expand throughout a range of interiorities and social worlds. This particular speculative route has special relevance for a critical Black anthropology. In my 50 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

reading, Black studies has historically been especially attuned to the deeply felt forms of cultural expression and their articulation with larger histories of race and class.49 In the evolving history of Black anthropology and the larger discipline theres been an awkward relationship to emotionality.50 The tendency to view Black people as overly emotional was also applied to key early voices in the discipline. This and the pressures of professionalizing within ostensibly meritocratic structures have led many Black anthropologists of Black life to focus more exclusively on concrete material conditions, whether to outline the continued power of structural racisms, the living traces of colonialism, or to continuities and dierences in mass-mediated processes of global racial formation.51 This tendency represents more than professional demands, too, and responds to the real experiences of crises of violence, wealth, incarceration, and so on, across so many Black diasporic contexts. However, it is important not to overstate this admittedly perceived tendency. Indeed, not only do many Black anthropologists attend to Black structures of feeling, many also situate themselvestheir personal voices, histories, and motivationsin their ethnographic treatments of Black life.52 In general, though, in anthropology, race has been focused squarely within the concerns of the real world and recent disciplinary trends that grapple with structuring structures (globalization, neoliberalism, and so on) and not in the generally less quantiable realm of feeling. Yet the sort of attention to ordinariness I argue for here, one framed through the powers and capacities to be intimately aected, oers important benets to ethnographic work on Black life and culture. Insofar as the ordinary registers singular experiences of aective intensities that emerge in relation to a heterogeneous material world, it provides one means among others of making sense of the creative, vital, and often powerfully hopeful ways people engage in the everyday art of making do, the practices of organizing feelings and realities of loss and longing, of struggle and transcendence, and all the other disparate aspects of a life into a life that is literally livable and that always promises something more.53 Aective ordinariness doesnt solve the problem of intersectionality or constrained readings of the everyday. But in the scenes that follow I nonetheless oer it as part of lateral eorts to complicate the materialist positivism at the juridical heart of the intersectional project, and, again, to

nourish interest as an optimistic opening into politics that are not yet of politics. Each scene highlights the challenge of making coherent the everyday ways desire and violence congeal in ways that matter to both Black and queer worlds (and their simultaneity). They each illustrate a speculative approach to theorizing and methodologically approaching these worlds, an approach I want to do better justice to them. And they each narrate scenes of shocking impacts, which I resolutely read against the grain, hoping to glimpse the hopefulness immanent in ordinary life (even and especially when it is violent) and the not-yet-conscious worlds and utopian politics that might animate them. CASE STUDIES Scene 1: The Murder of Arthur J.R. Warren In the rst scene, I narrate the July 2000 murder of Black gay Arthur J.R. Warren by two young White men in Grant Town, West Virginia. While the media and the law attened out the cases complexity and reproduced static notions of identityJ.R. became a gay Black victim while his killers became straight White menI argue that the murder resists such neat categorization and is best rendered by the bleed, a conception of difference as a messy and violent mixing of categories. In the rst scene, intersectionality neither does justice to the complex factors that resulted in J.R. Warrens murder nor oers sucient analytic traction for apprehending its interpretation. Here, I speculate on the aective intersections that bound J.R. and his murderers and, insofar as I nd anities between J.R. and my own life, as well as the narratives of other Black queer men, I also lay claim to other, even perversely utopic, implications of this vehement event. In Grant Town, West Virginia, on the eve of Independence Day in 2000, two17-year-old young White men beat 26-year-old Black, gay Arthur J. R. Warren almost to death after he accused one of them of taking 20 dollars from his wallet. Thinking him dead, David Parker and Jared Wilson, along with a third younger witness, put J.R. into the back of Parkers Camaro and drove him out near the old power station, where J.R., still alive, begged to be let out. The boys took him out of the car and then drove over his body four times to make their assault appear like a hit and run. Bones broken, liver nearly cut in half, his pelvis crushed, J.R. Warren died on the road by the old power plant. The next day, when a boy on his paper route found J.R.s body, he at rst mistook it for roadkill.

This is a terrible story, and one that doesnt seem to oer any particular insight into ordinariness, hope, or justice. It surges into consciousness as an extraordinarily tragic crime, one whose impact risks triggering a despair organized around what seems like the impossibility of transcending homophobic and racial violences. Initially the crime attracted national media attention in large part due to calls made to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) by a member of the West Virginia Lesbian and Gay Coalition angered by the Marion County Sheris Departments refusal to consider whether J.R. Warrens sexual orientation played a role in his murder. In the July 7, 2000 Dominion Post, Sheri Ron Watkins said, We have no indication that it was a hate crime.54 And on CNN two days later, he elaborated, In none of the statements that I received, no one that Ive talked to thereafter has ever indicated to me that [the murders] cause was sexuality or the color of his skin. Until I receive that evidence, I cant very well say it was a hate crime.55 Watkins refusal to admit the possibility of hate as a motivating factor in J.R.s murder became a rallying cry for gay and lesbian lobbying organizations such GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, as well as the NAACP, and word of the crime subsequently spread through national media outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post. The FBI denes a hate crime as a traditional oense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.56 And in 2000, gay and lesbian rights organizations, in the wake of the murders of Mathew Shepard in Wyoming and James Byrd in Texas, were working furiously to have sexual orientation included in federal hate crimes statutes. J.R.s murder was from the outset overdetermined, situated within a war of discourses about what categories of dierence warranted inclusion within hate crimes laws. This war of discourses oered a range of what Foucault calls ready-made synthesesfrom the conservative rights resistance to gay and lesbian special rights to the conviction among leftists that the murder of a Black gay man like Warren made sense only through the lens of anti-Black and antigay bias. The NAACPs statement evidences the way this event was snapped into already circulating and highly charged narratives about structural violence: Our preliminary inquiry clearly shows that bias served as a motivation for this heinous act and the NAACP wants to make certain that both the state and federal authorities are actively Shaka McGlotten 51

engaged in a full-scale investigation in treating this as a hate crime. This certainty resonates with J. R.s mother Brenda Warrens query on CNN, If its not hate, what is it? I just want someone to tell me what it is.57 Her tearful question at once arms the surety that racist and homophobic sentiment fueled the murder of her son and keeps open the possibility that these vehement passions might not achieve narrative closure.58 While major national media outlets and local and national lobbying groups brought considerable attention to J.R.s murder, resulting in a widely publicized vigil (itself attended by anti-gay pastor Fred Phelps), within less that a year J.R.s murder faded from the national consciousness in sharp contradistinction to the murders of Mathew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. This forgetting occurred not only because of the vagaries of media attention or public disinterest in justice for a poor Black faggot but because of the ways evidence from the trial of Parker and Wilson undid the sutured story of intersectional violence, the narrative in which J.R. gured as an innocent victim of racist and homophobic violence. Walter Benjamin says that the truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it.59 In the narrative sketch that follows, I draw on a range of sourcesnewspaper accounts, court transcripts, anecdotal accounts from a trip to Grant Town, and visual analysisto oer a series of speculations that might do some kind of justice to J.R.s murder through an attunement to the aective lifeworlds these young men shared. David Parker and J.R. Warren grew up together, and they grew up poor. David was a troubled kid and J.R., an older Black boy, one of very few openly gay people in Grant Town. J. R. was disabled too, small for his age, with some not wholly diagnosed learning disability, and only three ngers on his right hand. As the murder trial progressed, testimony revealed that Parker and Warren had had sex dozens of times over the previous ve years. And it was precisely this intimacy that was key to the murder and to its forgetting. Parker and Wilson killed J.R. not because they were racists or homophobes (certainly not only) but because they feared that J.R. would expose them to a homophobic gaze that would perceive them as queer. For the lobbying groups J.R. was no longer an appropriate poster child for hate crimes laws, and for the law, the punishments for the murderers of a Black pedophile were likely less severe than those meted out 52 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

for the murder of an innocent victim of a hatefuelled attack. Dierence in this instance, then, isnt best characterized by intersectionality (which would hope to make sense of Warrens murder through the intersection of his race and sexuality and perhaps the class status of all of the young men) but by what I call the bleed, a violent and messy dissolution of categories in which things like identities or desires or, even and especially, violence bleed into one another in ways that are terrible, but also generative and vital. From an intersectional point of view, or any other meta-structural analysis for that matter, the murder can only be apprehended through the ways it reects and reproduces other structural forms of violence. In my own earliest grappling with this murder, I understood it in terms of ritual violence and scapegoating. In that reading, the violence Parker and Wilson enact refracted larger social anxieties about racial and queer intimacies. J.R. was what Rene Girard would call a sacricial surrogate,60 a gure whose exile or death stands in for another more authentic sacricial object or ideal, the source of social cohesion and anxiety, in this case the (however limited) privileges and powers aorded persons who are White and straight. Yet this reading, like the discourses of hate crimes among many activists and media outlets, fails to account for all of the large and small ways the young men had encountered one another in public and intimate settings over many years. It fails to imagine that this terrible explosion of violence was situated in a more complicated emotional and sexual history than homophobia and racism alone would suggest, as well as the particular political, economic, and geographic histories of the failed mining town where they lived, histories that both facilitated and made taboo the sorts of intergenerational and interracial intimacies lived by Parker and Warren in particular. The utopian possibilities of sex, including and perhaps especially transgressive sex, have been variously celebrated and derided within and outside of queer studies. BDSM writer and critic Pat Calia has famously said, we cannot fuck our way to freedom,61 observing that while the dominant erotophobic culture understand minority forms of sex62 to have enormous disruptive potential,63 its unlikely that fucking will help us to obtain more than playful comfort. Yet a number of Black gay cultural producers have suggested that sexuality, especially those sexual encounters that transgress lines of dierence, contain a transformative

force that moves within and beyond ephemeral moments of contact. Robert Reid-Pharr, for example, describes the ways his critical life depends on a visceral, self-concerned, self-pleasuring bases form much of my activity as a left intellectual.64 He goes on to describe the disruptive image of one of his favorite sex partners, Rick, an ugly, poor, white trash southerner, with a scandalously thick Kentucky accent65: When he comes, usually standing over me, jerking hard at his dick and making those strange moon faces, the liquid spills out almost like an accident. He drawls, Goddam, Goddam, as the goo hits my skin.66 And elsewhere, Reid-Pharr considers the posthumously published journals of Gary Fisher and Fishers descriptions of sex with dominant White tops as a powerful way of understanding the ways Blackness continues to be dialogically produced by the white master.67 Yet Reid-Pharr makes this point not to condemn Fisher or bemoan the insurmountability of the master-slave dialectic, but to emphasize the ways Fisher brings the fraught, but also absolutely ordinary, entanglements of racialized sex into discourse, thereby providing us the opportunity to imagine new ways of articulating self and other, black and white.68 In his novel, Traitor to the Race, and the essay, Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom,69 Darieck Scott likewise attends to intimacies between Black and White men. In the essay, he critically examines Joseph Beams famous admonition that Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the 1980s. In Scotts reading, some strands of Black gay identity politics uncritical imagining of Black men loving one another as the only route to the utopian bedroom sometimes masks a partial refusal to engage in the politics of direct confrontations with the forces (racism and homophobia, and all the conditions and events which create, reinvent, and redeploy them in their various guises) that necessitate the creation of strategic identity.70 He describes the ways a vulnerability engendered by a friends ohand comment about Scotts potential interest in White dick leads to a more nuanced reection on Black mens desire for White men. Scott writes, White dick is socially and historically represented to us as potency; it is power, and power is sexy, just as sex can be the exercise of poweror rather just as sex can be the interplay of relatively empowered and relatively disempowered roles, roles that can become all the more erotically charged when the markers of dierent kinds of power, gender/race/sexuality, are

acknowledged.71 Later, after acknowledging that his own lover is White, Scott argues that interracial relationships have no intrinsic meaning in them, no pre-xed epistemological certainty: My aim here is not to be a spokesman for interracial relationships but to explode the way in which interracial relationships are currently understood to be a cognizable category, an intelligible symbol and rhetoric.72 Each of these thinkers, like myself, in turn has been inspired and challenged by the work of Samuel Delany, who reframes what would variously be described as merely transgressive or kinky sex as an ethical commitment to more politically and aectively expansive queer worlds, worlds of engagement and encounter that are both produced and sustained by interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.73 Among his most provocative and dicult to parse texts is his novel Hogg, which was unpublishable until 1995. The book is narrated by an apparently White, but likely interracial, 11-yearold boy, unnamed except as cocksucker, who joins a crew of rape artists lead by the eponymous Hogg. The novel explosively exposes and confronts beliefs about sexual power and agency through brutal depictions of violence against women (Hoggs crew is hired to exact vengeance on women) and pedophilia (the narrator begins the novel as a prostitute servicing a group of bikers and Black men, and later willingly serves as Hoggs cum and piss slave). Satire, excess, nausea, and vertigo, much less intersectionality, all underdescribe the narrative and aective import of the novel. Delanys provocation is to imagine an unlikely but not impossible world and to explore its ethical lineaments without recourse to easy judgment.74 For me part of being repeatedly drawn to J. R.s murder means being drawn to speculative scenes of transgressive intimacies. Reading accounts of J.R. and talking to people who knew him, I picture a vulnerable young man with big brown eyes who looked and acted years younger than his age. Reading the coroners report, I picture the wild violence that Parker and Wilson exact on J.R. And reading about the trial and the court transcripts, I picture dozens of sweet and desperate scenes of erotic contact between J.R. Warren and David Parker, moments hidden from view or maybe in plain sight if folks had been looking. I picture almost accidental and then more purposeful blowjobs, the fumbling negotiation of cock and ass and the oral bloom of cum, the Shaka McGlotten 53

stink of desire revealed in the blush of a pale face, and caresses that gesturally evidence heartfelt care. This real and imagined intimacy between the boys, because or in spite of its terrible aftermath, thus remains for me the site for productive, even hopeful, reection. Speculating on possible scenes of desire between David Parker and J.R. Warren, on scenes that variously speak to the ordinary and also utopic possibility of interracial and intergenerational intimacies, or to the ordinariness of pedophilic desire and sexual abuse, it becomes possible to dwell in the bleed, a queer space where the desire and violence that animate everyday life might be better given their due (Figure 1). In February of 2007, I traveled to Grant Town to speak on a panel organized around an exhibition by artist Rory Golden, See Related Story. Golden, like me, had been drawn to J.R.s murder, and he moved to Grant Town to learn more about his life and the social world that made Parker and Wilsons assault possible. Golden eectively conducted ethnographic research in Grant Town, living in and talking with community and family members and creating a body of work that juxtaposes the brief but intense media coverage and activist interest with more local stories and, importantly, his own speculations. In his images, which are layered with text and impressionistic images taken from life and the media, these stories and speculations are framed as essential, rather than causal, because deeply felt clues to the power of racism and homophobia, to the ways these things saturate and bleed into ordinary life. The resulting multi-media installation featured two sided images with drawings on one side and text on the other. Gallery visitors could read the text by positioning themselves in relation to rear-view

mirrors spread throughout the gallery. Like J.R.s killers, the audience looked backward and askance, through a reection, to approach J.R.s life and death. In Torso, Golden juxtaposes a rendering of the coroners report with gestural evocations of scientic dissection and splashes of blood, repetitive suggestions of collars, with an erotically enticing but leashed second Black gure. Evaluative analysis, violence, and stubborn sensuality resist reduction to simplistic narratives about race, sexuality, and violence. The mirrored text repeatedly asks, What else could it be? In Goldens work, the truth, or some small part of the truth, of J.R.s life and death, then, is less exposed as a matter of racist and homophobic violence than revealed as a more complexly lived and ambivalent history of ordinary aects. Scene 2: Hey Nigger@Gay.com The second scene, and the only one that can be deemed specically ethnographic (it is both largely autoethnographic and virtual75 at that) comes from my eldwork in the gay virtual sex publics of Austin, Texas and examines a startlingly concrete encounter with virtual racism. In my eldwork, I focused on the ways virtual sex publics were transforming life, love, and sex among gay men. In particular, I sought to understand the relationships between the disappearance of spaces used for public sex eected through policies of urban redevelopment and the rise of new online publics like those at gay.com. In this research, I found that these real and virtual worlds were mutually constituted and entangled; they bled into one another. Part of my ongoing task in examining spaces and scenes of what I call virtual intimacy centers on tracking the promiscuous ways

Figure 1. Torso, Rory Golden (Mixed Media).

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identities, practices, and, increasingly aects, circulate and ow in and across real and virtual domains and registers. Although, as I discuss below, I argue for maintaining an analytic distinction between the real and the virtual, the undeniably changing nature of socialitythe ways in which it is simultaneously shaped through forms of sensual embodiment, technological augmentation, and shifting modes of awareness and attentionsuggest that these distinctions are increasingly tenuous. In what follows, I narrate how the utopic promise of cyberspace that informed my research was tempered but not exhausted by an encounter with a racist request for interracial sex. My initial ethnographic work in virtual spaces like those at gay.com emphasized the promise of virtual queerspaces in relatively unproblematic ways. I was interested in the ways the Internet, and, in particular, the anonymity one enjoyed there, enabled queer identities, or, more accurately, dierent queer performances of the self. Situated within the playful and performative modes of a particular moment of queer theory,76 then, I looked to the Internet as a space in which gender and sexual identities might be articulated in heretofore unforeseen ways, and, importantly, with much greater freedom than in real life. The anonymity of these new technologies represented, in my view and the views of many others, the possibility for new, more democratic and hopeful ways to live, to actively construct subjectivity and community, and to relate to oneself and to others. This optimistic entree into virtual space was informed in no small part by the possibilities oered for the uid transformation of identities of all sorts, but especially gendered and racialized ones. As the editors of Race in Cyberspace observe of this now much complicated view, The most prominent of these arguments is the by now familiar assertion that online environments facilitate fragmentation of identity. Mark Poster, Allu cquere Rosanne Stone, and Sherry Turkle (to name but a very few) began writing in the early to mid-1990s about the multiple and dispersed self in cyberspacea uid subject that traversed the wires of electronic communication venues and embodied, through its virtual disembodiment, postmodern subjectivity (5). One night, a year or so after my rst experiences in interactive online environments, and still very much inspired and informed by the possibilities more than the constraints of cyberspace, I had only been logged on to gay.com for a short time

when I got a private chat message that opened with the line, Nigger you want to suck some dick? Sure, I know racism is ordinary, but it still came as a shock to me. Earlier that day I had changed the information about my race and ethnicity on my personal prole at gay.com. For the rst year or so I had used gay.com chatrooms for research and pleasure, it was only possible to select one racial identity category: I could be Black or White or mixed. And for that rst year I chose, through a complex series of personal and ideological negotiations, to identify myself as mixed. This ambivalent and laden decision was shaped by my own racial anxiety, the sense that race clearly mattered in online contexts, but in ways I was not yet equipped to understand. As one of my informants, August, a Black gay artist and activist put it, I didnt always feel like I understood the rules that had already been established because I was looking at it innocently. My own decision wasnt so innocent. I knew something was upmost of the chat room users were White and Black men rarely seemed to enter into the public chat room discussions. Moreover, unlike August, who, in his words, wasnt connecting the racial experience that I observe in the real world to online environments, I was especially attuned to the politics of race in the largely White and heavily spatially segregated social milieu of Austin, Texas and suspected that these patterns would be similarly reected in online spaces. Indeed, my felt intuition suggested that in Austin Black gay men were generally among the least desired romantic and sexual partners, while Whites were among the most desired, followed by Latinos.77 When oered to engage in no less politically fraught, but at least multiple forms of identity marking, I selected African/African American/ Black, White/European, and Mixed/Multi. And within a few hours, Id gone from mixed to nigger. In the now almost ten years since I was called nigger, I return to this experience, an event no less vital for having taken place in a chat-based interactive telecommunicative environment. The full text reveals in more detail the power of words that wound,78 my own capacity and even desire for racist and violent posturing, and the ways an aective impact can index the ways bodies are eectuated, moved, put into motion by other entities.79 Shaka McGlotten 55

<strongarms> nigger you want to suck some dick <shakaz> why do you think you can use the word nigger? <strongarms> well thats what you are <shakaz> and you? r u a cracker or a nigger? <strongarms> neither <strongarms> im anglo <strongarms> well you are a half breed arent you <shakaz> what does that mean to you? is it the same as redneck or honky or white trash? <strongarms> i just want you to suck my dick <shakaz> i want you to fuck o <strongarms> i want you to suck my dick <strongarms> youre my slave <shakaz> see my plantation fantasy usually goes like this . . . <shakaz> i fuck the white boy until he comes without touching his dick <strongarms> all niggers should be gassed < shakaz> after sucking your dick? <strongarms> yeah <shakaz> you sound like goebbels <strongarms> you want to suck my dick boy <shakaz> depends. do you have a small pink little white boy dick. or are u nigger hung? <strongarms> id like to shove it down your throat <shakaz> what do you do? <strongarms> i wanna fuck you <strongarms> thats what i want to do <strongarms> you interested in being my nigger or not <shakaz> no. u interested in getting the cum fucked out of you? <strongarms> how big is your dick <shakaz> big <strongarms> how big <strongarms> do you bottom

<shakaz> not for racist fuckers:) <strongarms> fuck you. i hate NIGGERS *strongarms left private chat. Exploring this exchange more fully would mean oering up an autobiographical and psychological narrative that might oer a range of insights into the phenomenology of my own particular Black queer life. At the same time, Im wary of autobiographys explanatory force and, tied to tendencies in the aforementioned phenomenology, to turn to the autobiographical when I dont understand something. Certainly, the personal has not only been political for feminist writers and thinkers but for nearly all of the queer men of color whose work presages my own and who likewise grapple with interracial encounters through the narrativization and analysis of those events. In Its a White Mans World, for example, Dwight McBride oers a collection of personal proles from the website m4m4sex.com as well as a series of anecdotes about encounters with White men that together evidence the unassailable preeminence of Whiteness in the gay marketplace of desire.80 He writes, gay white men know, and all of us who would have commerce in the marketplace know, that of all variables that circulate, none are more central and salient than the gift of racial whiteness. Whites know they have it, others know they will never have it, and virtually everyone wants it. This might be understood in the gay marketplace of desire as the main principle of doing business.81 Writing of racial cyber play he engaged in early gay.com chatrooms, Andil Gosine describes the freedom he experienced when he became Robbie: When I represented myself as an kind of nonwhite man in the chat rooms, my race almost always gured into users reactions. Whatever kind of non-white man I claimed to be, even opposed reactions referenced race; some respondents shut down conversations because I was non-white, others pursued me because I was Black/Indian/Chinese, etc. But as blonde, blue-eyed Robbie, I was normal, a complex human being whose behavior and personality were not necessarily read through racial tropes. No longer trapped in my skin, I was neither repulsive nor alluring because of

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it. I was not a member of a group but an individual. I was not a type and I spoke for no community but myself.82 Yet the powerfully experienced, albeit brief, enjoyment of White racial privilege had changed considerably by 2005. The commercialization of PlanetOuts holding increasingly promote[d] the creation of a stable identity through registration processes, subscription costs, demands for identity markers through photographs and the completion of menu-based proles. As cybertheorist Lisa Nakamura points out the demand to render legible identities in this way narrow[s] the choices of subject positions available.83 Both McBrides and Gosines accounts serve as reminders not only for the ways online as much as real world spaces of desire adhere even as they reformulate racial logics, but also of the feelings of injury that such persistent micro-aggressions induce. These accounts transmit an aective atmosphere84 that reactivates my own experiences of racial trauma and melancholia, inspiring, as demonstrated in the chat text above, my own desire to do injury to Whiteness and its individuated manifestations, and not just to those who would so directly attack me but to those people who have refused me, whose real and cybernetic gazes have so often smoothly passed me over without the least friction. In the context of my ethnographic research on sex and desire in real and virtual spaces, this encounter at rst appears to dissolve the distinctions between real and virtual worlds, and it appears to arm the overdetermined materialities of race and racism. Yet Im stubbornly attached to the promise of something else or something new in virtual worlds, and to a conviction that the certainty of the overdetermined might yet be recombined in compelling and politically hopeful ways. In their article on the impact of new webbased technologies on social life in Trinidad, Daniel Miller and Don Slater argue that computer mediated forms of communication represent essentially unchanged iterations of established cultural patterns of relating.85 They make this argument not to counter the widespread belief that somehow virtual technologies or communications are somehow less real than other, face-to-face means of communication, or that virtual technologies are in fact real, but, instead, to argue that the opposition of real and virtual is a kind of theoretical and methodological dead end. The opposition of real

and virtual [ . . . ] completely misses the complexity and diversity of relationships that people may pursue through the communicative media that they embed in their ongoing social lives.86 While its not hard to agree that relationships are complex and diverse, I also argue on behalf of an ethnographic attention to virtuality as an assemblage. This virtual ethnography would, then, be attuned to material formations as they are traditionally understood (means of production and scenes of consumption, the technological infrastructure of hardware and software, as well as the dialogic eects between virtual technologies and existing social formations), and to the virtual itself (the more intangible or unforeseen eects on social formations, but also the sense of incipience and promise that are the principal social weight87 of these technologies, like so many others). Of course, for social scientic work that seeks to cull and ground ethnographic data in objective social practices, this is at rst appears as dangerously ontological territory. Yet attending to the ways the Internet promised to change everything, even and especially the nature of the self, isnt to abandon a rigorous attention to those practices. Rather it is to focus with even greater emphasis on the ways in which the utopic promise of the Internet is embedded in the diverse aective materialities of ordinary life. It is, after all, the promise that things might still be dierent that keep us coming back for more (whether its more contact, more work, more hookups, more Facebook, or more online gaming). It also demands a turbulent material imagination, an expansive and lateral approach to what counts as material, or a materialist account of the world. Even if hey nigger changed a lot for me, it did not wholly exhaust the virtuals potential. Even as my prior investments in the transformative promise of the anonymity and racial cosmopolitanism of the Internet cracked under the forceful recognition that the virtual was not going to be free from dierence, or the anxiety and desire that dierence provokes, this did not collapse other sorts of real and yet-unrealized eects and eventualities. I did not fuck strongarms, but I did fuck the cum out of other White boys (usually without any conscious desire for retributive sexual aggression, I should add). I formed other on and oine relationships. And, though aected, my desire to seek a range of contacts and encounters in and through virtual spaces continued to be elaborated alongside, in an additive and ambivalent relationship, the constraints of racialized Shaka McGlotten 57

embodiment. Thus, even as this encounter that was for me impactful and injurious, I still looked for an immanent newness that might exceed rather than reproduce racial overdetermination. I still had what Latour calls the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be dierent, or at least that they could still fail.88 What kind of ordinary hopefulness might be recuperated from my narrative about the failure of the Internet to deliver on its promise to free us from the constraints of our embodied identities? Isnt this ultimately another story about innocence lost or the unattainable nature of fantasy? Fantasy, although, underdescribes our attachment to the virtuals promise,89 and failure might be precisely the location from which to reect more deeply on the hopefulness that I am suggesting organizes ordinary life. First, then, failure is never a forgone conclusion. Part of the power of a promise (like a gamble) comes from the hope that it will not fail (or be lost). And another part of its power has to do with the ways failure only defers the promises arrival. Failure doesnt collapse promises possibility; if anything, it heightens it. This reading of failurewhether it has to do with the impossibility of reconciling dierence, of justice, or of utopiais, of course, a queer reading, one that views failure as the site for vital and generative intellectual and political work.90 Failure in this view does not represent an end, but a site of departure and return. In failure, we nd the promise deferred and renewed. Failure becomes something to obsess and care for, to visit and revisit, to lick like a wound. Failure becomes the impetus for gathering up our hopefulness like the precious fragments of some beloved thing that we are very likely to lose or break again. Speculating on the future from an experience of failure is one way to redistributing the sensible world and the unexpected or virtual routes we might take as means without ends. Scene 3: Phoenix Fabrik The third, and briefest, scene comes from Phoenix Fabrik, a play by Daniel Alexander Jones that explores the thrill and terror of loss and revenge in the aftermath of a lynching. Here, characters navigate a suocating and haunting landscape of racial violence while also making room for the possibility of transformation and rebirth. As an anthropologist with a deep interest, vis a vis feminist and queer theory, in performativity and as someone who has also been an occasional producer of and performer in theatrical work, I 58 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

developed relationships with a range of other cultural producers in Austin, who explored issues of race, gender, and sexuality in their work. One artist was Alpert-Award winning playwright Daniel Alexander Jones (who remains a formidable interlocutor). Jones shared drafts of this work with me beginning in 2005, and in subsequent years, I was fortunate to witness two incarnations of this powerful work. The play, whose title can be loosely translated as resurrection factory is set in a doll factory in South Carolina after the end of the Second World War. In the factory, Inga Shumann, a young Ger man emigre whose uncle owns the factory and Eleanor, a young Black girl who works there, slowly form a friendship that is marked by a history of violence and the promise of something else: hope and maybe even love. In addition to Inga and Eleanor, there are two other central characters: Mother Dixon, a traveling preacher and The Boy, a young man who also works for Mr. Schumann, gathering bones from Black graveyards for Mr. Shumann to sell. Like Toni Morrisons Beloved, the play is structured around haunting. Shadrack Ambrose Dixon, Mothers Dixons son, is a fth character who, though he is not physically present in the play, shapes the action of the play in profound ways. (There are two other hauntings that inform the play, but I cannot attend to them here.) Rooted in a jazz aesthetic and structured around traditional ring plays and shouts, Phoenix Fabrik grapples with the consequences of Shadracks lynching for his mother and for Eleanor, who, though a child when he died, loved him. In a series of minor revelations, we learn that while Mother Dixon has been quietly exacting revenge on her sons killers, Eleanor has plans to resurrect him. Ingas introduction into this world of terror and loss is an uneasy one, and Eleanor initially views her with suspicion when The Boy says that Eleanor will be working with them at the factory. Eleanor asks, She working . . . whats she gonna do? And later, when Inga tries, through song and stories, to soften Eleanors attitude, Eleanor continues to coolly instruct Inga in the construction of dolls only to be seduced by Ingas persistence. Playing with a doll, Inga says, INGA . . . The air is pressing her. ELEANOR Hot. Gets hotter still.

INGA It presses through her dress. It wets her. ELEANOR Just heat. INGA We should make a thousand little fans for these thousand little dollies whose little dresses are wet and sticky. ELEANOR You could use this. (Eleanor tosses her the eye assembly chart). INGA [To her doll] You must take your nap. ELEANOR (A lullaby). Id like to make your dream come true Theres nothing else Id rather do Give you a magic carpet ride A thousand gold dubloons A snowstorm in July Atop a hundred red balloons Id like to pluck the stars for you And lay them on your bedtime pillow Then net a million butteries To sing you lullabies Conduct a thousand honeybees To buzz buzz buzz a mello cello Oh-oh but darling most of all When a teardrop falls Ill kiss if from your cheek And swallow all your sadness who-oole. To make you smile again my dear Ill never leave you musnt fear I live for you and you alone Theres nothing else I know So close your eyes and go to sleep Id like to make your dream come true. [To Inga] You gonna stir up all that air and wear out your arm and then you just gonna be hot all over again. In Phoenix Fabrik Eleanor and Inga make an art out of making do. Whereas Inga, who comes to the factory having lost her family and newborn child, tries to ll these absences with an obsessive interest in food and its consumption, Eleanor, who has had to cut her childhood love down from the tree where he was lynched, steals pieces of thread and muslin to make a resurrection doll to bring her love back to life. Even as they have managed to forge lives for themselves that are livable, their new intimacy somehow enriches their

ability to make do. They dont, however, get over their losses; theres no identiable catharsis available to suture the damage done to these girls. Indeed, they form this tentative and incipiently erotic friendship through their shared histories of violence (of war and of racism). The friendship between Eleanor and Inga that crystallizes during Eleanors lullaby to Inga and her doll reects an ethics of caring that is unforeseen and unforeseeable, brief and fragile, and rooted in the ways both Black and queer communities have learned to nd ways of making do, nurturing others through despair and loss, and hoping for better. Through dense layers of hauntings and revelations, Jones Phoenix Fabrik traces the suocating violence of racism in ordinary life, even as it tracks as well the expansive hopefulness that comes with forgiveness, and the power of intimacy and recognition as immanent forces that make life and death signicant. CONCLUSIONS In each of the scenes I describe in this essay, I have tried to grapple with intersectionality through a conception of ordinariness understood as the aective intensities that are attuned not to capturing or transcending life but to the desires and impacts and promises that help us get out of bed and get on with our day because of or in spite of things like racism or failure or loss. This ordinary art of making do animates each of the scenes I describe, though, admittedly, not always in very obvious ways. In brief, though, I can gesture to the ways that J.R. Warrens and David Parkers intense, improper, poignant, and tragic relationship helped them to better make do in navigating the racism and poverty and isolation of Grant Town, West Virginia, until it did not; or to the ways the promise, and its deferral, of the ways virtual media saturate daily life and endlessly renew attachments to the possibility of a life lived better; or to the ways desires for intimacy and recognition work their way into the everyday as a charge pregnant with revelation, transformation, and things to come. These stories may moreover strike some as rather perverse sites to look for something as intangible and perhaps even dangerous (especially to social scientists) as utopia. So I want to note that I do not take utopia to refer to a perfectly realizable society free from the sorts of violence told in the stories here. Rather, Im interested in utopia as a sort of genre of unrealized and unrealizable attachments oriented toward the possibility that life might somehow be lived dierently and Shaka McGlotten 59

 better. This is what Jose Munoz as describes as feeling utopia, an aective surplus that describes a more or less concrete then and there, an indeterminate horizon imbued with potentiality.91 These possibilities materialize in brief moments that are challenging and resistant to closure: two boys, one White the other Black, kiss, simultaneously transgressing and reproducing taboos; I get online to get o and have a racist confrontation instead; a Black girl sings a lullaby for a White girls doll. Utopia in my use here, then, is speculative (and more than a little spectacular). And nally, as an essay ostensibly concerned with Black queer life, Black queer life itself obliquely present as an object of analysis. Indeed, insofar as each story grapples with the ambivalent bleed or frisson or assemblages that interracial intimacies in particular generate, the essay might be productively read as a series of meditations on how Black queer life is produced dialectically and obtusely. That is, the signicance of Black queer life isnt given as a given but as something whose meanings have to be produced actively and only through relationship with things like Whiteness or violence or hopefulness or making do.92 As an initial eort toward doing better justice to Black queer life, the essay works less toward providing better or more accurate representations of what Black queerness looks like or how it might be lived authentically or even how to study it (although I hope to have oered modest suggestions in this last regard), than as a reection on how the force of things like violence and desire lodge themselves in the texture of ordinary life in ways that reanimate Blackness or queerness as vital spaces of potential rather than departure or arrival. And it suggests that a Black queer anthropology might take an eclectic approach to the material of Black life, drawing on ethnographic, but also autoethnographic and aesthetic archives, in its eorts to reveal and do justice to the lives we study and live.

Shaka McGlotten Media, Society & the Arts, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road, 10577, Purchase, NY; shaka.mcglotten@ purchase.edu

NOTES 1. This essay was originally conceived as part of a panel on Black queer anthropology that I

organized at the 2007 American Anthropological Association annual meeting. The years theme was coordinated by a leader in Black anthropology, Faye Harrison, and asked anthropologists to reect on issues of dierence, (in)equality, and justice. In the original iteration of this essay, then, I sought, on the one hand, to engage intellectual and professional peers who identied as Black and queer and who were doing ethnographically informed work on Black and queer lives and issues. On the other hand, I sought to engage these themes not only through the content of the work I solicited but by asking larger framing questions about dierence, disciplinary boundaries, and the ethics of ethnographic research. In my own work at the time, I was increasingly interested in a politics of hopefulness that was emerging among some queer scholars, partly in response to the negative critique in Lee Edelmans polemic No Future, and which had been an organizing if also often implicit utopian impulse in much critical Black scholarship for many years. I was surprised to see in the following year the explicit and successful deployment of this impulse in the candidacy of Barack Obama. Now, in the face of the current global economic crisis and a largely pragmatic approach by Obama to a range of domestic and international issues, this hopefulness appears muted. But it has not been extinguished entirely. In revisiting this essay, I labored to elaborate some of my earlier discussions. Yet I have maintained many of the central ideas, including the notion that negative critique or social violence does not always have to end in a zero sum game, that, in other words, recuperative gestures toward hopefulness continue to represent an aective and politically valuable embracing of the uncertain. A number of interlocutors have oered generous feedback. Daniel Alexander Jones oered early key input. Many members of the Gender Studies faculty at Purchase College oered close readings, including Lisa Jean Moore, Bill Baskin, Rudolf Gaudio, Karen Baird, and Morris Kaplan. I would also like to thank the sympathetic and very astute critiques of this project by two anonymous readers for Transforming Anthropology. 2. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Aects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 9. 3. Lateral reading and reparative reading are two qualities of the weak theory I elaborate in this essay. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, Youre so Paranoid you Probably Think This Essay Is About You in Touching Feeling: Aect, Pedagogy,

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Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123152. 4. As Eve Sedgwick observes, there are important phenomenological and theoretical tasks that can be accomplished only through local theories and nonce taxonomies; the potentially innumerable mechanisms of their relation to stronger theories remain matters of art and speculative thought (145). A weak theorys domain can be thought of as pockets of terrains each in analogic relation to the others and expandable only by textured analogy. A strong theorys domain is more digital: more highly organized and expandable by analogies evacuated of certain qualities. If a weak theory encounters some terrain unlike any it has ever tripped overif it cant understand this terrain as signicantly similar or resemblant enough to one or more in its domainit will throw up its hands, shrug its shoulders, remain dumb (120121 n. 11). She moreover makes a specic case for weak theory as especially appropriate for studies of aect: An aect theory is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and amplication; for this reason, any aect theory risks being somewhat tautological, but because of its wide reach and rigorous exclusiveness, a strong theory risks being strongly tautological (135, emphasis in original). Importantly, Sedgwick doesnt simply oppose strong, or what she calls paranoid, and weak theories, but suggests ways for them to interdigitate (145). This essay likewise interdigitates weak theories like speculation and aect with stronger ones like sexuality and race. 5. Melissa Gregg, analyzing the work of Meagan Morris, describes a mundane voice as a mode of critical engagement that draws on anecdote, an aective tone, a colloquial focus (364) to humble cultural studies projects while still cultivating forms of curiosity and interest with the aim of rendering legible new political performances (364). It is a way of performing the ways experiences, including those of the researcher or analyst, are nested in larger social worldswhat Lauren Berlant calls theorizing in living, thereby introducing complicating layers into the project of cultural analysis. 6. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 7. For an excellent argument on behalf of a more capacious materialism, see Ben Anderson and John Wylie, On Geography and Materiality, Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 318

335. Drawing on intellectual trajectories that include Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, Anderson and Wylie, and the work of other British cultural geographers, reintroduce an exciting and meaningful complexity into social scientic epistemologies. And key to their interventions is an emphasis on multiplication: heterogeneous materialities actuate or emerge from within the assembling of multiple, dierential, relations and . . . the properties and/or capacities of materialities thereafter become eects of that assembling, 320. Also see Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space|Politics|Aect (New York: Routledge, 2008). 8. Anderson and Wylie, On Geography and Materiality. 9. In an interview, cultural critic and political philosopher Lauren Berlant observes, Emotion doesnt produce clarity but destabilizes you, messes you up, and makes you epistemologically incoherentyou dont know what you think, you think a lot of dierent kinds of things, you feel a lot of dierent kinds of things, and you make the sense of it all that you can, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/naja_serlin.php, accessed May 1, 2010. 10. Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory, 5. 11. Anderson and Wylie, 323327. 12. Sianne Ngai and Michael Snediker, like the cultural geographers Nigel Thrift and Ben Anderson cited above, remind us that an ethical obligation of intellectual life, and what motivates and makes that live livable, is the cultivation of interest. Sianne Ngai, Merely Interesting, Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 777718; Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 13. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, Introduction: Queering Black Studies/Quaring Queer Studies in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 1. Also see my Introduction: No Beached Whales with Dana-ain Davis and Vanessa Agard-Jones in a double issue devoted to Black genders and sexualities in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 11.2 (AprilJune 2009): 8793. 14. Michael Warner cited in David L. Eng with Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Munoz, Whats Queer About Queer Studies Now? Social Text 23.34 (Fall-Winter 2005): 117, 3.

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15. Warner cited in Whats Queer About Queer Studies Now? 3. 16. For an essay admittedly expansive in its scope, citational demands prove particularly daunting. Here, as elsewhere, I only gesture toward relevant literature and do not provide an exhaustive account of either all of the work I have found especially useful or the work that is relevant to this project. But for one diverse group of texts, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991); Irma McClaurin, ed. Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap, eds., Out in the Field: Reections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), and Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 17. Anderson and Wylie, On Geography and Materiality. 18. Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1920. 19. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1996. What is Philosophy? (New York: Colombia University Press), 209. 20. Phillip Brian Harper, The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge in Black Queer Studies, 108. 21. Phillip Brian Harper, The Evidence of Felt Intuition, 110. Also see Whats Queer About Queer Studies Now? where the editors note, That queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclusionary operations has always been one of the elds key theoretical and political promises, 3. 22. Once again, citations prove challenging. However, for another eclectic grouping of work, 62 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); E. Patrick Johnson, Performing Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Marlon Riggs, Black Is . . . Black Aint, dir. Marlon Riggs (Independent Film Series, 1995). 23. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 89. See also Whats Queer about Queer Studies Now? especially for a discussion of the ways the more sustained attention to race and nationality, as well as a renewed interest in gender, have transformed queer studies. 24. Bruno Latour, How to Talk about a Body? The Normative Dimensions of Science Studies Body & Society 10:23 (2004): 205. 25. For a few important examples, see especially Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Patricia Clough, ed., The Aective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Touching Feeling: Aect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 26. For an excellent critical overview of some of this work, see Michael Snedikers Introduction to Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 27. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics and Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). For work of particular relevance to studies of race, see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Eng and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Sharon Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings in Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 28. See Ann Cvetkovich, Public Feelings, The South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3 (Summer 2007): 459468. 29. Abby Ellin, Seeking a Cure for Optimism, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/fashion/ 31positive.html, December 30, 2009.

30. Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Love, Addiction, and Identity @ the Matrix in Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality, eds., Kate ORiordan and David Phillips (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Feeling Black and Blue: Virtual Sex Publics and Black Aects in Do You Feel Me?: Exploring Black American Gender and Sexuality through Emotion and Feeling (Forthcoming 2011). 31. Again, see Snedikers Queer Optimism for a treatment of aect as structure and immanence. For more clearly Marxist, yet very nuanced accounts, see Anne Allisons sophisticated ethnographic examination of enchanted commodities in her Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of Cali fornia Press, 2006) and Jose Esteban Munozs recuperation of Ernest Blochs notions of utopia in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 32. For some examples from anthropology, see Renato Rosaldo, Death and a Headhunters Rage and Imperialist Nostalgia in Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 121 and 6887; Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). And for an overview of work, see Catherine Lutz and Georey M. White, The Anthropology of Emotions, Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 405436. 33. This trend is evidenced in Katie Stewarts work which I discuss below, and is exemplied by Brian Massumis Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Aect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Many scholars, including those under the umbrella of the Public Feelings group mix, as I do, psychoanalytic and posthumanist modes of aect. I do this in part because while there are theoretically useful reasons to keep these terms distinct, there are also quite good reasons to practice theoretical indelity by allowing them blur into one another (theory doesnt have to t, only provoke more thinking). In my use, aect arrives both as an impact, an embodied but not yet subjective encounter with dierence and as the individually experienced feelings that help us make sense of the world and that then circulate in the form of socially narrativized emotions. Aects growing traction has become evident even in the social sciences. In 2008, for example, I co-organized and co-chaired a panel on queer aect with Roshi Kheshti at the American Anthropological

Association meetings; and Bianca Williams and Jennifer Woodru are editing a forthcoming anthology on Black feeling that emphasizes the particularity of Black aective modes and the relationships between researchers and Black people. 34. Eric Shouse, Feeling, Emotion, Aect, Vol. 8, Issue 6 (December 2005), http://journal. media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php, accessed May 20, 2010. 35. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Aect, Sensation. 36. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Aects, 1. See also Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings. 37. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Aects. My colleague Jason Pine takes a similar tack in his work on aesthetics and political economy in Naples, in which aectively laden scenes in public and private life are entangled and mutually constitutive of moral and political economic structures. 38. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 39. Kimberle Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 12411299. The Combahee River Collective and the work of Patricia Hill Collins are also intimately tied to the intellectual genealogy and circulation of intersectional theory. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). 40. Across a broad range of intellectual and creative contexts, many feminists of color have worked to identify the mutual intensication of social categories in everyday life and to document the suocating despair these forces produced, as well as the creative resourcefulness with which people do more than merely survive, but, in fact, create rich and livable lives. A growing literature in Black queer studies and queer of color critique, in which this essay is clearly situated, have further elaborated this work. See especially Jose Munoz Introduction in his Disidentications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) where he identies the foundational importance of This Bridge Called my Back for subsequent theorists and cultural producers operating at the convergence of feminist, queer, and anti-racist theory and praxis. Munoz thinking, especially his notion of disidentication, an ambivalent mode of working on an against (11) dominant ideologies, and Shaka McGlotten 63

his dogged insistence on the necessity for utopian thinking in forming queerworld[s], (25) has and remains deeply inuential on my own thinking, as my subsequent discussion evidences. The editors of the anthology Black Queer Studies likewise trace an important body of work by Black feminist theorists that have deeply impacted my own intellectual and political development, including the groundbreaking Black Womens Studies text, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Barbara Smith, Patricia Bell-Scott, Gloria T. Hull, as well as work by Angela Davis, Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde, and others (4). For another important text in queer of color critique, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 41. For another distinct approach to intersectionality, see Hortense J. Spillers, Interstices: A Small Drama of Words in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 152 175. In Spillers important work, the interstice refers both to a crossing and a gap between categories of dierence. 42. Tavia Nyongo, Punkd Theory, Social Text no. 8485 (Fall/Winter 2005): 1934. For sympathetic yet complicating readings of intersectionality, See Leslie McCall who distinguishes three dierent approaches to intersectionality: anticategorical Complexity (deconstructs social categories), Intercategorical (/categorical, uses existing social categories to document inequality), Intracategorical (recognizes limits of social distinctions but still uses them to understand experience), The Complexity of Intersectionality, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.3 (2005): 1771 1800. Also, see Myra Marx Ferree, Inequality, Intersectionality and the Politics of Discourse: Framing Feminist Alliances in The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policy-Making (New York: Routledge, 2009), 86104; Jennifer C. Nash, Rethinking Intersectionality Feminist Review 89 (2008): 115. 43. Tavia Nyongo, Punkd Theory, 30. 44. Jasbir Puar, Queer Times, Queer Assemblages, Social Text 8485 (FallWinter 2005): 121139, 127128. 45. Nyongo, Punkd, 30. 46. Close readers will note that I have only implicitly argued for a more than semantic distinction between the everyday and the ordinary. My thinking here partly follows Melissa Greggs read64 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 20(1)

ing of the ways the appropriation of de Certeaus everyday art of making do was both intellectually constrained to a few models of looking at resistance (through play or consumption) and aligned with hegemonic structures of knowledge production. The shift toward an aective ordinary resists the inevitably of powers force as it is rendered in an through those epistemological forms. Thus, if the everyday derives its meanings from the ways social structures materialize in the form and content of daily life, then the ordinary begins from a multi-scalar aectively saturated world in which the direction of power ows altogether less coherently from top to bottom. See Gregg, A Mundane Voice, esp. 371378. 47. John L. Jackson, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9. 48. Close readers will note that I have only implicitly argued for a more than semantic distinction between the everyday and the ordinary. If the everyday derives its meanings from the ways social structures materialize in the form and content of daily life, then the ordinary begins from a multiscalar aectively saturated world in which the direction of power ows altogether less coherently from top to bottom. 49. For only two, but inuential works in this spirit, consider Angela Y. Davis Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1999) and Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 50. Think only of the debates about Black emotionality and expression between Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston about the relationship between social criticism and Black eusiveness. See Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, eds., African American Pioneers in Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) and B. C. Harrisons review of that book in Biography 23, no. 2 (2000): 407414. 51. This observation builds on my experiences in the African Diaspora program at the University of Texas, where many of my peers were focused largely the sorts of issues I outline here across a range of diasporic sites. It also builds on my still brief time professionalizing within eld of Black anthropology. 52. For a classic example in this spirit, see Zora Neale Hurstons Of Mules and Men (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). For more recent ethnographic texts that include analyses of struc-

tures of feeling, see Steven Gregory, The Devil in the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Joao Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Gina Ulysse, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Especially noteworthy, is The Politics of Passion: Womens Sexual Culture in the AfroSurinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) in which Gloria Wekker bravely foregrounds her own complex intimacy with a key informant. See also the ethnographic work by Aimee Cox, Tanya L. Saunders, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, and Marlon M. Bailey in the two volume special issue on Black genders and sexualities in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 11.2 and 11.3. 53. See Jason Pine, The Melodramatic Aesthetic and its Moral/Political Economy in Naples (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2005). 54. Source no longer available. 55. Bob Franken, Parents Call Murder of Gay Son a Hate Crime, http://archives.cnn.com/ 2000/US/07/09/gay.murder.folo/index.html, accessed October 21, 2006. 56. Hate CrimeOverview, http://www.fbi. gov/hq/cid/civilrights/overview.htm, accessed October 20, 2006. 57. Bob Franken, Parents Call Murder, http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/07/09/gay.murder. folo/index.html, accessed May 20, 2010. 58. Michael Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 59. Cited in Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2. 60. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977). 61. Pat Calia, Macho Sluts (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1988), 15. 62. Pat Calia, Macho Sluts, 15. 63. Calia, 15. 64. Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 9. 65. Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man, 9. 66. Reid-Pharr, 910. 67. Reid-Pharr, 137.

68. Reid-Pharr, ibid. See also Dwight McBrides Its a White Mans World in Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2005), where he analyzes Reid-Pharrs text and elaborates his own account of Fisher as an ethically provocative and rich elaboration of the limits of Black gay life. 69. Dareick Scott, Traitor to the Race (New York: Penguin, 1996); Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom, GLQ 1.3(1994): 299321. 70. Dareick Scott, Jungle Fever? 308. 71. Scott, 310. 72. Scott, 318. 73. Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 111. 74. See Herukhutis review of the novel in his Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Equity Pres, 2007), 2731. 75. See anthropologist Rob Shields excellent overview of the virtual, The Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2003). Also see Annette Markham Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 1998); Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000). For an excellent text that oers key methodological insights into virtual ethnography, see Nicole Constable Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and Mail-Order Marriages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 76. For an overview of this work, see Nikki Sullivan, Performance, Performativity, Parody, and Politics in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 8198. 77. This intuition has recently been supported by at least one study of online gay spaces conducted by UCLA law professor Russell Robinson, Structural Dimensions of Romantic Preferences, Fordham Law Review 2787 (2008): 125. 78. See Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assualtive Speech, and the First Amendment, ed. Mari J. Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado and Kimberle Crenshaw (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993) and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 79. Bruno Latour, How to Talk About a Body? 2.

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80. Dwight McBride, Its a White Mans World in Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch, 88 131. 81. Dwight McBride, Its a White Mans World, 125. 82. Andil Gosine, Brown to Blonde at Gay. com: Passing White in Queer Cyberspace in Queer Online, 139154, 149. 83. Quoted in Andil Gosine, Brown to Blonde, 145. 84. Ben Anderson, Aective Atmospheres, Emotion, Space, and Society 7 (2009): 7781. 85. Daniel Miller and Don Slater, Relationships in The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 187209. 86. Daniel Miller and Don Slater, Relationships, 187.

87. Donna Haraway, Modest-Witness@SecondMillennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41. 88. Bruno Latour in Anderson and Wylie, 89, emphasis in original. 89. See Lauren Berlant, Intimacy: A Special Issue in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 18. 90. Judith Halberstam, Notes on Failure, Lecture, University of Texas at Austin, UT Austin, January 26, 2006. 91. Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 1, 14. 92. See Roland Barthes The Third Meaning in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 5268.

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