Queer of color critique is an analytical framework that insists on the role of racialization in establishing normative gender and sexuality as an organizing principle of capitalism. Queer of color critique is an analytical framework that centers race, gender, sexuality, and class in its critique of politics, history, and mainstream gay rights movements. The term was first articulated in the book, Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique, by Roderick A. Ferguson. Expanding on women of color feminism, queer of color critique is an analysis of race, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to liberal ideology, the nation-state, and capital. In Ferguson's words, "Queer of color analysis disidentifies with historical materialism to rethink its categories and how they might conceal the materiality of race, gender, and sexuality." Through disidentification, queer of color critique voices the silences of Marxism that inscribe heteronormativity. In critiquing liberalism, queer of color critique problematizes the single-issue orientation of gay politics and historical narratives of LGBTQ exclusion. Deployed by activists, organizers, intellectuals, artists, care workers and community members alike, queer of color critique builds an analytic for political world building.
Historical context The origins of Queer of Color Critique are traced back to a cultural studies reading group of doctoral students Roderick Ferguson, Chandan Reddy, Gayatri Gopinath, Grace Hong, Danny Weidner, Victor Viesca, Victor Bascara, and Ruby Tapia. Ferguson, Gopinath, and Reddy questioned "what would an intersectional, queer critique of political economy look like?" after attending a talk at UC San Diego in 1999 on Martin Manalansan's essay, "In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma." There had yet to be an established methodology that provided a global critique of homonormativity, interjecting queer political analysis into critical theory.
Pre-queer of color critique
The praxis for Queer of Color critique came long before the establishment of a named analytical framework. Queer and trans people of color were foundational in organizing and activating LGBTQ movements in the US. However, efforts to converge racial, class, and gender struggles within the movement for gay liberation were sidelined by those who sought an assimilative approach to gain power and capital for largely upper-middle class white gays and lesbian. Notably, figures who participated in the Stonewall uprising, like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, saw gay liberation equally invested in racial and socioeconomic justice, involving themselves in housing, abolition, decriminalization of sex work, and harm reduction projects, and could be said to already be deploying a queer of color critique in their activist practices. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) and found difficulty of receiving funding and support from organizations like the Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front. For the latter half of the twentieth century, queer and trans people of color were already fighting against oppressive conditions and material circumstances resulting from intersecting vectors of oppression. The most prominent gay organizations of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s prioritized liberal rights like military inclusion and marriage equality, and were more concerned with respectability and power than empowering or materially supporting members of the community, such as transgender populations, homeless youth, sex workers, and the incarcerated.
Stonewall Queer of Color critique was also responding to the dominant homonationalist narrative that positioned Stonewall as the catalyst event for gay rights in the Western world. As discussed in Manalansan's foundational essay, the meaning of Stonewall is problematically applied transnationally, assuming universal stakes and value of Stonewall's symbolic and political ramifications. Malansan features interviews from gay Filipino men, one of which was present at the uprising, who do not view Stonewall, the subsequent pride parades, and movement to "come out of the closet" as integral to the formation of their gay American identity and life. He writes, "For my immigrant informants who self-identify as gay, narratives of the 'closet' and 'coming out' fragment and are subordinated in relation to the more highly fraught arena of the law and citizenship." Queer of color critique contradicts the emphasis on Stonewall in U.S. gay politics that misrepresents large swaths of gay immigrants whose identities are not solely defined by sexuality, or whose views on gay identity conflict with U.S. based representations.
HIV/AIDS advocacy Queer of Color critique was influenced by the disparities between white LGBTQ communities and queer communities of color made extremely prevalent by the HIV/AIDS crisis. In Juana María Rodríguez's Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, Rodriguez details the use of organizing tactics by the organization Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, a California-based Latinx AIDS advocacy group from the 1990s, that didn't rely on essentialized identity categories but rather creative and transformative messaging in order to save lives. Proyecto ContraSIDA moved beyond using solely gay identity as a tool for dismantling systemic oppression, using linguistic, cultural, familial, and neighborhood-based approaches. Proyecto ContraSIDA's resistance to identity politics was complicated by the organization's reliance on state funding, paradoxically requiring identity categorization or a "victimized subject" in order to stay running and establish a political force in the city. Queer of color critique uses the complications associated with intersectional organizing as grounds for analysis and theory production.
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