The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy - Softcover

Eng, David L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822347326 ISBN 13: 9780822347323

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism”—the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Q&A: Queer in Asian America.

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Q&A: Queer in Asian America.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Spanning psychoanalysis, law, and aesthetics, and reading richly and with passion, David L. Eng's "The Feeling of Kinship" looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. This is a fearless book that knows and feels what it means to have to defend oneself from the 'liberal' place in which one lives; what it means racially, sexually, and legally to have to be defensive in a nation that identifies itself with freedom."--Lauren Berlant, author of "The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Feeling of Kinship

QUEER LIBERALISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF INTIMACYBy DAVID L. ENG

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4732-3

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................................ix1 The Law of Kinship Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism.........................................232 The Structure of Kinship The Art of Waiting in The Book of Salt and Happy Together.................................583 The Language of Kinship Transnational Adoption and Two Mothers in First Person Plural..............................934 The Prospect of Kinship Transnational Adoption and Racial Reparation (WITH SHINHEE HAN, PH.D.).....................1385 The Feeling of Kinship Affect and Language in History and Memory...................................................166Notes.................................................................................................................199Bibliography..........................................................................................................225Index.................................................................................................................239

Chapter One

The Law of Kinship

LAWRENCE V. TEXAS AND THE EMERGENCE OF QUEER LIBERALISM

Since then I have wholeheartedly inscribed the cultivation of femininity on my banner, and I will continue to do so as far as consideration of my environment allows, whatever other people who are ignorant of the supernatural reasons may think of me. I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. -DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Trans-Atlantic slave and trans-Pacific coolie migrations to the New World constituted not only the material but also the philosophical foundation for liberal humanism to think the universality of human freedom and progress. This historical legacy continues to haunt the disavowed racial ground of our contemporary U.S. political moment. Our putatively color-blind age is replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the rights of citizenship, and through the globalization of capitalism and the proliferation of "free" markets. Indeed, under the neoliberal mandates of the "ownership" society, political and economic rights-citizenship and property-are increasingly conflated. As Aihwa Ong observes, neoliberal rationality is marked by the "infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics," with political and social problems insistently recast as non-ideological issues in need of technical, economic response.

Such a narrow discourse of human emancipation underwrites what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as "a history of the vanishing present," making it exceedingly difficult to imagine alternative knowledges, political possibilities, and social communities-especially in a post-9/11 world order. Today, ideals of a unified and ascendant U.S. national culture on the global stage are mobilized to distinguish a freedom-loving and civilized U.S. nation-state against its freedom-hating and uncivilized Muslim other. This genealogy of freedom simultaneously underwrites the contemporary emergence of what I describe as "queer liberalism." Queer liberalism marks a particular confluence of political and economic conditions that form the basis of liberal inclusion, rights, and recognitions for particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects willing and able to comply with its normative mandates.

In this chapter, I explore queer liberalism's law of kinship by examining the landmark June 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down as unconstitutional a Texas statute banning same-sex sodomy while reversing the infamous 1986 Supreme Court ruling Bowers v. Hardwick. Here, the Court had earlier affirmed the constitutionality of a Georgia statute under which Michael Hardwick had been convicted for engaging in sodomy with a consenting adult male in the privacy of his Atlanta home. In Bowers, the majority opinion, written by Justice Byron White, formulated its judicial task in the following, and as many have noted disingenuous, terms: whether the U.S. Constitution "confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy." In reversing Bowers, the majority opinion in Lawrence, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, reformulated the legal problem not merely as a question of same-sex sodomy, but as a question of the fundamental right to privacy and intimacy. Stating that the Court failed "to appreciate the extent of the liberty at stake" in Bowers, Lawrence reinterpreted the problem to consider whether one could be criminalized for loving someone of the same sex: "The question before the Court is the validity of a Texas statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct."

In conferring on gays and lesbians the Constitutional right to "intimate sexual conduct" as couples ("two persons"), and by describing this right to privacy "as an integral part of human freedom," the majority opinion in Lawrence constituted gay and lesbian political recognition, enfranchisement, and inclusion among "We the People" as a privileged relationship between freedom and intimacy, domesticity and couple-dom. Under the banner of freedom and progress, queer liberalism thus becomes linked to a politics of good citizenship, the conjugal marital couple, and the heteronormative family. In this context, we need to ask how a constitutive violence of forgetting resides at the heart of queer liberalism's legal victory, its (re)inhabiting of conventional structures of family and kinship. Doctrinally Lawrence appears in the pages of Constitutional Law textbooks as a watershed decision concerning rights to liberty and privacy for gays and lesbians. I would suggest, however, that repressed legacies of race and property constitute the core narrative of queer freedom and progress underwriting this legal decision. While race is not the doctrinal issue in Lawrence, I contend that it should be central to our thinking about the case politically and socially, and subsequently to our thinking about the historical emergence of queer liberalism. Indeed, as I argue in this chapter and this book, a long history of racialized intimacy subtends liberal narratives of freedom and progress, which require a more comprehensive analysis of the intersections of race and sexuality in U.S. law and society.

Chapter one offers an intersectional analysis of the Lawrence decision. Lawrence's legal victory might be something, in Spivak's words, that we "cannot not want." Indeed, in our conservative times, it is something we cannot afford not to want. Needless to say, the decriminalization of same-sex sodomy in U.S. law is an event of tremendous political significance. Nevertheless, it is crucial to explore the historical conditions of possibility as well as the social costs and limits of this latest episode in the story of human freedom and progress.

This chapter is divided into several sections. I begin with a historical elaboration of the emergence of queer liberalism onto the U.S. political stage. Departing from John D'Emilio's well-known analysis of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822347326
• ISBN 13: 9780822347323
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 266
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland