Race and Queer Time
This week in my feminist theory class we’re reading Jack Halberstam’s new book The Queer Art of Failure. This book builds on Halberstam’s earlier work, In A Queer Time and Place. Both texts argue that discourses and models of “maturity” and “adulthood” assume/are predicated on hetero-reproductive “timelines.” In these timelines, adulthood means settling down and reproducing. Because, Halberstam argues, queers often do not have children, or if they do have children, often don’t “settle down” in a white picket-fence sort of way, queer lifestyles often never appear “grown up” in the traditional, mainstream sense. Queer lives mark time, progress, and accomplishment by different markers. Thus, for example, queers often keep going out to clubs, even late into middle (and old!) age. Or, they may not “get a real job,” but involve themselves in low-wage or low-prestige work, like artmaking or activism. So, measured according to mainstream het-reproductive models of “maturity,” queers appear to never really “grow up.”
I was thinking about class as I was driving to school today; then, a commercial came on the radio for a “Grown & Sexy” club night. “Grown & Sexy” is an idiomatic expression in African-American communities. It refers to “refined” pop culture: it’s not for teenagers, and it’s not ghetto. “Grown & Sexy” means “refined connosseurs of black culture.” So even more than being an age distinction, “Grown & Sexy” is a class distinction within African-American communities.[1]For example, Urbandictionary.com defines “Grown & Sexy” as:
Ebonics for:”Don’t even think of showing up at my function in
in baggy jeans,Air Jordans,platinum chains,bandanas,and 3x white t-shirt.If you’re not custom tailored,Armani or Versace-stay your ass home!…Also unless it’s neo-soul,rare groove,or old school-you won’t hear it here.Want radio hip-hop?Go to that white kids’ club in the suburbs…And approach a Sista’with a little finesse.Leaning up against your homies’ Escalade does not constitute “having game”…feel me?”
RADIO ANNOUNCER: “FUNK JAZZ WEDNESDAYS at the ICE HOUSE LOUNGE
in downtown.Doors open at 10PM.This party is for the GROWN AND SEXY.”
I think the “Grown” in “Grown & Sexy”—and perhaps even the “Sexy”—is decidedly not the same as what Halberstam means by mainstream models of maturity and adulthood. In Halberstam’s view “grownups” don’t go to clubs, so the idea of a “Grown & Sexy” club night is paradoxical. Also, given the way that terms like “boy” have been used to enforce the racialization of black men, and the way that white racism constructs black heterosexuality as somehow inherently “broken” and “immature” (i.e., incapable of “settling down” into nuclear families), beign “grown” means something different when it applies to African-Americans than when it applies to white breeders.
Obviously this is something I need to think about further, and with more care. But I do think that Halberstam’s idea of “immature queers” does need to be problematized by race (among other things), and “Grown & Sexy” might be one way to trouble that idea.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Critiques?
[1]Rashod Ollison’s article in The Rootsuggests as much. http://www.theroot.com/views/who-you-callin-grown-sexy
i’ve been troubled in some way by the ways that halberstam and josé muñoz talk about this maturity/adulthood question. this post has already been really helpful in thinking about it – i’m sure it’ll only be more so as i mull over more thoroughly the different ways race plays into it…
i wanted to drop in two other ‘keywords’ that seem related – and which i’ve been trying to write about in relation to muñoz’ “cruising utopia”.
“kids” in the punk (and especially homocore/riot grrrl) sense. as a positive identification understood as resisting norms of ‘adult’ behavior (including materialism, sexism, racism, etc.), especially by valuing friendship and solidarity above all else. as Nation of Ulysses put it: “the kid that tells on another kid is a dead kid”. still very much the usual term for ‘one of us’ in punk and punk-descended queer circles, almost entirely regardless of age. you get to be “a kid” or “this kid” or one of “some kids” if you’re seen as actively part of a shared community of (cultural if not political) resistance. marked as white in many ways, but complicated, racially, by the race-inflected queer meaning of “punk”.
“children” in the nightlife and ball scene sense. which has a similar function of recognizing and acknowledging active commitment to a shared community held together by an ethic of mutual support and solidarity, which are seen as being in a similarly hostile relationship to dominant norms. very much a specifically queer term, and quite strongly racially marked as black, but also used of white folks and non-african-american folks of color who’re fully involved in the scene.
Thanks, rozele, those are both great points! if we wanted to stay within halberstam’s vocabulary, we could talk about the different meanings and functions of “kids” or “children” in different subcultures. these subcultures are stratified/marked by race both in their relation to mainstream culture, but also the dominant trends within the subculture (as you note about whiteness in punk). i’m inclined to think that like this idea of failure, which has to be contextual (failure according to which/whose standards of success?), “immaturity” and “maturity” are also contextual (again, which/whose standards). so, it’s not that there is some uniform “queer time,” but many ways of queering “white, straight” time; race itself may be a way of queering hegemonic time, for example.
thinking more about all this, i keep coming back to lee edelman’s line about queerness as “the side of those not fighting for the children”. which just plain doesn’t work in a punk or ball-scene/nightlife context – which is to say, in two of the most important (culturally, and i’d argue politically) queer subcultures. both of which often get dismissed or ignored precisely because they’re seen as youth cultures, despite the importance within both of intergenerational connections.
there’s some way in which it feels to me like all these theorists of queer temporality do this odd move where they position themselves so much as ‘adults’ that they think they can’t see the lived practices closest to what they’re talking about. though i think that both the punk and ball scenes came to the conclusions that these theorists have arrived at about 30 years ago. and at this point, each scene’s practice is so far beyond that point (in their different directions) that they no longer share the premises that the theorists are operating with…