Alison Reed in her piece, “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead,” exposes the ways in which queer studies deploys racialized bodies as “spectacular markers of queerness” (Reed 49). Reed goes on to write that this “… fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment in post-racial terms” (Reed 57). In “articulating embodiment in post-racial terms,” Reed is suggesting that we are reproducing colorblind logics. Therefore, “embodiment in post-racial terms” is the embodiment of race and racialized individuals in a society that chooses to believe that race is no longer an issue. In separating race and racism, race is thus, in Reed’s opinion, mobilized in colorblind ways to divorce discussions of structural racism from racialized embodiment” (Reed 52). With this separation, queer theory scholars tend to preserve white supremacy.
Reed continues her argument by stating that, “Whiteness, then, goes unacknowledged and unexamined, while uncritically reproducing multiculturalist logics that mainstream visibility can smooth over ongoing injustices, precisely by exploiting the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (Reed 57). From my understanding, Reed is drawing on how the white queer political movement has connected itself to the struggles and oppressions of all queer people, including racial minorities as well. By doing this, it fails to both incorporate and differentiate between the experiences of white queer people and black queer people for example. Whiteness is seen as the normative default in society and acts largely as an invisible category. I don’t think that the injustices white queer people face can be attributed to their race, however, I do think a black queer person faces injustice on the premise of both their sexual identity and their race. Black bodies have historically been hypervisible and hypersexualized as they stood in opposition to their white counterparts and identity politics comes into play as one cannot separate their sexuality from their whiteness as this fosters and reinforces what Reed refers to as white queer politics of injury.
Citation:
Alison Reed, “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory.”