Alison Reed in her piece, \u201cThe Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead,\u201d exposes the ways in which queer studies deploys racialized bodies as \u201cspectacular markers of queerness\u201d (Reed 49). \u00a0Reed goes on to write that this \u201c\u2026 fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment in post-racial terms\u201d (Reed 57). \u00a0In \u201carticulating embodiment in post-racial terms,” Reed is suggesting that we are reproducing colorblind logics. Therefore, \u201cembodiment in post-racial terms\u201d is the embodiment of race and racialized individuals in a society that chooses to believe that race is no longer an issue. \u00a0In separating race and racism, race is thus, in Reed\u2019s opinion, mobilized in colorblind ways to divorce discussions of structural racism from racialized embodiment\u201d (Reed 52). \u00a0\u00a0With this separation, queer theory scholars tend to preserve white supremacy.<\/p>\n
Reed continues her argument by stating that, \u201cWhiteness, 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\u201d (Reed 57).\u00a0 \u00a0From 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Citation:<\/p>\n
Alison Reed, “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alison Reed in her piece, \u201cThe Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead,\u201d exposes the ways in which queer studies deploys racialized bodies as \u201cspectacular markers of queerness\u201d (Reed 49). \u00a0Reed goes on to write that this \u201c\u2026 fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment … <\/p>\n