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Strange Affinities

The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization

Grace Kyungwon Hong editor Roderick A Ferguson editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:24th Aug '11

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Strange Affinities cover

Examines the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the "strange affinities," afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations

A collection of essays analyzing the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or strange affinities, afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations.Representing some of the most exciting work in critical ethnic studies, the essays in this collection examine the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the “strange affinities,” afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations. The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors of Strange Affinities contend that the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of color feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of color critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life.

Contributors
Victor Bascara
Lisa Marie Cacho
M. Bianet Castellanos
Martha Chew Sánchez
Roderick A. Ferguson
Grace Kyungwon Hong
Helen H. Jun
Kara Keeling
Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
Jodi Melamed
Chandan Reddy
Ruby C. Tapia
Cynthia Tolentino

“The contributors’ . . . many pieces convey both an astonishing range of insights and a tone that takes differences within difference as salutary, if not always comfortable.” - David Roediger, American Quarterly
“[T]hese essays help to define the contours of new ways of doing ethnic studies, recognizing yet resistant to minority nationalisms and normative forms of comparative analysis.” - Anna Pegler-Gordon, Journal of American Studies
“In a world reorganized by neoliberal globalization, the stark inequalities of new class and racial formations require newly sharpened analytic and political tools. The essays collected in Grace Kyungwon Hong’s and Roderick A. Ferguson’s Strange Affinities address these realities, stretching our too static concepts and methods, and challenging our political visions. Drawing on women of color feminism and queer of color critique, this indispensable volume suggests new modes of analysis for ethnic studies and feminist and queer theory, and it provides new ways of thinking the intertwined histories of race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality for the twenty-first century.”—Lisa Duggan, author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity
“This ambitious and theoretically compelling volume lays the groundwork for a ‘new ethnic studies’ by centering gender and sexuality within comparative race projects. In a globally integrated economy, with older forms of colonialism and the nation-state giving way to new modes of neocolonial exploitation and domination under the shadow of global capitalism, the need for a new ethnic studies that can unpack the political and cultural implications of these evolving social relations in various contexts and locations is ever more urgent.”—David L. Eng, author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy
“[T]hese essays help to define the contours of new ways of doing ethnic studies, recognizing yet resistant to minority nationalisms and normative forms of comparative analysis.” -- Anna Pegler-Gordon * Journal of American Studies *
“The contributors’ . . . many pieces convey both an astonishing range of insights and a tone that takes differences within difference as salutary, if not always comfortable.” -- David Roediger * American Quarterly *
"By deploying alternative comparisons across minoritized differences, the essays in Strange Affinities provide original analyses of racialization that unravel or unsettle existing categories of race and ethnicity (such as Black, Latina/o, and Asian)—or cut across them—to better articulate how racialized subjects and their relations are always already constituted by gender and sexual differences." -- Yu-Fang Cho * National Political Science Review *

ISBN: 9780822349709

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 667g

384 pages