Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng

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СКАЧАТЬ ones who are “left behind” with respect to educational attainment, economic insecurity, and health disparities.4 Thus, it is vitally important to speak about “queers of color,” as long as we do so in a strategic manner.

      Second, with respect to the umbrella term issue (that is, whether the category of “queer of color” does violence to its subgroups), it can be argued that “queer of color” does in fact serve a useful function while also honoring the experiences of its various subgroups. There are in fact important similarities among the work done by LGBTIQ scholars of color across racial and ethnic boundaries. For example, there is a deep “family resemblance,” to cite the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on language theory, with respect to this scholarship.5 This can be seen in the secular academy in which a “queer of color critique” movement has arisen among LGBTIQ scholars of color. This movement has recognized the importance of bringing together similar voices while also preserving their differences.6 Thus, it makes sense to look more closely at queer of color work as its own category.

      Third, it may be the case that “queer of color” is less about an identity—that is, constructing yet another identity-based theology—and more about positionality. That is, LGBTIQ people of color share a unique “in between” position with respect to both the queer community and communities of color, and thus may actually require a unique signifier that discusses the specific issues that arise out of this social location. For all of these reasons, I believe that “queer of color” is a valid category that can—and must—be used.

       2. Shared Scholarly Heritage

      In addition to the above theoretical issues, LGBTIQ people of color also share a common genealogy, or heritage, with respect to scholarly writings about living at the intersections of race and sexuality. Although this genealogy is not as widely known as the more “canonical” works in queer theory by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David M. Halperin, this history of queer of color scholarship does in fact exist and can help LGBTIQ people of color find a sense of community and belonging.

      In the 1970s, there were few, if any, writings by LGBTIQ people of color about their experiences. As Barbara Smith wrote in her groundbreaking 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” it was “unprecedented” and “dangerous” to write about the Black lesbian experience because “these things have not been done” by Black men, by white feminists, or even by Black women.7 Smith writes poignantly: “I finally want to express how much easier both my waking and my sleeping hours would be if there were one book in existence that would tell me something specific about my life.”8

      In the thirty-five years following the publication of Smith’s essay, however, there have been many books written about the queer of color experience. These books include anthologies on the queer Asian American experience such as Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998);9 the queer Black experience such as The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (2000);10 the queer Latina/o experience such as Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (2011);11 and the Two-Spirit Indigenous experience such as Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (2011).12

      In addition to the above anthologies, there have also been works written by key queer of color theorists such as Audre Lorde13 and Gloria Anzaldúa.14 In fact, writings about the LGBTIQ of color experience—including spiritual experiences—can be traced back at least a half-century, with the publication of Another Country by the gay Black writer James Baldwin in 1962. The gay Latino scholar Michael Hames-García has assembled a remarkable timeline of key works by queer writers of color from the 1960s through the 1980s, including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Cherríe Moraga, and Glora Anzaldúa, that predate the appearance of canonical queer theory in the early 1990s by several decades.15

      As noted above, there is now an entire movement within academic queer studies—“queer of color critique”—that is dedicated to the work of LGBTIQ scholars of color on the intersections between race and queer theory. In a special 2005 issue of the journal Social Text entitled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?,” the editors noted that queer studies have moved beyond issues of sexuality and now cover issues “on theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics.”16 In sum, LGBTIQ people of color share a common scholarly heritage, and it is important to recognize and honor this history in constructing a queer of color theology.

       3. Some Definitions

      Concepts relating to race, sexuality, and spirituality are often more complicated than they initially seem. As such, it may be helpful to set out a few definitions of key terms that are used in this book.

      First, the term “race” as used in this book is taken from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s seminal text, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. In that text, Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.” Although this definition refers to “biologically based human characteristics” or “phenotypes,” Omni and Winant remind us that the “selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process.”17

      Indeed, contemporary racial categories have their roots in the colonial expansion of western Europe starting in the fifteenth century. As Roger Sanjek has argued, race is a socially-constructed “framework of ranked categories segmenting the human population” that was developed during the 1400s and that “imputed racial quanta of intelligence, attractiveness, cultural potential, and worth.”18 Although none of this scaling is “real” from an anthropological perspective, Sanjek notes that race has “become all too real in its social ordering of perceptions and policies” and in the “pervasive racism that has plagued the globe.”19

      Thus, it is fair to understand the term “race” as referring to categories (for example, “Asian American”) that are based upon “physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type” as well as the “generalizations and stereotypes” that arise out of such racial categories. By contrast, the term “ethnicity” (for example, “Chinese American”) refers to a group that shares “common experiences” such as language, culture, national origin, religious affiliation, or other factors that over time comes to “distinguish one group from another.”20 The term “people of color” refers collectively to those persons—including, but not limited to, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Indigenous people—who belong to racial and ethnic groups that have been historically marginalized within the United States and/or colonized by European and North American powers around the world.21

      Second, the term “sexuality” as used in this book is very broad and refers to, on a societal level, “the bundle of social phenomena that shape erotic life: laws, religion, norms and values, beliefs and ideologies, the social organization of reproduction, family life, identities, domestic arrangements, diseases, violence and love” as well as to, on an individual level, the related “pleasures and pains that can shape our lives for good or ill.”22 As with race, sexuality is very much a social construct that changes with place and time.

      As noted above, the term “LGBTIQ” is used in this book as a collective term to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer persons. This book also uses “queer” interchangeably with “LGBTIQ.” (“Queer” is also a catch-all term that includes those individuals who identify themselves СКАЧАТЬ