ABSTRACT
In ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens’, Cathy Cohen observes that queer politics has not lived up to its radical potential, but collapsed back into a simple identity politics whose sole lens of oppression is sexuality, or rather white middleclass gay sexuality. She challenges the narcissistic construction of the ‘powerful heterosexual other’ by reminding us of the historical prohibitions against heterosexual marriages between enslaved black men and women, and the continuing stigmatisation and control of poor and racialised families. Her essay coincides with the proliferation of queer writings on ‘race’. Yet, many of these discussions remain within a ‘homonormative’ frame that re-centres the position of the most privileged gays (Puar 2006). As Malini Schueller (2006) shows with such prominent queer theorists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Gail Rubin, this often happens by analogising race and sexuality. By isolating and comparing the experiences of ‘gays’ (white) and ‘blacks’ (heterosexual), these writers obliterate racialised queer subjectivities and the multiple allegiances that they potentially give rise to.
