Roderick Ferguson

Roderick Ferguson is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He was previously professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His scholarship includes work on African-American literature, queer theory and queer studies, classical and contemporary social theory, African-American intellectual history, sociology of race and ethnic relations, and black cultural theory. Among his contributions to queer theory, Ferguson is credited with coining the term Queer of Color Critique, which he defines as "...interrogat[ion] of social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique." Ferguson is also known for his critique of the modern university and the corporatization of higher education. Ferguson served as 2018 President of the American Studies Association, delivering his presidential address, "To Catch a Light-Filled Vision: American Studies and the Activation of Radical Traditions," at the November 2018 annual conference.

At the University of Illinois, Chicago, Ferguson served as the co-director of the Racialized Body research cluster and was previously the chair of the African American Studies department. Before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN).

Ferguson is most renowned for the concept of "queer of color critique" from his book Aberrations in Black, which is rooted in the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective which 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.

Works

Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004) Aberrations in Black critically discusses the works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Karl Marx, and connects American cultural studies to questions from sociology, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and African American studies. Ferguson suggests that intellectual inquiry is not neatly defined within the boundaries of a single discipline, but that it is shaped out of heterogeneity. Aberrations in Black can be understood as a response to the canon and its regulation of sexual difference.

Ferguson begins his discussion with a description of a black drag queen prostitute, who serves as a fixture of urban capitalism in Marlon Riggs' Tongues United. This figure is confusing in that she is multiply determined and excluded by difference in race, class, sexuality, and gender. Ferguson proposes queer of color critique as a mode of analysis for interpreting the black drag queen prostitute, and uses this figure to demonstrate the heterogeneity of social categories with in the culture and genealogy of the West.

Queer of color critique emerges in Aberrations in Black as a method for challenging ideologies that work to conceal the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Ferguson builds on the idea in historical materialism that capital produces social formations that exceed the acceptable boundaries of gendered, racialized sexual ideals, while also critiquing the representation of these formations as pathological. Ferguson understands Wright as responding to social disorganization as a feminizing process "that disrupted African American gender and sexual integrity."

Sula Ferguson uses Toni Morrison's Sula as another example of a novel that depicts sexual nonheteronormativity, illustrating queer black critiques that attempt to displace heteropatriarchal discourse. Ferguson argues that Black lesbians such as Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith were leaders in critiquing heterosexuality and patriarchy during movements in the 1970s and 80s, utilizing Sula as a model for resistance. Sula is articulated as a framework for queer of color critique that questioned race, class, gender, and interlocking forms of oppression.

The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) In The Reorder of Things, Ferguson traces the history of interdisciplines in the university, including the rise of departments of race, gender, ethnicity, and queer studies, and argues that they are essential to the development of power in academia, the state, and global capitalism rather than a challenge to it. He narrates 60s and 70s movements in universities across the United States in which minority and women students organized to protest racial and gender discrimination and inequality on college campuses. Ferguson ultimately asserts that cultural studies and other minority movements are easily co-opted by the state, and it is necessary to develop new modes of analysis that resist the power of the institution.

Adrian Piper's art collage Self Portrait 2000 is used at the beginning of the book to exemplify how institutions—including the university, the state, and capital—actively work to undermine projects of equality despite outwardly promoting diversity. This project is used by Ferguson to demonstrate how the American academy has failed to keep promises to students of color. He borrows from Michel Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality about power as intentional and calculating to describe how institutions view minority movements as elements that can be coopted and incorporated into its own objectives. Ferguson uses "power" in Foucault's terms as a "strategical situation in a particular society" and is a mode for calculating and arranging minority difference that is not individual, but systemic and representative of a network of fluctuating relationships.

The Reorder of Things details 60s and 70s student organizing including the Chicano Movement, specifically focusing on the Lumumba-Zapata Collective at the University of California, San Diego which aimed to establish a college to educate Black, Chicano, and poor white students. Ferguson uses the examples of these movements to demonstrate how the academy, the US nation-state and capital used revolutionary organizing by minorities to bolster the US political economy, while failing to actually represent those subjects.