Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State begins with a discussion of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an act passed yearly in order to determine the annual budget for the Department of Defense. The 2010 act was one of the first major legislations Barack Obama signed as president of the United States. This particular passage was deemed a decisive victory in the struggle against violence committed towards LGBT citizens due to the act’s attached Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expands the 1969 federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by someone’s perceived or actual gender, sexual orientation, and disability. This believed civil rights victory, however, was strategically attached to an act that granted the Department of Defense its largest allocation of finances yet; the $680 billion were apportioned while the US was engaged in two wars and funded US drone strikes and the US armed forces. While the 2010 NDAA is considered a liberal rights victory, it is one that sutures liberal freedom with state violence. Reddy’s decision to open Freedom with Violence in this way reflects his overarching argument: through state actions such as legislation and the military, race, sexuality, and US globalism in the 20th century have triangulated in a manner resembling that of an amendment. In Freedom with Violence, sexuality revises and amends racial and global societal dimensions. Thus, rather than view race, sexuality and the US state in a purely intersectional way, Reddy traverses the literary works of W.E.B du Bois and Nella Larson and state mechanisms such as citizenship and the institution of marriage in order to call for a queer of color critique. This queer of color critique not only situates a materialist account of sexuality at the center, but also demands attention to the historically specific formations and events that our present moment has inherited.
Moving from David Eng’s examination into the discourses surrounding Lawrence v Texas as a legal success of the past and deeming sexual justice as the issue of the present in The Feeling of Kinship, Freedom with Violence continues this directed reading's trajectory of a coiling queer of color critique, one that engages with the epistemological foundations of our contemporary political practices. In the bounds of my directed reading, Reddy’s study is situated alongside Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black. Just as Roderick Ferguson simultaneously centers queer of color critique, critiques canonical sociology and calls for a more expansive American studies adept to assessing historical subjects and phenomena, Chandan Reddy moves us toward critical ethnic studies, an interdisciplinary examination that:
“deepens its comparative and intersectional work in a contemporary capitalist context characterized by a gendered transnationalization of previously national capitalist economic, institutional, and social practices” (19).
Rather than focus solely on the nation, Reddy calls scholars to think of the ways in which a transnational framing might offer us a more critical recounting of state-based violence. This move to the transnational is seen throughout the text, but comes up explicitly in the fourth chapter, “Moving beyond a Freedom with Violence: The Politics of Gay Marriage in the Era of Racial Transformation”. This chapter takes an incisive look at California’s 2008 Proposition 8. By employing a queer of color framework, Reddy argues that gay marriage in general and Prop 8 in particular are transnational projects that establish the state as a powerful apparatus with devastating normalizing controls. Looking at the “transnationality of Californian society”, Freedom with Violence’s fourth chapter argues:
“understanding the passage of the proposition as a moment within a transnational chain of events might actually afford the sexual progressive the possibilities of liberating the question of sexuality from its regulation by the nation-state, opening other horizons of political and collective agency that until now did not exist as normative social possibility” (217).
But these social possibilities come with consequences. One major offering I glean from this text is its constant interrogation with the state’s practice of legality through an engagement with history, haunting, and memory. I’m especially drawn to Reddy’s reminder that scholarly analysis must always be situated within its historical context. As Reddy historicizes his project within the contemporary politics of neoliberalism, specifically neoliberalism’s linkage of freedom, the pursuit of citizen rights, and state-based violence, he conveys a renewed practice of representing and remembering the past. Focusing on commemoration, Reddy asks us to complicate the legacies of Loving v Virginia, the legal battle that many gay marriage advocates cited as the precedent and example of which to proceed in LGBTQ civil rights. Rather that continue with “like race” analogies that both detach the nuance of race and sexuality and collude with linear progress narratives, Reddy insists that our memories of Loving must keep at the core a moral commitment to remember society’s victims. If, as Reddy suggests, history has both a redemptive and explanatory force (203) then commemorations are not simply tools of past memory, but, I would argue, are also acts of a present and active witnessing.
Moving from David Eng’s examination into the discourses surrounding Lawrence v Texas as a legal success of the past and deeming sexual justice as the issue of the present in The Feeling of Kinship, Freedom with Violence continues this directed reading's trajectory of a coiling queer of color critique, one that engages with the epistemological foundations of our contemporary political practices. In the bounds of my directed reading, Reddy’s study is situated alongside Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black. Just as Roderick Ferguson simultaneously centers queer of color critique, critiques canonical sociology and calls for a more expansive American studies adept to assessing historical subjects and phenomena, Chandan Reddy moves us toward critical ethnic studies, an interdisciplinary examination that:
“deepens its comparative and intersectional work in a contemporary capitalist context characterized by a gendered transnationalization of previously national capitalist economic, institutional, and social practices” (19).
Rather than focus solely on the nation, Reddy calls scholars to think of the ways in which a transnational framing might offer us a more critical recounting of state-based violence. This move to the transnational is seen throughout the text, but comes up explicitly in the fourth chapter, “Moving beyond a Freedom with Violence: The Politics of Gay Marriage in the Era of Racial Transformation”. This chapter takes an incisive look at California’s 2008 Proposition 8. By employing a queer of color framework, Reddy argues that gay marriage in general and Prop 8 in particular are transnational projects that establish the state as a powerful apparatus with devastating normalizing controls. Looking at the “transnationality of Californian society”, Freedom with Violence’s fourth chapter argues:
“understanding the passage of the proposition as a moment within a transnational chain of events might actually afford the sexual progressive the possibilities of liberating the question of sexuality from its regulation by the nation-state, opening other horizons of political and collective agency that until now did not exist as normative social possibility” (217).
But these social possibilities come with consequences. One major offering I glean from this text is its constant interrogation with the state’s practice of legality through an engagement with history, haunting, and memory. I’m especially drawn to Reddy’s reminder that scholarly analysis must always be situated within its historical context. As Reddy historicizes his project within the contemporary politics of neoliberalism, specifically neoliberalism’s linkage of freedom, the pursuit of citizen rights, and state-based violence, he conveys a renewed practice of representing and remembering the past. Focusing on commemoration, Reddy asks us to complicate the legacies of Loving v Virginia, the legal battle that many gay marriage advocates cited as the precedent and example of which to proceed in LGBTQ civil rights. Rather that continue with “like race” analogies that both detach the nuance of race and sexuality and collude with linear progress narratives, Reddy insists that our memories of Loving must keep at the core a moral commitment to remember society’s victims. If, as Reddy suggests, history has both a redemptive and explanatory force (203) then commemorations are not simply tools of past memory, but, I would argue, are also acts of a present and active witnessing.
I find myself newly invested in the concept of witnessing, especially as it pertains to regulatory practices. Freedom with Violence brings up a rich conversation on historical memory and the role it plays in our understandings of the present. I’m in the middle of reading Donna McCormack's Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing, which asks: what does it mean to listen to the body that has no witness, the body which has been rendered silent through normalizing institutions (the family, heterosexuality, citizenship)? The text names “listening as embodied witnessing” as a methodological approach to reading queer postcolonial narratives, narratives about bodies often rendered silent. Queer Postcolonial Narratives wonders what it means to bear witness to such bodies. In asking such questions, the text claims that “listening as embodied witnessing” serves as a performative narration of histories, a narration that evokes the vulnerability of the narrative form. The body communicates in a multisensory fashion – If multisensory witnessing is the desire to hear when words cannot be spoken, it is also an act of considering the body as an archive, an archive that can be shared so long as the listener approaches their reading with responsibility and reciprocity. My reading of Queer Postcolonial Narratives connects with Reddy’s insistence of a willful remembrance of the past. Just as the body is an archive, so too is the law. Both Freedom with Violence and Queer Postcolonial Narratives advocate critical analyses that take seriously the convergence of multiple factors under a specific historical frame. As I begin planning my final paper I will keep in mind the details of the historical frame I am operating within, a neoliberal moment that centers individual pursuit. How do cultural productions push back against a neoliberal focus on privatization and the self? How do neoliberal citizens exhibit forms of agency and resistance? In other words, how do neoliberal subjects disidentify? I look forward to thinking more about these questions when I read José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
RSS Feed