Dana-Ain Davis

Narrating the Mute: Racializing and Racism in a Neoliberal Moment 1 2

This article explores the shifting nature of racism in the context of neoliberalism. The concept of muted racism and racializing is the lens through which welfare reform policy is viewed to illustrate the practices and processes of new forms of racism, the impact of welfare reform policy and examples from welfare reform research are viewed through the lens of muted racism and racializing.

Working It Off

I’ve always worked. I worked all my life. I’ve worked for the Attorney General, the Manhattan Borough President’s office, and now I work for the Census. I have a Bachelor’s Degree. They [Social Services] want you to stop school. When they sent me to welfare, I made an appointment, you know, I kept it. So I bring my resume and everything. He (the caseworker) never once looked at my resume. He told me, “You’re going to the parks.” I said, “Excuse me, I’m standing up here in a suit, and you’re telling me I’m going to the parks?” This is dead in the wintertime. He said, “You heard me, you’re going to the parks.” I said, “I don’t think so. Why can’t I be in an office or something?” He said, “No you’re going to be out there with the rest of them . . .” He was so nasty. You can have your resume, skills, and everything . . . then they’re going to put me to work in the parks or else cut off my benefits. They closed my case. —Lorraine,2 4 June 2002

Black Gender and Sexuality: Spatial Articulations

How do Black gender and sexuality articulate spatially? At this moment, where are the quotidian spaces occupied by Black gendered and sexualized lives? We ask these questions in light of the years of scholarship that have mapped Black gender and sexuality in terms of emergent identities; scholars have talked about Black gender and sexuality as always in a process of becoming. While this point of view is intellectually and materially astute, there has been a concomitant, if implicit, assumption, namely that Black gender and sexuality has failed to actualize. In framing the essays included here in terms of spatial articulation, we assume that racialized, gendered and sexualized bodies have to some degree become concrete; they exist in spaces and they have histories. That is to say, they are discovered and known, not necessarily in process, but of processes. Black gender and sexualities exist and have been shaped by urbanization, ghettoization, segregation, as well as the other ways communities of color have realized and produced their own spaces, from squatting to making concrete their middle-class aspirations in forms familiar to the larger American Dream: home ownership, lawns, and even a few picket fences. This volume elaborates important issues and critiques of Black gender and sexuality in space—literally in places. In this, the second volume of our exploration of the ‘‘special issue’’ of Black gender and sexuality, the essays are thematically orchestrated around Souls

Introduction: No Beached Whales

Whenever exception—as in ‘‘a special issue’’—frames the context of scholarly inquiry, it’s important to ask about what’s different. After all, special implies, among other things, something unusual or out of the ordinary. And what, precisely, is unusual about talking about black gender and sexuality? In general terms? In the context of this journal? This ‘‘special’’ issue embodies an attempt to mark black gender and sexuality as fields that are special without being inevitable. That is, we do not seek to consolidate or reproduce many of the most widely circulated iterations of black bodies and desires, or to situate them in stable locations (filial, political, geographic). This is not to suggest that past or present studies of black genders and sexualities have only reproduced stereotypes or fixed the range of identifications and practices that fall under the rubric of gender and sexuality. Indeed, the past three decades have given rise to challenging, critical scholarship on questions of gender and sexuality throughout the African diaspora. Yet, at the same time, we have been struck by the way so much of the scholarly literature on black gender and sexuality is so largely focused on racism, and the ways racism operates as both cause and effect, at once determining black gender and sexual deviance and emerging as an effect of that deviance. Are the range of black gender performatives, affinal bonds, emotions, and sexual practices, and their links to larger U.S. political economies, necessarily overdetermined by racist ideologies? We can gesture here toward a range of Souls