VI. Theorizing Difference & Commonality: Gender, Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity and Their Intersections

The breakdown of notions of American exceptionalism and class consensus analyzed in section IV, was driven in large part by social movements of the 1960s. Those movements also set in motion a profound rethinking and rewriting of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and other modalities of "difference" that further challenged monolithic conceptions of Americanness. This process was fueled by the rise of ethnic and women's studies within and outside AS. And the new scholarly attention payed to previously marginalized subjects of history deeply reshaped theories and methods of study.

This category in particular points up the inadequacies of categorization, especially in interdisciplinary work. Separating race from gender from sexuality from my other categories threatens to re-marginalize them just as they are claiming their centrality to any cultural analysis. Hence I have also placed works reexamining these topics in other sections, cross-referencing some of them here. In addition, while separating racial studies from gender studies from sexuality studies serves to highlight their respective evolutions and achievements, it does so at the cost of obscuring multiple identities and complex interactions. Thus each subsection is structured to move towards points of intersection with the other categories.

And I employ this collective category not to ghettoize or collapse distinctions but to highlight interconnections, to point to important work that cuts across several sub-groupings, and to suggest that many of the writers cited here share a set of theoretical concerns emerging from a reconceptualization of relations between putative cultural "centers" and "margins." To this end, I've concentrated on work that refuses to simply "add in" race, ethnicity or gender or sexuality but that claims that attention to any one in isolation, let alone in combination, entails totally reconceptualzing what has been called the "mainstream."

Feminist, gay/lesbian/queer, racial and ethnic theory have had a profound impact on all levels and kinds of humanities and social science scholarship. Thus these works should be read as at once substantive contributions to their fields, and as critiques of the inadequate theorization of gender, race, sexuality and other constructions of cultural difference in traditional AS work (as well as in humanities and social science scholarship generally). For the stake of ease of operation I have divided the sections below into Gender, Sexuality, and Race/Ethnicty, but I want to stress that the best current work, including much scholarship cited below, is being done at the interesections of these and related modalities of difference (especially class, which is central in Section IV, among other places).

On-line Resources

• Feminist Theory Excellent, comprehensive site on U.S. and international feminist theory maintained by Kristin Switala.
• Black Cultural Studies Fine site with materials on figures like Stuart Hall, Wahneema Lubiano, Ann duCille, Paul Gilroy, Manthia Diawara and many other Black cultural studies intellectuals.
• Multicultural Resources Broad-ranging site from U. Virginia that inlcudes links to substantial intellectual resources on race, ethnicity and related matters.
• Chicana Feminist Homepage Rich site on literature, culture and theory.
• Ethnic Studies Includes links to articles, as well as programs.
• American Indian Resources Well-organized list, including literature, culture, and political issues.
• Electronic Directory of Les/Bi/Gay scholars. Quite extensive list, with links to individual web pages as well as general resources is les/bi/gay/trans/queer studies.
• Queer Theory, Gender and Identity Resources. Comprehensive site from www.theory.org in the U.K. Includes book reviews, articles, links and a general introduction to the field. With much on Foucault and Judtih Butler, this site's favorite queer theorists.

LESBIAN, GAY, QUEER THEORIES

• Cruikshank, Margaret, ed., Lesbian Studies. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982. Pioneering collection on approaches to lesbian literature, culture, and history.

• "The Lesbian Issue." Special issue of the feminist journalSigns9 (1984). A more systematic attempt to theorize "lesbianism" as a cultural lcoation. See especially the essays by Vicinus, Newton, Zimmerman, and Kennard.

• "Displacing Homophobia." Special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989). Rich collection of gay male theory for literary and cultural study.

• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990. Very influential study in the rise of "queer theory." Shows the centrality of homo/heterosexual identity formations to the construction of knowledge in virtually every arena of scholarship, but with particular attention paid to literary texts.

• de Lauretis, Teresa, ed., "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities." special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies2 (1991). Influential essays establishng the concept of "queer theory."

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble.New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Influential as one of the sources of queer theory in that it denormativizes all genders. Uses Lacan and Foucault to argue that "gender" is a kind of unstable, constantly reiterated performance.

• Fuss, Diana, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. A collection of very sophisticated multidisciplinary essays theorizing gay and lesbian studies as a key matrix of cultural analysis. As the subtitle suggests, the book insists on showing ways in which lesbianism and male homosexuality produce differing theoretical issues and paradigms, but like Kosofsky's book above, the anthology's larger claim is that the terms "gay" and "lesbian" are not of interest in marking the margins of culture, but rather ones essential for understanding the construction of cultural forms and identities by the so-called mainstream as well.

• Abelove, Henry, et. Al, eds., Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.London and New York: Routledge, 1993. A very comprehensive resource, with historical, literary and cultural articles, and an extensive bibliography.

• Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction.New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997. Gives a history of gay/lesbian studies, and thus situates queer theory in a larger context nicely. Lucid and succinct.

• Weed, Elizabeth and Naomi Shor, eds., Feminism Meets Queer Theory.Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press. Excellent pieces collected from a special issue of the journal differences.

• Warner, Michael. ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993. Excellent collection theorizing "queer" politics and cultural representations of homosexuality.

RACE & ETHNICITY

• Hull, Gloria T. et al. eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982. Pathbreaking collection of essays and bibliographies tracing the intersections of women's studies, black studies, and American studies.

• Wall, Cheryl. ed., Changing Our Own Words. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. A collection including some of the leading black feminist critics employing Bakhtin, post-structuralism and other critical theories to analyze writing by and about black women.

• Gates, H.L., Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist. New York: Meriden Press, 1990. Along with the Wall collection above, these two anthologies gather together important examples of black feminist literary scholarship from the 1980s, including historical surveys, theoretical readings, and studies of individual texts.

• Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. NY: Oxford, 1987. A theoretically innovative re-writing of the genealogy of African-American intellectuals and writers, beginning with slave narratives and ending with the 1920s, that places women in a more central role and complicates the dialectic of rural and urban black experience.

• Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, Second edition, 1994. Critiques ethnicity-, class-, and nation-based models of race, then offers a brilliant social constructionist argument for the semi-autonomous power of "racial formations" through an analysis of trends in racial politics in the US since World War II. Extremely influential in the rise of "critical race" theories.

• Baker, Jr., Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984. Uses neo-marxism, post-structuralism, tropology and other recent critical theory to aid in rewriting the African-American literary tradition as working dialectically through and out of the vernacular (especially the blues) and the economic matrix of slavery.

• Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the 'Racial' Self. NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.

• ---. The Signifying Monkey. Oxfors and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989. Gates is one of the most consistently interesting American critics, and these two books include much of his finest work, using contemporary literary theory to argue the specificity of African-American literary and theoretical traditions.

• Stepto, Robert. From Behind the Veil. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, [1979] 1991. A landmark study tracing the key themes of "literacy" and "freedom" as they shape an African-American tradition in fictional and non-fictional prose from slave narratives to Invisible Man. This revised version of Stepto's classic includes a new preface and an afterword on the trope of reader distrust in African-American narratives.

• Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory. London and New York: Methuen, 1984. Collection of essays employing and critiquing structuralism and post-structuralism as tools for interpreting African and African-American texts. See especially Gates's introduction, and the essays by Benston, Stepto, and Johnson.

• Asante, Molefi K. The Afrocentric Idea.Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1987. The most influential African (american) figure arguing for the ongoing importance of Africanisms on the black diaspora.

• Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. , This Bridge Called My Back. New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983.

• ---, and Cherríe Moraga, eds., Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras. San Francisco: Aunt Lutte Foundation Press, 1990. This Bridge is the key text in the creation of a broaad-based "women of color" or "Third World" feminist position. It and its follow-up collection, Making Face/Haciendo Caras,form two key collections of "critical and creative" writings by women of color that have contributed immensely to the rethinking of race, class, sexuality, and gender, while also challenging narrow definitions of "theory" by arguing for fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing as theory.

• Calderón, Hectór, and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Collects many of the most influential essays in theory and criticism of Chicano/a literature and culture from neo-Marxist, feminist, and new historicist vantage points. Includes a useful select, annotated bibliography.

• Chabram, Angie and Rosalinda Fregoso, eds., "Chicana/o Cultural Representations," special issue of Cultural Studies4.3 (1990). Includes nine essays surveying the past, present and future of Chicano/a cultural studies (inclduing film, literature, theatre, and ethnography), in terms of critical theories as well as institutional forms and practices. Key moment in the linkage of Chicana/o studies and cultural studies.

• Saldívar, Ramon. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Employs neo-marxist and deconstructionist approaches to a survey of narratives from Americo Paredes to Sandra Cisneros.

• Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon, 1989. An unusually lucid, jargon-free and politically pragmatic introduction to key questions in "postmodern ethnography" with special reference to Chicano culture(s).

• Nomura, Gail, et al. eds., Frontiers of Asian American Studies. Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1989. Part Four raises theoretical questions, particularly with regard to the discipline of ethnic studies. The other three sections include state-of-the-art essays on a range of topics from history, literary studies, and the social sciences, treating both specific traditions and relations among Americans of various Asian ancestries. Includes excellent annotated bibliography divided by specific Asian American sub-groups.

• Hume, Shirley, et al. eds., Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives. Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1991. Part One in particular raises key theoretical issues. Among the more theoretically interesting topical essays, see those by Marilyn Alquizola and David Leiwei Li.

• Lowe, Lisa. Immgrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Brilliant use of postcolonial, marxist, critical race and feminist theory to analyze the complicated interrelations of Asian diasporic, Asian American and dominant communties in the U.S. Using the example of Asian immigration in its various waves, Lowe exposes the historical construction of dominant notions of U.S. nationhood and citizenship in dialectical relation to those it would exclude or only partially include within those categories.

• Cheung, King-Kok, ed., An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Outstanding collection of essays on the various literatures by Americans of Asian descent. Includes introductions to Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, Vietnamese-, Filipino-, and South Asian-American traditions, as well as essays on particular theoretical issues.

• Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989. A series of interlinked essays relating special theoretical issues in the study of native American Indian literatures and cultures (i.e., the prominence of the oral) to problems of canonization and representativeness.

• Martin, Calvin ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987. Using Native American history as its focus, this collection of short essays covers a very wide range of historical theory and method, from the most positivistic to the almost deconstructive. It also provides one point of entry into the important field of ethnohistory.

• Vizenor, Gerald ed., Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literatures. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1988. Places contemporary literary and cultural theory (especially Bakhtin) in tension with Native modes of thought while interpreting works by contemporary Native American/AmericanIndian writers.

• Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995. Uses the work of John Joseph Matthews and Vine Deloria, Jr. to initiate brilliant rethinking of American Indian intellectual traditions that skilfully unites indigenous resources, sovereignty issues and contemporary cultural theory.

• JanMohamed, Abdul, and David Lloyd eds., The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990. A theoretically informed collection of articles from a two-volume special issue of Cultural Critique examining representational strategies in and strategic contexts for literatures of US domestic and international "Third World" writers. See especially pieces by Kaplan, Mani, Radhakrishnan, Rabasa and Rosaldo.

• Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985;1986. This collection of essays from Critical Inquiry includes a number of important pieces on race in America as well as key contributions to post-colonial theory. See particularly the essays by Gates, Said, Johnson, Carby and Gilman.

• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. A very influential study of the racial "othering" of the Middle East by "the West." and one of the founding texts of postcolonial theory.

• ---. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983. Extremely important and provocative collection of essays on the relation of literary theory to the wider social world. See especially "Introduction: Secular Criticism," "Reflections on American 'Left' Literary Criticism," and "Traveling Theory."

• Trinh, Minh Ha. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989. A formally innovative text that is at once feminist post-colonial theory and an autobiography of this Vietnamese-American film-maker/scholar.

• Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds. London and New York: Methuen, 1987. Collects many of the key essays by one of the foremost "post-colonial" cultural critics who combines elements from deconstruction, feminist theory, and marxism.

• ---. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" " in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988. Immensely influential piece critiquing and using post-structuralism in the context of a meditation on the voice of the subaltern subject.