Strange Affinities2011
The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization
by Grace Kyungwon Hong
Representing some of the most exciting work in critical ethnic studies, the essays in this collection examine the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the “strange affinities,” afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations. The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of...