On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility

Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity

by Ernesto Javier Martínez

On Making Sense juxtaposes texts produced by black, Latino, and Asian queer writers and artists to understand how knowledge is acquired and produced in contexts of racial and gender oppression. From James Baldwin's 1960s novel Another Country to Margaret Cho's turn-of-the-century stand-up comedy, these works all exhibit a preoccupation with intelligibility, or the labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others. In their efforts to "make sense," these writers and artists argue against merely being accepted by society on society's terms, but articulate a desire to confront epistemic injustice―an injustice that affects people in their capacity as knowers and as communities worthy of being known. The book speaks directly to critical developments in feminist and queer studies, including the growing ambivalence to antirealist theories of identity and knowledge. In so doing, it draws on decolonial and realist theory to offer a new framework to understand queer writers and artists of color as dynamic social theorists.

Genres: Nonfiction

217 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2012

Reviews

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a difficult one to rate, not the least of which is because I am in near total alignment with Martínez’s politics and am in total agreement with him regarding the importance of WOC feminist theory and queer of color critique. I have other major issues with the book, though, specifically with its commitment to a “post-positivist realism” a la Paula Moya and Satya Mohanty. The core sections of Martínez’s positive arguments are in the Introduction and Chapter 2 on James Baldwin’s Another Country. He claim that identity politics of queer of color cultural production ought to be valued not because they have their own “truths” equally as important as others but that actually their experiences may provide more objectively accurate (though not necessarily error-free) accounts of the world. Chapter 1 involves a terrible refutation of Judith Butler (if one reads this chapter without even bothering to read Butler, one might think Butler denies any reality except one that exists in language alone, as though matter didn’t exist), making up the negative part of his argument (what I honestly think mirrors the politically conservative caricature of post-structuralist ideas on relativism and linguistic indeterminacy). Chapters 3 and 4 are great in their own right but Martínez only kinda sorta successfully synthesizes them with the book’s opening chapters through the motif of how qoc people and those who share spaces with them “make sense” of their lived experiences. Chapter 5 was fun to read because it’s about my favorite Margaret Cho standup (her first two), which made me think that he and I would probably really enjoyed laughing our asses off if we were to hang out and have a Cho marathon. But he also makes some good points about her particular performance of queer racialized camp.