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The Erotic Life of Racism
A major intervention in the fields of critical race theory, black feminism, and queer theory, The Erotic Life of Racism contends that theoretical and political analyses of race have largely failed to understand and describe the profound ordinariness of racism and the ways that it operates as a quotidian practice. If racism has an everyday life, how does it remain so powerful and yet mask its very presence? To answer this question, Sharon Patricia Holland moves into the territory of the erotic, understanding racism's practice as constitutive to the practice of racial being and erotic choice.Reemphasizing the black/white binary, Holland reinvigorates critical engagement with race and racism. She argues that only by bringing critical race theory, queer theory, and black feminist thought into conversation with each other can we fully envision the relationship between racism and the personal and political dimensions of our desire. The Erotic Life of Racism provocatively redirects our attention to a desire no longer independent of racism but rather embedded within it.
180 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
20 people are currently reading
670 people want to read
About the author
Sharon Patricia Holland
8 books14 followersSharon Patricia Holland is Associate Professor of English, African and African American Studies, and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, and a co-editor of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 16, 2012
Holland's new book is an undeniably valuable piece of scholarship, and I think it will accomplish its aim to inspire new projects in race and sexuality. However, it is also one of the least coherent, complete, or readable books I know. It is bookended by two strong pieces of analysis -- the introduction grounds itself in an anecdote about a racist encounter the author had in a Safeway parking lot, and the conclusion entwines the Jefferson/Hemings relationship and Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! in conversation about the cultural significance of interracial "touch" -- but the chapters in between read like the annotated bibliography for the argument Holland planned to write (but didn't).
January 28, 2014
I'm sure that Holland makes some fantastic points in this book. However, it's so poorly written that whatever good points I encountered got lost in my frustration with the unstructured, unfocused prose.
July 7, 2012
Absolutely essential.
October 28, 2017
Without a doubt this book is going to be a stepping stone to exploring race and queer theory on a highly academic spectrum. Unfortunately, I struggled to follow and understand the thesis. I’m not sure what she was asserting and how the book explained or supported it. For me, it seemed a bit incoherent, like a rough draft that needed more focus and editing. Holland talks about the black and white binary being erotic in regards to race relations in The United States but I’m not sure how she used the works cited to prove this.
Buried in this book is the idea that the black, queer, female voice is often overlooked but is a part of so many movements: feminist, lgbt, civil rights. Holland tries to explain how in each movement, the combo of black-queer-female is overlooked and that there needs to be a whole new focus of the black lesbian but I’m not sure that she proves this in her book. It seemed like a lot of research and quotes, like an annotated bibliography, and not enough of the thesis and explaining of how the resources she quotes support her thesis.
Buried in this book is the idea that the black, queer, female voice is often overlooked but is a part of so many movements: feminist, lgbt, civil rights. Holland tries to explain how in each movement, the combo of black-queer-female is overlooked and that there needs to be a whole new focus of the black lesbian but I’m not sure that she proves this in her book. It seemed like a lot of research and quotes, like an annotated bibliography, and not enough of the thesis and explaining of how the resources she quotes support her thesis.
February 16, 2025
there was a good deal of really interesting work going on here. i appreciated how engaged the book was with scholarship in both critical race theory and queer theory.
my problem was, though the book wanted to bridge the gap between those two fields, it felt like that goal was never really reached. the first three chapters felt more like holland continually reiterating what she wanted to do instead of… doing it? for example, she kept saying that she wanted to recenter the “everyday” experience of racism, but that never really came up in her analysis, which was far more focused on conversations within theory.
that said, the last two chapters were the strongest. her close reading of a single passage from faulkner was particularly enlightening. i wish there had been more work like that throughout.
my problem was, though the book wanted to bridge the gap between those two fields, it felt like that goal was never really reached. the first three chapters felt more like holland continually reiterating what she wanted to do instead of… doing it? for example, she kept saying that she wanted to recenter the “everyday” experience of racism, but that never really came up in her analysis, which was far more focused on conversations within theory.
that said, the last two chapters were the strongest. her close reading of a single passage from faulkner was particularly enlightening. i wish there had been more work like that throughout.
March 19, 2017
brilliant metaphilosophy in terms of field formation and object lessons, but a critical misstep to have ended with the afterthought of touch when her thesis rests upon the physical and psychic biological hold of racism through sex, as well as QT and CRTs making of it an afterthought.
December 30, 2017
In the Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon Holland traces how the psychic erotic hold of racism manifests itself in quotidian interactions. Opening the book with an anecdote about a white woman who yelled “to think I marched for you” after losing a parking spot to the author, Holland situates this encounter as quotidian speech act that is meant to evoke the memory of ownership over Black bodies as a way to put Holland in her “place.” Through this anecdote, Holland is able to mount a convincing theoretical analysis on the how afterlife of slavery is apparent in quotidian, that is daily and banal, encounters as oppose to the (frequent) spectacular encounters of racial transgressions. What Holland suggests is that understanding the banal encounters like the parking lot tale enables us to see trace the psychic erotic hold of racism. Using Hortense Spillers’ work, Holland asserts that Slavery transform the vocabulary of human sexual relationships. Considering that all slaves were frequently raped, Holland relays the lack of sexual consent as effect of being owned by another. Thus, Holland’s parking lot encounter, the speech act of racism (which is a performative gesture drawing from systems of power), is drawing from the legacy of human ownership that was Slavery in the U.S. In pointing out how this “simple” racist encounter is loaded with erotic racialized undertones, Holland also mounts a critique on how this history is not only queer but affects queer relations as well. Holland’s book does not provide answers but rather provides a toolkit by which we can start to critically assess quotidian racist speech acts as instruments of systemic power.
August 6, 2016
Oblique, frustrating, and yet extremely valuable and a later "go-to" reference for a number of reasons. It provides a good critical genealogy of "Queer of Color Critique" and offers an excellent commentary on the relationship of contemporary queer theory to Black feminist theorizing, feminism and race more generally, and with great footnotes. There are a number of deeply fascinating and insightful points made, many pithy and quotable statements, and even a quote from the Lord of the Rings in a surprising moment.
However, with each chapter, I kept waiting for the discussion that the author said she was going to initiate, and just never felt like I got it until the last ten pages or so. While the introduction suggests that the book will explore the connection between racism and the erotic in every day practice, unless one's every day practice is going to academic conferences, it is hard to find what the author means when she says she is discussing quotidian experiences. The erotic that is addressed seems more connected to the way that the academic fields of critical race theory, feminism and queer theory have implicit "desires". For those seeking to know the relationship of race to queer theory, it's deeply thoughtful and refreshingly frank. As a book that picks up from Hortense Spillers and addresses connections between race and sexuality, it seemed incomplete.
However, with each chapter, I kept waiting for the discussion that the author said she was going to initiate, and just never felt like I got it until the last ten pages or so. While the introduction suggests that the book will explore the connection between racism and the erotic in every day practice, unless one's every day practice is going to academic conferences, it is hard to find what the author means when she says she is discussing quotidian experiences. The erotic that is addressed seems more connected to the way that the academic fields of critical race theory, feminism and queer theory have implicit "desires". For those seeking to know the relationship of race to queer theory, it's deeply thoughtful and refreshingly frank. As a book that picks up from Hortense Spillers and addresses connections between race and sexuality, it seemed incomplete.
July 13, 2012
"We often only have eyes for the spectacularity of racist practice, not its every day machinations that we in turn have some culpability in. This desire to see ourselves as exempt from racist violence, no matter how small, is part of the same logic that attempts to excise life choices, erotic choices, from these larger systems. What we would have called racism is now "personal choice" or become mildly prejudicial. For example, to say that I am not hurting anyone when I say that I prefer to sleep with one racialized being over another, is to tell a different story about the erotic- one where the autonomous becomes clouded by the sticky film of prejudice morphed into quotidian racism. The erotic, therefore, touches upon that aspect of racist practice that cannot be accounted for as racist practice but must be understood as something else altogether."
June 25, 2019
Holland's The Erotic Life of Racism, like Ferguson's Aberrations in Black (which it engages with) is a work that simultaneously is claim-making and a critique of a discipline. Of primary concern in Holland's work is the intertwined nature of who (or, which racialized bodies) is relegated to history and who is allowed futurity. Stated otherwise, Holland's primary concern in this text is the, "...the centrality of black bodies to modernity's reimagining of the white self" (17). In doing so, the erotic of the erotic life of racism comes in a critique of feminist and queer theorizing's presumption of eroticism as always inherently liberatory. In doing this critique of both the (white) disciplinary trajectory of feminist and queer studies and a critique of the erotic's presumed potentiality for liberation, Holland critically refigures queer and feminist theory, and its possibilities.
In the introduction, Holland uses an incident at a Safeway--an incident wherein she is simultaneously hailed and marked as "in the past"--as an entry into her broader work. In the first full chapter, "Race: There's No Place Like Beyond," Holland engages with Edelman to outline the ways in which the "beyond" of race (and the invoking of a "beyond" that is key to Edelman's project) is a problematic that situates the Black body (particularly the Black queer female body) always in the past. In the second chapter, Holland first unpacks the cleaving of analyses of desire from race, then moves on to a critique of desire, situated in the development of poststructualist feminist theory divorced from the body. One quote in particular is telling: "...race and racist practice mire an unfettered feminism in the materiality of the body and the idea of its limit. Where 'the biological' is understood as 'reductionism,' the black racial project is excoriated for its crippling backwardness, since it is embedded in notions of the biological that do not help it make the case for better (racial) feeling" (61).
In the third chapter, Holland moves onto discussing queer theory, the development of queer-of-color critique, and the continued conditions under which the Black female queer body becomes obliviated. A key quote summarizing this section is: "...the overarching problem here is that queer of color critique is not solely addressing the remnants of identity politics, but the object of queer theory's ongoing desire: a feminism that somehow turned the corner on the black body and never looked back. Underneath the critique of queer liberalism is actually an argument about feminist claims upon the black body and its historical specificity" (81). Concluding this chapter, Holland writes: "...we must break from the cycle of our critical attachments by breaking with the tradition of producing black.female.(queer) in a historical register that matters only to her" (93).
In the final chapter, Holland examines touch ("the touch") as, "...manifesting itself as the psychic life of difference, transforming two categories of being (human and nonhuman) into a charged space of pleasure and of possibility" (96). As Holland writes in her analysis of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, "How we become 'human' then is mediated by an ever-present 'touch' of the material, the object, the not-us, threatening incorporation....For Faulkner, the touch 'abrogates.' It nullifies our stubborn insistence upon separation between races, sexes, or nations, if you will" (104-105). In her final pages, Holland ties touch, her critique of feminist and queer theory's geneaologies, and the oblivation of the Black (queer) female body by defining the erotic life of racism: "If touch can be interpreted as the action that bars one from entry and also connects one to the sensual life of another, then we might go so far as to say that racism has its own erotic life....When we pay attention to the erotic life of racism, we move onto another playing field altogether where we must abandon the positions that hold white and black being in such static relation" (107, 114).
Ultimately, Holland's work is a concise, sharp critique of the development of feminist theory, queer theory as coming out of feminist theory, and the racialized projects inherent in both. I do wish this volume was longer, so that readers could sit more with the tensions that Holland pulls on, and work through those tensions and key concepts in greater depth. However, that does not detract from the fact that this work is a project much-needed for the continuation of feminist and queer theory, and the scholarship that comes out of both.
In the introduction, Holland uses an incident at a Safeway--an incident wherein she is simultaneously hailed and marked as "in the past"--as an entry into her broader work. In the first full chapter, "Race: There's No Place Like Beyond," Holland engages with Edelman to outline the ways in which the "beyond" of race (and the invoking of a "beyond" that is key to Edelman's project) is a problematic that situates the Black body (particularly the Black queer female body) always in the past. In the second chapter, Holland first unpacks the cleaving of analyses of desire from race, then moves on to a critique of desire, situated in the development of poststructualist feminist theory divorced from the body. One quote in particular is telling: "...race and racist practice mire an unfettered feminism in the materiality of the body and the idea of its limit. Where 'the biological' is understood as 'reductionism,' the black racial project is excoriated for its crippling backwardness, since it is embedded in notions of the biological that do not help it make the case for better (racial) feeling" (61).
In the third chapter, Holland moves onto discussing queer theory, the development of queer-of-color critique, and the continued conditions under which the Black female queer body becomes obliviated. A key quote summarizing this section is: "...the overarching problem here is that queer of color critique is not solely addressing the remnants of identity politics, but the object of queer theory's ongoing desire: a feminism that somehow turned the corner on the black body and never looked back. Underneath the critique of queer liberalism is actually an argument about feminist claims upon the black body and its historical specificity" (81). Concluding this chapter, Holland writes: "...we must break from the cycle of our critical attachments by breaking with the tradition of producing black.female.(queer) in a historical register that matters only to her" (93).
In the final chapter, Holland examines touch ("the touch") as, "...manifesting itself as the psychic life of difference, transforming two categories of being (human and nonhuman) into a charged space of pleasure and of possibility" (96). As Holland writes in her analysis of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, "How we become 'human' then is mediated by an ever-present 'touch' of the material, the object, the not-us, threatening incorporation....For Faulkner, the touch 'abrogates.' It nullifies our stubborn insistence upon separation between races, sexes, or nations, if you will" (104-105). In her final pages, Holland ties touch, her critique of feminist and queer theory's geneaologies, and the oblivation of the Black (queer) female body by defining the erotic life of racism: "If touch can be interpreted as the action that bars one from entry and also connects one to the sensual life of another, then we might go so far as to say that racism has its own erotic life....When we pay attention to the erotic life of racism, we move onto another playing field altogether where we must abandon the positions that hold white and black being in such static relation" (107, 114).
Ultimately, Holland's work is a concise, sharp critique of the development of feminist theory, queer theory as coming out of feminist theory, and the racialized projects inherent in both. I do wish this volume was longer, so that readers could sit more with the tensions that Holland pulls on, and work through those tensions and key concepts in greater depth. However, that does not detract from the fact that this work is a project much-needed for the continuation of feminist and queer theory, and the scholarship that comes out of both.
August 11, 2022
I liked the overall focus in the intersection of queer theory and crt as well as more quotidian racisms, this was very theoretically dense.
May 2, 2013
Holland's book is a great attempt to theorize the erotic life of racism, but it turned out to be a very disappointing and unsatisfying read for me. She starts with a personal anecdote about a racist incident she encountered in Northern California, which was promising. She emphasizes that our desires/erotics are always embedded in racism rather than autonomous of it (as some queer theorists might have us believe). I completely agree. Her turn to quotidian rather than spectacular racism is a convincing one. And I was waiting and waiting for fuller explorations of the erotic life of racism in more concrete, if not empirical but at least rigorously textual, ways, and they never came. Instead, I was left with rather long critiques of queer studies over the last few decades and extremely abstract analysis of Faulkner in the conclusion.
I understand where she is coming from. She is a black queer feminist who is really serious about bringing critical race theory and queer theory in productive dialogue. She draws on Spillers, Lorde, and Beauvoir rather than more familiar names in recent queer studies. Despite some of the unconvincing sweeping generalizations she makes throughout the book (and the rather irritating almost complete erasure of Asian American studies' theorizations about racism and erotics), her insistence that we cannot get away from the white/black binary is an acceptable one, at least in one short book, given her positionality. I think her criticism of increasingly transnational queer studies' tendency to elide "black.female.queer" is also something we need to take seriously. That said, I feel she left this project unfinished (the whole book is a little over 100 pages). I think she could and should have explored the relationship between erotics and racism, which she starts to do in Chapter 2, more fully by adding fifty more pages, if not 100.
I am not sure if Holland is planning on pursuing this project further and there will be a sequel to this. If so, great, I look forward to that. If not, well... we need to wait for another scholar to explore this issue more fully.
I understand where she is coming from. She is a black queer feminist who is really serious about bringing critical race theory and queer theory in productive dialogue. She draws on Spillers, Lorde, and Beauvoir rather than more familiar names in recent queer studies. Despite some of the unconvincing sweeping generalizations she makes throughout the book (and the rather irritating almost complete erasure of Asian American studies' theorizations about racism and erotics), her insistence that we cannot get away from the white/black binary is an acceptable one, at least in one short book, given her positionality. I think her criticism of increasingly transnational queer studies' tendency to elide "black.female.queer" is also something we need to take seriously. That said, I feel she left this project unfinished (the whole book is a little over 100 pages). I think she could and should have explored the relationship between erotics and racism, which she starts to do in Chapter 2, more fully by adding fifty more pages, if not 100.
I am not sure if Holland is planning on pursuing this project further and there will be a sequel to this. If so, great, I look forward to that. If not, well... we need to wait for another scholar to explore this issue more fully.
September 4, 2014
This book was super interesting and I'm glad I read it but I have to agree with some of the other reviewers here - it seemed really incomplete and jumped around a lot. As already mentioned, bits of the text read like an annotated bibliography for the argument Holland planned to write but didn't! In this sense it was like a bad academic thesis at times. She quoted so many amazing writers and texts just in passing. I think it definitely improved as it went but even in the conclusion she was introducing a whole lot of new concepts and ideas for the first time...
Thank you Alex for letting me borrow it for like a year :)
Thank you Alex for letting me borrow it for like a year :)
May 5, 2016
Rigorous but ultimately frustrating, The Erotic Life of Racism spends a great deal of time setting the foundations for an argument that is never successfully delineated. The idea that the erotic is intimately tied to racism is interesting, as is Holland's turn to an analysis of quotidian racism, but it seems to me that these ideas require a lot more unpacking. The three main chapters are extended literature reviews that would seem to set the stage for a massive undertaking, but which instead lead only to a very brief conclusion. There is obvious value here, but the title suggests more than what the content delivers.
February 19, 2015
I am reading this book as part of my graduate coursework on race, gender, and sexuality. While I agree with many other reviews that Sharon Holland has some wonderful insights within this book, it is exceedingly pedantic and as one reviewer put it, at times, "unreadable". Sometimes, simpler is better when trying to make a point.
June 9, 2015
Dense, highly theoretical, still struggling with a lot of what she was saying BUT thought provoking, nonetheless. Interested in a re-read after a few months sitting on her ideas.
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