i.’s Reviews > The Erotic Life of Racism > Status Update

"If we tie the black female body to the inevitability of slavery's abusive sexual terrain so that every time we think of enslaved black women and sex we think pain, not pleasure, then we also fail to acknowledge our own intellectual responsibility to take seriously how the transatlantic slave trade altered the very shape of sexuality in the Americas for everyone."

In examining race and the erotics through a critique of both time/chronopolitics (Edelman) and embodiedness, Holland lays the groundwork for a linking between critical race theory and theories of sexuality/eroticism, one whose central figure in its analysis is the Black (lesbian) body (38).

"By anchoring the erotic to racist practice, I champion an alternative location for grounding racism--in the quotidian and intimate action that beings belonging to one another out into bold relief and perhaps also into question."

"When we want to think of one race...then we become insensitive to the very real, very material effects of racist practice...when we return to that practices, we can only see something produced by machinations of large systems like the university or the state. We often only have eyes for the spectacularity of racist practice, not its everyday machinations that we in turn have some culpability in."

Holland moves to examining Crenshaw and Cohen to examine "the queer body's abandoning of race" (24). The tensions between queer theory/poststructuralism and critical race theory, particularly with the obliviation of the body are what Cohen in particular, Holland writes, is seeking to problematize and reimagine.

Holland is interested in critiquing Bonilla-Silva's emphasis on "familiarity" as a mode through which racisms can be dismantled, and uses this as a way to examine familairites, intimacies, and families, ultimately critiquimg the use of both biologics and "lineage/descent" in the context of race as an ordering pricinple.

In this synthesis of critical race theory and queer theory, Holland simultaneously pushes back against the calls to "go beyond" the Black/white binary and works to reenter pleasure, the erotic, and connectivity to conversations about the making of race. In doing so, she begins with an anecdote about a white woman at Safeway, emphasizing that she was hailed, and spoke back.