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The workshop explored how the policies and rhetoric of neoliberalism impact and reshape the intimate sphere, using it as a site for state intervention while deploying the language of privatization. This use of the intimate sphere as a site of regulation is not new. For example, the intimate sphere has always been a heightened domain of regulation for racialized marginal communities. Understanding this, what lessons can we learn from the history of struggle in African-American communities over issues such as sex, desire and family? Specifically, we explored what interventions in theory and practice might be developed from black queer theory to challenge the attack on or use of the intimate sphere in neoliberalism. Cathy Cohen is Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, and the author of the groundbreaking 2005 essay "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" (in: Black Queer Studies. A Critical Anthology ed. by Patrick E. Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, Durham/London 2005), that has inspired much reflection and response from queer of color as well as critical whiteness thought. In the essay, Cohen criticizes the all-too-simple binary of "queer" versus "straight" and pleads for queer theory and politics to be more attentive to the complex and intertwined power relations of, for instance, sexuality, race, and class. In her early book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago 1999), she addresses the tensions between NGO and black community organizing, state politics, and the needs of individuals in relation to HIV/AIDS politics and policies. In her most recent book, Democracy Remixed. Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford 2010), Cohen presents a detailed analysis of the racialized and often still racist power dynamics in contemporary US politics that draws on the actual voices of black youth. In her talk, she connects this understanding of the racialized state to neoliberal developments and the specific forms ...

The author gave this talk as part of the Queering Ethnic Studies plenary session at the "Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide" conference, which was held at the University of California, Riverside, on March 10 to 12, 2011. The queering of the analysis of violence against youth is rooted in an understanding of violence that flows from projects that pathologize and brutalize youth regardless of race, class, gender, or sexuality. Social justice organizations such as Gender JUST, FIERCE, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Queers for Economic Justice exemplify queer organizations that reject challenges to violence based on rights-based, individualistic approaches requiring special attention to LGBTQ victims and calling for criminalizing hate crime legislation and campus anti-bullying policies. Similar to other models of accountability explored in this issue, their remedies to violence must echo critiques and responses that reject the individualizing the criminalizing framework of the conventional anti-sexual assault and domestic violence movement. Instead, they call for a collective, community accountability response to state and intra-community violence. Adapted from the source document.

In Democracy Remixed, award-winning scholar Cathy J. Cohen offers an authoritative analysis of the state of black youth in America today. Utilizing the results from the Black Youth Project, a groundbreaking national survey, Cohen focuses on what young black Americans actually experience and think--and underscores the political repercussions. Featuring their stories, she reveals that black youth largely want what most Americans want--a good job, a fulfilling life, safety, respect, and equality. But while members of this generation have much in common with the rest of America, they also believe that equality does not yet exist, at least not in their lives. Many believe that they are treated as second-class citizens. Also, for a significant number the future seems bleak when they look at their neighborhoods, their schools, and even their own lives and choices. Through their words, these young people provide a complex and balanced picture of the intersection of opportunity and discrimination in their lives.

This paper explores the possibility of constructing a field of investigation based in African American Studies and borrowing from queer theory and Black feminist analysis that is centered around the experiences of those who stand on the (out)side of state-sanctioned, normalized, White, middle- and upper-class, male heterosexuality. This would entail a paradigmatic shift in how scholars of Black politics and more broadly African American Studies think and write about those most vulnerable in Black communities—those thought to be morally wanting by both dominant society and other indigenous group members. Using a theoretical framework for studying Black politics that highlights the construction and malleability of categories as well as the work of processes of normalization found in queer theory in tandem with the detailed understanding of power, in particular as it is structured around and through axes such as race, gender, and class found in African American Studies, we might gain new insights into the everyday politics of those at the bottom in Black communities.Despite the feelings of some in Black communities that we have been shamed by the immoral behavior of a small subset of community members, those some would label the underclass, scholars must take up the charge to highlight and detail the agency of those on the outside, those who through their acts of nonconformity choose outsider status, at least temporarily. An intentional deviance given limited agency and constrained choices sits at the center for this field of research. These individuals are not fully or completely defining themselves as outsiders nor are they satisfied with their outsider status, but they are also not willing to adapt completely, or to conform. The cumulative impact of such choices might be the creation of spaces or counter publics, where not only oppositional ideas and discourse happen, but lived opposition, or at least autonomy, is chosen daily. Through the repetition of deviant practices by multiple individuals, new identities, communities, and politics might emerge where seemingly deviant, unconnected behavior can be transformed into conscious acts of resistance that serve as the basis for a mobilized politics of deviance.

The author argues that the near invisibility of women of color in political science research is a result of the following: the definition of politics, the increasing reliance on survey data as the evidence of choice, limited attempts to expand political science curriculum, & the demographics of American politics educators. More research is needed on the historical political activity of women of color as well as research addressing their current policy preferences, political views, & level of political participation. In order to gain a better understanding about women of color's political participation & their contributions to American politics, the author suggests that we need to disaggregate the category "women of color" & broaden our definition of political activity to include the actions these women take on a local level. She calls on scholars to be "politically conscious," & conduct research that can help to empower & improve the lives of women of color. J. Harwell