Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare
Creator
Permalink
https://soundcloud.com/bbqplus/queerness-race-and-reproduction-exploring-the-politics-of-childcare
Transcript
[in process]
Description
Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare Through and Beyond Lee Edelman and José Muñoz
This open-access education resource explores the political, social, and theoretical issues surrounding children, childcare, and reproduction. It begins with a personal reflection on how my queer friends and I would speculate about the possibility of having children as undergraduate students. I observe that our queerness made these questions so salient to us as we recognized the unique challenges that we had as queer children. I then explore a tension within queer theory between scholars Lee Edelman, who characterizes childrearing as a necessarily heteronormative endeavor, and José Muñoz, who critiques Edelman’s argument for ignoring the fact that society does not value Black and brown children in the same way as it does white children. Despite Muñoz’s influential critique, I caution against assuming that critiques of the imperative to reproduce necessarily exclude racial analysis by drawing on the work of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who calls attention to the ways that racist institutions have forced Black people to reproduce in certain contexts. By putting these scholars in conversation, the audio reflects on the wide-reaching practical and theoretical consequences of reproductive politics.
References
Lee Edelman
José Muñoz
Christina Sharpe
Usage/Rights
Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0