Queer of color critique is an intersectional framework, grounded in Black feminism, that challenges the single-issue approach to queer theory by analyzing how power dynamics associated race, class, gender expression, sexuality, ability, culture and nationality influence the lived experiences of individuals and groups that hold one or more of these identities. Incorporating the scholarship and writings of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Barbara Smith, Cathy Cohen, Brittney Cooper and Charlene A. Carruthers, the queer of color critique asks: what is queer about queer theory if we are analyzing sexuality as if it is removed from other identities? The queer of color critique expands queer politics and challenges queer activists to move out of a "single oppression framework" and incorporate the work and perspectives of differently marginalized identities into their politics, practices and organizations. The Combahee River Collective Statement clearly articulates the intersecting forces of power: "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives." Queer of color critique demands that an intersectional lens be applied queer politics and illustrates the limitations and contradictions of queer theory without it. Exercised by activists, organizers, intellectuals, care workers and community members alike, the queer of color critique imagines and builds a world in which all people can thrive as their most authentic selves- without sacrificing any part of their identity.
Historical context
Queer of color critique was a concept long before it was an established framework coined by Roderick Ferguson in The Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique in 2004, and by Jose Esteban Muñoz in Disidentification: Queers of color and performance politics. Ferguson argues that the queer of color critique “interrogates social formation as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” Ferguson draws a connection between the capitalist nation-building and the state's regulation of gender and sexual eccentricities of non-white populations. Muñoz offers disidentification as a strategy of resistance that defies assimilation and challenges dominant ideology that associates queerness with whiteness, a concept that Ferguson then builds on further by challenging the universality of sexual heterogeneity. Without universality, it is possible to see differences as a source of strength and create new categories that are not fixed, but are experiencing constant change and reformation. Furthermore, without a "normal" or "natural" state of being, Ferguson states "queer of color analysis can be another step in the move beyond identity politics and toward what Angela Davis calls "unlikely and unprecedented coalitions."" The queer of color critique illuminates the ways that queer theory has been historically influenced by dominant ideology by treating the queer white experience as universal and failing to center the voices, needs, and bodies of those who exist at the margins of margins. Both Muñoz and Ferguson build on the scholarship of activists and intellectuals, whose ideas and contributions are explained below.