Roderick A Ferguson Popular Books

Roderick A Ferguson Biography & Facts

Roderick Ferguson is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He was previously professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His scholarship includes work on African-American literature, queer theory and queer studies, classical and contemporary social theory, African-American intellectual history, sociology of race and ethnic relations, and black cultural theory. Among his contributions to queer theory, Ferguson is credited with coining the term Queer of Color Critique, which he defines as "...interrogat[ion] of social formations 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. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique." Ferguson is also known for his critique of the modern university and the corporatization of higher education. Life and career Ferguson received his B.A. in Sociology from Washington, D.C.'s Howard University in 1994 before going on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Sociology program at the University of California, San Diego in 1997 and 2000, respectively. He is the recipient of the Modern Language Association's "Crompton-Noll Award" in 2000, which awards the "best essay in lesbian, gay, and queer studies in the modern languages," for his article, "The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption." He served as associate editor of American Quarterly: The Journal of the American Studies Association from 2007 to 2010 and filled the position of Department Chair in American Studies at the University of Minnesota from 2009-2012. Ferguson served as 2018 President of the American Studies Association, delivering his presidential address, "To Catch a Light-Filled Vision: American Studies and the Activation of Radical Traditions," at the November 2018 annual conference. At the University of Illinois, Chicago, Ferguson served as the co-director of the Racialized Body research cluster and was previously the chair of the African American Studies department. Before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). In 2004, he was a Scholar in Residence for the "Queer Locations" Seminar at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. In 2013, he was the Old Dominion Visiting Faculty for the Council of the Humanities and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. Ferguson is most renowned for the concept of "queer of color critique" from his book Aberrations in Black, which is rooted in the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective which do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life. Works Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004) Aberrations in Black critically discusses the works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Karl Marx, and connects American cultural studies to questions from sociology, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and African American studies. Ferguson suggests that intellectual inquiry is not neatly defined within the boundaries of a single discipline, but that it is shaped out of heterogeneity. Aberrations in Black can be understood as a response to the canon and its regulation of sexual difference. Ferguson begins his discussion with a description of a black drag queen prostitute, who serves as a fixture of urban capitalism in Marlon Riggs' Tongues United. This figure is confusing in that she is multiply determined and excluded by difference in race, class, sexuality, and gender. Ferguson proposes queer of color critique as a mode of analysis for interpreting the black drag queen prostitute, and uses this figure to demonstrate the heterogeneity of social categories with in the culture and genealogy of the West. Queer of color critique emerges in Aberrations in Black as a method for challenging ideologies that work to conceal the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Ferguson builds on the idea in historical materialism that capital produces social formations that exceed the acceptable boundaries of gendered, racialized sexual ideals, while also critiquing the representation of these formations as pathological. He also challenges the view of identity as a goal to be achieved, drawing from Barbara Smith's essay “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” to argue that identity should be a space to negotiate social contradictions, rather than a space where differences are concealed for the sake of stability. Ferguson uses the African American novel as a cite of material and discursive multiplicity that can exist outside of Western, canonical genealogies. He views African American novels as a cultural form that can deepen out understandings of gender and sexuality in African American culture. Ferguson borrows from Toni Morrison's Sula, and discusses Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain to display how the African American novel is a site of reflection compelled by struggles over gender and sexuality within the African American community. He juxtaposes these novels with sociological texts like the Combahee River Collective statement and Daniel Moynihan’s The Negro Family to contextualize heteropatriarchy and oppositional movements. Native Son Chapter 1 of Aberrations in Black juxtaposes Richard Wright's classic novel with the sociological work of Robert Park, who imagined assimilation and migration through heterosexual reproduction. Park believed urbanization exposed the “primary group” to prostitution, homosexuality, and juvenile delinquency, equating African American neighborhoods with nonheteronormative formations. Ferguson understands Wright as responding to social disorganization as a feminizing process "that disrupted African American gender and sexual integrity." Wright's use of Bigger Thomas's character, who is a feminized figure unconforming to heteropatriarchy or national ideas, was to represent the nonheteronormative dysfunction and gendered features within racial domination. Ferguson argues that working-class exploitation of Black men is demonstrated to be the source of feminization and societal dysfunction in Park and Wright's work. Invisible Man Chapter 2 of Aberrations in Black contains a detailed description of Professor Woodridge, a character present in an unpublished chapter of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. To Ferguson, Woodridge represents nonconformity and opposition to the canon within the university..... Discover the Roderick A Ferguson popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Roderick A Ferguson books.