Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity

Authors

Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1996

Abstract

A negative image of the homosexual must be promoted to preserve the heterosexual society, an idea that extends to the construction of African-American masculinity. African Americans represent the lack of boundaries in a chaotic culture. The resulting presumption that blacks are subhuman and irrational comes from the history of slavery and the presumed separateness of the race. Homosexuals also have been cut from their history by society and therefore must rediscover their roots to reject society's negative images.

Comments

This article was originally published in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 28, No. 3, Queerer Than Fiction, Fall 1996.