Roderick Ferguson

Roderick Ferguson is a professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). Previously, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN) His academic interests include 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. Ferguson is also known for his critique of the modern university and the corporatization of higher education, in particular. Additionally, Ferguson contributed greatly to queer theory regarding 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."

Life

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. 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 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

The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012)

In The Reorder of Things, Ferguson traces the history of interdisciplines in the university, including the rise of departments of race, gender, ethnicity, and queer studies, and argues that they are essential to the development of power in academia, the state, and global capitalism rather than a challenge to it. He narrates 60s and 70s movements in universities across the United States in which minority and women students organized to protest racial and gender discrimination and inequality on college campuses. Ferguson ultimately asserts that cultural studies and other minority movements are easily co-opted by the state, and it is necessary to develop new modes of analysis that resist the power of the institution.

Adrian Piper's art collage Self Portrait 2000 is used at the beginning of the book to exemplify how institutions including the university, the state, and capital actively work to undermine projects of equality despite outwardly promoting diversity. This project is used by Ferguson to demonstrate how the American academy has failed to keep promises to students of color. He borrows from Michel Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality about power as intentional and calculating to describe how institutions view minority movements as elements that can be coopted and incorporated into its own objectives. Ferguson uses "power" in Foucault's terms as a "strategical situation in a particular society" and is a mode for calculating and arranging minority difference that is not individual, but systemic and representative of a network of fluctuating relationships.

The Reorder of Things details 60s and 70s student organizing including the Chicano Movement, specifically focusing on the Lumumba-Zapata Collective at the University of California, San Diego which aimed to establish a college to educate Black, Chicano, and poor white students. Ferguson uses the examples of these movements to demonstrate how the academy, the US nation-state and capital used revolutionary organizing by minorities to bolster the US political economy, while failing to actually represent those subjects.

• Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. U of Minnesota Press. 2004. ISBN 9780816641284.
• Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press. 2011. ISBN 9780822349853. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help)