Cathy Cohen:The Quiet Storm Scholar That Queer Theory Needed
This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" The forum opens with Cohen's reflection on the article she wrote twenty years ago. Other authors in the forum then ruminate on such topics as the potential erasure of the queer political history that the original article provoked readers to consider in the time during and since its printing, the haunting answer to the original article's haunting subtitular question—"the radical potential of queer politics?," and new political alliances that might fit under the rubric of queer in our contemporary moment.
intersectionality, cross-cutting, queer of color, Cathy Cohen, queer political history
For almost two decades Cathy Cohen's scholarship has epitomized a specific style and aesthetic unremarked on in queer theory wars, or beefs in hip-hop nomenclature. Cohen's approach to queer studies was both an innovation of sexual politics and a remix of deracinated culture wars. This is why, for me, playing and reflecting on Mobb Deep's original "Quiet Storm" (1999) and the "Quiet Storm (Remix) featuring Lil' Kim" is an apropos way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Cohen's now necessary and canonical essay "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" (1997).
On the first verse of "Quiet Storm," Prodigy raps, "I put my lifetime in between the paper's lines. I'm the quiet storm nigga who fight rhyme," to capture the lyrical finesse of his style in rap battles. On the later "Quiet Storm Remix," Lil' Kim would drop scalding verses, "Light as a rock bitch, hard as a cock bitch," to signify her unique style. I take my inspiration from 1990s hip-hop because it is both thematically and aesthetically appropriate to what Cohen does in her essay, as it critiques the failures of queer theory and white queer studies in the 1990s. Not that I would ever equate Mobb Deep's oeuvre with white queer theory, but Cohen's essay is a notable reimagining of what queer theory and queer studies could do: "provide a space where transformational political work can begin" (438). The essay also, without explicitly stating an aesthetic intent, established through language that such a space could look and sound different. Black cultural studies and Black sexuality studies needed this essay to hype up a new generation for the work that is currently being done.
The video for Mobb Deep's remix was a Hype Williams production, but its red-light hue-filtered video was perhaps the least hyped video of Williams's career (the visual spectacle understated), owing to Mobb Deep's sonic sampling of Smokey Robinson's languid instrumental introduction from "The Quiet Storm" and the heavy bass line of Melle Mel's "White Lines." Unlike Smokey Robinson's version, there was nothing soft and warm about this Quiet Storm. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" establishes a tone that is quiet for its discursive moves [End Page 156] and themes that were hard (serious). The essay sets the stage for the fugitive public that she would call for in her groundbreaking book The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999) and a later essay, "Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics" (2004).
The Lil' Kim refrain on Mobb Deep's remix of "Quiet Storm" is how I can best articulate the cogent Blackness and lesbian feminist maneuvering of what Cohen's now necessary and canonical essay did to LGBTQ studies and politics and queer theory. Beginning with the essay's title, Cohen enters into the mix of queer theory and links her concerns with language and discourse. Her use of the vernacular is the blackest clarion questioning as to whether queer studies can fulfill its radical potential. Specifically, the question mark that punctuates the end of her title asks the field if it can move beyond a white homonormative assimilationist agenda too often unable to deal with difference, a key strategy for pursuing a radical transformational coalitional politics. Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and Alex Doty are just a few of the queer theorists that culled the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault into useful deployment of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism to shift LGBT studies from a strict enterprise of linear historical studies of lesbian and gay life. While Cohen does not use literary theory and philosophy as these authors did, she does perform close readings of cultural moments and texts and uses the vernacular to signal a foundational critique in the essay, that of class. Simply put, she remixes queer theory. Beginning in the vernacular allows Cohen to decenter white and upper-class narratives that shape sexual politics and sexual identity. Typically written as derogatory terms, much like queer was at some point, Cohen recognizes the nonnormative and marginal positions of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens as shaped by differences of race and class. Her use of the vernacular "creates a space in opposition to dominant norms" (Cohen 1997: 438), and those dominant norms typically ascribed to heterosexuality become incorporated in assimilationist agendas of LGBT communities that pay no attention to intersectionality. Much of the work in Black studies on respectability owes a great debt to the essay.
When Cohen asserts that radical queer politics should move away from "a simple dichotomy between those deemed queer and those deemed heterosexual" (ibid.: 440), since "varying relations to power exist among those who label themselves as queer" (ibid.: 449), she dismisses compulsory heterosexuality and assimilation politics. She provides Black feminist studies with an entirely new counterargument to the Moynihan madness and white queer theory with evidence of how class differences need to be addressed in queer politics. Assessing poor [End Page 157] and working-class women as similarly marginalized for their sexualities, Cohen observes that queerness might provide a space in which politics can refuse stigmatization and stereotype and lead to new ideologies.
Cohen's assessment of identity and normativity alongside intersectionality certainly cleared out a space for another important work, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Henderson and Johnson 2007). In many ways, Cohen's essay, republished in that collection, quietly demonstrated why Black queer studies would need to be invented, announced, and expanded to counter the limitations of queer studies. Like "Hot damn ho, here we go again," Lil' Kim's use of MC Lyte's verse from "10% Dis," a song about bite beaters and dope style takers, Cohen (1997: 453) does all of this while reminding readers that Black lesbian feminists such as the Combahee River Collective, Barbara Smith, and Cheryl Clarke have already radically complicated and challenged "reductive notions of heteronormativity articulated by queer activists and scholars." She subtly underlines the debt queer theorists owe Black feminists without calling them bite beaters, dope style takers, or knowledge colonizers.
That is why, even after twenty years in print, we can still sample the refrain from Mobb Deep's "Quiet Storm" to describe the significance of Cathy Cohen's "Punk, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens":
Yo, it's the real shitShit to make you feel shitThump 'em in the club shitHave you wilding out when you bump this
L. H. Stallings is professor of women's studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Mutha Is Half a Word! Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2007). Her second book, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (University of Illinois Press, 2015), explores how black sexual cultures produce radical ideologies about labor, community, art, and sexuality. It has received the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the MLA GL/Q Caucus and the 2016 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women's Studies from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA). It was also a 2016 finalist for the Twenty-Eighth Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBT studies.
