Answer

Week 4 Response

This week’s reading, “A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory” by Sullivan, was quite informative and breathtaking. One of the elements of the text that I found more compelling is the history of racial discrimination that has, to date, remained a recurrent theme in sociology, media/news, and equality discourses. Citing various theorists such as Tim McCaskell and Soibhan Somerville, the author uncovers how “race” came into existence as a classificatory concept in the classical episteme era in the 18^th century. The classificatory system was borne by Charles Linnaeus in his text titled “General System of Nature” where he classified people by their color types as Red Americans, White Americans, Black Africans, and Yellow Asians. Perhaps the biggest mistake that Linnaeus committed was to go ahead to attribute traits to each race because the traits have, until today, been used as the basis of racial-based discrimination. For instance, he associated Black Africans with negligence and indolent and White Americans with inventiveness and gentleness, and this partly explains why we see the majority of Whites occupying senior job positions whereas African Americans and other minorities such a Hispanics are relegated to lower menial positions.

The reading also uncovered various assertions and theorists’ viewpoints that I found thought-provoking, the first being assertions that underpin the biological determinist accounts of race science. I was surprised to learn that apart from physiological such as skin color, people are still categorized into races based on their psychological characteristics like morality, intelligence, and character. This categorization is perhaps the genesis of microaggressions that minority groups continue to experience in their everyday interactions with their social environments. One of the elements in the reading that seemed a bit confusing was the concept of heteronormativity, which the author described as the interplay between racism, homophobia, and sexism as the three key forms of social organization and regulation. To this end, the main question I would ask, as far as the text is concerned, is, “how is race historically and culturally related to gender and sexuality?”. Another question that emerged during the reading experience is; “can we define race as a biological attribute?” In other words, can we use people’s biological makeup/characteristics to categorize people into different races?