On the Cusp of Deviance: Respectability Politics and the Cultural Marketplace of Sameness

Kaila Aida Story examines the consequences of presenting identity as an “either/or” or “and/or” dichotomy through the visual and rhetorical strategies of the “return to marriage and respectability” platforms of black heteronormativity and the whitening and sanitizing platforms of the marriage equality movement. Throughout the essay, Story elucidates how the “old” way of doing racialized sexuality work is still very much present within popular media. Further, she discusses the possessive investment in the whitening of the same-sex marriage movement and the investment in heteronormativity forwarded by such black cultural icons as Tyler Perry and Steve Harvey. Against these normalizing impulses, Story urges queer people of color to continue their fight for their own agency and spaces and to do so with a consciousness that shows how oppression has functioned primarily through the racialization of their gendered and sexual identities and its relationship to the state.