There are sissies everywhere, or so Marlon B. Ross tells us. If such a proclamation seems to suggest the presence of a ghostly figure, he invites us to attend to the ways it haunts the politics of racialized masculinity. Studies that examine these politics often read the process of manning the race as the mounting of an assertive defense through traditionally patriarchal values. This has been an important critique because it acknowledges some of the strategies that Black men have deployed in response to being situated beyond the fraternal embrace of white supremacy. Perhaps, therefore, we are used to reading the sissy as a figure that is banished from the ritual making of manliness. In this groundbreaking text, however, Ross charts a genealogy that evinces sissiness not only as a wound but also as a cultural and political resource for imagining advancement.
In Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit...
