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AFTER THE PARTY
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers-Letson
Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Titles in the series include:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
Frances Négron-Muntaner
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
J. Jack Halberstam
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality
Dwight A. McBride
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid-Pharr
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lázaro Lima
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Scott Herring
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Karen Tongson
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading
Martin Joseph Ponce
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Michael Cobb
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias
Eng-Beng Lim
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law
Isaac West
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings
Juana María Rodríguez
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism
Amber Jamilla Musser
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies
Rachel C. Lee
Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men
Jane Ward
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
Uri McMillan
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire
Hiram Pérez
Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality
Katherine Franke
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique
Robert F. Reid-Pharr
Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible
Malik Gaines
The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia
Gayle Salamon
Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody
Melissa M. Wilcox
After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life
Joshua Chambers-Letson
For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org
After the Party
A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life
Joshua Chambers-Letson
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
Sections of chapter 2 first appeared in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, special issue on “Living Labor: Marxism and Performance,” vol. 26, nos. 2–3 (2016), edited by Aliza Shvarts and Joshua Lubin-Levy. Other sections also appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, special issue on “Reproduction and Performance,” edited by Rebecca Schneider. Vol. 62, no. 1, 2018. A subvention to support publication of After the Party was generously provided by Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano, author.
Title: After the party : a manifesto for queer of color life / Joshua Chambers-Letson.
Description: New York : New York University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055001 | ISBN 978-1-4798-9017-0 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4798-3277-4 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Queer theory. | Performance art. | Minorities—Social conditions.
Classification: LCC HQ76.25 .C425 2018 | DDC 306.7601—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055001
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
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CONTENTS