6

LOVING UNBECOMING
The Queer Politics of the Transitive Native
jodi a. byrd

I’m not sure how the change in the social status of homo­sexuality, sadomasochism, and
the like have changed the way we read the story t­oday. Ask me what the story is about
now, however, and I’ll prob­ably say it’s somehow about the desire for desire.—­Samuel R.
Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah”

To think about desire is to arrive at a queer place. But I do not mean for that queer
place to become overdetermined by its association with desire, with the erotic. In es-
sence, I am opening the door to a notion of the “erotic” that oversteps the category of
the au­tonomous so valued in queer theory so as to place the erotic—­the personal
and po­liti­cal dimension of desire—at the threshold of ideas about quotidian racist
practice.—­Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism

The last week of June 2013 saw the perfect storm of U.S. Supreme Court
landmark decisions. On June 25, the justices handed down their ruling in
Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder and in the pro­cess effectively dismantled
key protections in sections 4–5 of the Voting Rights Amendment of 1965.
On the same day, and with the same 5–4 majority, the court attacked tribal
sovereignty and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in Adoptive ­Couple v.
Baby Girl. The following day, the court struck down the Defense of Mar-
riage Act (doma) of 1996 as a violation of the Fifth Amendment in United
States v. Windsor and deci­ded that proponents of California’s Proposition 8
to ban gay marriage had no grounds to appeal the district court’s ruling. That the
pair of cases that purportedly advanced gay marriage as a homonormative civil
right ­were issued on the tenth anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas (June 26, 2003)
drove home the weighted intentionality of the court’s procedural deliberations.
Indeed, the significance of such anniversary alignments also helped predict
exactly how, in the context of current neoliberal refortifications of possessive
white heteropatriarchy, arguments about the Equal Protection Clause of the
­Fourteenth Amendment could and would unfold. In each case, the court ruled
consistently to maintain the logics of racial liberalism, which, as Jodi Melamed
observes, “allow vio­lence to advance precisely through a formally antiracist, ra-
tional apparatus.”1
While it may be tempting to read t­ hese cases as isolated, what emerges in
their temporal synchronicity are the machinations of a well-­scripted liberal-
ism designed to maintain settler colonialism through dialectical and compet-
ing modes of inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, the trifecta of po­liti­cal issues
surrounding ­these cases, with the undermining of Indigenous sovereignty
and voting rights for minorities on the one hand, and the tepid affirmation
of same-­sex ­couples’ rights to federal benefits and marriage recognition on
the other, demonstrates the trenchant need for queer, Indigenous, feminist,
and critical race theories to continue hammering home how U.S. neolib-
eral biopolitics govern bodies, rights, and access through state-­sanctioned
normativities that expand access only to ensure incorporation as non-­
transformation. ­These four cases, taken altogether as a unit of U.S. juridi-
cal biopower, exemplify the state-­endorsed modes of liberal tolerance that
con­temporary settler colonial governments use to manage racial, gender,
sexual, and Indigenous differences.
The consolidation of normative hetero-­and non-­families, especially at
the sites of transnational and transracial adoption, as well as gay marriage,
signals, then, the degree to which discourses of integration, tolerance, and
rights serve to tender equality within the U.S. settler nation-­state at the
price of assimilation, erasure, and vio­lence. Using equal protection to expand
the notion of individual rights over and against collective group rights, the
Supreme Court advances a rather chilling hegemonic liberalism: that rich,
white heterosexual c­ ouples make the best parents for “vulnerable c­ hildren

208 · Byrd
at a ­great disadvantage solely b­ ecause an ancestor—­even a remote one—­
was an Indian”;2 that race has been severed from the historical and material
conditions of racism; and that same-­sex ­couples, if white, propertied, and
wealthy, might become surrogates for white heterosexual ­couples. In the
zero-­sum contest that pits gay rights against Indigenous sovereignty against
civil rights for all arrivants within the institutions built through settler colo-
nial occupation of Indigenous lands, equivalences and pre­ce­dents reign as
the vertical and horizontal axes of intersectionality. Within such economies
of normativity, vulnerability, and accommodation, as Lisa Duggan might
argue, we are left with a “politics that does not contest dominant heteronor-
mative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them.”3 Given
the conditions of the United States’ postwar imperial and expansive gesture
­toward integration and naturalization as remedy to the injury of exclusion,
the Supreme Court’s rulings of summer 2013 augur the maintenance—­and,
in fact, the sustenance—of the status quo.
In the social media cele­brations that followed the Supreme Court’s deci-
sions on the two cases affecting same-­sex marriage recognition and benefits,
at least, t­here was a triumphal air reminiscent of a mission fi­nally accom-
plished. By December, journalists had declared that 2013 “was a r­eally gay
year,” with the top of the “best of ” lists including the striking down of doma,
the extension of federal benefits to married same-­sex c­ ouples, and the re-
sumption of same-­sex marriages in California.4 States including Delaware,
Hawai‘i, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, and, at least tempo-
rarily and provisionally, Utah legalized same-­sex marriage throughout the
months following the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor.
In delivering the opinion of the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy observed
that “doma’s avowed purpose and practical effect are to impose a disadvantage,
a separate status, and so a stigma on all who enter into same-­sex marriages
made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.”5 Evoking Loving v.
­Virginia (1967), as well as Lawrence v. Texas (2003), to provide pre­ce­dence
for “constitutional guarantees” within and against the states’ responsibilities
for “defining and regulating the marital relation,” Justice Kennedy explained
that doma “uses the state-­defined class for the opposite purpose—to im-
pose restrictions and disabilities.”6 Fi­nally, he wrote, “doma’s principal ef-
fect is to identify and make unequal a subset of state-­sanctioned marriages.
It contrives to deprive some c­ ouples married u­ nder the laws of their State,
but not ­others, of both rights and responsibilities, creating two contradictory
marriage regimes within the same State.”7

Loving Unbecoming · 209

 While Kennedy’s opinion does not directly draw on the pre­ce­dence of
race within its framing of the injury doma inflicts on same-­sex married
­couples, his use of phrases such as “separate status,” “disadvantage,” “restric-
tions,” and “two contradictory marriage regimes” are inflected with what has
now become the conventional narratives used to frame same-­sex marriage
rights as disenfranchised minority civil rights. In essence, Kennedy’s word
choices bear the trace of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), with the impli-
cation that civil ­unions and same-­sex marriages ­under doma are separate
and unequal. In what has become known as the “Loving analogy,” or what
Siobhan Somerville identifies as the “miscegenation analogy,” same-­sex
­couples, and lgbtq2 ­people in general, are figured as one of the last groups
in the United States to receive equal rights, recognition and incorporation
within the nation-­state as full citizens.8 Such arguments hinge on a further
palimpsest: gender and sexuality become “like race” or “black equivalents”
within popu­lar and activist discourses, while racial vio­lence and oppression
are rendered somehow already settled within the juridical and civil arenas of
the nation-­state.9
Tellingly, even before the new millennium arrived, it had already been
proclaimed as the achievement of a much desired “postracial” society, and
certainly the juridical governance structures of the United States have em-
braced such declarative fantasies with aplomb over the past fifteen years.
The legacies of the past five centuries of first Eu­ro­pean domination and then
U.S. imperial domination, however, persist within the juridical categories of
property, identity, citizenship, marriage, inheritance, and freedom that un-
dergird such beloved notions as rights, equality, and democracy. The quartet
of decisions issued by the Supreme Court in June 2013 draws on analogies of
prior rulings to legitimate the violent imaginary of postracial incorporation
into what was always intended to remain a white heteropatriarchal occupa-
tion of Indigenous lands, and each case relies on a narrative of incremental
pro­gress that, as Somerville points out, “creates and maintains comparisons
among dif­fer­ent historically excluded groups, such that the rights gained
by one group establish a pre­ce­dent for another group’s entitlement to the
same rights.”10 Chandan Reddy provocatively argues in his analy­sis of the
structuring force of Loving v. ­Virginia that the “miscegenation analogy” of
gay marriage mobilizations “becomes the form by which such questions are
structured and temporarily resolved.” Further, he points out, within such
postracial and analogous modes of the accrual of rights is an implicit desire
for a post-­queer ­future in which “advocates seek something like a gay mar-
riage analogy that would benefit the very o­ thers seeking to emerge from

210 · Byrd
the shadows of ­legal illegitimacy that the assertion of formal equality at this
moment casts.”11 Race, in other words, is the harbinger of gender, sexual,
class, immigrant, disabled, trans, and other rights within U.S. settler colonial
imaginings. Race, as the baseline historical sign of injury and its reparation,
becomes the condition of possibility through which the threshold of rights
becomes discernible for all other groups.
Such temporal hauntings of the historical consequences of race, subjec-
tivity, property, and identity collide with anticipated ­futures in which such
­matters ­will fi­nally have been resolved in repeating waves of increasing, if
halting, accrual of rights and ac­cep­tance within the nation-­state for all t­ hose
who may have yet to strug­gle against adversity to achieve full equality. Th ­ ere
is, however, no possibility of an end point to what Reddy identifies as a form,
­because, by its very genre, it becomes the structuring force through which
the United States establishes its own legitimacy for the continued occupa-
tion of Indigenous lands. This narrative, if reduced to its plot device, is just
another metonymic refrain of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis of
1893,” in which he argued that, for o­ thers to cast off their origins and achieve
American identity, they had to wrest it out of the adversity of the wilderness
and in strug­gle with its prior inhabitants. It is a narrative that, as Reddy ar-
gues, serves a “power­ful regulative fiction” that coheres territoriality, identity,
and culture.12 The generic form of the “miscegenation analogy” embodies this
regulative power at the site of a movable frontier now figured as the cauldron
of integration. ­Matters of race, subjectivity, and citizenship are only tempo-
rarily resolved so that bound­aries and borders can be established, ­violated,
and exceeded in a never-­ending push ­toward a civil and civilizing horizon. In
this pro­cess, however, indigeneity collapses into race and is then supposedly
remediated through a racial liberalism that offers incorporation into the impe-
rial nation as the fulfillment of humanity’s strug­gle against oppression.
What becomes clear in the aggregate of ­these four cases, however, is that
ongoing U.S. settler colonialism substantiates itself through concomitant
pro­cesses that extend and deny rights and equal protections at the site of a fe-
tishized disavowal of an Indigenous as well as a racialized presence. That dis-
avowal si­mul­ta­neously desires authenticity even as it abjects indigeneity as
categorically illiberal and unjust within the horizons of colonial governance.
In the pro­cess, indigeneity by its very nature pres­ents current modes of theo-
rizing race and belonging, identity and possession, rights and freedoms with
a fundamental and often incommensurable conundrum within the dialectics
of recognition. As the Supreme Court rendered its opinions on adoption,
voting rights, and gay marriage, indigeneity continues to circulate as a site of

Loving Unbecoming · 211

intelligibility and of delimitation, a site that is both required to establish the
field through which rights are wrested from the wilderness and the thresh-
old through which ­those rights are differentiated for the individual and the
state. At minimum, ­these simultaneous and contradictory significations of
indigeneity raise considerable stakes for activating intersectional analyses
grounded in queer, feminist, critical ethnic, and Indigenous studies as a
way to disrupt the colonialist logics of erotics, desire, subjectivity, and identity
that underwrite the normative equivalences of civil and gendered protec-
tions within U.S. settler colonial racial liberalism. How scholars take up such
questions between and among the queer and Indigenous offer instructive, if
sometimes vexing, directions for interrogating the subject of rights within
U.S. juridical governance.

Undoing the Subject

One of the per­sis­tent and recurrent themes of Indigenous critical theory cen-
ters on the autonomy Indigenous p­ eoples have, or often do not have, to af-
fect and determine the scales of debate and urgency within the well-­heeled
modes of liberal critiques of colonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Certainly, indigeneity has provisionally now arrived as a newly revitalized
category of analy­sis, although its efficacy and distinguishability are often
circumscribed within the larger intellectual routes of settler colonialism. As
an analytic, though, indigeneity is still most often apprehended at the disci-
plinary bound­aries of anthropology, history, lit­er­a­ture, and law. Such bed-
fellows have operationalized indigeneity as a site of intervention to how
culture, temporality, narrative, recognition, identity, and ­legal discourses
have constituted U.S. liberal settler colonialism, but they have also tended
to capture indigeneity within the expected temporal assemblages of recov-
ery, archive, authenticity, re­sis­tance, and performative enunciation of the
speaking Native. Put another way, in the first instance the United States has
juridically, socially, and po­liti­cally figured indigenous ­peoples as disadvan-
taged c­ hildren in need of U.S. white protestant tutelage to become, as Mark
Rifkin might argue, “straight” at some yet unknown f­ uture moment; in the
second instance, indigenous p­ eoples are expected to serve as ventriloquist
conduits to culture, nature, and progressive modes of sociality and sexuality
that might then offer alternatives to a world in crisis in what Scott Morgensen
has diagnosed as at least one form of “settler homonationalism.”13
In this vein, recent scholarship in Indigenous studies has begun to open
up the colonially inflected relations among identity, kinship, erotics, sociality,

212 · Byrd
recognition, sovereignty, and belonging, particularly as they arise within the
context of the nation-­state formations in which federally recognized tribes are
interpellated as “domestic dependent nations.” That enforced dependence, as
well as the concomitant domesticity Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling con-
notes in its relational construction, has always borne the trace of sexuality and
gender as wildness and savagery are civilized, abjected, or disavowed. Schol-
arship in the field continues to grapple with the consequences of such reso-
nances. Desire—­for legibility, for futurity, for intimacy, for authority, and for
priority—­raises questions about how vulnerability, embodiment, and erotics
might challenge or transform assumptions about re­sis­tance and accommo-
dation within U.S. colonial and racial regimes. For Rifkin, it is the pos­si­ble
reconfiguration of indigeneity as erotics that “takes the kinds of physicality,
intersubjectivity, and vulnerability categorized and cordoned off as ‘sexuality’
within dominant discourses as a starting point for mapping both the ongoing
management of Indigenous polities and the forms of collective perception
and experience settler policy has sought to foreclose.”14 Such a sovereign
erotics, Rifkin continues, reimagines “peoplehood and placemaking in ways
that register the complex entwinement of unacknowledged survivals, unof-
ficial aspirations, and the per­sis­tence of pain.”15 Coupling queer to desire
and sexuality to erotic sovereignty, scholars have begun to chart a queer In-
digenous theory of re­sis­tance that manifests with and against fetishizations
of exceptional Indigenous difference.
As an emergent field in its own right, then, queer Indigenous studies has
begun to stage difficult and impor­tant questions about the nature of iden-
tity and its discontents, posing quandaries about the possibilities and limits
of the transformative politics of gender and sexuality especially where they
intersect with race, transnationalism, and colonialism. As queer Indigenous
studies begins to articulate some of the stakes for culturally and tribally in-
flected counter-­practices of gender and sexuality, kinship, governance, and
relationally, one of the remaining challenges for the field is to interrogate
­whether the queer in Indigenous studies is the same as the queer in queer
studies. At first blush, it might be tempting to assume that the answer is
self-­evident, the question slightly coy. The question, however, might trou­
ble some of the methodological, theoretical, and quotidian horizons that
intersectionality and interdisciplinarity seek to make vis­i­ble within the fields
of Indigenous, gender, and sexuality studies. The queer within Indigenous
studies has already come to signify a range of prescribed practices attached
to decolonizing desire, gender per­for­mance, kinship socialities, and relation-
ities to land and community.

Loving Unbecoming · 213

 On the flip side, queer has had a longer trajectory within critical theo-
retical conversations, although its meaning continues to expand, transcend,
and escape expectations of causal subjectivity. According to Cathy J. Cohen,
“Queer theory stands in direct contrast to the normalizing tendencies of
hegemonic sexuality rooted in ideas of static, stable sexual identities and
be­hav­iors. In queer theorizing the sexual subject is understood to be con-
structed and contained by multiple practices of categorization and regula-
tion that systematically marginalize and oppress ­those subjects thereby de-
fined as deviant and ‘other.’ ”16 As queer theory has developed from its early
iterations in per­for­mance studies in the 1990s, and especially in the context
of queer-­of-­color interventions that mediated against normative whiteness
and the respectability of certain subjects and not o­ thers, the field of inquiry
has proliferated the sites of engagement. The definition of queer, David Eng,
Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz suggest, “can neither be deci­ded
on in advance nor be depended on in the ­future. The reinvention of the term
is contingent on its potential obsolescence, one necessarily at odds with any
fortification of its critical reach in advance or any static notion of its pre-
sumed audience and participant.”17 It is a word whose time has come and
whose time is already past. Queer is an analytic, and it is one, as Sharon Hol-
land observes, whose “methodology for thinking through the queer body
can be cited along three registers: the psychoanalytic, the critique of global
capital, and the biopo­liti­cal.”18
At its best, queer theory interrogates the stakes of recognition, as well
as the bargains embedded within identitarian-­based politics that proclaim
injury and demand redress from the state. The queer pushes against static
and stable notions of identity and t­oward reinvention, often refusing and
resisting the affective placations of liberalism that center rights and recog-
nitions, structured through the historical vio­lence of sexism, racism, and
homophobia, as biopo­liti­cal reparations in the form of marriage, military
ser­vice, health-­care benefits, citizenship, and livability. That mode of rein-
vention, that refusal of a presumed audience and participant that Eng, Hal-
berstam, and Muñoz hail, though, also pres­ents us with a fundamentally
incommensurable transitive figure within the theory, particularly as it inter-
sects with the Indigenous. Suggesting that queer studies might better serve
diasporic, queer-­of-­color, and Indigenous critique through an engagement
with normalization as a field of social and historical forces, Eng, Halber­
stam and Muñoz offer subjectlessness as an epistemological denial that “dis-
allows any positing of a proper subject of or object for the field by insist-
ing that queer has no fixed po­liti­cal referent.” Subjectless critique, in other

214 · Byrd
words, “orients queer epistemology . . . ​as a continuous deconstruction of
the tenets of positivism at the heart of identity politics.”19 In a similar vein,
Judith Butler has suggested that queer studies entails, in part, an undoing
by grief, rupture, and desire: “And so when we speak about my sexuality or
my gender, as we do (and we must) we mean something complicated by it.
Neither of ­these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as
modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of
another.”20 Each of ­these moves—­subjectlessness and undoing, possession
and dispossession—­serves to orient the field of the queer ­toward the ethi-
cal, the being for the other, by challenging the possessive logics inherent in
liberalism, subjectivity, and personhood.
Within queer Indigenous studies, questions of subjectlessness have taken
a slightly dif­fer­ent turn as some scholars in the field have suggested that the
intersections of queer and Indigenous studies might enable alternative modes
of identity formation against the identity politics of Indigenous communities,
including enrollment, citizenship, and community recognition. Subjectless-
ness as an analytic also transforms the scale of inquiry for the field. As
Andrea Smith suggests, “A subjectless critique can help Native studies (as well
as ethnic studies) escape the ethnographic entrapment. A subjectless critique
helps demonstrate that Native studies is an intellectual proj­ect that has broad
applicability not only for Native p­ eoples but for every­one.”21 Such orienta-
tions, which diverge from queer theory’s notion of subjectlessness as a de-
centering of a cohesive and authoritative subject of inquiry, reify indigeneity
into a practiced positionality produced at and through colonialism. Haunted
by the land rushes of the late nineteenth c­ entury, Indigenous possessions, in
Smith’s formulation, are understood to be for every­one except Indians. Indi-
geneity itself becomes transient, unmoored, and appropriable in procedural
narratives through which, as Jean M. O’Brien explicates, Native ­peoples “are
made to dis­appear, sometimes through precise declarations that the ‘last’ of
them has passed, and the colonial regime is constructed as the ‘first’ to bring
‘civilization’ and au­then­tic history to the region. Non-­Indians stake a claim
to being Native—­Indigenous—­through this pro­cess.”22 O’Brien names this
pro­cess “firsting and lasting,” and it is the method through which Enlighten-
ment liberalism formed its investments in possessive logics as the keys to
personal autonomy, individualism, and freedom. White possession, Aileen
Moreton-­Robinson argues, operates at an ontological level in which “the
structure of subjective possession occurs through the imposition of one’s
will-­to-be on the t­ hing which is perceived to lack w
­ ill, thus it is open to being
possessed. This enables the formally ­free subject to make the ­thing its own.”23

Loving Unbecoming · 215

 Faced with the quandaries that the colonial, racial, gendered, and histori-
cal disjunctions of encounter, contact, and orientation have left us, what can
desire and grief mean to the colonized if they signal, at their core, modes
of dispossession, undoing, firsting, and lasting? What might the subjectless-
ness that Andrea Smith suggests as intervention to ethnographic entrapment
offer queer Indigenous critique if it disallows anything fixed, grounded, lo-
cated, or, most impor­tant, accountable to community, relationality, and con-
nection? As a concept, indigeneity admittedly has had and has required a
po­liti­cal referent that is tied to land, relation, and community, even if such
referents are fluid and mutable. But at the same time, and as an ideological
referent that is always up for grabs, indigeneity remains elusive, ontologically
ephemeral, temporally challenged, and captured within the discourses of dis-
covery, enlightenment, and sovereignty. Caught within modes of possession
and its lack, Indigenous subjectlessness at the site of the queer si­mul­ta­neously
straddles the threshold between the colonialist practices of replacing the In-
digenous, on the one hand, and emptying the Indigenous of any prior signifi-
cation, on the other. In the grammars of empire where subject formation oc-
curs through the Hegelian dialectics of freedom and enslavement, owner­ship
and property, civilized and savage, sovereign and beast, the Indigenous might
be understood as the domain or register in which the tensions between and
among ­these antagonisms become sensible.
Indigeneity’s challenge to settler colonial subjectivity and its loss, then,
requires us to shift the frame slightly askew to apprehend how the pro­cesses
of subjectivity—be they queer or normative—­cohere, entangle, and unravel
in relation to what Elizabeth Povinelli has identified as the governance of
the prior. That governance, defined as “the priority of the prior person (or
­people) as a natu­ral right of all persons and the p­ eople as such emerged as
an impediment to the previous logics of kingly seizure and to the emergent
logic of colonial governance,” hinges on an unresolvable temporal paradox
that produces the conditions of indigeneity as prior to and a priority of the
law at the same time that the law abjects indigeneity from having any priority
at all.24
Returning to a distinction within the conceptualization of subjectless cri-
tique may help parse some of ­these tensions that exist within and between
the queer and the Indigenous that have made questions of subjectivity and
its temporality so fraught. In Imagine Other­wise, Kandice Chuh advocates
for the creation of subjectlessness as a way to “prioritize difference by fore-
grounding the discursive constructedness of subjectivity,” where the subject
“only becomes recognizable and can act as such by conforming to certain

216 · Byrd
regulatory matrices.”25 I want to pry open this space of subjectivity, its regu-
latory matrices, and its queer refusals to posit that a prior presence, ­whether
we name it Indigenous or something e­ lse, retains key transitive properties
that enable and, in fact, are required to adhere relationality within the inti-
macies and vio­lence of empire. According to Karen Elizabeth Gordon, tran-
sitive verbs “are t­ hose that cannot complete their meaning without the help
of a direct object.”26 Like vampires, such verbs feed off an object to sustain,
fulfill, and extend themselves in embodied orientations that require the
object in order to exist. Such orientations, a­ fter Sara Ahmed, “are about the
intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places”; they “allow us then to rethink
the phenomenality of space—­that is, how space is dependent on bodily in-
habitance.”27 Caught in a transitive relationality with indigeneity, settlers can-
not achieve their sovereign subjectivities and embodiments without the help
of the Native as object to orient them. In other words, the discursive frame-
works and “regulatory matrices” of the subject have already been formulated
in response to the colonization of American Indians. Within the structuring
ele­ments of settler colonialism, subjectivity, claiming to be, and speaking
for have gone hand in hand with the theft of lands, the politics of replace-
ment, and the forced normativities of compulsory heterosexuality and lineal
descent.
The fraught and contradictory desires for and against subjectivities em-
bedded within the ontological orientations of empire are located within
the diversity of experiences that have s­ haped such positionalities as settler,
arrivant, and Native. ­These colonial contexts inform modern claims to
Indigenous identity within the racial regimes of U.S. neoliberal multicul-
turalism and intersect with t­ hose queer politics that disrupt static, essential,
and normalized privileges of race, class, and gender, on the one hand, and
Indigenous identities that are tied to community recognition, sovereignty,
and land, on the other. How might desire—­which, as Holland has argued,
is imbricated within quotidian racist practices—­function to reproduce the
logics of dispossession at the site of reinvention and becoming for the other?
The U.S. Supreme Court, building on an interlocking foundation of pre­ce­
dence for its juridical authority, issued four rulings in June 2013 that hinged
on equal protection to arbitrate the triad of sexuality, race, and indigeneity.
In the pro­cess of maintaining white normativity within heterosexual—­and
now, by extension, same-­sex—­family units, the court inveighed on Indigenous
identity, fearing the possibility of a remote Indian ancestor to be a disability
hampering a child’s full incorporation into the rights due her as a transra-
cial Indian-­into-­white subject. That fear not only demonstrates the degree

Loving Unbecoming · 217

to which the ­legal normativities of embodied ability depend on racializing
and colonizing logics to produce the righted subject, but also highlights the
transitive form through which the law interpellates indigeneity as difference
and recourse. But how did indigeneity become transitive within the regula-
tive fictions of rights and liberties? That answer might be found within the
racial integrity acts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Loving v.
Virginia landmark ruling in 1967 purportedly overturned. By framing t­ hese
concerns at a slight slant, it is my hope that we might be able to begin to
apprehend how desire and identity function within the context of an ongo-
ing colonialism that adjudicates inclusion and exclusion through a transitive
relationality that requires the Native other to make vis­i­ble the biopo­liti­cal
structures of race, sexuality, gender, and sovereignty.

Spacers between Us
In his short story “Aye, and Gomorrah ” (1967), African American science
fiction author Samuel R. Delany attends to the queer terrains of desire and
colonialism by constructing a futuristic world traversed by “come downs”
and “went ups”—­the story’s slang for shore leave on Earth and the return
to space—­where spacers, astronauts who have been neutered at puberty,
and the frelks obsessed with them mark the longing abjections of transgres-
sive fetish at the edges of Earth-­bound normativity and exchange values.
Caught in the Hegelian master-­slave dialectics of desire, disgust, and need,
the first-­person narrator of the story is a spacer taunted by possibilities that
are forever teased and frustrated. Over the course of the story, the nameless
narrator maneuvers an intricate and dangerous world of coded come-­ons
and hustles in a lurid cruise for a frelk encounter amid the homosexual and
heterosexual pairings of ­human desire. And “frelk,” to be clear, is a deroga-
tory term that spacers use for ­those ­people, male and female, straight and gay,
on Earth who have a “free-­fall-­sexual-­displacement complex” that manifests
as mad love for the spacers.28 It is not erotic desire that the spacer-­frelk inti-
macy charts but, rather, its displacement and deferral into the silences and el-
lipses of space. As the story progresses, the reader learns that spacers, in this
sci-fi world Delany creates, represent the failure of identification and gender.
They are the absence of desire as they are si­mul­ta­neously a desire surplus
that is evident in key moments throughout the story. “ ‘You look as though
you might have once been a man,’ ” a blond young man tells the narrator.
“ ‘But now . . .’ He smiled. ‘You have nothing for me now.’ ” From the man,
the spacer learns that in French, frelk is a feminine noun, and that the spacer

218 · Byrd
would need to look elsewhere to find fulfillment (91). A page ­later, and dur-
ing another come down in Mexico, the narrator grabs the wrist of a Mexican
­woman and whispers, “Usted es una frelka?” She smiles and responds, “Frelko
en español. . . . ​Sorry. But you have nothing that . . . ​would be useful to me. It
is too bad, for you look like you ­were once a ­woman, no? And I like ­women,
too’ ” (92). Delany queers the naturalization of desire and in so d­ oing relo-
cates the queer at the intersection of the self-­same and its abjective refusal.
In many ways, the story is Delany’s reflection on the plasticity of the body;
the genocidal constraints enacted through normativities and their trans; the
aberrations of embodied race, class, ability, and gender; and the resilience
of bodies to enact re­sis­tance and survival. Desire itself is not biological, and
sexuality is socially constructed through the enunciative force of the law of
the ­father that announces its presence at the level of grammar to interpellate
gender norms that have now been denied a biological determiner. ­Toward
that end, Delany imagines a world delineated through exceptions, perver-
sions, disruptions, and surveillances, and the narrative slowly reveals spacers
to be government employees surgically engineered to work in the precari-
ous conditions of interplanetary exploration and development. Spending all
their time in deep space, on Mars, on the moon, or on the satellites of Jupiter,
with only occasional Earthside shore leave to drink and reenter the gravita-
tional pull of capital and h­ uman contact, spacers are exposed to dangerous
levels of radiation that would guarantee that their offspring would be, ­were
they not already rendered impossible, deformed. Instantly recognized by the
inhabitants of Earth for the work they perform—­and the material condi-
tions that enable it that have been written onto their de-­sexed bodies and
into their blue uniforms—­spacers ­were “altered” as ­children ­because they
­were identified as having sexual responses that ­were “hopelessly retarded at
puberty” (97). In this futuristic world, they, rather than gays and lesbians, are
the strangers with no ­future. In many ways, the title itself, with its affirmative
“Aye” in the place of Sodom, signals the story’s concern with the ethics of
alterity as it anticipates the liberal investments of homonationalism from the
historical context of the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s.
In their constant movement, the spacers are always in transit between
­here and ­there, and the frelks who worship them are, according to a ­woman
the spacer meets in Istanbul, perverted necrophiliacs “in love with a bunch of
corpses in f­ ree fall!” (97). As abjected sexuality, the spacers produce in their
physical neutering and undoing a casting off, an antimony of desire for ­those
earthbound p­ eople who have developed a deep and abiding attachment to the
deferral of sexual possibility the spacers have been constructed to perform.

Loving Unbecoming · 219

Frelks worship spacers ­because spacers cannot want them back. And the
spacers hustle frelks for money in exchange for proximity and access. “Aye,
and Gomorrah” is, ultimately, a meditation on the psychic reproduction of
desire that proliferates the queer in the face of norms outside the embodied
mechanics of sexuality and within the material exchanges of l­abor, capital,
and exploration. The core of the text ponders a central conundrum of the
production of desire. “If spacers had never been, then we could not be . . . the
way we are,” a frelk observes as she reflects on her need for the narrator (96).
In the invention of frelks as a response to spacers, f­ uture queerings prolifer-
ate and function in the story as rumor and anecdote: “Say, last time I was
in Istanbul—­about a year before I joined with this platoon—­I remember
we ­were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap
movies we found a l­ittle passage lined with flowers. . . . ​Anyway, we noticed
something funny about the spacers. It ­wasn’t their uniforms: they ­were per-
fect. The haircuts: fine. It ­wasn’t til we heard them talking—­they ­were a man
and w­ oman dressed up like spacers, trying to pick up frelks! Imagine, queer
for frelks!” (93).
The possibility of queer for frelks occurs at the site of passing, mimicry,
and ventriloquism and in the face of the repudiation of the ways the spac-
ers’ undone gender has been conscripted into their bodies. Frelks, the reader
learns, are experts on spacers, and their fetish manifests in the Orientalist
mode of knowledge production and in the desire to fi­nally and fully become
that which they desire so that they can then desire themselves.
Delany’s ten-­paged story might be said to function as a parable of differ-
ence produced and desired within the historiography of embodied racial
and colonial normativities that interpellate and police aberrations through
heterosexuality and the expression of fulfillable desires. Circulating at the
transnational borders between the United States and Mexico and within the
terrorist assemblages of Istanbul and Muslim countries where it is difficult for
spacers to find and consume alcohol, Delany’s story delves into the fractures
of race and empire as they collide with sexuality and the state. Along with an-
ticipating the self-­identifications that enable queer transgressions, Delany’s
1967 story signals something incredibly profound about liberal investments
with pro­gress and rights as they play out in the heart of colonialism. Gays
and lesbians in the story are fully accepted in this world: the police do not
bother them, although they might, it is implied, bother spacers b­ ecause they
are now the strangers, the shadows cast beyond gay incorporation who may
one day also achieve full equality and subjectivity. The clandestine meetings
between spacers and frelks enable the deferred rights for gays and lesbians

220 · Byrd
by fulfilling the exception that demarcates the thresholds of equality. And it
is all done through evocations of Indianness and disability—­Delaney’s nar-
rator, we fi­nally learn, was an “American red Indian” boy before he was cap-
tured and altered at puberty (95).
The presence of the Indian, evoked ­here by Delany in the ­future as both
“hopelessly retarded at puberty” and forever excluded from the futurity of
reproduction, is not chance; nor is it an isolated event. The Kid in his novel
Dhalgren (1975) is Cherokee and white although many authors often assume
other identifications for the character in their readings of the racial politics
of the text. In “Aye, and Gomorrah,” Delany’s evocation of Indian identity at
the site of the impermanence of gender, sexuality, ability, embodiment, and
desire bears something of that register or domain function that I discussed
earlier. Precisely b­ ecause of Indianness, the nameless spacer embodies the
logics of desire that the short story constellates within the biopo­liti­cal struc-
tures of racial capitalism. Forced into abject ­labor and bodily transformed
in the pro­cess, Delany’s “American red Indian” spacer charts an erotic life of
colonialism that desires desire for the other as a redemptive politic. The story,
however, frustrates any positive outcome for such an erotic exchange, and
the only ones fulfilled within the story are the frelks themselves when they
pose as spacers to seduce other frelks. The presence of the Indian in the story
serves a transitive function and re­orients desire and erotics, race and nation-
ality, ability and disability, within the larger historical and normative impli-
cations of empire and colonialism. The “American red Indian,” dis/figured
as exceptional other foreclosed within the cir­cuits of intimacy, renders sen-
sible the allegory of the story and in the pro­cess reveals something profound
about not only the function of desire within the context of ongoing colonial-
ist vio­lence, but also the function of identification that requires the Indian as
a mode of refraction to perceive the self.

Queer for Frelks

“Aye, and Gomorrah,” was first published in December 1967, before the
Stonewall Riots of 1969, and the story’s inquiries into how desire and norma-
tivities traffic through elision and occlusion ­were informed by and through
the material conditions of the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the
Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. ­Virginia (1967). That case, as I have dis-
cussed, gained notoriety as a watershed moment especially within the gay
marriage rights movement, where it continues to serve as pre­ce­dent b­ ecause
it purportedly promises state recognition of marriage equality for all ­those

Loving Unbecoming · 221

who historically have been, and who continued to be, excluded from the
institution. The racial and miscegenation analogies of the case continue to
inflect homonormative claims to equal protection, civil rights, and marriage
equality, and such analogies reify the trajectories of race into recognizable
mnemonics of black-­white oppositions that align the neoliberal proj­ects of
institutionalized multiculturalism around questions of inclusion, participa-
tion, and equality.
The details of the case at this point have been codified into a par­tic­u­lar
narrative that may be familiar. In June 1958, Mildred Jeter, a Black ­woman with
Amerindian ancestry, married Richard Loving, a white man, in the District of
Columbia. Not long ­after the wedding, the newlyweds returned to ­Virginia
and their community in Caroline County. In 1924, the State of ­Virginia had
passed an Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, which required citizens to file a regis-
tration certifying his or her racial composition “as Caucasian, negro, Mongolian,
American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof.” Further, if
any racial admixture was discernible, the registrant had to “show in what gen-
eration such mixture occurred.” That act made falsifying a registration a fel-
ony punishable by up to one year in jail and outlawed any marriage between a
white person and a person of color.
In October 1958, the Lovings ­were indicted for violating sections of the
­Virginia Code that made it illegal to leave the state to evade the law and
included punishments for interracial marriage. In January 1959, they pled
guilty to the charges and ­were sentenced to one year in jail. That sentence
was suspended for twenty-­five years, with the stipulation that the Lovings
leave the state and never return. The case reached the Supreme Court ­after
a series of hearings that took the issue from a class action suit the Lovings
had filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of ­Virginia to the
Supreme Court of Appeals of ­Virginia. Arguing that the antimiscegenation
statutes ­were unconstitutional, the Lovings filed motions to vacate the origi-
nal judgment ­under the grounds that V ­ irginia’s Racial Integrity Act v­ iolated
the F ­ ourteenth Amendment including due pro­cess and equal protection.
­After having the racial integrity statutes upheld in the lower courts, Chief
Justice Warren, in a landmark opinion of the Supreme Court, delivered that
“marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very
existence and survival. . . . ​To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsup-
portable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in t­ hese statutes, classi-
fications so directly subversive of the princi­ple of equality at the heart of the
­Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty
without due pro­cess of law.”29

222 · Byrd
 Loving v. ­Virginia, according to Somerville, was inflected at the time by the
debates within the court not just about race but also about homo­sexuality,
and the expansion of marriage rights the case instituted “effectively consoli-
dated heterosexuality as a privileged prerequisite for recognition by the state
as a national subject and citizen. An alternative lesson of Loving, in fact, is
that ‘­free men’ may be identified by any race, but their entitlement to that
claim is based on their presumed heterosexuality.”30 Reddy has additionally
linked the Loving v. ­Virginia case to a number of court cases that grappled
with interracial marriage and immigrant rights, assessing that “perhaps we
can read in the desire to further extend marriage as a right the preservation
of a modern feeling of personhood founded in racial typology.”31 Citing prior
cases including Pace v. Alabama (1883), Perez v. Sharp (1948), Naim v. Naim
(1955), and McLaughlin v. Florida (1964), as well as Boutilier v. Immigration
Ser­vice (1967), Somerville and Reddy compellingly argue for a reframing of
the Loving case through the larger state investments in racial liberalism, xe-
nophobia, and normative strictures of citizenship.
As queer theorists grapple with the transnational implications of gay mar-
riage in light of the deeply engrained histories of racism, on the one hand,
and the implications of racial typologies of diasporic transnationalism, on
the other, the larger frame of U.S. colonialism embedded in ­Virginia’s original
“racial integrity” is often overlooked within ongoing considerations of the in-
tersectionality of race, sexuality, and civil rights. Part of the work the Loving v.
Virginia case accomplished was to instantiate par­tic­u­lar narratives about
race within the United States, and, as Arica L. Coleman explains, “[The]
­lawyers Bernard Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the case
as overturning the last of the odious laws of slavery and segregation once
again reified the racial dichotomy of White and Black within American ra-
cial discourse. Consequently, the arguments presented before the court and
­later the majority opinion obscured racial issues beyond the Black-­W hite
boundary, namely the Afro-­Indian identity of Mildred Loving.”32 The ef-
fects of such elisions are multiple and likely expected, including the typi-
cal narrative that American Indians are vanished within the binaries of race
deployed during segregation that eclipsed colonialism in emphasizing racial
antagonisms. Coleman’s argument, however, suggests an alternative read-
ing that situates Loving v. V ­ irginia within a series of cases such as Atha Sor-
rells v. A. T. Shields (1925) that challenged white supremacist investments in
eugenicist language to pry apart the racial distinctions of African American
and American Indian identities at a moment when the State of ­Virginia had a
vested interest in collapsing both into the category of “colored.”

Loving Unbecoming · 223

 In evoking the “American red Indian” as “retardation,” dislocation, and
the failure of desire, Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” wrestles multidirection-
ally with the colonial logics that underwrite the racial politics of Jim Crow
and liberal multiculturalism embedded in Loving v. V ­ irginia and the Racial
Integrity Act that necessitated the ruling as it draws the transitive logics of
Indianness into the terrains of queer identities and desires that refuse static
notions of bodies, biology, erotics, and even racial positionality.33 Not only
did V ­ irginia’s “Racial Integrity” occlude Mildred Loving’s Cherokee and Rap-
pahannock ancestry by rendering her intelligible in the archive as African
American, it ensured that Indianness was reserved solely for whiteness. As
­Virginia’s white supremacist “first families” sought to codify racial exclusions
into law, they faced the racial complexity of their own, faux or factual, New
World origin story that called into question their integrity through a claim
of descent through Thomas Rolfe, son of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Their
solution was to implement the so-­called Pocahontas Exception to preserve
their whiteness through a claim to a hyperdescent Indianness: “It ­shall
hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a
white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and
American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ s­ hall
apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other
than Caucasian; but persons who have one-­sixteenth or less the blood of the
American Indian and have no other non-­Caucasic blood ­shall be deemed to
be white persons.”34
This exception, according to Kevin Maillard, “regulate[s] Indians to exis-
tence only in a distant past, creating a temporal disjuncture to f­ree Indians
from a con­temporary discourse of racial politics.”35 Arguing that “such ex-
emptions assess Indians as abstractions rather than practicalities, or as fictive
temporalities characterized by romantic ideals,” Maillard highlights how In-
dianness is essentialized while si­mul­ta­neously rendered an inconsequential
ethnicity within the racial topographies of U.S. liberal multiculturalism
in which many now claim an Indian great-­great-­grandmother.36 For Coleman,
however, the Pocahontas Exception retained an added alchemical function
within V ­ irginia’s racializing regimes, and it helped cohere American Indian
investments in blood purity that allow only white and Indian admixture
and refuse any pos­si­ble African American ancestry for tribes still residing
in the Commonwealth. As Coleman observes, “Mildred’s Indian identity as
inscribed on her marriage certificate and her marriage to Richard, a White
man, appears to have been more an endorsement of the tenets of racial pu-
rity rather than a validation of White/Black intermarriage as many have sup-

224 · Byrd
posed.”37 Mildred Jeter, in other words, may have used the Pocahontas Ex-
ception to assert an Indian identity to achieve whiteness through the logics
of miscegenation that would have disallowed her marriage to a white man
if she had, in fact, understood her own identity to be African American and
Rappahannock and Cherokee.
Rather than fulfilling the logic of elimination that Patrick Wolfe portrays
as the organ­izing task of settler colonialism whereby settler colonialism
“destroys to replace,” the Pocahontas exception manages to proliferate the
Indigenous within the prior terrains of antecedent and forebear as whiteness
comes to depend on a recidivist nativism that reproduces itself at the site of
a self-­same Indianness.38 It creates, in other words, a transitive relationality
that, like the queer-­for-­frelk that Delany’s story imagines, assumes an Ori-
entalist mien of Indianness to pick up whiteness. Such transracial transfor-
mations do not transgress colonialism so much as they enable colonialism
through usurpation, and although the queer remains a­ lways contingent
and provisional as a planned obsolescence or a radical undoing, it seems
worth interrogating further how the colonization of American Indians
encodes itself into the technologies and imaginaries used to constitute
subjects, rights, desires, and recognitions, especially where they emerge in
ser­vice to maintaining the continued colonial privileges of normativity and
whiteness.
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its opinions in the quartet
of cases at the end of June 2013, the presence of the Adoptive ­Couple v. Baby
Girl case alongside cases adjudicating voting rights and marriage rights sig-
nals a simultaneity that m­ atters beyond the “pink-­washing” per­for­mances of
settler nation-­states. And questions of transitive Indianness are hardly set-
tled as the Supreme Court determined the possibility that the presence of an
Indian ancestor—­even a remote one—­might in fact now prove a disability
to the full achievement of whiteness for a baby girl in transition. As Justice
Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissent, “The majority’s repeated, analyti-
cally unnecessary references to the fact that Baby Girl is 3/256 Cherokee by
ancestry do nothing to elucidate its intimation that the statute may violate the
Equal Protection Clause. . . . ​The majority’s treatment of this issue, in the end,
does no more than create a lingering mood of disapprobation of the criteria for
membership ­adopted by the Cherokee Nation, that in turn, make Baby Girl
and ‘Indian Child’ ­under the statute.”39 Indian identity continues to be the reg-
ister through which possessive subjectivities construct and deconstruct them-
selves within the context of ongoing colonialism. Within such erotic terrains,
desire for indigeneity manifests as a quotidian strug­gle to maintain whiteness

Loving Unbecoming · 225

as hegemonic possession, and t­ here can be no decolonization ­until such tran-
sitive logics are disrupted, refused, and failed. The queer in Indigenous stud-
ies, then, challenges the queer of queer studies by offering not an identity or
a figure necessarily, but rather an analytic that helps us relocate subjectivity
and its refusals back into the vectors of ongoing settler colonialism.

Notes
Epigraphs: Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967), in Off Limits: Tales
of Alien Sex, ed. by Ellen Datlow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 226; Sharon
Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2012).
1. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Vio­lence in the New Racial Capi-
talism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiii.
2. Adoptive ­Couple v. Baby Girl, 570 U.S. (2013), 16.
3. Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 50.
4. “Queer Year in Review 2013: doma, Transgender Victories and More,” February
December 20, 2013, http://­www​.­huffingtonpost​.c­ om​/­2013​/­12​/­20​/­gay​-y­ ear​-­in​-­review​­​_­n​
_­4482440​.­html.
5​.­ United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. (2013), 3–4.
6. United States v. Windsor, 3.
7. United States v. Windsor, 4.
8. Siobhan B. Somerville, “Queer Loving,” glq 11, no. 3 (2005): 335.
9. For more discussions on how racial analogies function within same-­sex marriage
debates, see Somerville, “Queer Loving”; Catherine Smith, “Queer as Black Folk?”
Wisconsin Law Review 2 (2007): 379–407; Chandan Reddy, “Time for Rights? Loving,
Gay Marriage, and the Limits of L ­ egal Justice,” Fordham Law Review 76, no. 6 (2008):
2849–72; Adele M. Morrison, “Black v. Gay? Centering lbgt ­People of Color in
Civil-­Marriage Debates,” in Loving v. ­Virginia in a Post-­R acial World: Rethinking Race,
Sex, and Marriage, ed. Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 235–41.
10. Somerville, “Queer Loving,” 335.
11. Reddy, “Time for Rights?,” 76.
12. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Vio­lence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 62.
13. Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality,
and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8.
14. Mark Rifkin, The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-­
Determination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 28–29.
15. Rifkin, The Erotics of Sovereignty, 31.
16. Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential
of Queer Politics?,” glq 3, no. 4 (1997): 438–39.

226 · Byrd
 17. David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about
Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text 84–85, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (Fall–­Winter 2005).
18. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 13.
19. Eng et al., “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text 84–85, vol. 23,
nos. 3–4 (Fall–­Winter 2005).
20. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19.
21. Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of
Settler Colonialism,” glq 16, nos. 1–2 (2010): 44.
22. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New
­England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv.
23. Aileen Moreton-­Robinson, “White Possession: The Legacy of Cook’s Choice,”
in ­Imagined Australia: Reflections around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity between
Australia and Eu­rope, ed. Renata Summo-­O’Connell (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang,
2009), 31–32.
24. Elizabeth Povinelli, “The Governance of the Prior,” Interventions 13, no. 1 (2011): 17.
25. Kandice Chuh, Imagine Other­wise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003), 9.
26. Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook
of Grammar for the Innocent, The ­Eager, and the Doomed (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 42.
27. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, ­Others (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006), 6, 8.
28. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah,” 98. (Hereafter, page numbers for direct quotes from
this work are cited in parentheses in the text.)
29. Loving v. ­Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
30. Somerville, “Queer Loving,” 357.
31. Reddy, Freedom with Vio­lence, 209.
32. Arica L. Coleman, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans,
and the Predicament of Race and Identity in ­Virginia (Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, 2013), 152.
33. I deploy the idea of multidirectional ­here a­ fter Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional
Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2009).
34. Racial Integrity Act of 1924, ­Virginia, SB 219, HB 311 https://­lva​.o­ meka​.­net​/­items​
/­show​/1­ 28.
35​.­Kevin Noble Maillard, “The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American
Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 12, no. 351
(2006–2007): 357.
36. Maillard, “The Pocahontas Exception.”
37. Coleman, That the Blood Stay Pure, 175.
38. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of
Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
39. Adoptive ­Couple v. Baby Girl, Sotomayor, dissenting opinion, 24.

Loving Unbecoming · 227

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