Description
Why does the racialised family recur as the queer of colour’s main antagonist? How does the notion of migrant familial dysfunction aid and abet the state and capital?
Keeping these questions in mind, this paper's starting point is a short documentary on the Gay Black Group, a Black and Asian organisation formed in the 80s in the UK, in response to state racism and alienation from the white queer scene. Starting with a discussion of the function of ‘family’ in the documentary, particularly what demands it masks and what politics it enables, the paper considers how the immigrant family's dysfunction figures into neoconservative and neoliberal fixations on the family as a key site to reproduce both the British nation and capital. It then considers how 'common sense' regarding the queer of colour's alleged alienation from culture and family serve to uphold the family unit, so long as it is maintained as nuclear, white and British. Through queer of color critique, Marxist feminism and family abolition Keep It Against The Family reflects on queer of colour politics here and now in, through, and beyond the hold of the family.
