by Roderick A. Ferguson

About Roderick A. Ferguson

Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. His most recent books are One-Dimensional Queer and We Demand: The University and Student Protests.

Race

The study of race incorporates a set of wide-ranging analyses of freedom and power. The scope of those analyses has much to do with the broad application of racial difference to academic and popular notions of epistemology, community, identity, and the body. With regard to economic and political formations, race has shaped the meaning and profile of citizenship and labor. In relation to corporeality, race has rendered the body into a text on which histories of racial differentiation, exclusion, and violence are inscribed. Analyzed in terms of subjectivity, race helps locate the ways in which identities are constituted.