The study of race as it is applied to queer formations demonstrates how the mainstream gay rights movement fosters forms of white privilege and displaces queers of color, particularly those marginalized by class and nationality. We might therefore say that today’s racialized gay rights agendas emanate from the dialectic of freedom and unfreedom that arises out of an equally racialized genealogy of modern morality. Work by queer scholars who engage questions of racialized modernity intervenes into the study of race by observing how the array of nationalist and normative formations has expanded within the contexts of diaspora and contemporary globalization. As it has for at least three centuries, the study of race today names the different permutations of morality that continue to shape social formations according to freedom’s relationship to unfreedom.

This is an excerpt from Roderick A. Ferguson’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 196).