Cathy J. Cohen is a political scientist at the University of Chicago whose work challenges the hetero/queer binary that organizes mainstream queer politics. Her foundational essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997) reframed the field by showing that the relevant political division is not between heterosexual and queer but between those whose sexuality and kinship are sanctioned by the state and those whose are not.
Core ideas
- Reframing queer politics: Cohen argued that a politics organized around the hetero/queer binary obscures the ways in which heterosexual people of color — Black single mothers, welfare recipients, people living with HIV — are already positioned as sexually deviant by the state. Their heteronormativity is not recognized; their kinship, reproduction, and sexuality are surveilled, pathologized, and punished. A radical queer politics would organize around this shared marginalization rather than around sexual identity alone.
- AIDS activism and Black communities: Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999) examined how Black political institutions failed to respond to AIDS because HIV/AIDS was associated with already-marginalized members of Black communities — gay men, injection drug users, sex workers — revealing the internal hierarchies within racial communities.
Notable works
- “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997)
- The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999)
- Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010)
Related
- Queer-of-color critique — the tradition her work helps establish
- Roderick Ferguson — whose queer of color analysis builds on Cohen’s reframing
- Heteronormativity — which she shows operates through race
- Biopolitics — the governance of populations her work analyzes