Multidimensionality: An Interview with Roderick A. Ferguson

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Multidimensionality:An Interview with Roderick A. Ferguson Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) and Roderick A. Ferguson Gender, race, sexuality, and class are often separated out as single issues. In his new book, One-Dimensional Queer (2019), Roderick Ferguson critiques this tendency, showing how the struggle for gender and sexual equality, for instance during the Stonewall rebellion, intersects with racial and class struggles. Taking the metaphor from Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, he argues for multidimensionality. Through his career, Ferguson has been a critic of the complications of identity. In Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004), he takes to task normative assumptions of sociology, as well as of identity politics, arguing that, "Instead of identity driving critical interventions, the heterogeneous formations that make up the social drive critical intervention." Alongside that work, he has also foregrounded diversity and identity in one of our chief institutions, the university. His influential The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) critiques the ways that higher education has incorporated difference in largely one-dimensional ways. More recently in We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017), he recounts a short history of multidimensional insurgent movements. In addition he co-edited Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (with Grace Kyungwon Hong; 2011) and Keywords for African American Studies (with Erica R. Edwards and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar; 2018). Born in 1972 in rural Georgia, Ferguson studied sociology at Howard University (BA, 1994) and University of California-San Diego (MA, 1997; PhD, 2000). He was a professor of American studies at University of Minnesota from 2000-2014, moving to University of Illinois-Chicago as a professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies until 2019. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton in 2013 and the president of the American Studies Association in 2018. In 2019 he took a professorship in American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. This interview took place on 11 January 2020 in Seattle, WA, during the MLA Convention. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams and transcribed by Bethie Wang, an MA student at Carnegie Mellon University. [End Page 567] Jeffrey J. Williams: One classic distinction in modern criticism is between space and time critics. In trying to encapsulate your work, instead I'd say you're a dimensional critic, emphasizing the different dimensions of identity and other social categories. Your new book, One-Dimensional Queer, goes back to Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man and underscores the idea of dimensionality and sexuality, although your previous work also focuses on the dimensions or complications of diversity. How would you define yourself as a critic? Would you say you are a critic of dimensionality? Roderick A. Ferguson: That's not the category that I had thought of before, but part of what I have tried to do as a critic is to look at all the other compartments or dimensions that the reigning perspective doesn't highlight. I have oftentimes seen my role as a critic as aligned with activists, artists, and writers who insist on looking at those other dimensions. In a way, there is a tension between a political routine that focuses on one dimension, and what people are doing in their lives as activists or artists or just everyday people, who are trying to shed light on the multiple compartments and dimensions that make up the social world. JJW: In your new book, you conduct a short tour of the history of social movements of the 1960s, arguing that the tendency of gay liberation, for instance, was to incorporate several dimensions during its first moment, whether class and poverty, or other issues. But then as it progressed, it became narrowed to one dimension as it became absorbed into U.S. society—so the solution to gay politics is gay marriage, rather than being about equality and other radical possibilities. How did you come to that argument? RAF: That argument has a few origins. One is that I've always been interested in how a political imagination gets narrowed, especially if it starts out as something broader. Part of that...