Roderick A. Ferguson: A Life in Thinking, Writing, and Laughing

Twice as Nice: Dr. Ferguson basking in orange.

Tell us a little bit about yourself (e.g., point of origin, education, places you’ve lived, taught, etc.)
I grew up in Manchester, Georgia which is about an hour and a half South of Atlanta, in West Central Georgia. I went to Howard University for my bachelors and did my M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego.

How did you come to American Studies?
Before I started teaching in an American Studies Department, I presented papers at the American Studies Association meetings as a graduate student. My advisor George Lipsitz has always been involved; he sort of introduced me to American Studies.

What is your relationship to text? Talk about your preoccupations, aims, desires as a theorist.
My sensibility about texts comes really from fiction writers. I’ve learned a lot especially from Toni Morrison’s observations about being a writer—things like writing the texts that you want to read; using texts to produce new languages; constructing the text as a stage on which to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. As a theorist, I’ve tried to transfer literary sensibilities to theoretical contexts.

What are the common misconceptions about the theoretical work you do?
I’m not actually sure about my work, in particular. It might be too early to tell or people are good enough not to worry me with distortions. In general, there is often the presumption that people write theory for prestige and status. And many people do. That’s never been my approach to theory at all. I only want to do work that somebody can use. Now, I don’t claim to make that easy for the reader. I do mean for the reader to work as hard as I do as a writer. Difficulty is a kind of ethic for me. I’m a secular person who was raised a Baptist, and one of my favorite stories is the one of Jacob who wrestled with the angel and when the angel asked to be let go, Jacob replied “I won’t let go until you bless me.” I don’t trust easy texts, and I don’t write them.

Talk about Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. How did this work originate?
It started out as my dissertation project. It kind of got me through sociology. The dissertation helped me answer questions that sociology—the discipline—refused to pose—questions about how sociology produced certain knowledges about African American sexuality and culture and how that production had very much to do with the unfolding of capitalism. When I began revising the dissertation into what became Aberrations, I did so trying to make it my version of Karl Marx’s Capital and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. It was my way of “jumping at the sun.”

As an academic, how do you relate to/interact with the queer of color community?
In a sense, that “community” is never coherent, always diverse, and constantly in motion. So I’ve tried to find it where I can. Producing community is always a project, always an effort. I’ve, of course, encountered queer of color communities as they are produced in the academy, among colleagues and students, because that’s the world in which I live. That world is no less legitimate or real than non-academic worlds. I was terribly fortunate to observe the production of one version of queer of color community because of the Think Again volume and the essay that I wrote, “Sissies at the Picnic.” At the various conferences with Think Again panels, I really got a sense of how black queer male communities, in particular, represented complex engagements with HIV/AIDS bureacracies and with artistic communities that preceded those bureaucracies and now coexist in tension with them. It was a very real education for me, and I appreciate every opportunity I have to bear witness to queer of color communities, whatever forms they take.

What are you working on right now?
Right now I’m working on a book about the university as corporation and the role that race, gender, and sexuality play in that. It’s a project that was inspired by my entrance into administration and by the ways in which I saw and continue to see how the life of the mind takes a back seat to administrative efforts to make universities more like corporations. You see it in minute instances like faculty and graduate students shaping their projects based on the possibility of funding rather than the possibility of oppositional and dissident interventions. In terms of anti-racist, feminist, and queer scholarship, I’m interested in what the university as an administrative machine does to work that comes out of radical genealogies.

Name ten favorite singers.
Liz Wright, Dorothy Love Coates, Aretha Franklin, Andy Bey, Sarah Vaughn, Marie Dualne (of Zap Mama), Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, The Caravans, Shirley Horn

Nine movies you love.
Daughters of the Dust, Isaac Julian’s Frantz Fanon, Days of Pentecost, Paper Moon, Up Town Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, A Warm December, The Lion in Winter, Eve’s Bayou

Eight foods you eat all the time.
I’m too embarrassed to answer this one because I’m a healthy eater. In moments of indulgence, I have been known to have a cheese burger, a basket of fries, and a malt.

Seven people you adore.
There are so many people who mean a lot to me, so many I’ve been fortunate to know and learn from. Getting it down to seven would be impossible. At the top of my list are those folks who taught me to laugh under the most trying circumstances. There’s a real art to that, I think. Friends and family often accuse me of laughing at everything, almost to the point of inappropriateness. Irony tickles me, and I’m grateful to several folks for teaching me to identify it and glean some pleasure in it.

My father used to say to me, “Every tub’s got to sit on it’s own bottom.” At the top of my list are also people who don’t ask anyone else to be responsible for them, people who make sure they ain’t livin nobody else’s life but their own. It’s sort of like when I used to hear the old people in Georgia say “You got to go to God for yourself.” That kind of commitment to being internally driven has always been important to me.

Name six words that describe you and why.
Insightful, old-soul, fun, unfettered, no-nonsense, earthy.

Five qualities you look for in a friend.
Maturity, generosity, openness, sense, and loyalty.

Four reasons why you love to travel.
Well, sometimes I love it. Too often I’m exhausted from it. Growing up in rural Georgia, travel marked my departure from Georgia and my entrance into adulthood. I travel a lot for work and some for leisure. But it’s still a way for me to be grown and self-sufficient.

Two places you’d love to be.
Well, I’m working very hard to be in a place called three-years-from-now. After I got tenure, I started doing administrative work so that I could help carry the load in my department. But in doing so, I had real fears that my administrative identity would overwhelm me as an intellectual. Fortunately, I proved to myself last year that I’m a pretty tough sissy who’s not going to yield to an administrative juggernaut. But I told myself that I would take two more years just to reinvent who I am and at the end of those two years, I would have another book as testimony of that reinvention. That’s one place I’d like to be.

The other place would be the place of proper way-making. Theres’s a verse in the Dao de Ching that says “The highest efficacy is like water. It’s because water benefits everything and dares to dwell in those places loathed by the crowd. And because of this, it comes closest to proper way-making.” I try to live my life accordingly, but I would like more discipline in the area of way-making. That’s the other place I wanna get to.

One thing you cannot do without.
My personal freedom. Sometimes people who know me think that my need for personal freedom comes from some presumed masculinity on my part. In actuality, it’s much more akin to a woman’s appreciation of personal freedom. I grew up seeing the women closest to me long for freedom while in really regulatory domestic relationships with men. What my mother, my grandmothers and my aunts passed on to me, ironically and unsuspectingly, was the desire to move away from intimate and homey regulations, and I’m pretty uncompromised in that desire. This is what being queer means for me.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 @ 11:56 AM