What is Johnson suggesting about whiteness and emotion? If you have read Muñoz’s essay, how is Johnson’s insight related to Muñoz’s?
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Through his critique of John Champagne’s analysis of two black gay performances, E. Patrick Johnson exposes current queer academia’s lack of understanding and misreadings of black corporeal, and thus emotional, manifestations.
In his analysis, Champagne, a white queer theorist, declares that Essex Hemphill’s “bodily ‘‘experience’’ is anti-intellectual and [his] “black” bodily experience is manipulative” (Johnson, 132) when the black gay writer is unable to contain his tears during a speech. After his emotional reaction, Hemphill experienced responses of both sympathy and protest from the crowd. Instead of admiring the room’s ability for such rare self-reflexivity, Champagne characterizes this reaction as a “masochistic [...] declaration of white culpability” (Johnson, 131). Johnson uses this mischaracterization to illustrate the rift between the expressions of trauma inherent in non-white bodily performances and the modes of address accepted in white institutions, such as universities. Integrating one’s multifaceted human experience through “style is equated in such a setting with a lack of substance” (Johnson, 132). By failing to interrogate bodily “whiteness” alongside “blackness” and its emotional implications, Champagne is a victim of his own theory of anti-subjectivity and effectively “renders [himself] ‘‘overseer’’ of black cultural practices and discourse” (Johnson, 133). Johnson states that ideas of “acceptable” emotional embodiment should no longer be hijacked and governed by a hegemonic establishment, and then navigated within the confines of whiteness. In his critique, the author calls for a ‘‘confrontation with difference which takes place on new ground, in that counter-hegemonic marginal space where radical black subjectivity is seen, not overseen by any authoritative Other Whiteness claiming to know us better than we know ourselves” (Johnson, 133).
Likewise, in a publication by The Johns Hopkins University Press, José Muñoz denounces similar mainstream interpretations of Latino displays of emotions as “over the top and excessive,” which allude to “spiciness and exoticism” (Muñoz, 69). While normative expectations are fueled by dominant white, middle-class values and behaviors, American Latinos/as find themselves both unable to naturally mimic white normativity and having the true breadth of their identities limited by the clichés pushed by the media, society’s “chief disseminator of “official” national affect” (Muñoz, 69). Failing to access dominant normativity and rejecting performative racial normativity effectively excludes Latinos/as from full societal participation. Thus, Muñoz shifts the discussion to “look at whiteness from a racialized perspective, like that of Latinos, it begins to appear to be flat and impoverished. At this moment in history it seems especially important to position whiteness as lack” (Muñoz, 70). Both Johnson and Muñoz seek to regain control of their narratives and democratize each and every body’s right to affective liberty within safe and sympathetic spaces. Muñoz does so by proposing his theory of “disidentification,” whereby one must “work on and against the dominant ideology” (Johnson, 139) to alter the cultural logic from within hegemonic establishments, thereby fostering permanent structural change.