Journal Article

Multidimensionality: An Interview with Roderick A. Ferguson

Williams, Jeffrey J., Ferguson, Roderick A.

2020

Overview

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 onedimensional ways.

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: American literature / Gender / Higher education / Identity / Interviews / Metaphor / Morrison, Toni (1931-2019) / Politics / Sexuality / Sociology