redbecca's review
2.0
I wanted to like this book, given its stated goal of connecting the politics of queer liberalism (often described as queer assimilation in contrast to a more radical queer politics) to neoliberal economics and colorblind discourse. However, I found the book's post-structural and psychoanalytic framework obscured rather than explicated those links, which have been made more clearly elsewhere. So, while there were discussions of the problematic politics of queer 1st worlders adopting "3rd world" babies, and a discussion of why people shouldn't compare Lawrence v. Texas to Brown v. Board (the comparison of which has also been discussed elsewhere) these discussions were not connected to later arguments about transracial adoption that were by far the most interesting chapters of the book. There were other pieces - an effort to redefine kinship so that it could be compatible with post-structuralism and to use a method described as "queer diasporas" which seemed to me to be asserted rather than well argued. Ultimately, the most interesting arguments in the book concerned the role of race in psychoanalysis and the notion of "racial melancholia" as the trace in colorblind discourse.
redbecca's review against another edition
2.0
I wanted to like this book, given its stated goal of connecting the politics of queer liberalism (often described as queer assimilation in contrast to a more radical queer politics) to neoliberal economics and colorblind discourse. However, I found the book's post-structural and psychoanalytic framework obscured rather than explicated those links, which have been made more clearly elsewhere. So, while there were discussions of the problematic politics of queer 1st worlders adopting "3rd world" babies, and a discussion of why people shouldn't compare Lawrence v. Texas to Brown v. Board (the comparison of which has also been discussed elsewhere) these discussions were not connected to later arguments about transracial adoption that were by far the most interesting chapters of the book. There were other pieces - an effort to redefine kinship so that it could be compatible with post-structuralism and to use a method described as "queer diasporas" which seemed to me to be asserted rather than well argued. Ultimately, the most interesting arguments in the book concerned the role of race in psychoanalysis and the notion of "racial melancholia" as the trace in colorblind discourse.
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