Aberrations in Black by Roderick A. Ferguson

Roderick A. Ferguson shows how discourses of sexuality have been used to theorize racial difference in American sociology. Canonical sociologists, from Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess and Robert Park to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William Julius Wilson, measured African Americans' fitness for a liberal capitalist order by their adherence to heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family norms. Ferguson sets this history beside the development of capital, Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and novels by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison that depict the gendered and sexual differences of African American culture. The book includes the first discussion of a never-published chapter of Invisible Man with a gay character, and introduces what Ferguson calls queer of color analysis.