Introduction

Q2, or “Q Squared,” features interviews, roundtables, short essays, and other accessible formats that highlight how queer and trans thinkers and LGBTQ histories engage and reframe contemporary social and political issues and processes, especially those that define national and global public squares.In light of the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which rescinded a “fundamental right” to abortion in the United States, the inaugural Q2 in GLQ 30:1 explored the suppressed queer and trans perspectives on and entanglements of “reproductive justice,” traced by Black feminist abolition, Indigenous anticolonial critique, and transgender history. In this installment of Q2, we explore queer of color critique in a moment of danger. Like attacks on critical race theory, intersectionality, and ethnic studies, queer of color critique has become a target, especially for US right-wing forces in their bid to reclaim the state for fascism. These attacks on queer of color critique seek to limit its scope, delegitimate its knowledges, and suppress its dynamic social force through the targeting of educational spaces. Our dossier opens with a roundtable by Roderick Ferguson, Kara Keeling, Martin Manalansan, and Gayatri Gopinath, discussing the political and intellectual genealogies of queer of color critique, the questions that initiated its formation in their work, and most especially its defining commitment to and refashioning of a “politics of solidarity.” The dossier closes with a short essay by Juana María Rodríquez, who furthers the queer of color engagement with solidarity by discussing how defending women and femmes’ “rights” to sex work is at the very heart of what matters to, or ought to matter to, queer studies today.The roundtable discussion is an edited transcript of a conference panel titled “Queer of Color Critique: Spreading the Sunshine,” which took place on November 4, 2023, at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Montreal, Quebec. Proposed by Martin Manalansan, the panel was a cheeky response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's administration's nationalized attack on particular scholars of Black studies, such as Angela Davis, Kimberly Crenshaw, Cathy Cohen, and Roderick Ferguson, leading thinkers of Black radicalism, intersectionality, Black queer studies, and queer of color critique. For the purposes of Q2, we threaded together the recorded remarks of Ferguson, Keeling, Gopinath, Manalansan, and Reddy into a conversational format, while sharing Juana's remarks in the form of a short essay. In the time since we proposed the session for the ASA conference in January 2023, efforts to destroy the contradictory anti-racist, feminist, queer, and trans horizons of struggle present within liberal and nationalist educational and academic institutions that defined the attacks on queer of color critique became focused most pointedly on intellectual, activist, and scholarly critiques of Israeli settler-colonial violence, and especially on preventing the dissemination of Palestinian visions of justice and liberation after the commencement of the US-backed Israeli siege of Gaza in October 2023.At this “present moment of danger,” to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase, with state assaults on ethnic studies knowledges and university administrations across the United States and elsewhere that are actively chilling the speech of students, faculty, and staff, and suppressing our efforts to learn together about and join in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation, we offer this dossier on queer of color critique in an effort to preserve and vitalize the recalcitrant knowledges that are produced by and reproduce queer modes of solidarity.

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