SOURCE: "Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Homosexuality, Abjection and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 372-94.

[In the following excerpt, Reid-Pharr analyzes several homosocial incidents in Soul on Ice as evidence of Cleaver's unsuccessful attempt to define a universal black masculine identity.]

Diana Fuss has argued in a recent discussion of contemporary gay and lesbian theory that the figure of what we might call the undead homosexual, the homosexual who continually reappears, even and especially in the face of the most grisly violence and degradation, is absolutely necessary to the production of positive heterosexual identity, at least heterosexual identity produced within bourgeois-dominated economies of desire that, as Eve Sedgwick demonstrates, deploy homophobia to check slippage between (male) homosociality and homosexuality [Between Men (1985)]. The inside/out binarism, then, the distinction between normality and chaos, is maintained precisely through the...