[8] Ferguson is most renowned for the concept of "queer of color critique" from his book Aberrations in Black, which is rooted in the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective which do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups.
Ferguson proposes queer of color critique as a mode of analysis for interpreting the black drag queen prostitute, and uses this figure to demonstrate the heterogeneity of social categories with in the culture and genealogy of the West.
Chapter 1 of Aberrations in Black juxtaposes Richard Wright's classic novel with the sociological work of Robert Park, who imagined assimilation and migration through heterosexual reproduction.
"[3] Wright's use of Bigger Thomas's character, who is a feminized figure unconforming to heteropatriarchy or national ideas, was to represent the nonheteronormative dysfunction and gendered features within racial domination.
[3] Ferguson demonstrates through the character of Woodridge how the queer of color can resist interpellation from categories of African American identity determined by dominant literary representations, and how other subjects can be inspired to defy the operation of these forces.
[12] Ferguson uses Toni Morrison's Sula as another example of a novel that depicts sexual nonheteronormativity, illustrating queer black critiques that attempt to displace heteropatriarchal discourse.
The essays in Strange Affinities follow Ferguson's intellectual tradition of queer of color critique and explore the possibilities of progressive coalitions in the production of racial, gender, and sexual difference.
[14] In The Reorder of Things, Ferguson traces the history of interdisciplines in the university, including the rise of departments of race, gender, ethnicity, and queer studies, and argues that they are essential to the development of power in academia, the state, and global capitalism rather than a challenge to it.
[15] Adrian Piper's art collage Self Portrait 2000 is used at the beginning of the book to exemplify how institutions—including the university, the state, and capital—actively work to undermine projects of equality despite outwardly promoting diversity.
He borrows from Michel Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality about power as intentional and calculating to describe how institutions view minority movements as elements that can be coopted and incorporated into its own objectives.
Ferguson uses "power" in Foucault's terms as a "strategical situation in a particular society" and is a mode for calculating and arranging minority difference that is not individual, but systemic and representative of a network of fluctuating relationships.
[17] Ferguson's August 2017 book is an installation of American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present, and it further develops his arguments on the university and post World War II student activism.
Ferguson argues that the university has increased its attempts to maintain the status quo and regulate students and faculty on campus, following a growing trend of anti-intellectualism in the United States.