Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A Conversation

Abstract

This conversation meditates on the ways in which Black Feminism and Trans Feminism relate to one another, how they speak to and supplement one another, and how they are in fact constitutive. Considering that Black feminism, historically, has attempted to interrogate the capaciousness of the very term “woman” and to gender, if you will, an androcentric “Blackness,” one might say, as Che Gossett has said, that Black feminism is “always already trans.” The present conversation, taking place via e-mail from October of 2015 to October of 2017, is a dialogue conducted by Black feminist scholars that deeply engages prevailing notions of Blackness and transness, and radicalizes how these are understood with respect to feminism. In short, it is a conversation in Black, in trans, in feminism, and offers different conceptions of how Black and trans and feminism work with and through one another.

Keywords::

• Black feminism
• Black women
• gender
• trans* feminism

Notes

Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 56–57.

See “bell hooks—Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body | Eugene Lang College.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs (accessed October 19, 2015).

Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 107–18.

Cathy J. Cohen and Sarah J. Jackson, “Ask a Feminist: A Conversation with Cathy Cohen on Black Lives Matter, Feminism, and Contemporary Activism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2015, http://signsjournal.org/ask-a-feminist-cohen-jackson/.

Charlene Carruthers, “In Defense of Korryn Gaines, Black Women and Children,” Colorlines, August 5, 2016, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/defense-korryn-gaines-black-women-and-children-opinion.

Sunnivie Brydum and Mitch Kellaway, “This Black Trans Man Is in Prison for Killing His Rapist,” Advocate, April 8, 2015, https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/04/08/black-trans-man-prison-killing-his-rapist (accessed September 12, 2015).

I have usually identified as a straight, cis, Black man, but have recently found a more apt descriptor in queerness insofar as it does the work of refusing the gender binary on which “straight” relies. As well, to understand myself as a Black queer man takes seriously the claim that Blackness disallows a seamless cisgender and troubles gender, which is to say that epidermal and para-ontological Blackness, to the extent that these describe my own Blackness, interrogate my perceived “cis” gender.

Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000), 72.

LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture, Black Performance and Cultural Criticism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 37.

J. Kameron Carter, “Paratheological Blackness,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (October 1, 2013): 591, doi:10.1215/00382876-2345189.

David Lionel Smith, “What Is Black Culture?,” in The House That Race Built, edited by Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage, 1998), 178–94.

U.S. Department of Justice, “Hate Crime Statistics, 2013,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fall (2014), https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2013/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses/incidentsandoffenses_final.pdf (accessed October 22, 2015).

“Transgender Bride,” by Arthur Forney, in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (September 30, 2015, Season 17, Episode 2; NBC).

Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

E. Patrick Johnson, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 63.

Nael Bhanji, “Trans/scriptions: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexual Citizenship and Racialized Bodies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 517–18.

Cooper, Brittney. “11 Major Misconceptions About the Black Lives Matter Movement.” Cosmopolitan, September 8, 2015, http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a45930/misconceptions-black-lives-matter-movement/ (accessed October 22, 2015).

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 4.

Jessica Contrera, “A Year Ago, Mohamed Became ‘Clock Boy.’ Now, He Can’t Escape That Moment,” Washington Post, August 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-year-ago-ahmed-mohamed-became-clock-boy-now-he-cant-escape-that-moment/2016/08/02/2b8650be-484b-11e6-bdb9-701687974517_story.html?utm_term=.562bd885ae16 (accessed August 3, 2016).

Jasbir K. Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” PhiloSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (October 2, 2012): 54.

LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, The New Black Studies Series (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 207.

June Jordan, Civil Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 143.

Horton-Stallings, Mutha’ Is Half a Word, 34, 36, 38.

Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Race and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57; emphasis added.

Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different: A Historical Context (London: Phaïdon, 2001).

Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 187.

Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, The New Black Studies Series (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 3; emphasis in original.

See C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kai M. Green

Kai M. Green is a shape-shifting Black Queer nerd Boi; An Afro-Future, freedom-dreaming, rhyme slinging dragon slayer in search of a new world. A scholar, poet, and filmmaker, Dr. Green earned his Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity with specializations in Gender Studies and Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. Dr. Green has published in numerous scholarly journals including GLQ, South Atlantic Quarterly, Black Camera, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. He co-edited a special issue of TSQ on Black Studies/Trans* Studies. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming Anthology entitled Black Trans Love is Black Wealth. He is a proud member of BYP100 (Black Youth Project) where he sits on the healing and safety council.

Marquis Bey

Marquis Bey is an English Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University doing work in Black Feminist Theorizing, Transgender Studies, and 21st-century African American Literature. He is currently working on his dissertation, tentatively entitled “The Blacknesses of Blackness: Fugitivity, Feminism, and Transness,” which queries the feminist and trans constituents of a radically recalibrated fugitive Blackness. His work on Blackness, contemporary African American Literature, transgender subjectivity, and feminist critique has appeared, or is forthcoming, in academic journals such as CR: the New Centennial Review, The Black Scholar, Black Camera, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and others. Additionally, he is an essayist whose essays on Blackness, Black feminism, and transgender subjectivity appear on forums such as darkmatter, The Feminist Wire, The Coffeelicious, and Fembot.