Black Trans Feminism

Abstract

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, Venus Di’Khadija Selenite, and Dane Figueroa Edidi, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.

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“…For example, in Black Trans Feminism, Marquis Bey argues that "race and gender shape how we experience (what we come to understand as) our bodies" but the "matter and materiality" of the body "are not to be equated with mere being, a transparent and unmediated facticity." 39 Bey's deconstructive argument highlights the contingent materialization of such categories (like race and gender) onto the body. Bey continues, "regulatory norms create the obviousness of the "fact" of such a body as black or transgender or woman through a forcible, which is to say coerced, reiteration of tenets of what is said to be possible for one to be."…”

Aporias at the intersection of geography and feminist science and technology studies: Critical engagements with Black studies

“…Black radical and feminist scholars have thus argued that Blackness destabilizes and "desediments" the discursive formation of the assumed normative and agential subject (Bey 2020(Bey , 2022Chandler, 2000Chandler, , 2011. Bey (2020) extends Chandler and Spillers (1987) to think through how racial distinction is differentiated through gender demarcations, such that "blackness, animates and instrumentalizes gender towards its dissolution" (7).…”

“…While ongoing conversations in Black radical thought indicate the limits of situated knowledge, newer Black trans feminist scholarship further probes geography, FSTS, and Black feminism's attachment to intersectionality and the socially differentiated body as productive of particular epistemological frameworks. Building on Spillers' (1987) sketching of the possible "insurgent ground" of Black female flesh, which has been refused and refuses normative racial and gender roles, Bey (2019Bey ( , 2022 argues for a movement away from organizing around identity categories because they are construed within the dominant power structure. As has been highlighted by poststructuralist feminist thinkers, Bey likewise reminds that the body does not offer up an untroubled and static identity nor is the body a transparent site of truth.…”

“…We likewise incorporate recent work in Black trans feminism which argues that processes of racialization are simultaneously ones of gendering and sexualization, an enforced differentiation which is reformulated to match the shifting necessities of liberal governance and racial capitalist logics (Robinson, 2020(Robinson, [1983). Blackness, which this body of work sees as inseparable from the transing of gender norms, refuses the onto-epistemological assumptions of separable, stable social categorizations that are either hegemonically imposed or reappropriated by intersectional political struggles (Bey, 2022;Harney and Moten, 2021;Snorton, 2017). Read collectively, these insights destabilize not only the critique of the pathologization of Blackness in FSTS and geography but also question any politics that seek to rewrite this pathologization along a trajectory of "improvement" (Harney and Moten, 2021;McKittrick, 2021) or repair within the existing racial capitalist social order.…”

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“…This is an impasse that Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey rectifies. Bey proposes an “abolitionist gender radicality” as a possible move towards collective liberation that can be organised according to “certain kinds of bodies but [that] provides knowledge and world-making onto-epistemic forces that can be mobilized by any and every body and nonbody” (Bey, 2022, p. 11). In moving away from what specific bodies are capable of being, black, trans feminism provides the basis for articulating radically expansive means of revolt founded on an ethics of peace.…”