Arts, Faculty of
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for
DSpace
UBCV
Williams, Savoy Whitney
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
The demand for scholarly works concerning black transmen’s experience within the fields of Transgender Studies, black feminist thought and Critical Race Studies continues to be longed for. As an immediate attendance to this longing for the concern of black trans beings, this work comes as a provisional glimpse into the complex relationships between race and gender as social categories, and as analytics concerning the figuring of being black and trans. Five works by black trans scholars presenting inquiries into the status’ of blackness, gender and being are analyzed, compared and ultimately grounded, to set my foundation for a creative method of practice for black transmen to augment their futurity towards one that is hoped for.
“FROM NOWHERE TO SOMEWHERE”: THE DESIRES OF A BLACK TRANSMAN’S FUTURITY by Savoy Whitney Williams A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FILFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2021 © Savoy Whitney Williams, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: “From Nowhere to Somewhere”: The Desires of a Black Transman’s Futurity submitted by Savoy Williams in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Examining Committee: Dr. Dina Al-Kassim, Associate Professor, Social Justice Institute, UBC Supervisor Dr. Athena Colman, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Brock University Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract The demand for scholarly works concerning black transmen’s experience within the fields of Transgender Studies, black feminist thought and Critical Race Studies continues to be longed for. As an immediate attendance to this longing for the concern of black trans beings, this work comes as a provisional glimpse into the complex relationships between race and gender as social categories, and as analytics concerning the figuring of being black and trans. Five works by black trans scholars presenting inquiries into the status’ of blackness, gender and being are analyzed, compared and ultimately grounded, to set my foundation for a creative method of practice for black transmen to augment their futurity towards one that is hoped for. iv Lay Summary This work attempts to inspire a creative method of practice for black transmen to envision their futurity, while revealing to non-black and trans readers the ways actualities of black transmen’s lives become occluded from current imaginings of black and trans futurity. v Preface This thesis is an original, independent intellectual work of the author, Savoy Williams. The contribution is dedication, intellectual courage, and a daringness to be hopeful. vi Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................. iv Preface ....................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... vi Dedication ................................................................................................................................ vii Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Summaries ................................................................................................................................. 4 Definitions ................................................................................................................................ 32 Comparisons............................................................................................................................. 42 Futurity: What makes a future I am hopeful for? ..................................................................... 54 References................................................................................................................................ 63 vii Dedication I dedicate this to you. So you will always have a reminder that you belong. So you will always see yourself. So you will always know you have arrived, Somewhere. 1 Introduction N O W H E R E Where do I fit? I don’t know. All I know is that I want to. I want to be desirable. For whom? I don’t know that yet. All I know is that I don’t fit and I want to. - S. W. At this moment in time I am compelled to push beyond a critique of the current climate of Transgender Studies, and rather seek to disrupt its nature with the provision of a glimpse into the complex relationship between race and gender as social categories carefully negotiated by black transmen to gesture toward a desired Somewhere; a space and time for the untethering of all that dares to not be thought, said or done by a black transman. It is here I engage in auto ethnography to assert myself within the context of this inquiry. My desire to present this particularly nuance experience and its potential imaginings of futurity stems from my personal struggles to understand where I fit in the spaces I desire to. The struggle to make sense of my movements through these spaces can be felt when reading the poem I wrote titled, “N O W H E R E”, shared at the beginning of this work. It describes a present grounded in Nowhere; the liminal space for which my existence continues to try and actualize itself through personal narratives, selected cultural representations, and most profoundly through living. It is from this place of Nowhere that I depart to engage in this inquiry exploring the question: “How 2 do black transmen negotiate their race and gender in the everyday contexts, to augment themselves towards a desired futurity - Somewhere?” This inquiry is an active fulfilment of another desire to provide an account of the experience of a black being as they process their encounters with further academic inscription of blackness as “non-being,” without a method of navigation for this terrain that is violently erosive. It appears in its persistence that theorizing blackness as a state of “non-being” existing as the condition for possibility of human being, is a radical shift towards an alternative way of being uncategorized by racialized and imperialist conceptions of black humanity, but is this true? More importantly, how does this necessitation of the status of “non-being” consequentially demand a presentation of disfiguring one’s being as black? I begin with Richardson (2012) to acquaint you the reader with a fictional grounds used as an arena for the battle of representation for the violently absented, imagining a being of blackness amidst the presence of violent terror. Social death violently terrorizes and contours the borders of the arena by way of a non-representation absence signing death of sociality and the term, “death” allegorizing the social condition of black being. I present this through Richardson’s (2012) use of the everyday fictional novel, Trumpet to configure a nuanced meditation on gendered implications and reimagining black manhood with femininity. Then I proceed into Snorton’s (2017) analysis of the Three Negro Classics and how black mother’s figuration is the rendered non-being who simultaneously functions as a portal for black personhood. Such function necessitates an insurgency for recognition of the black maternal’s spatial and temporal coordinates as of non-being, figuring Afro-Modernist subjectification. In continuing to illuminate the spatial and temporal coordinates of black being as non-being, I present an articulation of Bey’s (2017) comparison of blackness and transness. Complexifying 3 the contrast of nuanced black and trans* subjectivities from their political iterations, subjectivity rests on their para-ontological anoriginality. This contrast of thought by Bey (2017) is collapsed and furthered through Warren’s (2017) provision of it as grounds for speculation. Black trans is thus provided as a philosophical enterprise capable of devastating the ontological human, by asking from the zone of non-being, “Can one call into being from non-being?” To answer, Warren (2017) asserts black trans as a practice of exposing the para-ontology of nothingness that is black being, while vesting interest in its argued capacity to devastate the ontological ground of the human being. In arguing that black being is the nothingness of the zone of non-being, I present a later meditation on the question of black being by Warren (2017) published the following year. In 2018, Warren (2018) attends to black suffering with urgency as it is in a state of representational and conceptual crises. What is revealed through critical examination of the Negro, is an ontological condition of function for human being’s possibility. The ontological terror devastating the free black is paired in contrast to the Negro illuminating the double sign of ontological terror. I move from what appears to present fiction as grounds of inquiry, to that which is reveals the fictions grounding ontological formulation of ruling epistemology. Afterwards I compare what each work, from every day representation (through fiction) to philosophical cogitation, describes of blackness, gender and being. Following the defining of key terms, I will present what I conceive to be the upmost intentional of thinking to consider futurity through hope in being while contending with configurations of blackness, gender and being. Additionally, I will illuminate futurity’s dependence on black being’s urgent attendance to the present. 4 Summaries To begin this provisional glimpse into the social categories negotiated by black transmen I compiled and analyzed five works written by black trans scholars. The first is by Matt Richardson (2012). In this work Richardson (2012), whose title is an epigraph from Jackie Kay’s novel Trumpet, sets forth to unpack a crisis of black manhood. Trumpet is a 1998 fiction about a son Colman who finds out after his father Joss’ death, that Joss was anatomically female. The depiction of this apparent crisis for Colman and his masculinity as a black man, are understood as an allegory of social death for Richardson (2012). Trumpet is also reflective of an earlier instantiation of gender crisis recalled of Hortense Spillers according to Richardson (2012), who explains black captives of slavery were stripped of genders they were used to during transport from the African continent. During the process of transport black captives were disallowed from continuing the gender systems they were from, while being simultaneously prohibited from the new gender systems demanded of them (Richardson, 2012, p. 361). It is this assertion of Spillers which historically contextualizes Richardson’s (2012) attendance to the gender categories and social death depicted in Trumpet. Social Death is defined as the condition of slaves forced into the position of unrecoverable disrespect, natal alienation and dishonour (Richardson, 2012, p. 361). A definition Richardson (2012) extends from Orlando Patterson, in stating its implication reach well beyond the end of slavery. The gendered implications of social death ought to be explored as a challenge, to gain insurgent grounds outside the “traditional symbolics” of gender (Richardson, 2012). Such a sentiment is to be regarded as Richardson’s (2012) fulfillment of Spillers’(2003) instruction. To accept this challenge is to confront queer implications of black masculinity, particularly in the form of a question, what it would look like for black men to embrace femininity within 5 themselves. As a challenge that Richardson (2012) accepts, the fictional grounds of Trumpet projecting social death, is the event for insurgency. To unpack social death allegorized in Trumpet, Richardson (2012) explores his interest through Colman, who comes to see himself as socially dead. As a black man, it is his feminized position in relation to legitimized patriarchal white masculinity. Blackness is defined by its hybridity as incited from a recapitulation of Darieck Scott, who states “blackness is at once hypermasculine and feminine” (Richardson, 2012, p. 362). The structural meeting of femininity and black manhood urges to be an opportunity for reimagining; improvising other registers of black masculinity through the maternal. Black queerness is thus a site where improvisation of positionality can be clearly rendered despite its outside (of “traditional symbolics”) locomotion (Spillers, 2003, p. 228). As representative of this method of improvisation and reimagining the grounds of insurgency, Richardson (2012) meditates on the authorial intentionality of Jackie Kay as the author of Trumpet. Her inspiration for writing the fictional novel was the real life and death of musician Billy Tipton whose gender was sensationalized in national press. His story was also captured in a book titled, Suit Me. Jackie Kay adopts this publicly sensationalized story of Billy Tipton to present Trumpet as an elucidated collection of gender and racial conditions rarely discussed in a Scottish context. Delving into Trumpet as the breadth of Richardson’s (2012) analysis, the main character of the novel Joss, who is a jazz trumpeter, is cast outside the boundaries of Scottish nationhood along with other black Scottish people when his gender variance is exposed upon his literal death. His death renders all familiar gender categories into crises for his white wife Millie and his son, Colman. The intrusion by state and media, interrupting the family’s mourning with new 6 vocabulary misnaming Joss, exposes the untenability of normative gender categories for racialized subjects in Scotland. The implication of this exposure lends to a terrifying recognition of the fragility and social femininity of black manhood for Colman (Richardson, 2012, p. 363). Richardson (2012) presents this moment to consider blackness as that which is absent from national Scottish historical imaginary. Absence in this regard is akin to death; social death is the condition of slaves which defines the structural position of blackness well after slavery’s end. This is evidenced in “the continuous interruptions to black ancestry, forcing black people to reimagine and create their own histories”, states Richardson (2012, p. 364). An example of this death by absence from genealogical representation of nationhood, is Joss’ father who stands in as the black Scot whose history is rendered, “dead.” Moore, Joss’ father, comes to Scotland by way of “a less recognized middle passage” at the beginning of the twentieth century, which eerily resembles the stories of slave life and transport less than a century before Moore’s travel to Scotland (Richardson, 2012). And although Moore spends many years in Scotland, Richardson (2012, p. 364) retains he is not living; a liberal subject of citizenship; legible to people around him. The story of Moore’s travel is passed on by Joss at the end of his life to Colman as a final recognition they were dead all along. It is this social death Joss tried to shield Colman from all his life. Literal death in this instance, presents the condition for confronting social death. To contend with the inherent confrontation with social death, Richardson (2012) recalls Sophie Stone. She is a character in the novel who is a reporter, hell bent on exploiting Colman’s grief and anger towards his father for keeping his past a secret. Sophie symbolizes the intrusion of media as a national intervention for relieving normative gender categories. This is enacted by the exploitation of Colman as the black instrument, national relief is predicated on. As Stone 7 seduces Colman for a sensational story, what is evidenced is the magnitude in which a nation will attempt to manipulate cultural memory for its own production. When seduction is not possible, displacement is necessitated. Consider displacement as misrepresentation (the exposure of Joss’ past) for the purpose of relieving cultural anxiety about its own hybridity in rigid suspension. The impacts of exposing Joss for having a past gender, varying from the one presented at the time of his death, affectively forces Colman to mourn the loss of not only his father but his coherence of gender in black men. The revelation of his father’s differing genitalia forces Colman to face the social femininity of black masculinity. The conversations of Joss in the media using pronouns unrecognizable to Colman, reveal Colman’s fear of being left vulnerable without a form of recognizable self as “man” is no longer available – it never was for the socially dead. Colman’s vulnerability is the precipice of black men’s desire for their father’s presence and (potential) gendered position in society, Richardson (2012, p. 368) deducts. So what remains desirable as a “self” to Colman? Richardson (2012) explores Colman’s self-conception through an analysis of Colman’s first memory of another black man living amongst the white people of Scotland. It is a memory depicting the racial degradation and violence inflicted on a black man while riding the bus. It causes Colman to consider himself (devastatingly) as the epitome of criminality in the eyes of the whites surrounding him. He is always at risk of racial brutality. Even remembering his father Joss, is to remember he himself is dead too; a fact Joss’ celebrity status as a jazz trumpeter could not shield Colman from. Richardson (2012) reminds, Scotland has neither history nor place for the black man if he attempts to exist outside of criminal or animal. Both are historical representations of the same symbolic figure, the hypermasculine and feminine of black manhood. 8 The symbolic figure of black manhood depicted in Trumpet, illuminates a precedence of displacing the maternal feminine for an attempt at arriving at the black paternal. But the structural position of black men is always vulnerable to disappearance. Richardson reiterates black fathers are an elusive illusory figure, even if physically present. His thought is aligned with the considerations of David Marriott who states, “black fathers are murdered, usurped and withheld, by a culture and a nation,” (as cited in Richardson, 2012, p. 369). Joss’ death exists as reminder of the fragility of possessing his own manhood. The intervention to such a condition is a high risk, desperate attempt at recovering black manhood through the dispossession of femininity. Richardson (2012) describes this attempt at recovery, as happening the moment Colman and Joss’ funeral director are stricken with fear upon discovering Joss’ manhood as different from their own. Black manhood no longer taking stalk in the penis, threatens Colman and the funeral director with obsoletion. But what remains, does not have to be an occasion for distress, Richardson (2012) reassures. What remains available is the practice of jazz; a method for creating and recreating black manhood (Richardson, 2012, p. 371). Such a practice is observed in Joss, by Millie who is Colman’s mother. She witnesses Joss create his black Scottish manhood by recreating the masculinity of U.S jazz musicians. Richardson further explains that black men become ideals of cultural manhood by copying tolerated “icons and models” to mitigate the schematic identifications of criminal or animal. This method of resistance against reproducing the white imaginary, presents black manhood as “socially constructed and performative thus not restricted to born-male individuals” (Richardson, 2012, p. 371). In Joss’ world of jazz as a trumpeter of the “Moody’s Men” ensemble, black men reinvent themselves. 9 Music as a reoccurring presence in Trumpet is a site of black gender and sexual improvisation. For analysis, Richardson (2012) considers the intimacy between Joss’ and his ensemble members. Depicted as a close-knit collective, each member defends the other from scrutiny of their masculine presentation in addition to the provision of care for each other. An example of this care is illustrated through Big Red, an ensemble member who defends Joss when asked about his “squeaky voice” or “baby face.” Upon Joss’ death, Big Red bawls expressing the “effeminate” and “overemotional” side of Jazz (Richardson, 2012, p. 372). This is a signal to the femininity in the symbolic of black manhood, reimagined. In the interest of providing of more concise exemplification of the female within black manhood is Josephine; it is the name referring to Joss in his gender variant past. She is who Richardson (2012, p. 374) asserts as the “absent presence of the black female in the diaspora… which sustains the present and future.” In a dream of Colman’s, he is determined to save child Josephine from drowning. What was once a desperate attempt at proving black manhood through the penis, is now reimagined as an endeavour to recover the female within black patrilineage. Richardson (2012) asserts this shift as the symbolic turn to the black maternal, indicative of Spillers’ (2003, p. 228) instruction guiding his exploration. It is a dream showcasing the analytical consideration of what it would look like for black men to embrace femininity. Trumpet as Richardson (2012) has argued is an event for insurgency; a challenge for exploring outside of the “traditional symbolics” of gender. The second work I analyze is written by C. Riley Snorton. This work by Snorton (2017) presents a critical analysis of the historical figurations of Black personhood as he returns to the repackaged and recirculated collection of works in 1965 titled, Three Negro Classic. Three Negro Classics is the collective binding of Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, The Souls 10 of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois and The Auto-Biography of an Ex-Colored Man by James W. Weldon Johnson. The grouping of the three books was initially described as an auspicious event as it would signal a spectrum of political views on the Negro question. The repackaging and recirculation of the texts as a collection, 50 years after their individual publications presented them as cultural artifacts worth returning to for insight into what Du Bois refers to as, “What it feels like to be a problem” (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 102). Alongside its collective publishing as the Three Negro Classics, readers would witness a slew of racial interventions imposed on Black people in the United States. The publisher of the three book collection believed its publishing “would instruct the Black on how he could keep his self-respect” (Snorton, 2017, p. 103). The use of masculine pronouns by the publisher is said to index the concerns of Du Bois “manhood rights,” the imperative securement of legal rights for black men in tandem with women’s suffrage. Du Bois evidently relies on a conception of identity that figures race and gender as distinct but comparable constructs for which Snorton (2017, p. 102) reminds us. The cultural and legal status of a Black man was intrinsically tied to the status of his mother. To analyze this relation, Snorton (2017) draws on Hortense Spillers who defines the matrilineal arrangement practiced and codified by slavery in the US. Snorton (2017) layers her description with one of a new born child, “the offspring of property;” a phrase emphasizing the volatility of slavery, for its systematic production of black persons stripped of their belonging to their mother and without relation to the White supremacy maintained by the owner who possesses it (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 103). A child born into slavery was orphaned by patriarchal order on the boundary of woman/man, undefined of humanity and family. This production of a child into a slave during 11 slavery created familial and anthropomorphic level crises for black people in Antebellum New World. Snorton (2017, p. 102) recounts Du Bois who stated these crises were issues inherent in creating a systemic code predicated on race and not condition; the condition of labour by force of violent murder, that is the code. Particularly as an example gesturing towards the ways gender and sexuality were instruments of organizing racial classification, the emancipated status inherited by black sons of white mothers is figured. Given that the association between being of blackness and having a black child was imperative to slave production and continued as a matter of consideration in the process of Reconstruction in the United States, Snorton (2017 p. 108) rephrases Du Bois inquisition of what it means to be a problem, to become that of what it means to have a black mother. It is this question which organizes Snorton’s (2017) locating of the “female within” the Three Negro Classics (Spillers, 2003, as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 108). It is argued by Snorton (2017) that black mothers are a symbol and metonym of Black life and considers their figuration through abjection. The question that emerges is “How might one constitute a self through abjection?” To answer, Snorton draws on Frantz Fanon’s description of black that is an exclusion from the dominant symbolics of gender. “The black man is not one in an anti-black patriarchal world; he indicates the result of antinomic projection that centers him in a universe that requires his destruction” (Fanon, 2008/1952, as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 105). The grounds of this assertion is that zone of non-being which is characterized as extraordinarily sterile but never the less the place for authentic upheaval to reproduce. This scene of abjection is the grounds Snorton (2017, p. 105) deploys Sylvia Winters’ proposition of a “sociogenic praxis to address the conundrum of human consciousness”. This is held in conversation with Kristeva’s emphasis on the project of constructing a self, positioned in contrast 12 to the phenomenology of “wanting” (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 106). Wanting in this context is the logical preliminary to being and the being of an object; abjection of self is wanting’s only signified. The signifier is then solely literature but when placed in opposition to Fanon, Snorton (2017) urges us to question what is the self that precedes abjection. For its sole signifier to be only literature would not take into account Fanon’s version of self as one that is produced through racial abasement (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 106). With these analytics to subjectify abjection, Snorton (2017) asserts black masculinist modernist literature to illustrate the corporeal effects of “wanting” under abject conditions. This is often depicted in corporeal splintering, a symptom of being in contact with the zone of non-being. It is a space that dually exists outside of Enlightenment’s possibility and in a space that presents different sociogenic possibilities. The possibilities echo Spillers’ “yes” to the African heritage of one’s mother to regain an aspect of personhood (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 106). Fanon, Spillers and Kristeva are all scholars informing the analytical framing of Snorton’s project of locating the female within the Three Negro Classics. Snorton (2017) utilizes the Three Negro Classic to envision the ways black mothers have been rendered to the zone of non-being and become the portal to a black (modernist) self. She is the corporeal splintering of a body whose figuration is crucial for reworking antinomic blackness because her representation reproduces the borders of a black self, endowed with an interiority and racial blackness built exclusively by the social. The Three Negro Classics are thus examined as demonstrations of the interface between non-being and modes of Afro-modernist subjectification that is marked by the complex figuration of the black mother. Each text presents a confrontation with how to represent black personhood with the mother’s deployment textually to render subjectivity in the absence of the father. The imperative placed on locating and 13 examining black mother’s figuration in these texts for Snorton (2017) expresses the capacity for black literacy to rupture Western Modernism, threatening the logic of post-Enlightenment subjectification. For example, Jazz aesthetics with its idealization of improvisation is one form of encapsulating Afro-Modernism. This exploration by way of improvisation is also seen in the Three Negro Classic, implicating the trans- of transatlantic to movements between space as well as time and being, alongside Blackness. Snorton (2017) pursues the degree to which trans in Transatlantic literature resembles trans- that modifies conceptions of gender, through a tracing of paradoxes of the black maternal figures in the compilation of texts. He intends to illuminate the experience of black sociality occurring under the conditions of social death, but cautions us to not mistake the figurations of black maternal for the real. The figuration of her gender is inextricably tied to the structural position of blackness as “mother-like” and thus, her figuration is conditioned through the metaphysics of time. Returning to Fanon and Spillers who are cited as foregrounding Snorton’s (2017) literary framework, clarification of their relations to power is necessary. Fanon’s (2008/1952) articulation of power refers to the normative patriarchal exercising, whereas Spiller’s (2003) articulation of power is the “yes” to the “female” within as a political praxis for accessing black maternal to reveal black personhood (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 108). In Snorton’s (2017) attendance to the relationship between stages of production to audience’s consumption and reception, he argues this process to be one which constructs how texts, authorial and black body politics have been impacted throughout time. In doing so Snorton (2017) engages in a project of locating the “female within” (Spillers, 2003, as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 228) as a meticulous meditation on defining Black personhood in a modernist idiom. 14 The third text I analyze is of Marquis Bey’s scholarly contribution. In this work’s introduction, Bey (2017) reveals the moment his meditation on whether or not blackness could meet transness, becomes inspiration for this cogitative journey. It occurs in a discussion with his friend for which the question is posed and the response received is, “Why not? Black transgender people exist.” What is most generative from this discussion is the presentation of a possibility for the conceptual meeting of blackness and transness as analytics of thought provoking inquiry. To engage in this inquiry, Bey (2017) initiates the different yet primordial kinship between blackness and transness. It is a kinship arising from the “undercommons”, saturating the conditions for which subjectivity rests. Bey (2017) designates this a kinship of para-ontological concern, as it is a recapitulation of what J. Cameron Carter marks of blackness; movement on the outskirts of purity. In establishing the defining terms for Bey’s (2017) critical examination of the staged conceptual meeting of blackness and transness, he relies on the insight of thinkers such as W.E.B Du Bois, Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers. As a result, Bey (2017, p. 376) professes his arrival to blackness and transness by way of “refusal, abnormality, para-ontology and eruption.”. They are poetic forces of black and trans para-ontology, thus only arbitrarily related to bodies. While the relationship between black and trans* bodies and their analytics must be handled with care, Bey (2017, p. 277) asserts that racial identification will not determine one’s relation to power, rendering epidermal hue an insufficient determinant of politicity. His assertion echoes a sentiment from Spillers’ relay; “the nature of power is a phenomenon independent of race – it is of bad faith to maintain such a fallacy” (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 277). It is a similar case for trans* presented through the considerations of Cathy Cohen who argues in order to be of a radical trans politic, one must demand openness and equitability, complexifying the relationship between trans persons and trans* politics (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 277). Bey (2017) 15 inserts a nuanced perspective extending Cohen’s to consider those whose gender non-conforming presence is marked as momentous in spaces previously prohibitive or absent. Thus in setting the stage for the conceptual meeting of blackness and transness, delineations from their bodily positionalities are necessarily made. Although different, black and trans* bodies speak to and as metonymic flashes of the poetic forces of blackness and transness. They are an imagined counterstatement to Western culture whereby culture is the vocational space for lawlessness and refusal to unfold (Bey, 2017, p. 278). They are instances, not archetypes, of the poetic forces Bey (2017) describes, “black and trans.” If one is interested in making a definitive distinction between bodily positionalities and the analytic aporia of blackness and transness, Bey (2017, p. 278) reminds, they are nodes of one another. Both exist as the ordinary names of nothingness which distinction rests; even if that distinction rests beside ontology, on bodies. Bey (2017) thus sets out to scale the outskirts of purity in an attempt at showcasing the transness of blackness and the blackness of transness. To illustrate transness of blackness, Bey (2017) presents an argument for the anoriginality of blackness as it is a fugitive, poetic and creative force. Described in the previous section the “undercommons,” Bey (2017) riffs off Moten and Harney’s concept which renders blackness into a no/place where fugitives dwell simmering along the underside of ontology, reveling in chaos (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 279). Blackness defines a modality of escaping a location without a definitive spatial description. It also marks a “syntagmatic break in movement for one property to another, as represented in the disjuncture of “African” and “American,”” Bey (2017) reiterates of Spillers (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 279). Blackness is representative of a cultural wounding, abeyance of closure. As that in-between, its movement is flight, escaping ontological pinning. To distinguish from Spillers (2003), Bey (2017, p. 279) explains “blackness 16 as excessive of the logic of governability and cannot be arrived at.” It does not rest and should be thought in motion. To exemplify the fugitivity of blackness, Bey (2017) locates blackness in Physics; the location of Michelle Wright who attempts to conceive of her blackness through space, time and her notion of “epiphenomenal time.” Both Wright and Bey (2017) rely on the thoughtful contribution of Hortense Spillers, however, Bey (2017) clarifies Wright’s misreading of Spiller’ (2003) to demonstrate its non-normative, perhaps even trans*, call for the power of “yes” to the “female within.” Through her historicizing of African American culture, Spillers (as cited in Bey, 2017) explains that clear distinctions of gender and sexuality are sustained elsewhere unavailable to the black (ungendered) female. Bey (2017, p. 281) clarifies Wright through Spillers (2003) as a provision illuminating the trans* nucleus, fueling blackness. What remains of his inquiry into the transness of blackness is an articulation of its besidedness to Ontology. To provide one, Bey (2017, p. 282) revitalizes his definition of blackness with an uptake of Moten’s definition suggesting blackness is the “anoriginal displacement of ontology… an irreparable disturbance to ontology’s time and space.” Blackness is already here; affirmation of its being the nothing, providing the condition for something legible, something human. Transness meets blackness by way of anoriginality, blackness’ undoing of the human. As deduced from this conceptual meeting, blackness is not reducible to a particular modern racial categorization. Transness is thus not solely a descriptor for the body. For Bey (2017, p. 284), trans* is a mode of engaging with history and space through “worldly inhabitation constantly refusing to limn ontological overflows.” This warrants Bey’s (2017) justification for the use of an accompanied asterisk symbolizing its colloquial referent of space; empty yet full. It is the openness of possibility, the very condition for such to exist. The asterisk 17 attached to trans* is its metonym for its primordial force of unfixing the openness of our world, according to Bey (2017, p. 284). In this formulation, trans*ness is what Claire Colebrook defines as, “Transitivity” (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 285). “It is the beginningness that underlies the gendered conditions of possibility permitting distinction” (Bey 2017, p. 285). These distinctions are characterized by the instability of singularity’s legible potentiality. Thus trans* denotes its own pervasive non-moving movement preceding what is human and what is animal to be what legibly is. Transivity further enacts what Bey (2017) recounts of “Transfiguration” for C. Riley Snorton. Transfiguration is a radical analytic of destabilization for it operates within the space of liminality, gesturing as a site for understanding queer relations between feminist universality and particularities (Bey 2017, p. 286). Trans* once again presents a force, like blackness, troubling ontologized states with its volatility, “a disruptive and irruptive undercommon subversion” (Bey, 2017, p. 286). To conclude this conceptual meeting of blackness and trans*ness, Bey (2017) reveals the stage was set on “demonic (non)ground.” As a recapitulation of Katherine Mc Kittrick’s term, the (non) ground is a creative use of language to describe the thereness and not thereness of black and trans* as conditions for groundedness (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 288). Blackness and trans*ness mark the abyss underlying the order of purity. The next scholarly work summarized in my analysis is Calling into Being. It is a work by Calvin Warren (2017) that unveils black trans as a speculative, philosophical procedure, in practice exposing the irresolvability between black existence and being. Black trans is presented as an instructive practice capable of exposing the violence inflicted by ontology onto black bodies. Black is not the embodiment of a being, for the moment embodiment is abandoned by ontology the experience of black remains a question unassimilable, ontologically (Warren, 2017, 18 p. 271). Black trans is thus presented as the speculative grounds necessary to draw inquiry into blackness and gender which collides it, without attempting the impossible call from ontological procedure. The practice of tranifestation is also considered for its onto-phonological procedure enabling a particular caller whose self may make a call into being. Warren (2017) prescribes the caller to have being, in which the caller must be of ontological ground, in order to manifest oneself anew in an anti-black world. The caller must already be recognizable as human, despite the trans to gender necessitating their call for being in the world in the first place. Gender is a method for which ontological procedure explicates itself for the human, and not the black whose existence (non-being) lacks ontological resistance. The ungendered black female through gender is specified as an exposure of gender normativity’s foreclosure of black calling into being. Black trans beings as Warren (2017, p. 267) asserts, are those who exist experiencing the devastating violence of ontology, and desperately require an intellectual space to manifest devastations of their own. In his introduction Warren (2017, p. 266) presents three questions central to his inquiry. “Can we represent the black self through a call into being?” “What manifestation is possible, ontologically within the context of an anti-black world and an antiblack field of being?” and “What might such a transformative call entail?” The desire to seek answers to the aforementioned is accompanied by another to expose the, “tremendous violence, routinized humiliation and systemic terror experienced by black trans beings” (Warren, 2017, p. 267). Black trans as a philosophical enterprise is charged with a capacity, Warren argues, to create the intellectual occasion for recognizing, interpreting and introducing black trans experience into a larger field of inquiry despite all prior failed attempts (267). 19 To explain the necessitation of black trans as inquiry creating intellectual space for black trans recognition, Warren (2017) investigates the inquiry practices of other critical fields such as Gender, Sexuality and Black Studies. What he finds is an appropriation of ontological presumptions and humanist foundations that he deems unethical, as it appears to be unreliable in its ability to account for and explain the existence of black being. This inquiry strategy in consideration for its failing presumption is called tranifestation. For Warren (2017) black trans is the provisional solution to transifestation’s current insufficiencies, because black trans is not an ontological formation but rather a speculative or philosophical enterprise that is determined to devastate the ontological human. Tranifestation is the philosophical space where the question of black existence becomes a topic in discourses of gender and experience. This is a result of the ontological grounding for which said discourses arise from, making black existence inescapable as a concern. Warren (2017) considers if gender and experience are features of a self, capable of representation and transformation, as tranifestation suggests, then the self is the starting point of any form of manifestation. The self must possess the capacity to call into being, “to enquire, to demand, to extract from being’s mysterious resources, something transformative, something that challenges normative experience, that of a being” (Warren, 2017, p. 267). Manifestation then proves to be a successful call into being as the transformed being is being’s answer to the call. Tranifestation is the ontological creation for which the call into being is vehicle, driving the self to manifest anew. Evidently, this fails to explain black trans’ call. Is there one? Warren (2017) returns the conversation to black existence by addressing manifestation for failure to explain black trans. He recounts Christina Sharpe who posits the idea of being as a 20 foreclosure to black trans due to non-being (Warren 2017, p. 267). Both the violent experiences of black and the violent experiences of trans do not provide, “being.” This articulates the devastating split between existence (the province of experience) and being (the field of ontology) constituting the core of black suffering in an anti-black world (Warren, 2017, p. 268), creating black catachrestic (meaning unrepresentable as a self). Warren (2017, p. 271) recounts Frantz Fanon (2008/1952) whom emphasises this devastating split for the black man having no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white one. For Warren (2017) it is imperative to grasp manifestation, because such an understanding leads to tranifestation revealing itself as a kind of ontological resistance for a self to manifest anew despite the violence of gender normativity. Black existence however, lacks ontological resistance which lacks the capacity to call, have that call answered and acknowledged. Thus Warren (2017) laments black existence is experienced but impossible to represent with the tools necessitating ontology as their “telephone” for transformation (Warren, 2017, p. 268). There is no answer provided as to what “experiencing black” is, if not within ontological framings and lacking being, but we are encouraged to engage with this question even if our tools are limited. Warren (2017) presents the notion “ontology is phonology” as stated by Jean-Luc Nancy to allude to tranifestation’s call into being, establishing itself as an onto-phonological procedure, illuminating metaphysical resonances of latitudinal and longitudinal richness (as cited in Warren, 2017, p. 268). The “into” represents the creativity and transformation by way of a thereness; the manifestation of a “thereness” for the self. Gender can be thought of as that which provides intelligibility for the self, but seeing as it is an onto-metaphysical concern, being is imperative. Warren (2017, p. asserts the question, “Can black inhabit a place in the world along the coordinates of gender?” 21 To respond, Warren (2017) asserts Spillers’ (2003) consideration of black’s thingness, being for the captor. “A thing can experience the world, not inhabit it; a thing is without a place.” What is projected of Spillers (2003) cited in Warren’s (2017) work, is the call for a place for the social subjectivity of black “ungendered” females. This is due to the traditional symbolic of the female not having a place for blackness and gender, creating the illusion of an impossible project in consideration of things existing outside of ontology. For Spillers (2003, p. 228) it is about the insurgent ground of black ungendered female subjectivity, which informs Warren (2017) of the non-place of black gender foreclosing a call to being as into does not begin with black as a calling, self. Further, Warren (2017) brings forth Spillers’ term symbolic blend to explicate the blending of categories unrecognizable as gender (p. 269), in presentation of blackness as a devastation to gender and social categories of the human. Black trans establishes a similar path of inquiry deriving from black feminism and black trans studies, and yet despite interest invested similarly for both fields, it is black trans studies which centralizes ontology as the fundamental issue. Gender is the guise for this engagement, bearing the lack of onto-phonological procedure. It is at this point Warren (2017) widens the scope of his initial meditation on the (non)relation between blackness and ontology, to discuss the modification of tranifestation for its attempt to call into being. Warren (2017) ultimately regards the attempt as an undermining of itself, from the moment it is deployed. This occurs because a direct call into being for blackness is impossible. Blackness despite this status attempts the impossible, but only ever manages to rebound its muteness into the terrifying chamber of being (p. 270). For Warren (2017), the attempt already announces its own fail; failure as possibility; muteness as transformation but the 22 attempts continue. Tranifestation illuminates this particular drive in black critical discourses; this attempt to achieve an impossible objective, a call into being despite all else. To exemplify tranifestation for this attempt at the impossible, presents the desire for muteness to be heard, for it to create a space in being. If there is power in muteness it would not be a concern of tranifestation according to Warren (2017), as tranifestation already assumes the call will not be mute, asserting that blackness has the same capabilities to call as everyone else. This is the failure of appropriating humanism black critical studies must overcome. Blackness is both the unfixed of movement into being, and the “other” of ontology, and the call is supposed to close the gap between the two. Black existence however is that gap. Black trans is what orbits. Tranifestation thus provides a warning as to not fall for the seductions of onto-phonology and the violence it inflicts on black bodies (Warren, 2017, p. 271). Before necessitating the instructiveness of black trans, Warren (2017) provides contextualization of discourses already present in existing intellectual spaces thinking all things, black. These thoughts all arrive having necessitated humanism, fundamental to ontology which black is not; “Blackness remains mute before being” (Warren, 2017, p. 271). Ontology would in fact be the source of black suffering; the violence of white making a thing of black. There is no manifestation, for a thing does not inhabit being to do such a calling. Tranifestation presents ontological procedure for establishing being in the world that implicitly explicates the prefix of anti-blackness for ontology to render black transgender never into being. Warren (2017) explains tranifestation as the inverse of black existence described by Frantz Fanon (2008/1952) as lack of ontological resistance. Such an inversion presents tranifestation as procedural for humans only, with ontological resistance to call, to refashion themselves anew. This is not available to blacks. 23 For black transgender it is the body, Warren (2017) states which is called to speak where muteness exists (p. 271). To claim embodiment only predicates itself in the face of ontology. For ontology to abandon embodiment there would still remain questions about black embodied experience going unexplained and inassimilable, ontologically. This is where black trans as a speculative practice functions to foreground the gap between black existence and being through the instrumentalization of gender. Black transgender is thus presented as instructive, philosophically. The black is trans to the world and all that of being; black trans illuminates the impossibility to find symbolic coherence (a fit) in the world. The devastations Warren (2017) argues black trans is capable of, are to expose the nothingness at the core of black existence. It is to undress other critical discourses using onto-phonology as their unethical ground. This steers us directly to the irresolvable tension between (white) ontology and (black) existence while undoing gender normativity. Black studies would benefit from black trans procedure to divest from the failing attempts to appropriate humanist principles of universal ontology, according to Warren (2017). Black trans is said to assist in exposing the anti-black violence which sustains the ontology grounding any attempt to call into being. Black trans must continue to overcome the seductions of tranifestation as well, for it only makes beings from calls made by humans, which blacks are arguably not (Warren, 2017, p. 272). The fifth work selected for analysis, continues with the previous work’s meditation as a building on his own philosophical considerations within its futurity. Warren (2018) poses the question of black being to bring himself within the vicinity of its representational and conceptual crises (p. 26). This question evokes crises, illuminating the magnitude of urgency for attendance to black suffering; that is the “spiritual and physical deprivation, political demoralization and the 24 permanency of proliferated necropolitical agendas” (Warren, 2018, p. 26). What this question of urgent magnitude produces as crises, is what Warren (2018) argues to have been recycled throughout history under different guises. Each requiring address that seems impossible because the very materials that may provide an answer are too called into question. Warren (2018) reproduces Hortense Spillers’ meditation on this dual problematic to further his investigation of black being. What is to be made of Warren’s (2017) echo of Spillers is a problem of adequacy. How does one question the being of blackness when the very method and metaphysical structure to do so, reveal to be features of the paradigm which warrants the question of black being in the first place. To ask the unasked presents as the only response. What is to come, is a return to the onto-metaphysical site of this question, utilizing the unasked and unanswerable to navigate the treacherous terrain of onto-metaphysics and anti-blackness in hopes of “building a way” (Warren, 2018, p. 27). To engage in this inquiry, Warren (2018) attends to the crucial function of the Negro with three propositions. The first is that the Negro is the incarnation of nothing, that is constantly tried by the metaphysical world for eradication which is also the function of black being in relation to ontology. The second is the invention of the Negro through an onto-metaphysical holocaust that destroys the coordinates of African existence. The Negro is not human, it is instead available equipment built for supporting the existence of the human being. Black being thus becomes the evidence of ontological murder that is “irrecoverable and irremediable” (Warren, 2018, p. 27). This condition is what Warren introduces as the “execration of Being.” Being curses Black being with unintelligibility within Ontology. The third proposition is a return to Spillers’ meditation on adequacy, to which Warren’s (2017) analysis presents the Negro Question as in fact a proper question of knowledge. This warrants an analysis of the ontological problem, syntactically 25 regarded as the free Black, the obsession of Antebellum culture who seeks to eradicate the black Negro (p. 28). Warren clarifies each of his three propositions by furthering considerations made by thinkers of the Black radical tradition such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynters and Frantz Fanon. These three propositions unfold through an engagement with the Black radical tradition and against Heidegger’s philosophy of metaphysics, to illuminate the despised necessitation of the nothing that Warren (2018) argues is Blackness. However, a departing from Heideggerian episteme is signaled early on for its Eurocentric perspective lacking consideration of the available equipment that is necessitated of Black being. Heidegger is made to reveal the tension between hatred and necessity that is the main contention of Warren’s attempt at building of a way. Warren’s (2018) first proposition follows the philosophical instruction of Hortense Spillers to “strip through layers of metaphysical baggage and attenuated meaning” (as cited in Warren, 2017, p. 29), necessary for addressing the concealment of the Negro in Heidegger’s, Destruktion (destructuring of the history of Ontology). It is this concealment which sustains the anti-blackness of both metaphysics and ontology. A previous meditation on this concealment of the Negro is reiterative of Du Bois who questions what it means to be this problem. The question, “what does it mean to be a problem?” reflects a dual problematic; in its form as a metaphysical riddle; and blackness representational of a problem. The dual problematic is known as the Negro Question, the concern of Antebellum thinkers for which Sylvia Wynters asserts cannot be a proper object of knowledge for the ruling episteme does not accommodate blackness with being (Warren, 2018, p. 30). The Negro exists outside of man by way of simultaneous exclusion from discourse of man and inclusion of being, otherwise. Warren (2018) argues this 26 spatial precondition of the Negro’s being outside of man, is what enables the human’s inside condition of possibility. And thus the problem of black being, is that it is the absent centre at the heart of onto-metaphysics, constituting an inside/outside paradox of contention for the ruling episteme. For black being the heart at the centre of metaphysics and ontology, whose representation is that of absence from the centre, is the crux of anti-blackness. It does not accommodate black with Being; a proper inquiry of knowledge. Heidegger is thus brought forth by Warren (2018) for examination of the ruling episteme and the anti-blackness at its core sustaining its own inventiveness (29). In Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics the question of fundamental concern is, “how’s it going with Being?” Warren (2018) explains, in order for this question to pose as proper concern epistemically requires an acceptance of the Heideggerian critique of Metaphysics that calls for its destruction (p. 30). Further, this assumes all fundamental questions regarding metaphysics have been relieved of epistemic concern with representable answers. It is Heidegger after all who reminds us, according to Warren (2018), that a metaphysical question always grasps at the whole of metaphysics. With there being the destruction of all represented answers as the whole of Metaphysics, what remains of its fragments ought to be checked upon. This checkup comes in the form of Ontological concern. In Heidegger’s Destruktion, the fundamental question, “how’s it going with Being?” becomes answerable through the destruction of metaphysics and the building of a way from its left over fragments. These fragments are crucial for the invention of Ontology (Warren, 2018, p. 31). It is of Heidegger’s own inventiveness that Dasein re-members itself to Being, providing an answer to the status of Being after metaphysical destruction. The central question of ontology is 27 thus unveiled of its own inventiveness through Warren’s analysis of the fragments of metaphysics and Dasein’s ontological presentation as the answer to, “how’s it going with Being?” But, where is black, being? It exists – where? Blackness still remains as the absent heart at the centre of both metaphysic’s and ontology’s invention. To accept Heidegger’s account of a fundamental question generated from the left over fragments of metaphysic’s destruction, is to accept a post-metaphysical enterprise built on the concealment of the unanswered question, “Why is Being something instead of nothing?” To accept the concealment of black being. In the absence of concern for blackness, the unanswerable Negro question remains as something concerning nothing, for it is outside the boundaries of man’s own ontological invention (Warren, 2018, p. 31). The problematization of black being is a revelation of temporal and spatial coordinates relied upon for their indestructibility, always marking the boundaries of ontology. The Negro is an invention for metaphysical function and the black being is an ontological rebuilding of the same involuntary labourer. Both function as portal to being something, human. It is Warren (2018) who states, “black being emerges in modernity primarily to inhabit this treacherous position as function, which enable human beingness to engage in its projectionality into the world and to restore its forgotten relationship to Being” (p. 32). What is provided is an account of the Heideggerian post-metaphysical enterprise that operates through anti-blackness for the invention of Dasein in relation to Being, while pursuing the destruction of an epistemological register of such concealment. The Negro as Warren (2018) argues is the incarnation of the nothing that is constantly pursued by the anti-black world for 28 eradication. Black being arrives as a construction, functioning solely for ontological labour, filling the void of nothing relationally between black being and human being. The second proposition of Warren’s (2018) pertains to the Negro’s invention and the necessitation of black being for onto-metaphysics to sustain its relation to human being. To work through this, Warren (2018) traces the historicizing of African existence, only to find at the site of its destruction the invention of a desperate world– the Negro; who is designed to embody a certain terror. It is not human but instead an “altered human factor.” To recount Spillers, Warren (2018) explains an altered human factor is the rendered alterity to the European ego as described in the transport of Africans to Europe. Once on European soil, the African ceases to exist and instead becomes other; an invention as “decisive in the full range of its social implication as the birth of a newborn” (p. 38). The African is altered by dispossession to become black being of a pure instrumentality and function, a different trajectory than the ontology of the human being. Black being and African existence are not to be conflated, for their distinction is in recognition of a black tradition of Africa and diaspora predating blackness. Blackness is then conceived of as a confrontation with modern conditions of existing in exchange, without a standing in the world of its surrounding organizational system. This enforces a pure instrumentality to disjuncture black being from Being; “the gulf of metaphysical and ontological violence” (Warren, 2018, p. 39). Black being is thus a structural position, not identity, because it is a functioning anchor for humans (self adaquation) according to Warren (2018), who asserts this philosophical consideration as the “execration of Being”. The execration of Being is Warren’s (2018) consideration of the ultimate withholding of care, generosity and freedom, to black beings contradistinctive of human being’s genealogical representation. Only after the death of African existence does the black being exist for 29 representation. This very well is the site of onticidal murder to African existence. Ontology, as Warren recounts of Frantz Fanon (2008/1952), is “an admittance to leaving existence (metaphysics) by the wayside and this movement does not generate an understanding of the being of the black man… the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (as cited in Warren, 2018, p. 42). To examine further, Warren (2018) explains that the primordial relation to Being for African existence was ontologically murdered and this wiped out the grounds for intelligibility, generously made available to the human being. The ontological enterprise is one reserved for preservation of care and freedom made available to humans by withholding Being from blackness. Black being is the execration of Being. How’s it going with Black being? The condition of the execrated continues impervious to legal historical and political change and what remains at stake is the question of being in an anti-black world. Politics is placed as an ontic articulation of Being and Antebellum politics is no exception. The multiplicity of positions about black citizenship, freedom and slavery of the nineteenth century sediment political debates at the heart of black being. This is ontological terror; being a political problem for structural anti-blackness to discipline and obliterate (Warren, 2018, p. 49). The register of violence for all its visceral inhumanity, is an organization of the metaphysical contention with black as nothing. Warren (2018) recounts an argument by Nahum Chandler who posits, the Negro brings relief to a problem of purity since its ontological constitution reveals a problem of thought (p. 49). Purity, as vindication for a metaphysics of fiction, is precisely the ontological terror the Negro is always contaminating. The project of purity becomes a discourse for responding to the materialization of black as nothing deployed by Antebellum politics. Purity is deployed as a 30 covering to ontological terror at the heart of its own metaphysical infrastructure. This infrastructure is always at risk of its own invention, black being. It is necessary to understand the representation of onto-metaphysics as infrastructure which otherwise goes undetected. This notion of “detecting the otherwise” analytically guides Warren (2018) to and through his third proposition of the Antebellum free black as a paradigm of ontological terror. The free black is a syntactical devastation knotting human being with black being and freedom with unfreedom. Free indexes an onto-existential condition of human access to its primordial relation. This indicates a particular ontological orientation in an anti-black world (Warren, 2018, p. 50). Black however, is not free and cannot be in an anti-black world whose metaphysical infrastructure desires to obliterate it. Through examination of the politics of black citizenship, Warren (2018) declares these politics an articulation of metaphysical anxiety, one that threatens Antebellum culture (p. 52). The free black signals a resituating of politics for the exposure of such infrastructure, because it ruptures purity without any metaphysical position of intelligibility to the ruling episteme. Purity is once again deployed as a covering to ontological terror at the heart of its own metaphysical infrastructure. This is an infrastructure which sustains the fiction of the white man as both ontologically resistant and an adequate object of knowledge, through anti-black violence. Returning to the Negro Question, the initial inquiry of Warren’s (2018) exploration, the free black materializes an invocation of this question as it signs a double violence (political and ontological) with its fundamental lack of value and meaning for Being (p. 53). The allegory of a “floating body” is provided as a visual description of a certain liquidity resembling the space between the conjoinment of free with black; an incessant movement between two established properties. Just as the black being is exiled from cartographies of livability, so is the free black 31 excluded from the American states and localities (Warren, 2018, p. 57). The “floating body” allegorically signs this lack of resting place, existing outside oneself and the world to mean a lack of life, meaning, and futurity. This existence of nothing terrorizes the human by rendering its metaphysical infrastructure fallible, says Warren (2008, p. 57). Consider the removal of this terror, the free black, to be the attempt of a desperate nation to preserve its infrastructure for nationhood. The removing of free blacks transmogrifies an ethical necessity to maintain nationhood comprised of human citizenship. Antebellum culture is thus an instance of organizing anti-black existence in an anti-black world, and the anxiety and hatred it directs at the free black is to contend with its own obsession of destroying the black Negro. 32 Definitions What follows is the provision of gathers descriptions of blackness, gender and being from the five works summarize in the previous section. The work of Richardson (2012) describes blackness as a hybrid of both masculine and feminine positionality. It is understood as being from somewhere else (p. 363). Death defines the contours of blackness after the formal end of slavery. Blackness is understood by Colman, whose fictional narrative is the centre of this analysis, as the epitome of criminality in the eyes of White minds (Richardson, 2012, p. 368). Gender in relation to blackness is uncertain of normative categories and presents fragility in Black masculinity. The undoing and reworking of black gender is a key facet of social death (Richardson, 2012, p. 361). Inspiration is drawn from Spillers (2003, p. 228) who demands there not be a reliance on the heteropatriarchal normative gender categories, to gain “insurgent ground” in standing outside the “traditional symbolic” of gender. The structural meeting of feminine and black masculinity is not an occasion of distress. It could instead be an opportunity to reimagine and improvise other registers of black manhood even through the maternal as a direct disruption to the assumptive misogyny of black masculinity. It is to embrace possibility through the feminine. To acknowledge such would be to unveil as though secret gender and sex are not immutable; that female-bodied persons “trespass” a patriarchal manhood and do so often undetected by both state and its subjects. The revelation in this acknowledgement is illustrated when Colman finds out his father has a vagina and is presented with a challenge to his own fear of a feminized masculinity. His fear created an impossible condition for recognition of his own manhood if not one residing in a patriarchal black father figuring. The symbolic figure of black men is presented in this novel titled, Trumpet as both the hypermasculine and feminine parts of Black manhood with no history or place in Scotland outside of nightmarish visages of “mugger” 33 or “ape.” The feminine as only tolerable in displaced subordinate association to masculinity (Richardson, 2012, p. 370). If black masculinity is not the penis, what is it? A resistance to white imaginary presents the disclosure of black manhood as socially constructed and performative therefore not restricted to born-male individuals (Richardson, 2012, p. 366). This performative nature of heterosexual black masculinity becomes occluded with pressure to naturalize it in the face of black erasure and death. Jazz is thus reimagined by Richardson (2012) as a practice of creating and re-creating black manhood in Trumpet. Being of an undone and reworked gender category is an imperative of social death according to Richardson (2012). Living categorized by the availability to a full range of subjectivity and citizenship. Black death as an incessant rendering of non-being is a formal relief to normative gender categories particularly, if those rendered non-being practice an identification that would otherwise reveal resistance to white imaginary of heteropatriarchal gender. Being of black manhood without the presence of a penis evokes a painful and terrifying recognition of the fragile state for which Black manhood is the socially feminine. “Black death exists as a reminder of how fragile his possession of himself and his manhood can be,” articulated by David Marriot included in this work by Richardson (2012, p. 369). What would it mean to acknowledge and not annihilate the existence of being socially dead and not forgotten? Richardson (2012) argues this is precisely the question that lingers improvised possibilities of black manhood through the feminine. Being of a melancholic attachment to black manhood and masculinity demanding legibility where there is only death, forecloses possibilities for self-invention. Now to continue, Snorton’s definition of blackness, gender and being must be explained. Snorton’s (2017) description of blackness derives from a conundrum of how to figure black 34 personhood, historically represented as African existence transported across the trans-Atlantic and violently submitted into slave labour. The production of African people to black captives to slave labourers is the grounds of black personhood’s figuration through the concern represented as the “Negro question” (Snorton, 2017, p. 102). The question insights a description of blackness predicated on the reproductive capacity of black mothers. The historical reproduction of black motherhood as “the mammy” annunciates blackness as an inquiry into the reproduction of racial borders (p. 120). Snorton’s (2017) collaborative tracing of the black maternal figurations in the Three Negro Classics intertwines the production of racial classification with reproductivity bordering black gender. Gender according to Snorton (2017) “stages the relation between whites and blacks” because gender excludes participation from blackness, in an anti-black patriarchal world. Patriarchal anti-blackness codifies blackness as “mother-like,” instantiating the feminization of all black persons, including black men (p. 126). Snorton (2017) urges an articulation of gender in relation to blackness that illuminates blackness bordering gender neither as woman or man but as a symbol of fungibility developed during the politics of enslaving African people in the United States. There incepts the lack of concern for black gender difference (Snorton, 2017, p. 126). The colonial implications of gender during Antebellum slavery, explains the production of black women into (re)producers of property, always consenting and unable to not consent. The production of black men into slaves registers an association between being black and having a black mother. In instating the colonial codifications of slavery rendering blackness, the Three Negro Classics narrativize the project of black manhood through this register, indicating a logic of gender inversion. The project bears a resemblance to trans subjectivity insofar as “a mind’s view of self has yet to become legible on the body for others.” (Snorton, 2017, p. 129). The 35 illustrations of black masculinity analyzed from the Three Negro Classics gesture towards the cruciality of the black mother presenting a different kind of manhood for her black son; it is a kind of manhood marked by the feminization of blackness during Reconstruction in Antebellum New World. To define being Snorton (2017) reiterates Frantz Fanon establishing a definition of the being of blackness, “the black man is not a man” (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 105). As a rendering of the zone of non-being, black non-being serves as a site for the reproduction of an “authentic upheaval” (Snorton, 2017, p. 105). It is also the space extending sociogenic possibility outside of Enlightenment legibility. This is reiterative of Hortense Spillers who Snorton (2017) recapitulates to assert that black personhood is only possible when one says ‘yes’ to the female within. It is precisely this ‘yes’ that illuminates the zone of non-being as the site where the figuration of black motherhood becomes a portal for articulation of a black (modernist) self (Snorton, 2017, p. 106). The next work presents the defining of key terms, reimagined by Marquis Bey. Bey (2017) argues the existence of a primordial kinship between blackness and trans*ness that “saturates the conditions for which subjectivity rests.” Bey (2017) considers this condition to be of para-ontological concern. This concentration on para-ontology argues a press-in that racial identification does not determine one’s relation to power. Further making epidermal blackness not a presupposing determinant for political positionality (p. 277), as Bey (2017) reminds that black and transgender people “sedulously” work to assimilate into a citizenship despite identification. Black and trans* bodies speak of “metonymic flashes” of the poetic forces of blackness and trans*-ness because they are imagined the alternative as counter to Western culture. This is to echo the work of Fred Moten. It is the refusal to and of Western culture and 36 civilization according to Bey (2017, p. 278) that present black and trans* bodies as instances and not archetypes of the lawless force that is the para-ontology of blackness and trans*ness. Blackness and trans*ness are differently named inflections of a kind of lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology. Blackness is articulated as that poetic, creative and fugitive force of anoriginality. Its location is a no/place; a spaceless place that renders governability ungovernable. Bey (2017) draws inspiration from Moten and Harney’s concept the “undercommons” to describe blackness as a subversive dwelling in a reveling of chaos. Its modality is that of constant movement – escape, flight, elusion (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 279). Blackness thus rests in the in-between of syntagmatic pin downs of logic, a description of blackness’ force through a motion of escape from the confines of ontological governability. For Bey (2017) it is imperative that blackness be disarticulated from black people because it perpetuates too easily that race is a natural occurrence rather than an assemblage of forces continually exercised to reproduce black subjects as non-human (p. 281). But it is not reducible as Bey (2017) maintains, it cannot be pinned to a particular colonial imposition or racial categorization. “Blackness cannot, and refuses to, attain the agreeable because such a category is predicated on an exclusionary “human” and defers to a fixed rigidity that aligns with propriety, decorum, and the like” (Bey, 2017, p. 282). To think about blackness is to think within a space of volatility and to threaten the disintegration of the hegemonic binary of human-thing. Trans* is also explained as an undoing of the human for which gender is an identificatory practice. Trans* is more – it is an eruptive orientation of “unpredetermined movement,” in reiterating a sentiment work of Kai M. Green, Bey (2017) adds it is also a mode of fugitive interaction with history and space by reveling in excess, constantly refusing ontological 37 overflows. The inclusion of an asterisk intends a disruption to insight that in the beginning there was trans*, a fundamental openness of our world (Bey, 2017, p. 284). Trans* is a movement as well as a force of materialization that may become matter but only prepositionally so, a consideration brought forth initially by Hayward and Weinstein (2015), informing Bey (2017) of the ontological position of trans* as that expressive force between. “It is the refusal to be, to be sure of itself, to be certain of where it is at” (Bey, 2017, p. 284). Trans* as transitivity presents an analytic of destabilization gesturing toward a space for mapping the queer relationships between feminist universality and particular trans subjectivities, a method known as transfiguration. This analytical tool of C. Riley Snorton’s operates in the space of liminality bringing under scrutiny assumptions about gender and the ways it shows up on bodies until it implodes. A transfigurative transitivity unmakes ontology via para-ontology. Being is defined by an ontological determinacy of which black being is not. As previously articulated, blackness refuses to attain the agreeable because such a category is fixed to a rigid exclusionary “human,” (Bey, 2017). The gendered conditions for possibility allowing for gender distinction rely on transitivity as the beginningness. This is to say that transitivity is the potentiality characterized by instability that stabilizes regulated legible corporeal identities (Bey, 2017, p. 285). Trans* is the illegible and unclassifiable described as that which precedes the human and ultimately all that legibly is. Being indicates a kind of stability and legibility to be and locate where that is, if trans* presents the predication of necessary instability for emergence of being according to Bey (2017, p. 287). Next, Warren’s (2017) work Calling into Being presents black trans as the discursive formation built to expose the irresolvability between black existence and being. This devastating split between the existence of experience and the ontology of being “constitutes the core of black 38 suffering in an anti-black world” (Warren, 2017, p. 268). Black trans is instructive of a philosophical procedure, creating an intellectual space for the epistemological production of concern and inquiry into black trans being. Warren (2017) asserts that blackness does not occupy an ontological presence of being, for the moment the experience of existing is abandoned by ontology the being of black existence remains a question unassimilable ontologically (p. 271). Black trans is thus presented as the speculative grounds necessary to draw inquiry into blackness and gender colliding, without attempting the impossible call (into being) from ontological procedure. The methodology of tranifestation is also considered for its onto-phonological procedure enabling a particular caller whose self may make a calling into being. Warren (2017) understands the caller to have a representable self, asserting the caller must be of an ontological formation in order to manifest oneself anew in an anti-black world. The caller must already be recognizable as human, despite the transness of gender necessitating their call for being in the world in the first place. Black being is thus disqualified, as caller in an anti-black world, from the privileges of calling from a representation of traditional gender categories. Gender is defined within the traditional social categories of subjectivity available to the human. Warren (2017) presents gender as a method of ontological procedure explicating itself for the being of the human not the black whose existence (as non-being) lacks ontological resistance. Gender aligns itself on the planes of onto-metaphysics in a particular spatial and temporal coordinate that provides intelligibility for a self (p. 268). Warren’s (2017) question of black trans being in alignment with gender is suggestive of Hortense Spillers’ problematic of ontology and gender; the black ungendered female is Hortense Spillers’ figuration, Warren (2017) proliferates akin to black trans with inhabiting the metaphysical coordinates necessary for exposure to the ontological foreclosing of a black trans call into being. 39 Being is presented as the ontological formulation of being human. It is the ontological human for Warren (2017), asserted in a recapitulation of Frantz Fanon, who bears white eyes that do not see ontological resistance in the eyes of the black (as cited in Warren, 2017, p. 268). The being of blackness is that which exists in an anti-black world, experiencing the insufferable violence of ontology. Thus black existence attempts a call into being with the attempt marking its own failure because black suffering remains mute to ontological creation (p. 270). The black trans non-being, under Warren’s (2017) philosophical advisement, may necessitate black trans in practice of representing a desperately needed intellectual space for investigating the being of black trans experience (p. 271). Continuing this philosophical meditation one year later in Warren’s (2018) work titled, The Question of Black Being, blackness is described as having always been a terror for metaphysics. To be a problem is the being of blackness (Warren, 2018, p. 29). Blackness is the index of formlessness and it is of a nothingness that assumes a function as something; to prevent any something from belonging to the whole. The Negro is black because it is forced in an anti-black world to inhabit the position of black within metaphysics and must provide form for the formless as the interruption of black non-being. The Negro gives blackness form that threatens and perplexes (Warren, 2018, p. 35). Blackness is unthought because the world uses it with such regularity – anti-blackness is both the systematization of use of blackness as well as its concealment (Warren, 2017, p. 45). Being of the Negro is understood by Warren (2018) as the reincarnate of nothing that defies eradication from the metaphysical world. The Negro is not human it is instead the available equipment for supporting the human’s existential journey (p. 27). Its invention in modernity marks the onto-metaphysical destruction of African existence. Black non-being is thus 40 the ontological labour of the Negro performed in an anti-black world, and also takes the place of the metaphysical problem; the entity existing outside of man and its overrepresentation of being. It is the absent centre at the heart of metaphysics constituting an inside/outside paradox. Why is being black such a problem? Being curses black non-being by creating an entity unintelligible within the field of ontology. Black non-being is then the projection and absorption of inhabiting that problem. The problem provides the necessary conditions of possibility for the human being. Black non-being helps the human being re-member its relation to Being through its lack of relationality (Warren, 2018, p. 32). The Negro is the excess of form in an anti-black world as well as the interruption of form. It is the formless that is Negro as it is blackness within metaphysics. It is the interstice between man and animal, property and human whose purpose is to embody formlessness as a corporeal sign. The human however cannot remember Being without remembering the Negro, and the Negro exists absorbing the terror of this nothing, an interruption to time and space within modernity (Warren, 2018, p. 36). It is the limit of both meaning and being. It is imperative to Warren (2018) that we remember the Negro is not a human who is simply mistreated; it is an invention to embody a certain terror of the world. Biological and visual resemblance do not render a Negro a human being (p. 38). Black non-being and African existence are not synonymous for Warren although he presents a possible argument as to why this conflation occurs, “black non-being is the transformed African existence through violence, transport, systematic humiliation and terror” (Warren, 2018, p. 39). African existence is an identity whereas black non-being is the structural position anchoring human identity. It is the excess of value; having none all while being too valuable, because it enables the very system which excludes it. Black non-being is the execration of Being because it emerges through the 41 murder of African existence and does not transform nor translate into any recognizable ontology (Warren, 2018, p. 41). The primordial relation anchoring one’s existence is groundless for the black non-being because its invention marks the obliteration of African existence and the anchoring of an existence that is not being. It is an existence outside oneself lacking space of life, meaning and futurity (Warren, 2018, p. 56). Warren’s (2018) understanding of human being is inspired by Heidegger’s Dasein (p. 47). For the human being, ontology is what anchors a primordial relation to Being. Its mode of existence and structure of care is to be for itself. The human being uses the black non-being as site to project its desires, fantasies and ontological narcissism (p. 47). If the human is to maintain its fiction of ontological coherence it must continue to exterminate the problem it is terrorized by. The free black presents a syntactical strategy for holding the tension (and terror) of the metaphysical problem that is freedom and blackness, chaotically knotted together with unfreedom and human being. It exposes the metaphysical infrastructure that attempts to sustain the boundaries of white human and black equipment. Pairing “free” with “black” is recast as a weapon committing two forms of strategic violence; the first is ontological terror and; the second is anti-black destruction. 42 Comparisons In the interest of presenting the negotiations with race and gender augmenting futurity for black transmen, I have been engaging with works written by black transmasculine scholars to gain an understanding about what is currently representative of black transmen’s negotiations with futurity. This then requires a necessary provision of resonances carried from one author’s work to another informing my conceptual understandings of blackness, gender and being. It is important to trace the conceptual resonances of blackness, gender and being, because there representation is a legible formulized concern for the nuance experience of the black being, who exists in its naming of trans experience, as that identifiable gender outside the “traditional symbolics” (Spillers, 2003, p. 228-229). This is to say that the four scholars whose works I have chosen as the primary texts of my exploration, contour academic discourse of black trans being as a concern negotiated within the fields of Critical Black Studies, black feminist thought and Transgender studies. As academia is a milieu of epistemological productions, what is sedimented in the construction of knowledge presents a currency of epistemological value, dictated by an attendance to its formal establishment as knowledge. As each black transmasculine scholar produces knowledge legitimizing their attendance to inquiries about blackness, gender and being, it is imperative to consider their attendances as concerned with representing the status of being a black transman. In addition, I assert each author’s attendance to nuances of black being as a literal contending with race and gender as social categories augmenting their futures as black transmen, being presented as epistemologically breadth of concern with representation. The description of gender brought forth in Richardson’s (2012) work carries resonances in Snorton’s (2017) work. With considering gender a system of negotiable social categories for personhood, I am urged to consider how gender becomes negotiable if it is in fact a negotiation 43 at all. To delineate, Richardson (2012) presents a historical instantiation which catastrophizes gender as a failed negotiable social category, if gender is left without an adequate meditation on how it is catastrophized in the first place. In other words, it provides an account of how gender may be pre-emptively thrown into catastrophe or crisis if the “failure” in negotiating the social categories of gender is not adequately meditated on. The historical moment Richardson (2012) includes is set to contextualize how black manhood comes to depict a crisis of gender. Gender is forfeit during the literal negotiations of African people for black captives. Richardson (2012) asserts Hortense Spillers to reiterate that during the Trans-Atlantic transporting of African people from the continent, one of the ways their captors assaulted African existence was by prohibiting black captives from participating in gender systems of their own as well as disallowing them from assuming the new gender systems of the European countries they arrived in. I recapitulate this historical moment to be one reflecting gender as an implied negotiable, and as one Richardson (2012) provides to illustrate what must be forfeited in order for gender to appear as black manhood. Richardson is revealing the contentious historical implications of gender which present the conditions for that which is left to be negotiated for black personhood. The condition of the black man in particular, is staged through Richardson’s (2012) analysis of Colman, the main character in Trumpet which forms the basis of Richardson’s (2012) exploration of reimagining black manhood by embracing femininity. Colman whose black manhood is ruptured into crisis after the revelation of his father’s gender differing past, at the time of his father’s death, speaks to a description of gender as fugitive; a negotiation of blackness, forfeiting the presence of an existing gender in order to maintain an assumptive gender coherence. The condition of gender for black being is to render negotiations between 44 implications predicated on race, in an attempt at presenting a coherent gender sociality. By referring to a “coherent gender sociality,” I am referring to the sociality of feminine and masculine gender categories to articulate a representable personhood, womanhood and manhood. What is most poignant about Richardson’s (2012) historicizing of black gender crisis is that it lends to a description of gender presented in a temporally non-specific modern idiom, through the perpetual occlusion of the female for black manhood. She is the forfeited figure enabling a possible coherence of gender for black personhood. The description of gender gathered from Richardson (2012) carries into the work of Snorton (2017) who analyzes the “trans-” in Trans-Atlantic Literature to determine a representation of black personhood. What is cohesive among their works is a concern with what conditions the possibilities for black gender categories to be representable, socially. From Richardson (2012), I learn to consider gender as fugitive. Snorton (2017) relays a similar consideration through an analysis of black narratives published as discourse on black sociality in the United States during Antebellum culture by sampling the Three Negro Classics. When figuring the black maternal from Up From Slavery and Autobiography, two of the three “classics”, Snorton (2017) explains “the narration of mothers’ deaths coincides with the availability of a different life for her son” (p. 130). These illustrations present black maternal figurations in conjunction with death, to condition the availability of negotiating gender categories for a representation of black manhood. Her incorporation into black sociality, as having a representable negotiation with gender categories, is forfeited in death of her figuration. For Snorton (2017) and the likeness of Richardson (2012), the refusal to adequately meditate on the conditions giving rise to black gender coherence, the condition of death, is akin to the refusal of blackness as abject personified as the black mother (Snorton, 2017, p. 134). This is similar to 45 Richardson (2012) whose analysis of Colman’s masculinity crisis in Trumpet, presents alleviation through both social and literal death, signalling blackness’ abject position. The sentiment “blackness as abject” warrants a necessitation on the literal death of Colman’s father Joss to render a presentation of his possibilities of anew black masculinity. The abjection of black subjectivity (personhood) is personified by death, from which I render social death the status of black gender cohesion; it is the assumptive cohesion of gender predicated on the racial implication of black as abject, and gender as an available negotiation for black manhood presented in the works of Richardson (2012) and Snorton (2017). I come to consider gender as fugitive because it is the figuring of gender within the figuration of the black female (black maternal) which catastrophizes black masculinity as showcased in Trumpet by Richardson (2012), and it is the figuration of the black man who forfeits as a fugitive of gender cohesion, the black female in both works for what Snorton (2017) recounts of Du Bois as “the securement of “manhood” rights.” My understanding of gender combines the work of Snorton (2017), who illuminates historically traced resonances of gender within, Three Negro Classics, narrating black personhood shaping discourse about black sociality after Antebellum slavery in the United States (103), with Richardson (2012) who analyzes the gender implications of black manhood and possible reimagining of its embrace of femininity through the fictional novel, Trumpet. Each combines representations of historical instantiations of gender implications through the considerations of Hortense Spillers and gender narratives presenting black subjectivity, to reverberate social death of blackness. It is the black female in conjunction with figurative death which presents the availability of a negotiation for the black man with black manhood. The black man mindedly is a figuration within its discussion, as well. 46 Blackness for Snorton (2017) is depicted through considerations of black literature specifically the Three Negro Classics, sedimented as cultural artifacts representative of black personhood under the temporal and spatial conditions of Antebellum New World. In explaining that, the conflation of black literature and black bodies as indicative of a racial real, reproduced a notion of black personhood reiterative of the black maternal’s rendering to non-being. This is to say the Three Negro Classics for Snorton (2017), reproduced as a cultural artifact about black life, calls into question the condition of the Negro evidencing a continuation of black life being a concern, politically. Snorton’s (2017) examination of the racial real imposes a concern for black life and the people living it, as to be made distinguishable from asserted representations of a racial real including its gender implications, especially if written under the political tyranny of Antebellum New World. The tension of necessitating distinctions between black life, representations of a gendered racial real and literature concerning the being of blackness evaluated by Snorton (2017), inflects a feature of blackness and trans*ness in Bey’s (2017) work. Bey (2017) illustrates the tension of blackness’ description through the conceptual meeting of blackness and trans*ness when stating, “the relationship between my usage of these poetic forces and subjects identified with/as black trans* must be handled with care” (Bey, 2017, p. 277). Bey (2017) further interprets the tension of blackness, in stating “racial identification will not determine one’s relationship to power, thus making epidermal blackness in this case not an a priori determinant of politicity” (p. 277). I consider this an element of the description of blackness carrying resonances across Snorton (2017) and Bey’s (2017) works, because black people render black personhood in a multitude of ways. By illuminating the tension of distinguishing black life from representations of a racial real and literature concerning the being of blackness, Bey (2017) configures a conception of 47 blackness bridging the gap between blackness and trans*ness and the analysis of the, “Trans” in Trans- Atlantic Literature presented by Snorton (2017). Snorton (2017), I’d like to remind, informs my description of blackness with his analysis of the construction of black personhood in the United States after the formal inscription of slavery’s end, through examination of black narratives in the Three Negro Classics. Bey (2017) in comparison, articulates blackness through Fred Moten and Stefano’s concept of an undercommons; “a subtending and subverting sub- where fugitives dwell, reveling in chaos” (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 279). Blackness as this no/place of an undercommons is that which glides under discernable ontology. In asserting blackness as an ontological concern, Bey (2017) situates his description of blackness within the Western philosophical and Black Radical traditions. More poignantly, the transition from unveiling the tension resting in Snorton’s (2017) work to Bey’s (2017) describes blackness as a contentious existence of escaping representational distinctions, an insufferable consequence of its structural position. The insufferable consequence of blackness’ structural position I speak to, rests its tensions on the representability of black subjectivity. Snorton (2017) reiterates this is an “anthropomorphic and familial level crisis” through a recapitulation of Hortense Spillers who historicizes the matrilineal arrangements codifying the production of slaves. The production resulted in the black child representing “the boundary of wo/man whose familial and human status had yet to be defined” (as cited in Snorton, 2017, p. 103). A consequence of illuminating this arrangement is a representation of the implications resulting in black subjectivity, and this presentation is comparable to the tension with blackness Bey (2017) instructs to be handled with care. In setting the conceptual meeting of blackness and trans*-ness, Bey (2017) emphasizes the poetic force of blackness through its linkage to and disarticulation from black bodies in para- 48 ontological distinction (p. 281). Blackness contours, non-reducible to a particular colonial imposition or modern racial categorization according to Bey (2017, p. 281). Its poetic force is described in Bey’s (2017) reiteration of Fred Moten, “blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology… it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space” (as cited in Bey, 2017, p. 282). Blackness is defined by its refusal to “be,” affirming its nothingness standing in as a perennial refusal of lawfulness. In primordial kinship with the poetic forces of blackness is trans*-ness, a similar disarticulation from trans* bodies is deployed to illuminate gender categorization contoured by the poetic forces of trans*-ness. Bey (2017) echoes Hortense Spillers when advancing, “black and trans* bodies speak to and as metonymic flashes of the poetic forces of blackness and transness insofar as they are imagined as a counterstatement to Western culture/civilization” (p. 278). For Bey (2017) black and trans* are instances, flashing this fugitive lawless force. To convey what I learned about blackness and gender from Bey (2017) that carries resonances to Warren’s (2017) work, one must consider race and gender categories as implications of a primordial kinship under the tension of black trans being. Warren (2017) collapses these “different yet intimate primordial kin, arising from the undercommons that saturates the conditions upon which subjectivity rests” (Bey, 2017, p. 276) to pose a question of representing a black self through a call into being. Moreover, Warren (2017) condenses and recapitulates black trans as a necessary philosophical practice/procedure for building an intellectual space for inquiries into the being of black trans “beings” (p. 267). Unlike Bey (2017) who presents the conceptual meeting of blackness and trans*-ness as analytics of para-ontological concern, Warren’s (2017) concern is carried forward in provision of black trans as a philosophical method for thinking para-ontologically about black trans being. Black trans is also 49 the discursive formation designed to devastate ontological humanism (267) (Warren, 2017). This discursive formation of blackness in tension with gender describes the conditions for possibilities of conceptualizing black trans being. In both works, black and trans signal a relation to non-being through their para-ontological positions augmenting the question: “can blacks inhabit a place in the world along the coordinates of gender (or any other coordinates for that matter)?” (Warren, 2017, p. 268). The question renders the spatial and temporal coordinates of a no/place unveiling blackness’ kinship in liminality with trans*-ness, reveling in the chaos of the “undercommons” showcased in the work of Bey (2017). Additionally, the question imposes a tension on the conditions of race and gender categories augmenting being in the world, and as analytics black and trans exist “unrepresentable with the transformative instruments of ontology,” argues Warren (2017, p. 268). To depict the zone of non-being resting the tension of blackness and transness from Bey’s (2017) work to Warren’s (2017), gender reflects that which provides intelligibility for a self and for there to be a “self”, being must be present. But if “blacks are reduced to a thing, being for the captor” as Warren (2017) rearticulates of Hortense Spillers then there is no inhabiting of a self for gender to provide intelligibility to. This “thing” problematizes gender placing her outside the “traditional symbolics” of gender for Hortense Spillers (2003, as cited in Warren, 2017, p. 269) who furthers, “it is our task to make a place for this different social subject,” but this place is not recognizable to ontology for Warren (2017). Ontology is problematized through gender, by black trans just as black trans studies concerns itself with ontology as a fundamental issue of concern. In other words, I understand black trans to describe the tension of being through its problematic of black gender foreclosing a call into being since no place exists for blackness to call “into” (Warren, 2017, p. 269). 50 In his 2017 work, Warren explores the question of a call into being from a position of non-being. To articulate a representable description of non-being Warren (2017) presents the black trans caller. Warren elaborates that “blacks can experience trans violence but the experience does not translate into being trans” (p. 267). The division between existence (experience) and being (ontology) that constitutes the core of black suffering renders an unrepresentable self. As black trans represents that being which is unrepresentable as a self, Warren (2017) explains its call cannot be made from the no/place of its non-being because ontology constituting the legibility of beings, is not concerned with attending black trans suffering from a lack of representational self. Furthermore, this lack of attendance registering as ontological anti-blackness, disqualifies blackness from participation in the traditional gender categories privileged by the human beings (Warren, 2017, p. 269). Black existence is thus something in participation of other categories unrecognizable to gender. Warren (2017) administers Hortense Spillers term, symbiotic blend to describe the hybrid of black gender, blending in a kind of transness. The transness of the caller “problematizes gender for its covering of a deep onto-metaphysical challenge, the lack of onto-phonological procedure,” (Warren, 2017, p. 269). Continuing this meditation on the non-being of blackness presented in his 2017 work Calling into Being, Warren (2018) pursues further inquiry into the formation of onto-metaphysical devices assembling black being within the treacherous, spatial and temporal terrain of an anti-black world (p. 27). With an interest in ascertaining the descriptive resonance of non-being that is carried between these works by the same black trans scholar, it is necessary to trace the development of his attendance to black suffering through The Question of Black Being . I suggest that Warren’s (2017) philosophical enterprise of black trans inflects the temporal and 51 spatial coordinates non-being because it is this intellectual space which attends to the concerns of black trans being through its problematizing of gender unrecognizable ontologically (p. 269). And it is from within this cultivated intellectual space that is designed to “devastate the ontological human,” that Warren (2018) launches into an attendance to black suffering in an anti-black world. More succinctly, in 2018 Warren reconfigures the discursive formation of black trans to project the “abandoned, arid onto-metaphysical space” echoing Fred Moten’s, “unasked question” about black being (p. 27). My use of the term “non-being” in reference to black being in this description, speaks to Warren’s (2018) defined state of being. To illustrate Warren’s (2018) conception of black being as non-being I shall briefly rehearse his three propositions, attending to the function of the Negro (existence) or black being (ontology) in onto-metaphysics. The first proposition is that the Negro is the incarnation of nothing constantly tried by the metaphysical world, and black being functions identically in relation to ontology. The second proposition asserts that the Negro was invented through an onto-metaphysical holocaust which destroyed the coordinates of African existence. The third proposition instructs that the Negro Question is a proper question of inquiry one that warrants an analysis of the ontological problem syntactically regarded as the free black; it is the obsession of antebellum culture reimagined by Warren (2018) as the ontological instantiation of what is done with the nothingness terrorizing and destabilizing metaphysical grounds of anti-black existence (p. 27). Anti-black existence describes the ontological foundation of human being (Warren, 2018). In explanation of each proposition Warren (2018) applies the philosophical instruction of Hortense Spillers to strip through layers of attenuated meaning and metaphysical excess that is sediment over time to reveal the “marvels of our own inventiveness” (as cited in Warren, 2018, 52 p. 28). I consider Warren’s (2018) three propositions invocations of this inventiveness, as their provision augments a particular temporal and spatial coordinate of non-being necessitated in this meditative analysis on black being. Returning to the work initially set forth to deepening my understandings of blackness, gender, and being in this comparative section, I present my final comparison between Warren’s 2018 work and Richardson’s (2012) as both articulate possible imaginings for black being projected onto fictional grounds. The fictional grounds is a conceptual apparatus for projecting the imagined possibilities of black being, somewhere. What I consider to be most generative of each author’s process for representing the racial and gender implications of black being, are their instances of deploying the fictional grounds to stage and analyze race and gender augmenting the conditions of black trans subjectivity and black trans being. The fictional grounds described in Warren’s (2018) work is one of metaphysical projection; the invention of the Negro is a projection of the representational absence of metaphysical concern for African existence (p. 40). The grounds of fiction is further sustained through ontological procedure following representation of all metaphysical concerns; ontology is only established after the destruction of metaphysical provisions of existence. This is evidenced in Warren’s (2018) rehearsal of Heidegger for which metaphysics necessarily occludes the existence of the Negro to move forward, maintaining the fiction that all metaphysical concerns have been attended with a representable answer. Warren (2018) explains, Heidegger relies on the fiction of anti-blackness as indestructible to “instigate metaphysics for its self-consumption” (Warren, 2018, p. 31). This reveals an actuality of fiction which sets the grounds for projecting the ontological invention of the black being. Black being is invented to fill the void of nothing as a predication of the post-metaphysical enterprise “opening a primordial relationality between 53 Dasein (Heidegger) and Being (ontology)” to make something human possible (p. 32). The ontology of the human is thus revealed to be from the possibilities of a fictional grounds, presenting the inventiveness of Being by the ruling episteme and Heidegger alike. The fictional grounds in Richardson’s (2012) work, is first deployed to project an illustration of the nuance experience of black trans manhood in the case of Trumpet. In the novel, Joss is staged to catastrophize the race and gender implications of black masculinity, projected through his son Colman who finds out after his death that Joss existed in time as a gender differing from the one presented at his death. At the heart of Richardson’s (2012) analysis is a vocation “to look to different models of self-invention” (p. 375). On these grounds of necessitation, I argue what is looked to for possible imaginings of self-invention, is that which is represented on fictional grounds. As another indication, the fictional grounds is necessitated once more to project the possibilities for improvising black manhood to embrace femininity in personification of the challenge to “gain of insurgent grounds outside the traditional symbolics of gender,” instruction from Hortense Spillers (as cited in Richardson, 2012, p. 362). From Richardson’s (2012) analysis of Trumpet, beginning this provision of resonances carried, to the work of Warren (2018) unveiling black being as the remanence of metaphysical destruction, the description suggesting black trans being as nothing still paradoxically presents black trans as being something, Somewhere. A something that is even as a fictional imagining of a possibility of black being, or as that something necessarily occluded to insist a fictional condition of absence, grounding the presence of an ontological concern for imagining human’s possibility for being. 54 Futurity: What makes a future I am hopeful for? As one who hopes to arrive at my desired Somewhere, I consider such a question of “what makes a future one is hopeful for?” to implicate a concern of time and space in relation to one’s present surroundings, which warrant a dependency on hope for futurity. To depend on a relation to the present in order to remain hopeful for a desired Somewhere, illustrates the necessity of the mundane in every day, while illustrating the apparent paradox of this reality that is hope in the most mundane of everyday practice. By practice, I am referring to the routine of existing. This dependent interrelation between our time in the presence of space is paradoxical in illustration because what is represented in one’s present surroundings does not secure them to a future hoped for, no more than the future is secured to that very present moment representing one’s surrounding existence. With these considerations in mind, I desire to describe what it feels like to be me. To live up to this very moment has been my way of resisting the encapsulation of my existence as a consumable abyss of darkness worth dying for, and I desire to share this experience of being a black trans man, through the use of analogies, poetry, humour and anecdotal reflections to create what I describe as a visceral reading experience. It is from within the hope of Nowhere augmenting a futurity Somewhere, I dedicate this section to the profound illustrations of this paradoxical reality in everyday practice. To begin, I must confess that fear plays a much larger role in my life than I ever truly acknowledged. The fear I am speaking about is an overwhelming, all-consuming feeling of helplessness; I cannot help but be me. Additionally, I fear what being me stirs up in others and if that stirring attempts to rupture, I must be ready to enact a superpumped version of courage in site of the slightest rupturing. The bodily expression of this superpumped version of courage, at 55 times looks like a smile and remaining calm in the face of bloodcurdling misrecognitions of humanity, displayed in violent expulsions of insubordination. The affect resides similarly to ice coming into contact with a hot frying pan. To analogize this visceral articulation of courage, the stage is set on the grounds of fiction to represent one’s existence reimagined through the quotidian possibilities of a frying pan. Consider the following monologue of my own inventiveness, a presentation of this courageous imagining: “I am hot - real fucking hot. I am on high and *pshhhhhh* here comes the freezing ice. But remember I am on high and running hot; this ice doesn’t stand a chance. It may bring me down in temperature a little but all in all I am still hot enough to disintegrate the ice hailing at my surface. Now, let’s dump a whole bucket of ice into a hot pan… Ain’t so hot now. The ice will melt but it pools covering my pan’s surface area. Eventually it will heat enough to evaporate but how long? Surely a pan is not on high without a purpose. And that purpose is to cook food – not melt ice. I didn’t ask for ice. This is misguided energy! Can’t you see I am hungry!” The frying pan analogy exemplifies one possibility for imagining the presence of being as it conveys the literal shift in body temperature I experience when confronted with misrecognitions of my humanity as a black trans being. It is to witness my black trans masculinity, being human. So there I remain in place, confronted by an existence in my surroundings. I stand in fear of what the impacts of expressing my humanity are. I stand longer in urgent negotiation with my fear and with courage I embrace a return into focus. I smile. I choose to express a smile because smiling is what feels best for me. Somehow though, even in choosing me, I still feel ordered. My humanity, that which my future presence depends on, is called upon to augment me toward a future beyond this existing confrontation. I must learn from the confrontation in preparation for its possible return in the future. Some would call this 56 “resilience”, but I consider the conditions for resilience not necessarily some achievement. Instead I regard it as a by-product of further misrecognitions of humanity with one’s ability to move forward presented at the forefront of choice; just like the choice for another to attempt to recuperate whatever humanity they’ve misrecognized as lacking, through me and mine. To state more succinctly, I think resilience arises from confrontation with your surroundings, presenting a negotiation with fear. Resilience is expressed in one’s ability to evoke courage during that negotiation with fear. Human being is thus reimagined as the embrace of expressivities that augment oneself towards a desired future Somewhere, beyond confrontations of misrecognition. I utilize the term “misrecognition” to refer to negotiations of humanity because I consider the choice to misrecognize, a practice of humanity. Remembering Warren’s (2018) analysis of the Heideggerian post-metaphysical enterprise, we are urged “to twist metaphysics and instigate its self-consumption” (p. 31). For Warren (2018) the twist of inquiring about the status of black being is that it must first be excavated from the centre of ontology, where it remains as the heart suffering perpetual ontological terror. Black being’s occluded ontological presence of being, belabours a stasis of absence conceding the status of the Negro to black non-being. This onto-metaphysical problem of black non-being is Warren’s (2018) Question of Black Being twisting two misrecognitions of humanity into illustration. The first instance is Heidegger’s necessary occlusion of the Negro’s existence to invent his post-metaphysical enterprise of Dasein in relation to Being; the second is of Warren (2018) who misrecognizes the necessitated occlusion of black being’s status, as the temporal and spatial coordinates of non-being. It would appear in its persistence that theorizing blackness as that state of non-being which exists in opposition to human beings, is a radical shift towards an alternative way of being uncategorized by racialized and imperialist conceptions of gender for black-humanity, but is this 57 true? More importantly, how does this necessitation of the status of “non-being” consequentially demand a presentation of disfiguring one’s being as black? There are inevitable consequences for the black subject who encounters this disfiguring misrecognition. These consequences are rooted in histories that when encountered by black beings, invoke a transmogrification of blackness within them. To attempt to recuperate being through a lack thereof without an account of how such an endeavor is experienced and navigated for existing black beings, is akin to a violent suspension in disfigurement. How it is that one attempts to recuperate being of blackness is just as much an indebtment to beings who exist as black as it is an archivable map of epistemological navigation. I write my futurity as being Somewhere, under this assertion because it is of my volition to remind all theorists writing on the being of blackness, especially black ones to consider who is best equipped to interpret their analytical assertions with precision. With such consideration, there ought to be a concern for how the reader departs the violent suspension of disfigurement, readings of blackness as non-being may displace them into. This is quite the endeavour for both myself as the writer and yourself as the reader of my work, because I am relying on you to maintain a level of close reading, that may feel very overwhelming at times. It is with a deep intention to illuminate your relation to being through what will be an encounter with my experience of being. I, too, have felt alone throughout the process of writing this work and so I will share my encounters with a past rooted in connections I had not imagined yet. It is for the meticulous, dedicated to inscribing life as it is experienced by way of thoughts and relations to being in the world, as well as that which dare not be said aloud. I desire to communicate my existence as a human being living in the ways I desire to. I wish to remind you that the resonances of this desire carried from my departing from Nowhere, stage the fictional grounds set to provide my account of the experience of a black being, as they process 58 their encounter with further academic inscription of blackness as “non-being,” without a method of navigation for this terrain that is fearfully erosive of futurity. Don’t let my ability to articulate the experience of being me, fool you into believing that this removes the fear I initially began this passage with. It is just as much out of fear that I document what I live and experience so urgently. My urgency in attending to black trans being is rooted in a fear of not being able to augment the coordinates of my being towards a desired futurity. Further it is to remind that I cannot control the way my futurity is imagined in existing misrecognitions of blackness, gender and being epistemologically produced. When accompanied by the demand to recuperate my coordinates of black trans being, through negotiations with fear provoking my humanity into action… A superpumped version of courage is embraced, indefinitely. What I offer as an imagined possibility of being Somewhere, is the choice to engage in recognition of one’s humanity – not misrecognize through a lack of or displacement of expressions of humanity. As one cannot extract humanity from humans’ being, the possibility to witness human expressivity is imagined as the necessitated confrontation with one’s existing surroundings, which augments one’s being back to human principle. More precisely here, it is to witness the being of black trans manhood. As a means for thinking through my own encounters with blackness, gender and being, I have compiled and analyzed what I consider to be attempts at mapping the epistemological navigation of encounters with figurations of black trans being executed in the works of Richardson (2012), Snorton (2017), Bey (2017) and Warren (2017, 2018). Their navigation examines the relationality between conceptions of blackness and being. By reimagining each black trans scholar as an epistemological navigator, each provision of the implications of black being demonstrates a contending with the cultural and onto- 59 metaphysical methods of reproducing an epistemology of black being. The desire to fulfill ontological devastation to the human for instance, contending with the “tremendous violence, routinized humiliation and systemic terror” which Warren (2017) presents, is perhaps the most intriguing expression of courage when confronted the status of black trans being. This is because Warren (2017) urgently demands intellectual space for “recognizing, interpreting and introducing being, Black trans” through necessitating a confrontation with Heidegger’s Dasein occluding the Negro on the ontological grounds of its projection. The confrontation for Warren (2017) is staged on the same grounds of fiction where lays the possibilities of the same philosophical registers setting the precedent for being, human. It is also that same precedent which refuses to recognize the practice of being black as a practice of enduring the violent eruptions of fantasies, from human’s practice of being. Warren’s (2017) refusal to appropriate humanism while taking claim to intellectual space adjacent its philosophical fieldhouses of Metaphysics and Ontology is thus reimagined as a courageous instantiation of augmenting one’s present expressivities (academically) towards a desired futurity. The encounter one has with theorizations of blackness is not to be removed from their understood proximation to blackness. The process of documenting affect through encounters with theories of blackness often begins like my own, with a confrontation of the brutalization of black bodies. Whether that brutalization is a recapitulation of slavery by way of a returning to narratives written by enslaved black people or a rehearsal of an argument considering ontological lacking in black humans, blackness as being is subsumed under the violent inscription of non-being. The violence of reinscribing black human beings as non-beings will always supersede its theoretical elasticity insofar as the real black beings must prepare for its break. The break represents the concluding effects of confronting the violent suspension in disfigurement as non- 60 being. The break in conclusion never provides black beings a moment to feel the elasticity of their being insofar as that experience is snapped back into a brutalizing disfiguration of their very own possibility. I consider this break to mirror social death, conditioning the existence of Joss and his son Colman’s black personhood in Trumpet (Richardson, 2012). You may recall social death is defined as “the condition of slaves forced into a position of unrecoverable disrespect, natal alienation and dishonour” (Richardson, 2012, p. 361). A definition Richardson extends from Orlando Patterson, in stating the implications of social death reach well beyond the end of slavery. The gendered implications of social death render the space of black gender outside of the “traditional symbolics” of gender, according to Spillers’ through Richardson’s (2012) provisional analysis. If one chooses to accept this assertion of social death then a confrontation with the queer implications of black masculinity, particularize in the form a question. The question, the same question which caused Colman’s manhood crisis, is one which asks what it would look like for black men to embrace femininity within themselves. As a challenge, Richardson (2012) accepts the fictional grounds of Trumpet to project the social death of black manhood as possible event for insurgency in meditation on social categories of gender outside the “traditional symbolics” of gender. This instruction is generative of Hortense Spillers (2003), whose critiques on the cultural representing of the black female methodically guide Richardson (2012) through the terrain of social death. Death portals navigation to the fictional grounds, the temporal and spatial possibility for reimagining the femininity of black manhood represented in Trumpet. With this present attendance to the viscerality of black suffering, I remain hopeful for the future of being for black transmen. Being, Somewhere, I conceptually imagine as the sheer presence of recognition available through the expressivities of one’s recognizable human 61 existence. I utilize “human” being because it is the most legitimized presence of being consistently bearing its fears of illegitimacy through epistemological production; that is the fear of being unrecognizable; the spatial and temporal coordinates of non-being. I imagine gender as that which expresses a negotiation with fear, either resulting in a forfeiting of what presents as a necessary invocation of courage or embracing the possibilities imagined of the courage to express all that dares not to be uttered, thought or done by a black transman. What I am relying on is a negotiation with one’s existence of being in the world, through confrontation with others existing as their imagined subjectivity, as well. For both race and gender, as analytics and implications of subjectivity, fear is confronted and courage is expressed to occupy a particular coordinate of existence. So in my desired Somewhere, gender I hope to resemble a courageous expression of an imagined self, actualized through an instance which demands a negotiation with one expressivities amid confrontation with existing surroundings. Somewhere, I imagine blackness as a social category that I am hopeful presents the spatial and temporal coordinates augmenting futurity, that is dependent on the present’s urgent attendance to black being. Blackness in Somewhere is represented as all that can be representable of an imagined possibility. It is not that race is a factual indication of these possibilities. Blackness on the account of its present description in the works I examine, is thus reconfigured to one “courageous” instantiation of imagined expressivity; the result of a confrontation with African existence stirring fear in the eyes of the white man, demanding a negotiation with one’s own expressivities of existing otherwise, white. To conclude as the demand for scholarly works produced on black transmen within the fields of Transgender Studies, black feminist thought and Critical Race Studies continue to be longed for, I present my attempt at inspiring a creative method of practice for black transmen to 62 locate their desired Somewhere; a place and time for actualizing the hopeful imaginings of futurity for black transmen. I will make this attempt from Nowhere, the space of liminality for which a fictional ground of inquiry into black transman futurity can be made. Traversing through each author’s reworking of blackness, gender and being to reveal the onto-metaphysical fictional grounds for which ontological formulations by ruling episteme are made possible. I have presented my articulations of how each work, from Richardson’s (2012) use of fictional novels to Warren’s (2018) philosophical enterprise, describes the definitions of blackness, gender and being. Following the provision of definitions, I comparatively analyze the nuances distinguishing each authors usage of these central terms to conclude with a provision of my upmost intentional thought, my considerations for generating a futurity one is hopeful for through visceral illustrations of confrontations with one’s spatial and temporal coordinates of existing in relation to the surrounding present. My desires for a future Somewhere exist alongside these configurations of blackness, gender and being as I deem their representing instrumental to illuminate futurity’s dependence on black being’s urgent attendance to the present. S O M E W H E R E I know where I fit. Where do you? All I know is that I do. I am desirable. For me. Do you know that yet? All I know is that I fit. - Savoy Williams 63 References Adair, C. (2019). Licensing citizenship: Anti-blackness, identification documents, and transgender studies. American Quarterly, 71(2), 569-594. doi:10.1353/aq.2019.0043 Austin, A. (2016). "There I am": A grounded theory study of young adults navigating a transgender or gender nonconforming identity within a context of oppression and invisibility. Sex Roles, 75(5-6), 215-230. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1007/s11199-016-0600-7 Bannerji, H. (1995). Thinking through: Essays on feminism, marxism and anti-racism. Women's Press. Bey, M. (2017). The Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 275–295. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815069 Bey, M. (2019). Black Fugitivity Un/Gendered. The Black Scholar, 49(1), 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1548059 Code, L. (2014). Feminist epistemology and the politics of knowledge: Questions of marginality. In M. Evans, C. Hemmings, M. Henry, H. Johnstone, S. Madhok, A. Plomien & S. Wearing (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory. (pp. 9-25) London, UK: Sage. Collins, P. (1986). Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of BlackFeminist Thought. Social Problems, 33(6), S14-S32. doi:10.2307/800672 Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952) Hayward, E., & Weinstein, J. (2015). Introduction: Tranimalities in the age of trans life. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2(2), 195-208. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867446 Kosenko, K. 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Willmer broadnax, midcentury gospel, and black trans/masculinities. Women & Music, 22, 117-125. Retrieved from: http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/2120133125?accountid=14656 Rees, M. (1996). Becoming a man: The personal account of a female-to-male transsexual. In R. Ekins, & D. King, (Eds.), Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Crossdressing and Sexchanging (pp. 27-38). Oxford: Routledge. Richardson, M. (2012). “My father didn’t have a dick”: Social death and Jackie Kay’s trumpet. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 18(2–3), 361–379. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1472935 Ricky, G. (2019). Lawrence ‘Larry’ king and too muchness: Complicating sexual citizenship through the embodied practices of a queer/trans student of colour. (1st ed., pp. 57-70) Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781351214742-7 Roen, K. (2001). Transgender Theory and Embodiment: the risk of racial marginalisation. 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Whittle, (Eds.), The transgender studies reader (pp. 194-202). New York, NY: Routledge.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
"From Nowhere to Somewhere" : the desires of a black transman's futurity
Text