The Shape of Angels' Teeth

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marquis Bey
Keyword(s):  
Transgender Women ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Gender Variant ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
Trans Women ◽  
Racialized Gender

This essay argues for a productive alliance between trans feminism, trans studies, and black feminist thought (BFT) to articulate a black feminist mode of activism that takes seriously the epistemologies of black trans women. Ultimately this essay critiques BFT's cisgender normativity and offers a more inclusive imagining of BFT, referred to as blacktransfeminist thought (BTFT). To illustrate the scholarly significance of BTFT, I draw upon the ontological invalidation of black trans lives in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. #BlackLivesMatter is situated as (1) an exemplar of how black transgender women are commonly excluded from activist discourses, and (2) an opportunity to theorize the utility of BTFT as it relates to racialized gender variant lives and deaths.

Issued by Way of “The Issue of Blackness”

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-444
Author(s):  
Joshua Aiken ◽  
Jessica Marion Modi ◽  
Olivia R. Polk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
The University

Abstract In 2017, TSQ published its special issue on the convergence of blackness and trans*ness, “The Issue of Blackness.” In their introduction, “We Got Issues,” editors Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton offer a vision of a black trans* studies that acknowledges twentieth-century black feminist thought as its primary genealogy. For Ellison et al., the move to make black feminism the intellectual center of black trans* studies not only resists black women's persistent erasure from institutional narratives of knowledge making but also opens the contributions of trans* studies onto new fields of possibility for thinking and feeling embodiment, sociality, and memory otherwise. Aiken, Modi, and Polk build on Ellison et al.’s vision for a black trans* studies by bringing the concerns of “The Issue of Blackness” into conversation with recent black feminist critiques of disciplinarity and representation to imagine again how a black trans* studies rooted in black feminism might take shape in the university today.

IntroductIon: Plenary on Black Feminist Thought

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Tempest M. Henning ◽  
Scott Aikin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought

Sweat, Display, and Blackness

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-109
Author(s):  
Amber Jamilla Musser
Keyword(s):  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought

This essay analyzes two African artifacts—a nkisi and a bieri—in order to parse the utility of liquidity as a Black feminist analytic. Enlarging the concept of media to incorporate these artifacts, the text links diaspora, blackness, and affect to the violence of colonial rupture, while also using an analytic of sweat to explore forms of expressivity that escape capture. Sweat becomes a way to think between two axes within Black feminist thought: the pornographification of the racialized body that Hortense Spillers and others have described, and the joy and critique embedded in Audre Lorde’s erotic, especially in relation to formations of diaspora and spirituality.

Preface: “Be a Mystery”: (The Infinity of) Black Feminist Thought

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Treva Lindsey ◽  
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Keyword(s):  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought
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