Black Trans Feminism

Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

by Marquis Bey

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

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Queer, Race, Politics, Gender, LGBT

304 pages, Paperback

Published February 25, 2022

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ecstatic, superb. Hard to even wrap my head around the joy and curiosity this work filled me with, but this is mandatory transMad abolitionist reading, concerned with the poetic, the illegible, the unintelligible, and the refuse/al/ing. Lovingly and generously citational, uncompromising in its voice and serious in its stakes. You need need need this in your life and all the future lives that have hitherto been foreclosed to you.

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel so conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I agree with basically everything Bey says in it. On the other hand, Black Trans Feminism is not a very enjoyable read. Perhaps Bey would say that's intended, but I actually don't think that's true. There are some quite pleasurable little asides, including places where they say things like you're gonna wanna check out this footnote. Mostly, however, their style is just so frustrating, and it made the book difficult for me to get through. In terms of content, again, I'm completely on Bey's side, and I found the introduction very illuminating, but then the book's second half, for the most part, repeats stuff Bey has said in the book's first half. Ostensibly, in the second half, Bey has turned to analysis of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jay dodd, and the poets Venus Di'Khadija Selenite and Dane Figueroa Edidi, but this is only somewhat true. One gets the impression that everyone is saying the same thing here, and I longed for a more sustained engagement with the work of these other writers as such rather than what felt to me like a wrangling of their work as support for Bey's arguments. Again, I agree with those arguments, I just wonder how some of Gumbs', dodd's, Selenite's, and Edidi's more unruly, unable-to-be-corralled ideas might have pressed on Bey's own if they weren't being read only as in agreement.

[ASC Library]

305.4201 Bey

[Barbie Dog · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was life changing. It's loving call for a new perspective on the world. Reading it changed my life.

[Marietere T · Rating 5 out of 5]

great great great.

[Isabella Hausle]

Just began this book and struck by the staggering transmisogyny of this part of the endnote, where the author attempts to authenticate themselves as queer:

"To say that I understand myself through queerness is to say that I may be (and have been) attracted to a non-op trans man or trans woman, or a trans woman who passes as cis but is adamant about holding onto the transness of her womanness, or a nonbinary person, all of which do not map onto straightness. It would be at the very least simply off to say that I am straight when, say, expressing attraction for a trans woman, as it would possibly, in a sense, disqualify her transness from being constitutive of the body and identity to which I am attracted."

It is mind-boggling to me that a straight non-trans enby could write a book named "Black Trans Feminism" and imply that they may be queer because they could imagine themselves to be attracted to a hypothetical trans woman.

[Mateo Dk]

Unsure how to review this one. It was more hung up on language games than I expected, but I love a good language thought experiment and there was definitely an attempt to bridge the gap between the spoken and the lived which for the most part worked. Regardless, it was a real thinker that changed the angle for a reader to look at certain ideas. It felt a little needlessly jargony at times-- this is unpenetratable at times unless you're EXTREMELY in touch with the field of queer/trans studies in the theoretical. Also, it felt like it didn't speak on/about transfemininity enough in the first half of the text for a book I thought was more about transfeminism than it is in reality

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

It wasn’t quite what I expected. I enjoyed it, just wish it didn’t repeat itself so much, didn’t quote others so much (I would have preferred the others be mentioned as a, go-check-out-this-work-and-move-on kind of way, so I could focus on what this book was saying while gathering other materials I could go check out after)

[David Magill · Rating 4 out of 5]

dense theoretical concepts but Bey does a nice job of articulating his vision.

[hauntedandholierthanthou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely vital.

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved the intro and first chapter.

[Lele]

Maybe I will read this when I am older and smarter and better read and it will make more sense. For now I have a very difficult time understanding what they’re talking about…..

[Wenjing Fan]

SIMP28. written by men, don’t like it.

[Akosua Adjei · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the part about the importance of fat Black women.

[Isabel J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This text presents a brave and boldly argued intervention within the fields of Black studies, Black feminism, and more.

[Peter Bruno]

I found this interview and this talk particularly helpful.