ABSTRACT
The study of Blackness, its origins in the West, and Black people’s resistance has had considerable influence on interpretations of transness, trans literature, and cisnormativity. Black studies, specifically Black feminist criticism, provides several indispensable concepts—intersectionality, fungibility, ungendering, passing, etc. In turn, Black trans literature and Black trans studies reciprocate with urgent revisions of those same concepts. Trans scholars working in Black studies, including Treva Ellison, K. Marshall Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton, have historicized the interdependence of Blackness and categories of gender variance. Their projects necessarily critique cisnormative assumptions embedded within Black studies’s central objects of study—Blackness, race, slavery, freedom, citizenship, etc., while also revealing how Black feminism inadvertently laid the groundwork for trans theorizing by destabilizing the West’s grand narratives of gender binaries as developed under chattel slavery. In addition to surveying the symbiosis between Black studies and trans studies, the chapter demonstrates how this confluence materializes across trans literature. The histories and theories of gender emanating from Black studies have especially influenced contemporary poetry and fiction by Black trans writers, specifically research revealing how Atlantic chattel slavery and white supremacy depended on constructing Blackness as a deviant gender system separate from the Western binary. From Danez Smith’s Black Movie (2015) to River Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), Kokumo’s Reacquainted with Life (2016) to Kacen Callendar’s King and the Dragonflies (2020), authors have engaged with and repurposed these unorthodox constructions as the trans possibilities of Blackness imagining new modes of trans life, justice, and liberation. Additionally, Black trans studies has produced a capacious reading practice expanding the meaning of trans literature. The chapter concludes with a rereading of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Natalie” (c. 1898) uncovering “the possibility of trans subjectivity” structuring the story’s form and theme despite going unremarked by contemporaneous critics.
