ABSTRACT
The Black trans femme is the symbol of a politics fit for the flagship journal of queer studies without elaboration, apparently not requiring analysis or her own voice beyond one slogan. The Black trans woman is nearly always in the foreground of left queer and trans thought or cultural production today, yet paradoxically she is also their background. This chapter critically reads the idealization of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and asks how the project of making them signify queer and trans intersectionality might be dismantled in favor of taking seriously trans women of color as authors and practitioners of political, historical, and aesthetic projects in which they are more than iconic cover images. The ignition of a heterogenous surplus into coalitional politics ties “trans of color” to Black feminist traditions that have long treated intersectionality as a matter not of flattening difference into a shared umbrella interest, but strategic alliance.
