Dear Marquis,

From the outset, I have to admit that I do not exactly speak your language, though I have been endeavoring to learn it. The world of contemporary black studies/theory is a world that I eavesdrop on, wallflower-like, whose chatter and conflicts and (para)institutional life I am deeply interested in and engaged with, but I often don’t have much to say about the goings-on—though, again, I endeavor to. I am, nonetheless, quite regularly called on to respond to your work, in no small part (I cannot help but think) because of the very grids of legibility that black trans feminism, as you describe it, steadfastly calls on us—that motley us—to abscond from, to “let go” (Bey 6). Mostly, not knowing what I would say or how, I say no. But now here I am. Trying to speak to you. 

This spring, I led a seminar on trans/queer of color thought for the first time, a seminar which—despite or because of the general terribleness of the semester—gave me a glimpse of what a classroom might be for, how we might think together in and through the mess of things. Given my tendency to be interested in, more than anything else, “the stories we tell” (Hemmings 2), the course was much less about some content called “trans/queer of color thought” and much more about how trans/queer of color thought in and around the US university has been narrated, how these narrations do and don’t live up to the work that has affiliated itself with (or been hailed as) trans and/or queer of color, what makes it nonetheless a field that more or less coheres. 

At the end of the semester, one of my students, Terrell James, offered an answer to this latter question that I was and am quite taken with. He said, to paraphrase, that trans and queer of color thought is concerned with what we do in the in-between (alternatively: the mess (Manalansan), the interregnum (Malatino), and so on). What I like so much about James’s answer is that it accounts for many of the various modes and postures of tqoc thought; it is a project that is at once descriptive (what is it that we do, what is the texture of our living?), questioning and given to polemic (what ought we do, given the given?), and a collective critical practice (tqoc critique is what we do) aimed at “simultaneously negating society as a given and imagining what more liberatory possibilities are being blocked by that given state of affairs” (Hames-García 20). It’s no surprise that James came to offer this answer during or just after our discussion of Black Trans Feminism, a book that, on my read, is primarily concerned with what we do in the in-between and beautifully enacts each of these modes of trans/queer of color thought. 

Most basically, Black Trans Feminism is a moving and motivated meditation on each of its animating terms: black, trans, feminism. I say that it is motivated in part because you insist on particular inflections of each: blackness as fugitivity, “as mutinous relation to imposed ontology”; transness as unfixation, “as a departure-from without the presumption of a stable destination, or indeed a departure that itself destabilizes destinational desires”; feminism as undoing and unraveling, “as the reiterative un/gendered quotidian process of how not to be governed and given from without” (Bey 3). You insist, that is, on inflections that index not identity or closed ontological forms (what is) but, instead, paraontological forces that might animate what/how one does. Put another way, blackness, transness, and feminism are each “not replaceable…not substitutable” names for how we know (or sense? or live as though?) what is is not all there is (Tsang and Moten 344). Consequently, black trans feminism, as you describe it, is a kind of “abolitionist gender radicality,” a critical posture against closures of all kinds (Bey 13). In this way, Black Trans Feminism (and black trans feminism) is a critique of identitarianism in general. In particular, though, it is a critique of how identitarianism so often structures our sense of what black feminism, trans feminism, black trans feminism is about at the expense of its radicality, where radicality, for you, means turning not to the root of things but to what has yet to be, “an imaginative will to engage life unbounded” (Bey 12). But, also, at the expense of the necessarily coalitional spirit of black trans feminism, the need for everyone to get in on it in order for otherwise to be other than a nonperformative gesture, for it to be something we daily do and endeavor to cultivate within/below/beside the world. 

Though, again, I do not exactly speak your language, all of this is very familiar, which is, I think, the point. Or, part of it anyway. At the very least, I wonder if this point accounts for the poetics of Black Trans Feminism, especially its cento-like citational style. Of course, citation simply is one of the tools of the genre of academic prose, but I think you do something very particular and interesting with that tool, which is to enact, in the very form of your writing, a “coalitional subjectivity” (Bey 195). As a reader, I could not help but notice that though you often say “I” you do not exactly speak with one voice, nor exactly with many. Instead, your way of writing, of assembling and writing with and through a black trans feminist we, makes the text feel like the voice of “the multitude” (Bey 138), “more than one yet singularly together” (Bey 179). Most obvious in the conclusion, the citationality of the text creates a density that is not the same as what we ordinarily mean by “density of thought.” I think it is more like the density of a crowd at a protest, everyone occasionally saying the same thing (with more and less conviction and precision); occasionally lapsing into other chatter, breaking off; occasionally unsure of how we got there or where we are going; all, generally, moving in the same direction nonetheless. This sheer density arrives as a reminder—during this moment of intensifying general threat that leads to fracture perhaps more often than it leads to general resistance—that there is and has long been a black trans feminism (though it goes by many names) “that lets us feel that this world is not enough,” that insists on more, that there is more, for all of us (Muñoz 1). I, for one, am grateful for and enlivened by the reminder.

And yet, perhaps due to differences in disposition, in tendencies in the in-between, I left Black Trans Feminism equally enlivened and vexed—which is, for the record, a good thing. Also for the record, I think that you have anticipated many of my vexations, my sticking points that I have not yet fully thought through. Still, in the spirit of conversation I’ll offer, briefly, two, both of which have to do, loosely, with the effortfulness and difficulty of coalition. 

First, as I have said, I found the style of Black Trans Feminism effective and affecting, a real pleasure. In addition to the multitude gathered by your practice of citation, I appreciated how, even when you were engaged in real arguments with individual scholars or intellectual traditions, that conflict was (mostly) sidestepped and/or acknowledged and set aside so as to foreground the creative work of thought. However, I do wonder about the ethics (for lack of a better word) of this dual propensity to, simultaneously, elide conflict and gather everyone into a textual coalitional subjectivity. Indeed, there is a long moment in the text where, in the process of theorizing coalition, you let Judith Butler riff at length on the matter. Among other things, they insist that within coalition “there can be—perhaps must be—active antagonisms” over the aims and methods that bring together coalitions in the first place (Butler 147; quoted in Bey 208). Given this, I am curious about the way that you tend to sidestep the antagonisms—the, as you say, “mutual exclusivit[ies]” (Bey 145)—within your textual gathering. For example, although you twice direct readers to Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child, it is nowhere remarked that that book is, in many ways, a sustained account of the dangers of insisting on an inflection of trans that, as you risk doing, makes it synonymous with plasticity, mutability, indeterminacy: “I argue that plasticity is too combustible a concept to animate trans children in any way that does not also do them harm” (Gill-Peterson 202). Also, it is hard not to notice that the poet KOKUMO is staging a small protest about her appearance in Black Trans Feminism on its Goodreads page, a protest that—on my read—is demanding a different way of being held. Also, it is hard for me in particular not to notice a moment where you voice an essay of mine to nearly the opposite effect of what I understood myself to be saying, which is, I hope you’ll believe me, perfectly fine. I’m happy to be of the coalition and to disagree with myself—I do it all the time—but all of this makes it seem like so much is animated by a desire, perhaps your desire, for coalition without conflict, disagreement, or, indeed, antagonism. And I wonder about whether this desire might actually sit in vexed relation to “radical openness” (Bey 106). About what has to be disavowed in order to offer the appearance of “unification” (Bey 48). Again, and truly, this is not meant as shade or complaint but as a sincere and hazy question about writing and its limits, about how to hang together in the in-between, about “how we hold each other” (Bey 5).  

I’ve struggled with how to say this second thing because, to some extent, it seems unfair.  Still, it gets to the heart of a matter that I have been trying to work out for myself, which I, incidentally, wrote a book trying to work out. So, let me put it this way. Through your engagement with Venus Selenite, you briefly incorporate disability—“even disability” (Bey 178)—into your accounting of what it might mean to live and think black trans feminism, though in a conflicted way. On one hand, Selenite quite explicitly presents xyr mother’s deafness as a nonnormativity that “allows her to coordinate life / on her own terms” (Selenite; quoted in Bey183); indeed it is deafness that enables (requires?) the feminism of Selenite’s mother, of xyr childhood, a feminism that you describe as “self-determinative and further outside the bounds of normative discourse” (Bey 184). And this admission of deafness-as-generative-nonnormativity echoes your earlier call to La Mar Jurelle Bruce’s account of madness as of a piece with black creativity, “the madness engendered in the underlife” (Bey 99). 

But, on another hand, disability by other names shows up in Black Trans Feminism as fundamentally what indexes the violence of the given that black trans feminism strives to exceed: “Black trans feminism cannot be circumscribed simply by trauma,” “we are various shades of brokenness and lack…We need to be healed and do not wish to remain writhing in our broken pieces,” “what has been pathologized in us” (Bey 181, 14, 227). Basically, and given the deeply abolitionist impulses of mad liberation and deinstitutionalization and the deeply coalitional impulses of much critical disability theory and culture, I am interested in your insistence (and it does feel like an insistence) on life as what happens in excess of “trauma, anxiety, and depression,” in “excess of these hardships of disability” (Bey 176, 182). To my mind—and, I would wager, to Selenite’s mind, though of course I don’t know—disabled life is, in fact, “not nonlife but life lived otherwise and life stolen” (Bey 135) back from eugenic regimes, capitalist ideologies of life-as-work, “ableist reasoning” (Kim 87), and the “cultural devaluation of life with a disability (and life with pain)” (Patsavas 208). 

Of course, there is a way in which you have already offered an answer: just as “blackness…will outlast ‘race’; transness will outlast ‘gender’; feminism will outlast ‘women,’” crip radicality (a collective contestation of imposed norms of capacity, configuration, modes of cognition and affectivity…) or what Robert McCruer might call “severe disability,” will outlast ‘disability’ as it is predicated on/imposed by the violence of normativity (Bey 14; McRuer 32). And yes. Yes. But for what it’s worth, I’m stuck on this because, at bottom, I simply do not believe that disability and/or pain are (only) antagonistic to life, certainly not to transformation. Indeed, one of the axioms of disability studies might be, in brief, things change. Given this, I cannot help but wonder how the coalitional subjectivity called Black Trans Feminism might change if it were to be open to disability (which is, in some ways, an openness to limit, though not only that) as yet one more name for what compels us otherwise. But maybe this is the wrong question. I’ll think on it. Thanks, as always, for the occasion to think beyond myself. 

Yours,

Cameron

Works Cited

Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. 

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2016.

Hames-García, Michael. “Queer Theory Revisited.” In Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, 19-45. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 

Hemmings, Clare. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 

Kim, Jina B. “Cripping the Welfare Queen: The Radical Potential of Disability Politics.” Social Text 39.3 (2021): 79-101. 

Malatino, Hil. “Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum).” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6.4 (2019): 635–58. 

Manalansan, Martin. “Messing Up Sex: The Promises and Possibilities of Queer of Color Critique.” Sexualities 28.1 (2018): 1287–90. 

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: NYU Press, 2006. 

Moten, Fred, and Wu Tsang. “All Terror, All Beauty: Wu Tsang and Fred Moten in Conversation.” In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibilty, edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, 339–48. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009.  

Patsavas, Alyson. “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014), 203–18.

Selenite, Venus. trigger: poems. CreateSpace, 2016.

1. Thief, Radical

I’ve had the great privilege to sit with this text for quite a while and I have been taken by, well, its radicality; its penchant to radicalize blackness, transness, and feminism beyond their commonly accepted radicality precisely by taking seriously their paraontological possibilities and pushing them as far as they can go. That is, by its taking of blackness beyond (one of) its formulation(s) as that which is formed by way of the harming predilections of normative violences bestowed to it by race. By its analysis of transness as an entropic and insurgent force animating transgender, though not exclusive to it. And by its movement with (black) feminism as a project of anticaptivity that engenders the abolition of normative racialized gender (enclosures). For these reasons and many others, Black Trans Feminism is a special text.

I began an early draft of a still unpublished paper by saying that “I am a thief.” It was meant to signal my attempt to theorize a fugitive subjectivity that subverts power and refuses the normativity of things ordered by whiteness as well as cisgender and heterosexist logics. And it was also an attempt at declaring an abolitionist posture by attending to the inadequacies bound up in the politics of white allyship, whose logic requires, at least from my point of view, self-imposed limits—limits that are predicated on the correctness of categorical distinctions of race and gender and their ostensibly immutable properties. Further, it was an attempt to contribute to an open genealogy in the space of the abolition of whiteness as someone who is read as and understands himself as white, taking Moten’s idea that “it’s fucked up for us”1 to a higher level of abstraction, that being the problematic of the world and of normative ways of being, to which allyship so willingly assents. As I will try to explicate, thievery, or thief work, is a formulation deeply indebted to Black Trans Feminism, and to Bey’s body of work more generally.

“I am a thief” was articulated as such to (1) critique so many of the pitfalls I see with those who insufferably declare ally subjectivity, which sees to it to change precisely nothing, and to (2) induce a philosophical program for thinking otherwise about (what might be understood as) the white radical disposition. To illuminate allyship’s inert politicality at the level of syntax, my partner quipped, brilliantly: “That’s some allyshit!” I then modified it to read as “allyshi*,” suggesting that it is immaterial whether a “p” or a “t” completes the word. The kind of radical white subject that thief work might engender, I concede, remains difficult to envisage in theories of the Subject, because that subjective expression would defy the normative assumptions of subjectivation formed in the crucibles of whiteness and coloniality, articulated as such as ontologically anti-black. Yet, despite philosophical, political, and historical delimitations, we can still think about the “white” abolitionists whom Section 7 of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 sought to punish; the Wide Awakes; and the race traitors at work in the 2020 uprisings as anti-normative exemplars of subversive thievery: those who—insofar as they joined in coalition with black people to not only resist slavery and subjection, but unfix themselves from whiteness—stole themselves away from the Subject. A thief is, for my purposes and under my pen, one who steals, who plots the theft(s) in advance; one who dwells in the premeditation of acts of thievery and who relishes in its spoils. A thief is someone who denies the law the capacity to exercise its ontological mandate—to overdetermine life chances and sanction anti-blackness.2 And though I have a clean sheet, it’s unfair to say I’ve never committed a crime. I’ve just never been caught. The law, it might be said, cannot keep up with me, even and especially if it claims to know my exact intentions.3 

But just as I came to this understanding of the thief, it got uncomfortable and complicated. It always is and should be, but not for typical or expected reasons. Instead, I came to understand that being a thief was an imprecise and ethically inadequate posture of abolition. Its inadequacy lays not in the notion of thievery, which is cool and critical and necessary, but in the reduction of thievery to an identity that can be anticipated by “already given ontologies.”4 In saying “I am a thief,” I inadvertently assented to identity as a hegemonic system of governmentality even though I did not want to conceptualize thievery under the rubric of identity or expose it to logics of governance. I wanted to understand and proliferate thievery and theft as fugitive actions available to anyone willing to take up their task, and that requires dispensing with the quintessential ontological statement, “I am,” preferring “I do” as the operative statement of a radical politicality. Simply put, I learned (from Black Trans Feminism) that we must shape our politics around “radical actions” not “radical actors.”5

Similar (and undeniably indebted) to Marquis Bey’s conceptualization of black trans feminism, my aim when articulating a thief posture is to “think about how we might rally around a subversive politics.” So instead of grounding politics in a sort of identity—thief—I want to rally around thievery as a quotidian praxis; thievery not as spectacular performance, but as a modality of living by way of blackness, transness, and feminism, which are, according to Bey, “inflections of mutinous subjectivities” (9) that “describe the process by which…different modes of being and becoming are glimpses of life unfettered by normative violence moving through us by way of white and cis male supremacy” (43). And more, they are open subjectivities—“open to being understood by any and every one and non-one” (18). Bey’s black trans feminist theorizing is my work’s condition of possibility. We both explore the paraontological distinction, and in the vitality of this distinction, Bey and I do work on two sides of the same coin. Though they might have something to say about that, which I eagerly anticipate.

2. Endnote 86

Black Trans Feminism (BTF) pulls together fugitive hope, spaces for living otherwise, trans/figurative Blackness, and gender abolition as part of a grand theoretical project designed to celebrate Black poetic excess and to refuse pessimistic articulations of Black nihilism. The book is divided into two parts—the theoretical elaboration of Black trans feminist thought and the engagement with an archive of Black feminist trans poetics. The book confirms Marquis Bey’s emergence as a major theorist of contemporary race and gender politics.

Like other work by Bey, BTF is passionate and bold, dense and complicated, inspiring and difficult. This book, furthermore, in a manner that doubles down on his citational practice in earlier work, records and announces its indebtedness to other thinkers. Indeed, as part of its collective ethos, the book echoes with the phrasings, syntax, and arguments of a range of fellow thinkers. As someone who also weaves my own thoughts through the writings of other scholars, I recognize the technique, I applaud it, but I also see some of its limitations. The most obvious problem with deeply citational work can arise when the author builds a scaffolding for themselves from work that might actually be at odds with one another. Then those contradictions become part of the warp and woof of the book, sometimes for better (polyvocality) and sometimes for worse (glossing over difference). In this book then, Bey pulls together ideas from a range of thinkers who have influenced him, and whose work has compelled him to write this compendium of political outrage and love. Among the most obvious of his interlocutors, Fred Moten and Jennifer Nash stand out. Moten (often Moten and Harney) provides Bey with the language of fugitivity, mutiny, brokenness, paraontology, and ritual practice. But Bey also borrows a certain syntax from Moten—“this book urges abolition in a broad sense: the making impossible—and creation of a sociality indexed to the impossibility—of carcerality, any form of captivity, which can include categorical taxonomies, agential circumscription, and the like” (BTF, 22). Moten and Harney write: “What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” Like Moten and Harney, Bey understands abolition as a multi-pronged event in which the target is not this or that institution but the structure that allows such an institution (the prison, for profit healthcare, tuition-bound universities) to seem right and inevitable, good and functional. And from Nash, Bey borrows a critique of intersectionality as the main language of Black feminism and a commitment to another kind of Black feminism that does not center solely upon Black women but that proceeds by way of radical acts of “anti-territoriality.” When I say that Bey borrows these concepts, I mean that he thoroughly absorbs the lessons from Moten and Nash into his own text, and then generously and capaciously uses these seeds to grow new work. His text, indeed, is a web of intertextual references and in the footnotes alone, stories emerge, some personal, about identification, disidentification, community, communality, and queer modes of “categorical irreverence.” 

This method of weaving together citations and inhabiting the syntaxes of the scholars with whom he thinks joins in Bey’s work with a theoretical commitment to thinking through transness, through movement, through a utopian and collective reaching for other worlds and towards other articulations of world, being and life. By making trans* bodies and theories the basis for all other kinds of thought, Bey turns a theory of the unfixing of identities, bodies and classifications into an anti-foundational basis for life otherwise. For example, Bey has said about transness and Blackness that they meet in a space of para-ontology: “Trans* and black thus denote poetic, para-ontological forces that are only tangentially, and ultimately arbitrarily, related to bodies said to be black or transgender” (“The Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness.” TSQ, 2017). Both categories—Black and trans*—in other words, sit alongside understandings of ontology that run through Western philosophy and they function outside of conventional systems precisely because they have been excluded from and by those same systems. Indeed, the exclusion of trans* and Black bodies creates the possibility of articulating the fixity and purity of other bodies. Rather than merging, marrying, joining, and combining Blackness and transness then, and using this conjoined term to put pressure on ontology, Bey’s work issues a refusal. Bey’s work eschews endeavors to join and marry and he proposes, succinctly, that “Blackness says no.” This no, a refusal of “I do” or “I will” or of the additive rhetoric of this and also that, is a key to the kinds of Black anarchism he invests in and the forms of Black trans feminism outlined by his new book. This method of refusing simple connections and instead detailing how para-ontological formations have developed in excess of conventional systems leads to insightful readings of Black poetic writing by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others.

The main claims of Black Trans Feminism hold that: (1) “A radical feminism must center the needs, experiences, and material concerns of trans women, trans femmes and nonbinary femmes.” This claim depends, furthermore, not on any clear identitarian classification of who occupies such categories but on a set of practices that emerges out of political commitments (to decolonizing, anti-capitalist feminism for example) that would benefit those groups. (2) Black trans feminism denotes an unfixity in relation to bodily identity, and a rethinking of ontology and paraontology in relation to the futures that Black trans feminism imagines for itself. 

(3) Blackness and transness are both predicated upon relations to “being and becoming otherwise-than.” This movement away from normative orientations of racial identity and gender identity activates Blackness and transness on behalf of an abolitionist project under the heading of “feminism.” (4) Ungendering the body allows for a “tranifestation” of modes of being that normativity has erased and, to use a Foucaultian term, “disqualified.” “Black trans feminism,” writes Bey, “commits to the nonnormative because nonnormativity references the world of abolition” (BTF, 40). In other words, that which appears as nonnormative within a bio-politically managed world, does not simply represent the result of prior acts of rebellion or subversion (although such acts may well have produced and sustained gender nonconforming bodies). The nonnormative can be understood, according to Bey, as evidence of “what gender might be and become were it not for Gender” (40). (5) Finally, Bey, in the lyrical second half of the book, finds evidence of these non-identitarian, non-normative and excessive forms of being in the poetry and archival work of Black queer and trans poets and writers.

Black Trans Feminism will be much read, oft-cited, and widely circulated in the years to come. But it is not without certain weaknesses or structural quirks. The book is deeply indebted, for example, to the work of Judith Butler and Butler is cited throughout particularly in relation to questions of subjectivity and subjectification. Butler, as most readers will know, crafted the concept of “performativity” in order to challenge a volitional theory of identity that sprang from a misreading of the operations of power. Butler’s work, at present, circulates widely in trans studies, often as an object of critique, but mostly as an uncited basis for claims about ontology and recognition. Some critics, like Kadji Amin, have crafted entire theories of the fallacy of self-determination indebted to Butler while barely crediting Butler at all. Bey does not make this mistake—he credits Butler for the “metaphysics of gender” that operates in his work but he depends upon Butler’s anti-foundationalist critiques while still holding out the possibility of “self-determination.” He writes: “Black trans feminism is also committed to gender self-determination in a way that slightly departs from the term’s popular conception….The gender self-determination affixed to black trans feminism is a social dance, but a sociality not really here; black trans feminist gender self-determination avows a subjective cultivation of ways to do illegible genders, genders that abolish the bestowal of gender, genders that allow us all to be and become expansively outside of the very desire to have to bestow onto ourselves gender” (23–24). I do understand that this passage is saying that Black feminist self-determination is a potential to be differently bodied under different regimes of visibility, recognition, transformation and classification. But since we do not fully know what would bring these different regimes into being, it is hard to credit this specific understanding of “self-determination” as operation outside of the agentic notions of rebellion and self-naming that Bey has eschewed. 

Another critique that Bey pulls into his work from elsewhere concerns intersectionality. Intersectionality, he believes, following Jennifer Nash, “conflates black women with the wholly oppressed and thus evacuates them of the possibility of privilege and the ability to do harm” (58). Of course, intersectionality is by no means a one-size-fits-all kind of project. It described a very specific failure of the legal system when confronted by subjects who were not representative of the groups covered by protective legislation. All too often, Kimberle Crenshaw pointed out, a discrimination case could not move forward when a Black woman was the plaintiff because the company would be able to show that it was not discriminating on the basis of race because it had hired Black men, nor on the basis of gender, because it had hired white women. As far as the law was concerned, Crenshaw proposes, intersectional analysis is not simply advisable, it is necessary. Of course, intersectionality, over time has been applied across multiple social and political projects to point to blind-spots, to think about overlapping forms of discrimination and exclusion and to mark the inadequacy of an identity politics committed to single-issue projects. I guess I do not see how Bey’s project is at odds with this earlier refusal of identitarian models of theory and practice and I am not at all sure what the book gains from the critique. Bey proposes that trans feminism must link to Blackness rather than intersectional feminism in order to highlight the specificity of its gender politics. While Black feminism remains mobile and unfixed for him, “intersectional feminism has the potential to always reify the limits of the still-discrete identities that converge,” he writes (59). Well, unfortunately, all claims to feminism have that potential and what prevents the ossification of feminism into this or that statement of identity is a clear program of political praxis rather than a preference for this term over that. Veronica Gago’s recent work, for example, in Feminist International has made feminism the basis for a general strike that unites Black, queer, trans, poor, homeless women and sex workers on behalf of an abolitionist desire to “change everything.” Gago brings together the situatedness of specific struggles with the shared goals of “massiveness” and “radicality.” Her work, like Bey’s, wants to use the term feminism for an insurgent force of abolition. But her book works through specific movements, battles and activist episodes. Bey’s archive is more speculative and theoretical. Which does not make Bey’s work any the less powerful. But it does make the quibbling with intersectionality seem beside the point.

The other major target in BTF is Afro-Pessimist thought. This school of thought is not really named as such in the book but Bey insists, without targeting any thinker in particular, that “my responsibility is not nihilism or its obverse, optimistic zeal, but, rather, life” (201). And more than this, life is “the aim of black trans feminism.” His point is that anti-Blackness cannot and has not defined Blackness in its totality: “Are there not modes of being black, and, more pointedly, doing blackness that are about liberation?” This is a passionate argument for seeing how and where and when Black life and art exceeds the representational regimes that seek to hold it and control it. Bey’s argument here, according to the footnote, is with Calvin Warren and his refusal of hope within an elaboration of Black nihilism. But I wonder if there is not more that unites Warren and Bey than Bey proposes. Like Warren, Bey sees ontology as part of the machinery of white supremacy—Bey speaks therefore of para-ontologies in relation to Blackness, ontologies that emerge alongside the authorized forms of being. Like Warren, Bey uses refusal as a tool to push back on the imposition of the hegemonic—“we do not say “Yes” to any and all genders…it means we advocate for the ethical requisite to say “No”—or better to decline to state—with regard to the imposition of gender.” Like Warren, Bey says “no” a lot, to great effect and, like Warren, he does so while fully aware of the resonance that this “no” has across whole systems of thought that insist we say yes!

But, ultimately, these objections, are quibbles. I admire the depth and rigor of the theoretical half of the book and the lyricism and inventiveness of the second part. I think that merging the two sections could have been helpful in as much as the first part of the book sometimes feels as if it lacks an archive, and the second part feels as if it lacks theoretical compass; but the splitting of the book into these two parts makes sense too. I am by now an avid reader of Bey’s work, a dedicated commentator on his ideas and I am very influenced by his formulations of Black trans feminist thought. I know this book, already worn and creased from multiple readings, will sit on my shelf alongside Negative Ontologies and Wayward Lives and The Undercommons and Feminist International as part of a library of insurgency that is trying to find a way through the thickets of contemporary political life to the other side. Whether the way forward is dark or light, up or down, multidirectional or lost, wild or turbulent, this book suggests, the joy is in the loud, mutinous, hopeful struggle. 

“What, then, if rhythm is not time, or, even, space? What if rather, it may be understood to mark or remark the very opening of temporality for sense, or to announce duration as the reciprocity of space in its eruption and the concomitant organization of all that we might place under the heading of time – that, if at all, spacing gives temporality; perhaps we can say […] simply, in one word…dance?”

—Nahum Chandler (2018)

Marquis Bey invites us to juke and jive and groove and vibe, to move with “perennial openness” (Bey 2021, 99) from the grammar of ontological capture to the anagrammaticality (Sharpe 2016, 76–77) of a “before beginning” where the black/trans/femme(inist) who “consents-not-to-be-a-single-being” (Moten 2018) lives, on the run from existence.

She moves not where she shouldn’t but when she shouldn’t, with a wilding imagination that is out of time, in no-time, in any time. Her improvisational getaway is “‘[a] dance of body,’” “‘[a] waltz of hips’” (Bey 2021, 196). Not an identity (arrival) but a praxis (departure), the black/trans/femme(inist) “‘turns/And… turns/And…turns’” (Bey 2021, 195), unfixing “all that we might place under the heading of time” (Chandler 2018). 

Positivism and progress—the promise of a “beyond”—are not hers to claim (they never were). Her unsanctioned movements built this “time of the now” (Benjamin 1968, 261 [XIV]), “danc[ing] the beginning of humanity and the genesis of creativity” (Bey 2021, 198), and she’s “still fucking here” (Bey 2021, 32), threading Man’s timeline, skipping rocks across the coordinates of his longue durée.

Not anti-historical but ante-historical; not (just) paraontological but paralogical. Lawless. Mutinous. Insurgent. The black/trans/femme(inist) does not wait for “cessation or interruption of historical flow” (Sexton 2011, 6) to “[move] ‘to music not yet written’” (Bey 2021, 33). She goes mad and loses her mind to this song. 

Her movements are “mad black,” “mad queer,” mad free, mad mad (Bey 2021, 173). Not doubly conscious (pace Du Bois) but cognitively dissonant (pace Fanon), the black/trans/femme(inist) is “out of possession of [her] mind” (Brand 2011, 29). She “dance[s] to ‘the music of the madness’” (Sexton 2011, 6) because it’s the only tune that’s playing. 

Her “threatening mobility” (Bey 2021, 7) is a “no, not, naught, nonbeing, emptiness, nothingness, nothing, no thing” (Moten 2013, 750) to the life of a mind that “law-likely function[s] to semantically-neurochemically induce the performative enactment of our ensemble of always already role-allocated individual and collective behaviors” (Wynter 2015, 32–33, original emphasis). Rationality and reason were never hers to begin with.

The track skips a beat, but the song keeps playing. 

Madness and delirium. Madness qua delirium. Madness-cum-delirium. “THERE IS MADNESS IN ME AND THAT MADNESS SETS ME FREE” (Sexton 2011, 6, original emphasis).

She dances to a “racialized gender cacophony” (Bey 2021, 115) made not by afropessimism, but by the wor(l)d, “and maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a wor[l]d” (Sexton 2011, 31). 

The song is like a drum in her head. Not “a healing genre” (Bey 2021, 195), not genre-making, but a healing vibration—a frequency responsive not to the white-cum-phallic gaze that claims to know her, but to the sonic and, perhaps, haptic registers that make her “freer than [she] want[s] to be” (Bey 2021, 227)—this rhyme without reason is the soundtrack to her flight. 

She travels not in search of a new or different or under-wor(l)ding. She spins and spools and (t)werks “the wor[l]d that the wor[l]d lives in” (Sexton 2011, 28) on its axis, alchemizing its big bang. Her romp across time is the sine qua non of wor(l)d-making “at every scale of abstraction” (Wilderson 2020, 218). She’s mad and she’s magic.

Her chronopolitical coup “lead[s] everywhere” (Sexton 2011, 9) but lands nowhere, “opening temporality for sense” (Chandler 2018). She jumps—“leaps” (Fanon, Markmann 1986, 229)—with fugitive hope and blind (bad) faith, refusing “the cartographical maps that have been imposed not simply on but as our bodies” (Bey 2021, 27, original emphasis) and which sediment us in the “territorializing projects” (Bey 2021, 9) of historical arrival. 

She is “not a prisoner of history” (Fanon, Markman 1986 229). Her “‘being is older than time’” (Bey 2021, 197). She “existed before [her] name” (Bey 2021, 191), unmarked “by the power of chronology” (Wilderson 2010, 280), under the sign of “the mutinous lawlessness that blackness anoriginally names” (Bey 2021, 154). She wasn’t born in the hold of the slave ship. She was born in the heart of darkness, “outside of time and the quantum logics of civilization’” (Bey 2021, 216). 

She arrives at civilization “too soon”—as creator and captive of Man’s historicity, in an African somewhere—and “too late” (Fanon, Markmann 1986, 9), dancing in circles, losing her mind, “endlessly creating” herself (Fanon, Markmann 1986, 229), going nowhere. Her “flesh that doesn’t sit still” (Bey 2021, 195) is the seed and antecedent against which everyone else’s “beyond” is measured. 

“‘There was no gender’ in this before-beginning, and ‘there was no pronoun’” (Bey 2021, 197). There was only the “ontologizing process of gender through the irruptive figuration of blackness” (Bey 2021, 77, original emphasis). There was only “the work of blackness and its inherent transness” (Bey 2021, 29). There was only blackness and blackness’s gender trouble (Bey 2021, 233).

The black/trans/femme(inist) stays with this trouble (Haraway 2016). Not with “otherwise ontological schemas” (Bey 2021, 99) that “parameterize life through the metric of time” (Bey 2021, 216), but with the “indeterminate, non-fixed space” (Bey 2021, 27) of not-knowing, with the “awesome [of] nothingness” (Bey 2021, 192), “breaking free of the hold of the optic and breaching the realm of the sonic” (Bey 2021, 195), dancing like no one’s watching to the momentum of “critically fabulated memories” (Bey 2021, 216), willfully “‘forget[ing] what [she] look[s] like through Western eyes’” (Bey 2021, 216). 

The “perpetual and involuntary openness” (Sexton 2008, 149) of her gratuitous invagination is not a fact of her gender but the fact of her blackness (Gordon 1995, Ziyad 2017). Reluctantly, resentfully, she gravitates towards the only dance partner who can hold up this mirror. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.) The pessimism of afropessimism finds home in the black/trans/femme(inist)’s optimism and opulence. Though estranged, they move contrapuntally—not in “second time” (Chandler 2018), but in this time, in this now, “posing [the] question…of being” (Sexton 2011, 9) that outs afropessimism’s best kept secret: that the problem of blackness is also the problem of those who are not black. 

They dance in dehiscence, in “moments of asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipses, flashback, hysteron-proteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition, reversal, surprise” (Freeman 210, xxii) that open blackness for thought, as “critical thought qua thought” (Bey 2021, 201). Their “agreement […] takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief” (Sexton 2011, 28), in “the excess where becoming occurs” (Bey 2021, 95).

Her “radically open claimable [posture]” (Bey 2021, 28) is “not an identity, not a history, not a location on the map of desire” (Bey 2021, 154), but “the nonidentitarian ethos of blackness, transness, and feminism” (Bey 2021, 28)—of un/gendered (trani)flesh—that afropessimism says is “the signal for everything to be called into question” (Fanon 1963, 227). 

“Rather than imitation of a form of being” (Sexton 2011, 9), she “introduc[es] invention into existence” (Fanon, Markman 1986, 229). The universality-of-her-singularity is “the interrogation of how we become we” (Bey 2021, 195). She moves not with the phallic agency of knowing but with the invaginated possibility of a critical opening. Her ontological zero “teaches us all how we might better inhabit multiplicity under general conditions at the global scale” (Sexton 2011, 8). 

Afropessimism warns the black/trans/femme(inist) that her “etcetera” (Bey 2021, 102) cannot “proliferat[e] [the] possibility of other genres” (Bey 2021, 195) if it is to remain “the terrain upon which we come to ask questions” (Bey 2021, 200); in other words, if it is to remain black. 

The “‘irruption within the fabric of existence’” (Bey 2021, 150) that her blackness anoriginally names cuts the “stalled,” “slow time of captivity” (Sexton 2011, 4, 5) that afropessimism bemoans as the tape of social death. She reminds afropessimism that what it calls ‘captivity’—by its own definition, “an unsettled condition, open to an outside about which it will not know anything and about which it cannot stop thinking, a nervous system always in pursuit of the fugitive movement it cannot afford to lose and cannot live without” (Sexton 2011, 9-10, my emphases)—is not a death, social or otherwise, but the “occult instability” (Fanon 1963, 227) of “a mad freedom […] where there is none” (Sexton 2011, 6). 

If “cognitive schema is captivity” (Brand 2011, 29), a nervous system trapped in “the eternal time of the unconscious” (Sexton 2011, 5), sociogenically engineered to “hate you” (Marriott 2000, 90) “without break or interval or punctuation” (Sexton 2011, 5); then “it is held here that a certain mania could serve us well, a mania coughed up when we are constantly choking, relieving us of our tracheal constriction” (Bey 2021, 202), freeing us from the chokehold of Man’s timeline. 

“There is freedom and freedom is there” (Sexton 2011, 6), in the convulsions of the black/trans/femme(inist)’s crazy; in the untrackable movements of her “mobile flesh” (Bey 2021, 195); in her unanticipated flight “outside of history, logos, and telos” (Gossett 2015). 

Her dance dance revolution in the “before beginning” that she made, without gender or pronoun, “cannot be contained by or abide [the] description” (Bey 2021, 151) of “‘earlier revolutions [that] relied on memories out of wor[l]d history’” to make their “‘contents’” known (Fanon, Markmann 1986, 223). The sonic and haptic freedom of her fits and starts “‘exceeds the expression’” (Fanon, Markmann 1986, 223) of social death’s distress signal. Her “boundless movement outside the tendrils of History” (Bey 2021, 29) is “the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility for any thought about being whatsoever” (Sexton 2011, 7). 

On this much, the black/trans/femme(inist) and afropessimism agree, locking step to polemicize blackness as a problem for time that makes us all “freer than we want to be” (Bey 2021, 227). The mirrored funhouse of sound and color where they waltz is “not a place you enter but a groove that enters you” (Bey 2019). We-who-are-the-universality-of-her-singularity, invited by Marquis to claim our freedom, too, assemble there “in a riotous manner” (Hartman 2018), as soldiers in the black/trans/femme(inist)’s rhythm nation, twirling through the time that she put in order. 

Works Cited

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