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Black Transfeminist Nihilism: Captive Maternals and Transmisogynoir as Fulcrum
🕑 Added 2021-12-02 19:39:55 +0000 UTC“We are left, yet again, to place our hope in a future politics that avoids history,
historicity, and the immediacy of black suffering. For this reason, the black nihilist
rejects the emancipatory impulse within certain aspects of Black critical discourse
and cultural/critical theory. In this sense, the modifier “black” in the term “black
nihilism” indicates much more than an “identity”; a blackened nihilism pushes
hermeneutic nihilism beyond the limits of its metaphysical thinking by foregrounding
the function of anti-blackness in structuring thought.” — Calvin Warren, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope
The summer 2020 slave uprising brought with it a rupture in the very epistemic foundations of liberal democracy itself. Specifically, the assumption that America has sufficiently “resolved” the so-called Negro Question was stripped bare and revealed for the farce that it is. Some, who were either on the precipice of understanding or already tapped into this reality, turned to Afro-pessimism as a guide for understanding not only why this question has failed to be resolved, but will always elude resolution within the context of the American nation. At the same time, there have been rumblings of criticism from those at the margins that Afro-pessimism not only fails to sufficiently consider their particular experiences, but has an explicitly parasitic relationship to them. Here I hope to clarify the necessity of an alternative to Afro-pessimism that is firmly grounded in deep theoretical study and developing roots-grasping science that properly addresses the weaknesses within Black feminism and Black queer theory that Afro-pessimism ostensibly rectifies as well as demonstrate what such an alternative might look like in the form of what I refer to as Black Transfeminist Nihilism.
Frank Wilderson identifies the following texts as foundational to Afro-pessimism: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America by Saidiya Hartman, his own Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and On Black Men by David Marriott. This list is interesting for two reasons. The first is that absent from this list is Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, something that stands in contradiction to the reduction of Afro-pessimism to the concept of anti-Blackness qua social death. The second is the absence of prominent Black feminist works or critical engagements with Black feminism that Wilderson has stated previously that Afro-pessimism uses as theoretical foundation. Let’s unpack these two further.
Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death is very influential within Afro-pessimism however you wouldn’t really know it unless you cared to find interest in studying the origins of the term social death. The reason for this, I would argue, stems from the fact that social death is itself a distilled culmination of the broader attempt by Patterson to conduct a transhistorical survey of slavery throughout society and in various countries/nations to come to an understanding of the essence of slavery. In this way, Patterson is not necessarily attempting to define what makes the slave a slave but rather clarify the various interplay of the dynamics between institutions that produce slaves.
I find it necessary to make this point because from this perspective, the inclusion of social death ends up being sort of one of convenience, as Slavery and Social Death was published around a time where slavery as expressed/produced in antebellum US by the Trans-Antlantic Slave Trade was being placed under the microscope for closer analysis as a result of the upheavals spawned by Black revolt, uprisings, and revolutionary movements during the 20th century. Patterson’s endeavor is much more ambitious in scope than it initially appears, as US antebellum slavery is placed within a broader context of slavery as an institution. Because this required an analysis that was transhistorical by nature, the fact that Afro-pessimism posits Black enslavement as something that defies spatio-temporality is, it would seem, misread as a direct product of and misappropriation of Patterson’s general thesis.
Indeed, Patterson himself disavows this application of social death to Black people post-emancipation and his reasons for doing so, collectively referencing the various ways in which Black people have ostensibly been folded into civil society, but this itself invokes a conflation between the distilled social death and an analysis of slavery’s transformation throughout time, an analysis which is not the central goal of Patterson’s work. In other words, while Patterson’s work is primarily an analysis of structural institutions and their production of slavery, Afro-pessimism takes this up and utilizes it as a framework to analyze the slave—specifically the Black slave—as occupying a specific structural positionality that, while defying spacio-temporality, can be expressed in various ways to accommodate the transformation of slavery through various institutional reforms. Therefore Afro-pessimists seeks to explain why the instance of Black enslavement developed in its particular form and why it appears to be the case that slavery has continued to haunt and inform not only the US, but the world itself.
This leads into the notable absence of certain prominent Black feminist works that Afro-pessimism is ostensibly constructed upon and owes so much to, according to not only Wilderson but other Afro-pessimists as well. To be clear, there are Afro-pessimists who engage thoroughly with Black feminists, both contemporary and not and while I generally agree that one shouldn’t reduce Afro-pessimism to Wilderson, it is egregious that Wilderson neglects to properly situate this debt that he claims Afro-pessimism owes Black feminism. The closest the list gets to this are Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection and Jackson’s Becoming Human (I’ll go into more depth on the latter later) which both present frameworks that have not been sufficiently synthesized to advance Afro-pessimism in the direction that it should be going.
You might notice however, the work that is most explicitly about Blackness and gender is Marriott’s On Black Men which, in an effort to examine the role that the Black “male” body plays a role in sustaining the “psychic life of culture”, in truth neglects an entire section of Black people who are assigned “male” at birth but who transgress by instead naming their womanhood. One might ask then, what is the utility of arguing that through being reduced to fungible flesh, Black people experience ungendering that paves over gender distinction and then writing about the distinct experiences of those designated “male” and consciously hand-waving those designated “male” but who transgress gender norms out of existence? Or perhaps I’m mistaken and this is actually an unconscious decision? What would it imply for there to be a group to fail to register within the consciousness of the Unthought?
I’ve initially agreed to read Afro-pessimism as an attempt to continue the interjection of Black feminism in pointing out the limitations of preceding feminism in its foundation laid upon the presumption that there is a universal “womanhood” that by necessity must be white in order for such universality to maintain any sort of coherence. What is interesting is that Sylvia Wynter’s place within this legacy is somewhat delegated to more of a footnote than anything but paradoxically it is true that her interjection is part of the bedrock of Afro-pessimism to the extent that there is an agreement with specific conclusions Wynter makes but how she reaches these conclusions is occluded to the point where her relation to Afro-pessimism is in a similar vein to that of Patterson; that is to say, Afro-pessimism isn’t so much necessarily a continuation of Wynter’s developments so much as her contributions are convenient to and find themselves within a meta-critique that is broad enough to house them.
Importantly, I think that Afro-pessimism aims in the correct general-direction that I believe is necessary to understand anti-Blackness, and thus finds itself running more or less parallel to Wynter’s intervention in Black feminism in the form of further construction of Fanon’s sociogenic principle. What ends up being the case, however, is that they operate along distinct paths that at some point necessarily diverge and this divergence stems from a refusal to question the foundational presumption of Black feminism that cissexism is merely an unfortunate side-effect of colonialism that is of little consequence to gratuitous violence against “the Black”. Afro-pessimism as a meta-critique, generally speaking, is indeed indebted to Black feminism in the sense that it finds agreement that the hold that cissexism has on Black feminism is considered sacred ground that cannot be defiled by meta-critique.
Patrice D Douglass’ At the Intersections of Assemblages: Fanon, Capécia, and the Unmaking of the Genre Subject demonstrates this bio-centric hold fairly explicitly. In a move that is unsurprising to me at this point, she prefaces this text with the statement that “violence, as a paradigm not solely conducive to a singular act, enraptures blackness prior to and in excess of subject categorization” followed by “this statement is not illusive or hypothetical in its orientation, nor does it dismiss the specificities of black life.” The mediation of this dialectic embodies the attempt of Afro-pessimism to theorize the twin sides of anti-Blackness: form and formlessness. Black gender itself becomes the medium through which these contradictions are attempted to be resolved and this is embodied within a specific form: the Black female body.
In some ways, this text can be read as a defense of the cissexist presumptions of Black feminism, something ever-so-subtly glossed over when she places the text Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar within a broader context of anti-Black theoretical labor which she characterizes as “any such attempts to theorize violence using black bodies, and particularly black women as the location to think modes of violence, the theory is marked as antiquated and counterintuitive to the subject’s theoretical progression towards liberation”. We further find this in her following analysis of the critique of Fanon’s supposed misogyny against Mayotte Capécia in the second chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Women of Color and the White Man,” where she states “Taking sexism as the center of black female oppression reduces and lessens the purview of blackness-qua-violence with respect to gender. It displaces black violence with a conception of human violence that situates all women in a human community sublated by their assumed equal potential for gendered harm”.
What undergirds Douglass’ analysis, therefore, is a tacit recognition of the way that sexism as a concept has been designed to mirror racism as a design — i.e. obfuscation through a universalism which inherently centers white womanhood in the case of the former and nonblackness in the case of the latter which therefore culminates in obscuring the particular precarity of Black women. That recognizing the fact of Blackness problematizing categorization/differentiation/classification leads to realization of the shaky foundations of the framework of sexism is a testament to its utility, however again this is in reality an extremely roundabout way of reaching this conclusion and one that is implicitly justified through a sleight-of-hand whereby Black woman and Black “female” become interchangeable. Put another way, in order to identify the direct pathway to reaching this conclusion, I ask the question that if sexism is inherently embedded with a universalized presumption of shared gender experience, why would it not be the case that the experience of Black gender that is Black womanhood being consolidated within the form of a particular sex, i.e. the Black female, is a universalized presumption of shared Black gender experience? Further, if it is true that universalized gender experience inherently obscures anti-Blackness, would it not be the case that an attempt to create a universalized Black gender experience obscures anti-Blackness?
In other words, when Douglass states that “engagement with black gender as the ultimate other is often elided or misrecognized in critiques of gender that do not aptly assess black gender as a formation all its own” one has to question the utility of implicitly collapsing the experience of cis Black gender with that of trans Black gender. Further, when she states that “universalism of gendered violence as a theoretical model to apprehend the truth of suffering for black women will always fall short of accounting for just how black womanhood disfigures understandings of the role gender and sexual violence play in the configuration of blackness” it begs the question of whether this “truth of suffering” is fundamentally an extension of the suffering of cis-gender and if so, does this not indicate an obscuring of “the role gender and sexual violence play in the configuration of blackness”?
I therefore find that this analysis functionally reproduces the very mistake that Wynter critiques in On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory. Douglass makes a crucial defense of intersectionality but one which is situated upon a gender fungibility in which certain gender performances, relations, and inhabitations are carved open and excised in order to be enjoyed by others. Referencing Cathy Cohen’s “Punk, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” she makes the familiar argument that through “black kinship structures under slavery [...] blackness is rendered the quintessential being of sexual deviance enacted through a pathologizing of slave gender performances as inherently nonnormative and thus subject to gratuitous violence.” This carries with it an intriguing flattening of Black gender performance that itself derives from the flattening effects of slavery, something Douglass later notes: “What is granted precedent over variation amongst slaves is the paradigm of submission of all slaves to the will of the master.”
The very notion of Black gender performance is itself only legible through the ontological relationship to (non)Being that Black people embody and is therefore a script, an interpretation, translated according to the language of Western epistime. From this epistime, Black, or more properly, Black African gender relation is not something borne from particular ecological inhabitations and social and labor relations that accompany them, but are mere signifiers for Black pathology. What has happened however is a misreading of the fact that—and here I will focus on Black women specifically—the gender experiences of those Black and trans encompassies a wide variety but is consolidated under trans to stand in firm contradistinction to cis which is a crucual undergird of white womanhood. I agree with Douglass that “rather than approaching blackness as a racial category, it instead should be approached as a paradigm predicated on dissociation”, however what remains unspoken—and yet still read quite plainly by those of us affected by this—is the dissociation of Black trans women from the gender performance of womanhood. What permits this is a wilful neglect of the violence of cissexism which is constituted of an ordering of racialized sexing engendered qua anti-Blackness. This is why I characterize transmisogynoir as abjection from dissociation itself.
Returning to Wynter, I recognize this trajectory through her understanding of the “reterritorialization” of Black Studies more broadly, “whose goal was to reincorporate these movements, sanitized of their original heretical dynamic, into the Liberal-universalist mainstream”. It is certainly true that Afro-pessimism takes upon her point that “Marxism as a universalism [...] based on the primacy of the issues confronting the Western working classes postulated as the globally generic working class, this in the same way as their issue, postulated as that of the struggle of labor against capital, had also logically come to be postulated as the generic human issue”. Afro-pessimism therefore as a meta-critique takes close interest in the ways in which particular forms of struggle become overdetermined and become representative of and equivalent to human struggle itself while Black people are displaced from said struggle.
Where this begins to break down is at the point of Black gender and the application of this analysis to the Black Woman. If feminism embodies an attempt to present a generic womanhood embodied in cis white women and Black feminism attempts to present a generic Black womanhood embodied in the “Black female body”, what has occurred is not a deconstruction of Western ontology or metaphysics, but merely an attempt to make them Black through the Western epistemology of sex. No amount of attempt at “meta-critique” can result in an escape from this ordering—because sex and sexual dimorphism were formulated as racialized by necessity per certain material interests to consolidate labor and social relations to serve Man—as long as such a paltry dedication to mere “deconstruction” is insisted upon.
What I am therefore interested in is clarifying that which has amounted to a hermeneutic shift whereby the collapsing of the “real fantasy” of Black gender and the metalanguage of Black language is obscured and that this shift has become the most common ground upon which Black feminism and Black queer theory have settled. Put another way, the structural relations of slavery and anti-Black cisheteropatriarchy which produce the particularity of Black gender, or the “real”, is conflated with the language with which we study the “language” which sutures and makes legible biocentric codes, modes of humanness, genres, etc. This metalanguage is what Frank Wilderson refers to as a “grammar of suffering”—taking the invisible, underlying norms, schemas, scripts, which while unspoken nonetheless forms the structure of hierarchy and oppression and making them visible and no longer unspoken.
Within Black feminism, if there is anything that could be considered the magnum opus in terms of the attempt to formulate a “grammar of suffering” with regards to Black gender it would most likely be Hortense Spillers’ own Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, aptly named because it is indeed very much so a Grammar Book for the structure that is slavery in the United States and the manner in which it produces Black gender. The work employs what could easily be mistaken for doublespeak—were there any intent to deceive—that is instead more of a doublewriting whereby Spillers is engaging in a mythmaking through an almost ever-shifting perspective. She not only writes about the “event of slavery” that distorted reality in its worldmaking as it historically existed in the “real” but also writes about the distortion of that “real” and through this, she crafts a new reality entirely. This is why the prose of the text is so notoriously difficult to parse—she is engaging in this writing not as an academic text but more of a song, in a similar way that Wynter described her own thinking as something that “never came linearly. It tends to come the way a flower blooms.”
Spillers is working through a language that is interminably bound with Western onto-epistemology in order to attempt to obliterate that very language with her own. It is from this understanding that I read Spillers’ engagement with the “Black female body” as an attempt to obliterate that very (pre)-figuration. Spillers herself appears to hint at this, where she describes a ”porosity of motives whose direction and outcome could be reversed, in fact, demolished”:
“By isolating a subject of gender here, we were interested in process and the laws by which it operated that ascribed to subjects on this stage of history their particular role and act. This ‘grammar of motives,’ the subject of my long-term project in connection with this essay, commences an investigation of gender-making in British colonial North America. It was rather clear to me from the start that ‘gender,’ like ‘race,’ is not given, although it would appear to be counterintuitive to make such a claim: after all, the ‘facts’ of human reproductive biology cannot be contravened. But the powerful additions of culture render such facts not simply descriptive, or differential, but, as we know, evaluative and inherent.”
The question becomes, if the goal is to “reverse” the direction of this “gender-making” to the point of obliteration, what is it that lies beyond this obliteration? Spillers’ audience is that of cis Black women and men and this is reaffirmed when she speaks of the capacity of diasporic African cis men to understand something “about the female that no other community had the opportunity to understand, and also vice versa.” That this equation does not include Black trans people is indicative of slavery as a singularity. However, whereas Christina Sharpe utilizes the slavery-as-singularity in her terms of anti-Blackness as total climate within weather, I use it here in its general conception within physics—as representing the point at which our theories of physics breaks down we require something new as an explanatory tool. What is important is to keep in mind that some singularities are resolvable. Theoretical explanatory tools such as the “Black female body” that have a certain utility and function begin to break down at the singularity of slavery however they become resolvable through discarding an attempt to Blacken sexism and instead analyze cissexism and intersexism and their intersection with anti-Blackness as materially grounded in the genocidal attempt to obliterate indigenous African (non)relations to gender.
Spillers points us in this direction when she identifies one of the key interjections made by Black feminism which, through making note that “the African female[...] performed tasks of hard physical labor—so much so that the quintessential ‘slave’ is not a male, but a female” and therefore “we wonder at the seeming docility of the subject, granting her a ‘feminization’ that enslavement kept at bay. Indeed, across the spate of discourse that I examined for this writing, the acts of enslavement and responses to it comprise a more or less agonistic engagement of confrontational hostilities among males.” In other words, Spillers highlights the ungendering of Black slaves such that “African females” were subjected to the same harsh labor as those “male” and asking the question of why we do not find within the historical record/archives the same presence of the former as the latter in terms of resistance and rebellion. She then states that the common explanation given is that said “females” undergo “feminization” however this introduces a contradiction whereby they are both “masculinized” and “feminized” simultaneously. This absurdity is a result of the singularity and she points to this directly via her succinct statement that “in the historic outline of dominance, the respective subject-positions of ‘female’ and ‘male’ adhere to no symbolic integrity”.
To make my own interjection however, where Black feminism stumbles is a failure to recognize the noted absence within the historical record/archives of resistance and rebellion from Black trans people, specifically Black trans women/transfems. Therefore, the positionality at play here is not merely one of sexism, but it is specifically one of cissexism and intersexism. Black trans women/transfems are not represented through the domination of “Black males” within the archives and records, we are instead categorically erased, and rather than desiring the upending of this, Black feminism and queer theory have engaged in a reterritorialization whereby our erasure has been reconfigured as overrepresenation—or as it is framed so often within queer spaces writ large, “taking up space”. Afro-pessimism, whether intentionally or unconsciously, has furthered the insistence of taking the “Black female body” as a literal, physical site that acts as the nexus for engendering the particularity of Black gender, regardless of the fact of Black trans women/transfems being delegated to the realm of the Unthought to be excavated in order to make Black gender and Black Womanhood itself legible. Therefore, what would an alternative framework look like? From here on, I will attempt to map out a skeleton of this alternative through Joy James’ Captive Maternal.
Joy James defines Captive Maternals as “self-identified female, male, trans or ungendered persons feminized and socialized into caretaking within the legacy of racism and US democracy” who “are designated for consumption in the tradition of chattel slavery; they stabilize with their labor the very social and state structures which prey upon them.” In short, Captive Maternals are those captured whose labor is exploited in service of sustaining and stabilizing structures that perpetuate their captivity. The two notable aspects of this definition are that 1) Captive Maternals do not exist necessarily as a function strictly of their gender and 2) this is facilitated through the interplay between US democracy, racism (anti-Blackness), and chattel slavery.
That the Captive Maternal is not a descriptor of an identity tied to a specific gender is something James has been careful to note numerous times. For example, a year earlier she clarified that “the whole concept of the captive maternal came about from watching people, predominantly women, but it’s not just women. I call it an ungendered function, right? It’s not an identity, so it’s not a biological mother per-se, but it’s a function of care taking and nurturing of reconstituting or stabilizing your community.” What I would like to question however is the way that in relation to the Black Matrix, what is both spoken and unspoken prioritizes some above others such that the attempt to present a structural positionality can in turn express itself as an identity.
According to James, the Black Matrix is spawned from Womb Theory. Womb Theory is not directly defined by James, however in short it is a descriptor for the nexus of Western theory concerning democracy and slavery that also encompasses it which culminates as “the historical context that married democracy with slavery.” Because the preeminent subjects of Womb Theory are democracy and slavery, it (unintentionally) engenders the Black Matrix. Again, the Black Matrix is not strictly defined, however from the definition of the word “matrix” as per Merriam-Webster as “something (such as a situation or a set of conditions) in which something else develops or forms”, putting this together with the concept of the “womb” and we might envision the Black Matrix as describing the particular environment within which (anti)Blackness, as mediated by the theoretical collapsing of democracy and slavery, develops and is nurtured. This appears to reaffirm slavery as world-founding and offers a potential explanation as to what distinguishes (but not divorces) contemporary anti-Blackness from the anti-Blackness of antiquity via Western democracy.
While I use “Western democracy” here, James presents democracy itself as the problem, with its Western variant merely exposing democracy itself as “a boundary defining freedom through captivity”. It is in this way that Womb Theory creates that which carries the potential to destroy it, embodied in the Black Matrix. James identifies Black feminism as an expression of this Black Matrix and thus those who theorize within it as Captive Maternals. Womb Theory is at constant war with these Captive Maternals, as they regularly expose the “borders of democracy” which challenges the very core concepts of democracy. However because Womb Theory emerges from the presumption that “free (white) males of property were presumed to inherit a unique capacity for contemplating the universal, the timeless, and the sublime”, Black feminism is read as being fundamenally incapable of conceiving of the whole, i.e. a liberatory framework for the betterment of all.
Consequently, these Captive Maternals must make endless concessions, must orient their theoretical labor around the interests of Man which is supposedly universal and all-encompassing, and represents the generic interests of the human. Black feminism thus undergoes reterritorialization and juggles “theorizing for liberation” and “theorizing for domination”. This endless feedback loop “that builds social platforms also enables production and performance.” It is from this, Joy James conceives of the Black Matrix as “a fulcrum to leverage power against predatory democracies” and that “atop that fulcrum sits a spectrum whose bandwidth reflects diverse political ideologies.” James asks that we imagine this spectrum as a plank atop the fulcrum (like a see-saw, for example) and upon that plank lies the political actors, who, using their “weight”, determine “who is elevated to the highest position and who scrunches their knees up with their bottom on the ground.” Therefore this acts in a similar fashion to a physical lever system, whereby the amount of force required to move an object is altered through its relation to the fulcrum. In other words, the Black Matrix as fulcrum can be utilized to leverage, and Captive Maternals through their relation to the Black Matrix occupy a unique position with the capability to employ this to the greatest degree.
If the Black Matrix acts as fulcrum that can be leveraged by the Captive Maternal to dismantle power structures, it follows then that should there be an overdetermined subject that is said to embody this positioning, there would be ramifications for the framework’s application because of the broader trend of reterritorialization and the function of the Captive Maternal itself. Recall the earlier point that Black feminism per Western epistime is incapable of generating broadly applicable frameworks at a fundamental level.
This sentiment that Black feminism is incapable of serving the interests of “all” in reality is an expression of Black feminism’s challenge to the foundations of Man’s religion/science/onto-epistemology, which are all presumed to be neutral, objective, and universal. As a result, this sentiment is also intimately bound with Black people being positioned as the “problem child” within a multiracial coalition. Or, as Jared Sexton put it in Amalgamation Schemes: “Blacks are thus depicted in the multiracial imagination as a conglomerate anachronism, perpetuating disreputable traits of antebellum slave society and presenting a foremost obstacle to the progress of liberal society today”. This “liberal progress”, is sustained utilizing Black suffering as its lifeblood. The narrative, mythos, call it whatever you like, of American Progresss utilizes slavery as its measuring stick— no matter how much Black (non)being might be in crisis, no matter how many Black people are murdered, mutilated, imprisoned, etc. at least we aren’t slaves anymore, so the story goes.
What has become clear to me however is that Black feminism has its own narrative of Progress as well. Its divergence from (white) feminism being grounded in questioning the latter’s utility with regards to Black gender carries with it the presumption that the Black trans* gender question is resolved. This theoretical void that was not recognized as such was attempted to be filled by Queer Theory, which has now been met with Black Queer Theory. At every stage, the unspoken “development” occurs through a critique of various extensions and additives of “all the women are white, all the Blacks are men”. Black feminism and Black queer theory have employed intersectionality to show that it’s not enough to critique that maxim through pointing to Black Women, but one must also point to Black Women who are poor, not straight, fat, etc. However, recall that Black feminism operates upon the collapsing of the overrepresentation of “Black males” and the overrepresentation of cis Black men. Therefore, if Black feminism emerges from a critique of the maxim “ all the women are white, all the Blacks are men,” then Black trans*feminism emerges from a critique of the maxim “all the women are white, all the Blacks are men, all the Black Women are cis.” James herself makes an important insight when referencing Aristotle’s responsibility in providing much of the grounding that would nurture the creation of Western Womb Theory that is useful to trace my argument:
“Aristotle’s three-part construct is as follows: theorist is free male-as-human; non-theorist is slave-as-antihuman; and defective-theorist is nonslave female-as-semi-human. The ‘natural order’ ignores that (1) action is part of theorizing—the ‘slave’ is created by an act of enslaving (not by biology or ontology); (2) ungendering the slave veils power differentials among the enslaved. “Black” often means ‘black males’; ‘black females’ often refers to cisgendered females; violence disproportionately targets black transgendered women and girls.”
This is a succinct description of the presumptions that culminate into the Western epistime that is Womb Theory. It also summarizes my above line of thinking, whereby “Black” becomes “Black male” and “Black [woman] female” becomes “Black cis [woman] female”. From this, we can glean that Black trans women/transfems are made into Captive Maternals and occluded as Captive Maternals, all the while facing disproportionate amounts of violence specifically as Captive Maternals who are transmisogynoir-affected (TMA). Most crucially however is that James implicitly ties this structural abjection to Womb Theory. In other words, we can translate Wynter’s conception of the reterritorialization of (Black) feminism as being the process whereby potentially radical Black feminisms are integrated into Womb Theory utilizing the captive bodies, flesh, and labor of Black trans women/transfems.
“The theft of time, the trauma of rape and enslavement, the resulting incapacitations of body and mind, the debilitation of spirit—all are appended to predatory theory’s hierarchies and contested by liberatory theory’s battle to call forth theory that does not reduce the experiences of captive maternals to raw resources mined for capital, or narratives that become theory only after they are translated into Western abstract logic. Assertions that captive maternals are incapable of producing theory about reality that
their labor cocreated solidify the dominant role of the captor as structure, boss, interpreter, and warden. Captors in their own race for dominance reengineer theorizing to mask the traumas of captive maternals, and the theft of their time and labor. Predatory ‘theorizing’ renders the captive an ‘edible,’ a ‘delectable negro[/negress]’ that black queer theorist Vincent Woodard describes as cannibalized by the benevolent/malevolent master/mistress.”
Again, Captive Maternals are exploited in ways that maintain the stability of the structures, institutions, and systems that exploit them. Thus I ask, within the realm of the academy, the purported center of theoretical production, are those who are theorizing about the positionality of Black trans women/transfems predominantly Black trans women/transfems? We are not. Is it the case that the overwhelmingly cis Black feminists theorizing about our trauma, our deaths, our sexual violation, and the policing of our bodies go beyond us being excavated and cannibalized and reduce violence against us? Contrary to the amount of times “center Black trans women” may escape from their mouths and evident by only ever-increasing violence against us interpersonally and via the State and the Law, it is not. Do these theoretical productions from cis Black feminists exceedingly rely upon the translation of our structural positioning into the logic of Western abstraction? Given that the highest degree of “representation” we receive is explicitly under the grouping of “Black males” and having our womanhood occluded because it serves as a fundamental transgression to Womb Theory, I would rather confidently say that they do.
I therefore turn to Calvin Warren’s Black Nihilism in part because Joy James’ reorientation of democracy as an instrument of preserving slavery through becoming interminably bound with it is complementary with Warren’s own notation that “the American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule
for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the
Political without black suffering.” But also, Warren and James find common ground in a “politics of refusal” that in fact serves as a non-politic as anti-politic—or as Warren puts it, a “political apostasy”.
Further, Warren identifies the focus of the Black Nihilist as “the relationship between the spiritual concept of hope and its use as a political instrument.” This is because “the critical questioning of the spiritual is that it often appropriates spiritual concepts and then, insidiously, translates them into the ‘scientific’ or the knowable, as a way to both capitalize on the mystic power of the spiritual and to preserve the spiritual under the guise of ‘enlightened understanding.” Thus, for Warren and therefore the Black Nihilist, the danger of spiritual hope is not it as such but that it is violently appropriated by and utilized to sustain the Political. It is forcibly seized and transmogrified into Political Hope. However hope need not be understood in such strict terms, for we find this process of the translation of the spiritual into the “scientific” and “objective” and carried along with it is a hope in certain institutions, structures, onto-epistemology, etc. that is embodied in a racialized sexual dimorphism which culminates in transmisogynoir.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson describes this within Becoming Human:
“[S]cience and philosophy share many characteristics with literature and visual art despite the espoused objectivity and procedural integrity of scientific and philosophical discourses. In debates concerning the specificity of human identity with respect to ‘the animal,’ science and philosophy both possess foundational and recursive investments in figurative, and arguably literary, narratives that conceptualize blackness as trope, metaphor, symbol, and a kind of fiction. Instead of thinking of philosophy and science as separate and unrelated sites of knowledge production, my study reveals their historical entanglement and shared assumptive logic with regard to blackness.”
Further, in relation to gender particularly:
“Gendered and sexual discourses on ‘the African’ are inextricable from those pertaining to reason, historicity, and civilization, as purported observations of gender and sexuality were frequently used to provide ‘evidence’ of the inherent abject quality of black people’s human animality from the earliest days of the invention of ‘the human.’ Christian Europe had already privileged gender and sexuality as indicators of ‘civilization,’ and visual observation, namely culturally situated perspective, had not emerged as an epistemological problem for thought.”
Jackson’s interjection is a much welcome one, and I read it as one that runs not along the same path as Afro-pessimism, but in parallel to it. Specifically, what she does is note the weakness of Black feminism and queer theory in properly analyzing and situating the violent act of racialized sexing upon African bodies and therefore she makes careful note to emphasize the particularities of a Black gendered experience from this. Thus, she attempts to avoid reproducing the flattening of Black gendered experience and calls for resolving the issues of limited scope within Black feminism and queer theory and presents the framework of ontological plasticity to do so. Plasticity for Jackson is defined as “a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter”. Jackson contrasts this with attempts from Western philosophy to self-critique through characterizing the source of anti-Blackness as merely a strict “dehumanization”. For Jackson, the violence of anti-Blackness is not merely found in being denied humanity, but being subjected to ontological malleability that renders Black flesh and (non)being as a plaything that can produce Blackness as “sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially ‘everything and nothing’ at the register of ontology.”
Jackson does not, in my mind, successfully escape the trap of Black feminism and queer theory which have been self-imposed thus far. She reaffirms the “Black female body” as being the nexus of racialized sexualization, specifically deeming it “paradigmatically the human’s limit case”. In other words, the “Black female body” represents the boundary of the human. The problem with this is that this also serves as the limit of theoretical intrigue. Jackson observes as I have elsewhere that the hierarchical racialization of sexual distinction/differiation functionally renders Black women as both an otherized gender and sex and yet in her venture to argue that integration within liberal/Western humanistic conceptions of being, the focus is not on that which lies beyond the limit/boundary that she identifies as the “Black female body”. What lies beyond the determined limit of the human—that which is refused a name both in the Western epistemological order and that which seeks to critique it—are those Black and trans*.
I therefore supplement Jackson’s ontological plasticity with Warren’s onticide. Warren conceives of onticide as being an act of ontological murder, whereby the Black is subjected to a state of nonbeing which permits or allows for the engendering of Being for the human. However just as physical death/murder implies a preceding physical life, ontological death/murder implies an ontological “life”. Where Warren diverges from previous attempts to conceptualize anti-Blackness and therefore provides the most potential for those Black and trans* is that he identifies onticide as something that is done to those who are not merely Black. Specifically, the site of onticide is “the distinction between African existence and black [non]being”. Thus, onticide is the point at which Western metaphysics and ontology murders African existance at the level of being such that African modes of living through relations of selves, labor, and environmental inhabitation are obliterated. This murder is then accompanied by a zombification whereby, per Spillers, we become “living laboratories” and sites of experimentation via ontological plasticity.
This synthesis permits us to no longer take for granted the established boundary of the human as formulated per the whims of Man’s religion, Man’s science, and Man’s mode of being. The Afro-pessimists who have insisted that the analytical tools employed to combat anti-Blackness are infused with anti-Blackness themselves certainly have a strong case, however the implications from certain theorists that this will always remain the case are spurious. These implications are sustained by a set of specific interests aligned with cisheteropatriarchy. This is not to repeat the tired characterization of Afro-pessimism as consisting of merely cishet men; rather, this is to point out that the discursive spaces within which these discussions and theorizations often occur are structured in such a way where imagination outside of Western abstraction of gender is rendered nigh-impossible and that not only is there no incentive for those who are not Black trans women/transfems (i.e. those transmisogynoir-exempt) to escape this, but that there is also an active disincentive against this.
Currently, there are theorizations of transmisogynoir as being a particular positionality through which class, race, and gender is lived. This is not done in the academy, which self-justifies displacing Black trans women/transfems to the realm of the Unthought. We are overwhelmingly lumpenized and the relationship we have to the academy is one which is demystified by the Captive Maternal. In Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition, Joy James described Angela Davis’ relationship with George Jackson and how with the latter’s assassination, Davis repurposed her 1971 article The Role of the Black Woman in a Community of Slaves from “an analysis of how Black women fought alongside Black men in family/community for freedom” to “a Black feminist manifesto, castigating the Moynihan report on ‘black matriarchy’ and highlighting the centrality and indispensability of Black feminist leadership.” Jackson’s labor, both as a grassroots intellectual and militant, instigated both his death and the possibility for Davis’ notoriety within the academy and allowed the latter’s full integration such that “Jackson maintained from the site of prison that the US was proto-fascist; from the site of the university, Davis asserted it was not.” James all but states that George Jackson was not only a Captive Maternal, but was specifically Davis’ Captive Maternal. From this, I state firmly that Black trans women/transfems are not only Captive Maternals, but are the Captive Maternals of Black feminism and queer theory. Further, Black feminism and queer theory are sustained through the airbrushing of transmisogynoir for the sake of academia.
Black feminism and queer theory are stabilized by transmisognyoir precisely because racialized cissexism and intersexism must be rearticulated as a “loss” that is both embodied principally within and affecting in the first and foremost the “Black female body”. This only obtains any sort of coherence through an analysis which argues that those European travelers and anthropologists who arrived in Africa merely “observed” the “fact” of sexual dimorphism and consequentiallly ascribed a lower form of “female” onto Blackened bodies. What is absent from this narrative, or at the very least glossed over, are the preexisting gender (non)formations and (non)relations that existed within Africa that were decimated and then violently folded into Western episteme. In other words, those embodying a womanhood unrecognizable and incoherent to Western ontology and metaphysics being subject to onticide as a result are not only not recognized as its victims prior to cisgender Black women, they are not recognized as victims at all.
This is supplemented through a misunderstanding of trans* itself. The persistence of the “Wrong Body” theory of trans* emerges from a fundamental need and desire, both conscious and unconscious, for womanhood to not be expansive. In other words, rather than womanhood being seen as an expansive and vast terrain and the womanhood of those we now refer to as “cis” encompassing merely one region, those who are not cis are merely those “trapped” within “broken” bodies who seek to approximate cis womanhood. Cis Black feminists and queer theorists exploit the fact that trans* is a recent configuration to occlude relations that are not cis. Because a framework which sufficiencently names the violence against those relations would necessarily require toppling cis womanhood from its pedestal, the “Black female body” serves as its last refuge and Black gender-based violence must be retroactively read through it. The body is reaffirmed as flesh and from this Womb Theory is reified.
I am therefore a nihilist about the “hope” that Black feminism and queer theory presents to those like me and I find myself returning to Joy James’ conclusion that “theorizing through a fulcrum can unseat Womb Theory, by allowing the Captive Maternal to leave the seesaw.” The Black Matrix as fulcrum is sustained with transmisogynoir as its foundation, granting legibility to the various signifiers which are theorized as Black(ened) gender and sexuality. Those Black TMA Captive Maternals who are the “least recognized” and yet mined as raw materials to make conceiving of Blackness as existing in excess of Western metaphysical ordering of gender must abandon the lever system and chip away at the fulcrum in order to topple it altogether. As James suggests, we can do this through the development of various maroon philosophies which enable us to escape and avoid capture through gender fugitivity. One such example is Nsambu Za Suekama’s gender-as-maroonage, embodied through the act of “flight”, a reference to “how Toni Morrison said that the ‘people could fly’ stories were a ‘psychological trick’ that enslaved folk used whenever they were asked about their spirituality. It was a symbol for the runaways.” For her, flight also reconnects us to our legacy as spiritual rootworkers while also bringing it forward into a political rootgrasping. “We must transform our ecogeny, by transforming the mode of material provisioning through transforming the mode of production, which is a question of class.“
My Black trans*feminism rejects Black trans* people being enjoyed as (re)sources for analogy. It rejects the faulty “centering” of us while we are delegated conceptually to the periphery. It specifically names those Black slaves and maroons who were fixed into the positionality of trans* because they were designated as “male” and their living as women was fundamentally transgressive as being the true stress points for Western ontology and metaphysics. It recognizes that an obsession with Black gender, sexuality, and reproduction requires the obliteration of Black trans* women as women. It recognizes that genital fantasies form a double-bind whereby Black trans* women are utilized as Black depravity incarnate because the Black phallus and the Black penis in conjunction with womanhood represents not only the sexual threat but also the othering of Black reproduction.
My Black trans*feminist Nihilism therefore embraces the call from Spillers to “claim the monstrosity” but recognizes that those deemed to embody the form of monstrosity the most are Black trans women/transfems. Thus, it recognizes that we are in truth reclaiming the monstrosity, both from Womb Theory but also from Black feminists and queer theorists who deride us for “taking up space”. It recognizes that the absurdity, the incommunicability, of (anti)Blackness exists as such in no small part because preceding theorization would prefer proximity to Western abstraction rather than reckon with transmisogynoir-as-fulcrum. It thus amends Barbara Smith’s statement “if Black women
were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” and clarifies that if Black trans* women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.
