This week, I'm interested especially in what I'm calling
"theoretical methodology" (although maybe that's just a fancy way to
point us to theoretical intervention or framework?): how do our theoretical investments/interlocutors/interventions come to
bear on the people or objects we think with or about?
One major way I thought about Black on Both Sides was as a kind of extended think-through of
Hortense Spillers' work, applying it where it should absolutely should be/should have already
been applied, but hadn't quite been yet. That is, it elaborates Spillers' work—especially
her argument that captivity "ungenders" the body—in a sustained way
for trans and black studies. In one of my favorite blog
posts about teaching theory, Kyla Tompkins (who shows up briefly in
Snorton's work on p66) succinctly describes the tension surrounding Spillers'
"Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe":
"[D]oes it matter that Spillers
wrote 'Mama’s Baby' three years before Butler’s Gender
Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity was published? Yes, it matters very much. What is there to say about
the fact that Spillers is mentioned only once, in a footnote, in Butler’s
groundbreaking book? What is produced by the force of that exclusion? What if we rewrite Butler’s theory from
within the work that Spillers does to re-narrate gender as an always-already
raced American grammar book. What other ideas about matter, performativity,
abjection and regulatory normativity might be produced? (Answer: read
Spiller’s essay, in which almost the entire gist of critical theory –
particularly on race and sexuality – for the next thirty years is
predicted.)" (Emphasis mine.)
Another answer is what we get in Black on Both Sides, a genealogy of
gender "fungibility" that emerges from blackness such that black and
trans become coeval. (Snorton, pg 7: "What pasts have been submerged and
discarded to solidify—or, more precisely, indemnify—a set of procedures that
would render blackness and transness as distinct categories of social
valuation? Relatedly, what insights are yielded in a reading of 'black' and 'trans'
that do not regard these as social markers that are manifestly
transparent?") One synopsis of Snorton's work might say that the
afterlives of captivity and slavery's undegendering of enslaved people render
blackness as an already-trans way of being (or, that gender is stabilized by
blackness and so trans is also produced out of blackness)—on page 68, Snorton
calls this "the impossibility of normative gender and sexual reciprocity
under captivity." (for those of you wanting more about the root of this,
you might look at chapter one, although be warned it has an explicit rendition
of J. Marion Sim's gynecological experiments.)
This is both extremely convincing to me
but also raises an interesting place to extend or put pressure on this link for
the contemporary moment: Snorton notes in the introduction a kind of resistance
to "trans" as a stable identity category, which on the one hand I
agree with—but on the other hand, naming blackness as an impossible
location for gender normativity risks in its uptake effacing that there are
material differences between the lives of cis and trans black people,
too, even if those are different categories from cis and trans people of
different races. (And, coming off of Alvarado, thinking through where
indigneity or Latinidad might fit could be productive, too.) (Side note: for those wanting more of Snorton's engagement with trans individuals in the archive, look at chapter 4!)
This also might be a good moment to work through some
distinctions or shared axes between performance, passing, and being, especially
vis-a-vis the abject, and especially given Alvarado's
attention to performance art. On 70 Snorton notes that as passing "became a term
to describe performing something one is not, it trafficked a way of thinking
about identity not only in terms of real versus artificial but also, and
perhaps always, as proximal and performative...passing is figuratively
represented by moving up or down hierarchized identificatory formations." But
Snorton is also re-thinking passing by positing "fungibility" such
that a "passing performance" (McMillan's term when thinking about the Crafts) is not a "put-on" but an alternate mode of being. There might be some correlation between
Snorton's "passing down" and the abject (maybe!). This feels pressing
for this work because Snorton's idea maybe holds or doesn't for us in the way
it re-orients (or doesn't) our understanding of the case studies that have been conventionally scripted with temporal bounds or specific "goals"
for those performances (i.e. the Crafts, Harriett Jacobs).
In response to both the way that Snorton prompts us to think of passing in alternative ways and your helpful articulation of the way that passing moves across that text in relation to the other key terms that we get from the texts we've read thus far this semester, I wanted to just add another thought from Ashon Crawley's Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Although Crawley does not engage with passing and his subject matter is Black Pentecostal aesthetic practice and epistemological possibility, I think that his discussion of instrumentality is interesting in relation to Snorton's argument, which you mention, about passing as "an alternate mode of being." In reference to the Black Pentecostals instrumentalization of the body through and towards ecstatic practice, Crawley writes, "To desire to be made instrument, to desire use for meditative, sacred practice as a means of connecting with others, illustrates will and volition that emerges from a different epistemology, a Blackpentecostal epistemology, a choreosonic form and forum" (176). I'm wondering if, similarly, thinking of passing in Snorton's terms can help us to see how the ontology that might emerge from these "passing performances" instrumentalizes the body by subverting Western racial essentialist frameworks as well as the concept of self-determination--which Crawley also talks about in Black Pentecostal Breath--that is problematically associated with Western Enlightenment thought. I think including the concept of instrumentalization in our conversations is also really relevant to the concept of afro-alienation and objecthood which we've discussed earlier. This is more of a side note, but I want to look more into Adrian Piper's work because I remember reading that she was not necessarily always immediately read as a black woman in terms of appearance, so I'm wondering if her work could be an interesting place to think about these questions of racial legibility, visuality, passing, and instrumentalization of the body towards an objecthood that plays with alienation and reaches out towards alternative ontological positions.
ReplyDeleteI encountered Snorton’s text in a similar way to you, as an extended rumination on Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” Coming from that very specific reading experience, I am interested in your questions of applying Alavarado and the abject to the notion of passing and being. Part of this interest stems from a (perhaps) discomfort with applying Spillers’ historically specific notion of ungendering to a Latinidad subject. But I also recognize that that is not necessarily what is you or Snorton’s text is asking or pushing a reader to do. As Snorton extends Spillers’ ungendering into fungibility and passing (which is allowed in some ways by the previous ungendering), perhaps a space opens up to consider the abject as performance on a spectrum of passing which you mention briefly in your response. Snorton writes “[a]s passing is most commonly understood, one ascends into privilege, being, and distinction, or, as Jacobs’s blackening suggests, into the converse of those things, which is to say, into fungibility, thingness, and the interchangeable.” (70). I’m reminded here of Alvarado’s opening example in her text of the Dream 9 who “passed” (could we say?) or performed as graduates. To which Alvarado suggest perhaps leaning into the abject, the fear of the Latinidad anchor baby instead of the American “assimilative potential” of the college graduate and future civic contributor (Alvarado 3). With this in mind, I want to posit that perhaps the abject is on one spectrum of “passing” and performance that taps into different political means of survival or commentary. As Snorton notes, passing can constitute a delve into darkness or an ascent into privilege. I also wonder to what extent the Mexican/US border might operate as a place of undoing similar to Jacobs’s Snaky Swamp. Though I don’t have as much experience in this area, I know there are people in the class who might be able to better flesh out this connection or tear it apart.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it does seem that all of this still relies on passing as a mode of “putting on” in some ways at a surface level. To think about alternate modes of being, perhaps it is important that abjection is specifically a passing down instead of a passing up, offering a different understanding of being and operating within the world.
I am thinking a lot about your inquiry that “naming blackness as an impossible location for gender normativity risks in its uptake effacing that there are material differences between the lives of cis and trans black people”. In my experience, it seems that both trans and queer within academic discourse increasingly operate outside LGBTQ-lived experience or solely talking about these lives and push towards ways that transness and queerness can help dismantle existing binarisms, gendered structures, and critique normative forms of arriving at “identity”. I am not necessarily opposed to this, and like Snorton’s work, I think texts like Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic” are important contributions to an archive that is not limited to seeing queerness and transness in terms of identity, specially because stable notions of queerness and transness don’t exist outside of white supremacy and erasing marginal trans and queer experiences.
ReplyDeleteYet, I too wonder about the dangers of this collapse at a time when black trans women are murdered specifically because they exist at intersections of blackness and transness. Namely, what does anti-trans violence look like when the body is not ungendered, but rather embodies a gender that does not align with cisnormative expectations? Is violence that comes from ungendering the body the same as the one that occurs when the body is gendered a particular way? I am thinking about these things because a lot of the violences trans people experience involve very intentional acts of hyper-gender enforcement that operate differently from a form of undoing. This is especially true of violence against black trans women, if we think about the fact that an insistence on maleness, as opposed to nothingness, often drives trans-panic defenses, along with the act of deadnaming.
Sam,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate the thoughtfulness and reach of your reflections in this post, both in terms of 1) the value, risks, and limitations of thinking blackness and transness together as well as in relation to 2) //how// and //with whom// we theorize (and the consequences of those framings and methodologies). In connection to the latter, I’ve been thinking about the generally fixing or stabilizing character of theory and the gesture with which Snorton pushes back against it in his introduction when he anticipates that some readers might consider his book not “exhaustive or fully explanatory,” and justifies his approach as “a scholarly gambit to replace certain aspects of what is commonly regarded as a methodological rigor with //a political and ethical imperative to the right to opacity//” (11, emphasis mine). Snorton situates his project “in the midst of ongoing black and trans death and against the backdrop of the //rapid institutionalization of trans studies//” (7 emphasis mine), which, to me, emphasizes even more the fact that his project is both thematic (that is, to explore the co-configuration of transness and blackness) and structural/methodological (rehearsing transitivity and transversality in his writing). I’d be curious to discuss what are some ways in which everyone sees (if they do!) other authors read in this class or elsewhere exercising their “right to opacity” in academia and what we think are this practice's stakes and what it might bring to the table.