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Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture

Johanna Burton, series editor ‘j” Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century,

edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter

Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good,

edited by Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Wilisdon DOORTrap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility,edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton TRANS CULTURAL PRODUCTiON AND THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY

EDITED BY REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY,

AND JOHANNA BURTON

The MIT Press / Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England

CONTENTS

ix SERIES PREFACE

JOHANNA BURTON

xi DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

LISA PHILLIPS

xv KNOWN UNKNOWNS:

AN INTRODUCTION TO TRAP DOOR

REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY,

AND JOHANNA BURTON

1 The Labor of Werqing It:

The Performance and Protest Strategies of Sir Lady Java

TREVA ELLISON

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or

mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)

without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Chaparral and PP Din by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the

United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-03660-3

23 Cautious Living: Black Trans Women and the Politics of Documentation MISS MAJOR GRIFFIN-GRACy AND CECE MCDONALD

IN CONVERSATION WITH TDSHIO MERONEK

39 Existing in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans Visibility CHE GOSSETT AND JULIANA HUXTABLE IN CONVERSATION

57 Trans History in a Moment of Danger: Organizing Within and Beyond “Visibility” in the l970s ABRAM J. LEWIS

91 Out of Obscurity: Trans Resistance, 1969—2016 GRACE DUNHAM

121 Introducing the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art CHRIS E. VARGAS

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

135 One from the Vaults: 349 Canonical Undoings:

Gossip, Access, and Trans History—Telling Notes on Trans Art and Archives

MORGAN M. PAGE STAMATINA GREGORY AND JEANNE VACCARO

147 Everywhere Archives: 363 Contemporary Art and Critical Transgender

Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet Infrastructures

MEL Y. CHEN JEANNINE TANG

161 Dark Shimmers:

The Rhythm of Necropolitical Affect in Digital Media 393 PUBLICATION HISTORY MICHA CARDENAS 395 CONTRIBUTORS

183 Blackness and the Trouble of Trans Visibility 403 BOARD OF TRUSTEES

CHE GOSSETT 405 INDEX

191 Representation and Its Limits

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS: LEXI ADSIT,

SYDNEY FREELAND, ROBERT HAMBLIN,

AND GEO WYETH; MODERATOR: TAVIA NYONGO

201 The Last Extremists?

HEATHER LOVE

221 An Affinity of Hammers

SARA AHMED

235 The Guild of the Brave Poor Things

PARK MCARTHUR AND CONSTANTINA ZAVITSANOS

255 Spiderwomen EVA HAYWARD

281 Proximity: On the Work of Mark Aguhar

ROY PEREZ

293 Dynamic Static

NICOLE ARCHER

321 Models of Futurity

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS: KAI LUMUMBA BARROW,

YVE LARIS COHEN, AND KALANIOPUA YOUNG;

MODERATOR: DEAN SPADE

339 All Terror, All Beauty

WU TSANG AND FRED MOTEN IN CONVERSATION

vi I CONTENT S CONTENTS ,,

SERIES PREFACE

Between 1984 and 2004, the New Museum produced six anthologies under the series title “Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art.” Initiating these books was ArtAfter Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), a volume that, more than thirty years after its appearance, continues to stand as a model for what it looks like to consider and reflect upon a historical moment even as it unfolds. Indeed, the pivotal nature of that book, and those that followed, evidenced a new model for scholarship within the purview of a contemporary art museum. Taking the art sphere (and its attendant discourses) as a nodal point by which to investigate larger culture, ArtAfter Modernism gave shape and visibility to an arena of debate. The broad questions being considered—Were modernism’s effects truly waning? What movements or reorientations were replacing its foundation?— found provocative, pointed answers in wide-ranging texts by equally wide-ranging authors. In today’s much-changed context, the seminal arguments that appear in ArtAfter Modernism are often discussed as having produced their own foundation, now itself in the process of being productively overturned.

Our decision to reinvigorate the series in the year 2015, under the new rubric “Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture,” came out of discussions with museum and academic colleagues, with students, and with artists, all of whom expressed a hunger for platforms that equally prioritize debate and experimentation. Rather than focusing on topics around which there is already broad consensus, these books aim to identify and rigorously explore questions so salient and current that, in some cases, they are still unnamed, their contours in the process of being assumed. To that end, the series aims less to offer democratic surveys of themes under consideration and rather hopes to stage arguments and offer conflicting, even contrasting, viewpoints around them.

The role of art has substantially, perhaps fundamentally, shifted in the last several decades. What has not changed, however, is its ability to channel,

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magnify, and even alter the ways we approach the world around us. The increasing

speed and density of cultural information ironically create an even greater need

for the kind of rigorous and sustained engagement that the Critical Anthologies

volumes set forward as their ultimate priority. These books serve to underscore

the importance of intellectual endeavors as political and ideological acts. We hope

they will become, like their predecessors, invaluable documents of our histories as

we come to make them.

Johanna Burton, Series Editor

Keith Haring Director and Curator ofEducation and Public Engagement

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

Questions of identity have always had a place in art. One can scarcely think of a time or an instance in which the role of subjectivity has not, overtly or inadver tently, been raised by an object created by one person and looked at by another. Yet subjectivity as a topic unto itself has a shorter history, one that coincides, not incidentally, with a larger cultural awareness of the roles race, gender, sexuality, and class play in social life and the formation of identity. Contemporary art’s inter sections with feminism, postcolonial theory, Marxist thought, and institutional critique demonstrate that artists have been questioning the structures in which they live, work, and make their art for decades.

The effects of such intersections were—and continue to be—felt within art institutions, too. In some cases, museums battened down the hatches, insisting even more strongly on historical canons that mostly excluded artists who were not white and male. But many more institutions actively questioned histories that were taken for granted, and more than a few institutions opened their doors specifically to facilitate discussions around these and other emerging dia logues. The New Museum was one such institution, established in 1977 to provide, as founder Marcia Tucker put it, “a forum for dialogue, controversy, and visual provocation—a place where artists, public, and professionals of all kinds can once again become engaged in contemporary art in an active and meaningful way.”1

Over its now forty-year history, the New Museum has regularly presented exhibitions that question subject positions and the politics of identity, such as “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality” (1984—85), “HOMO VIDEO: Where We Are Now” (1986—87), and “Bad Girls” (1994), among many others; and books like Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (1990) and Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1998), both of which are volumes from the earlier incarnation of our Critical Anthologies

xI SERIES PREFACE

series. The New Museum’s commitment to providing time and space for artists to

consider their own and others’ place in art and the world is formidable. Trap Door:

Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility continues this tradition and

feels absolutely vital for this moment.

Trap Door provides a platform for emerging thinking and theories around

transgender cultural production. As the editors point out in their introduction,

the representation of queer and trans bodies is at an all-time high, in both art

and popular culture, manifesting what seems to be a great curiosity about gen

der nonconforming subjects and an insatiable hunger for images of transgender

bodies. Yet violence against trans people, particularly people of color, is also at

an all-time high, showing how starkly such “interest” plays out.

Trap Door examines the paradox of this moment: seeming embrace paired

with violent rejection. Debates around trans representation take on a special

urgency in the current political climate, with its escalating violence, daily roll

back of rights, and increasing discrimination. The book’s contributors delve into

issues as wide-ranging (and yet ultimately connected) as trans archives, main-

streaming, beauty, performativity, technology, fashion, craft aesthetics, collectiv

ity, police brutality, and chosen family. By considering these matters, the volume

inherently asks that institutions—art museums among them—consider their

own roles and responsibilities in the context of new cultural constellations, re

flections, and terminologies. Moreover, Trap Door hopes to ignite a conversation

beyond trans culture per se, insisting that while these debates and dialogues are,

of course, specific, they nevertheless have great relevance for all readers invested

in the ethics of visual culture. The publication of this anthology marks the third in our revival of a series

that was active between 1984 and 2004, during which time six seminal volumes

were coproduced by the New Museum and the MIT Press. The partnership

marks a shared commitment to the field of contemporary art as a primary plat

form for scholarship, intellectual exchange, and the evolution of new ideas. The

first volume to appear under this reignited collaboration was Mass Effect: Art

and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (2015), edited by Lauren Cornell

and Ed Halter, which offered a singular meditation on how art has responded

to technology since 2000. The second volume was Public Servants: Art and the

Crisis of the Common Good (2016), edited by Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson,

and Dominic Willsdon; that book explored art’s evolving relationship to activ

ism and the contemporary public sphere. We expect that future volumes, like

this one, will similarly examine and further dialogues around the most pressing

questions of our time as they emerge both in art and in culture at large.

For his belief in the need for this series and his commitment to it, our sincere thanks go to Roger Conover, Executive Editor at the MIT Press. Roger helped steer the first series of books we produced together, and we so value his part nership both then and now. We are also enormously grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and its President, Earl Lewis, and Executive Vice President for Programs and Research, Mariët Westermann, for their generous support of these books and the crucial related research around them. Further support for this publication was provided by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and the New Museum Council for Artists Research and Residencies.

Johanna Burton, Keith Raring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, is the series editor for our relaunched Critical Anthologies as well as one of the coeditors of this volume. Her initiative, intelligence, and dedica tion in conceiving the structure for these books and overseeing every aspect of their production are fundamental to their realization.

My deepest thanks go to Johanna, as well as to activist, writer, and film maker Reina Gossett and to Eric A. Stanley, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside—the three coeditors of this truly groundbreaking volume. As the editors note in their introduction, central to the volume is the very question of whether and how gender nonconforming subject positions retain—or resist—legibility within a larger context that threatens to repress or appropriate anything that challenges the status quo. The rich roster of texts collected and commissioned for inclusion within these pages reflects directly on this paradox, asking that we understand art as always in dialogue with other institutions—from schools to prisons, hospi tals to courthouses—that administer and control the way subjects are recognized and accounted for, if at all.

Many other members of the New Museum’s staff have been fundamentally and enthusiastically involved in every step of this book’s publication, contribut ing not only sheer labor power but unquantifiable brainpower, excitement, and belief as well. Particularly deserving of thanks are Jeanne Goswami, who served as the patient and thoughtful editor for this volume; Kaegan Sparks, Publication Associate, Critical Anthologies; and Kate Wiener, Education Associate. Without Jeanne’s, Kaegan’s, and Kate’s tireless and committed work on every aspect of this publication, this project would simply never have come to be. We also wish to thank Olivia Casa, who stepped in to assist on the editorial front during the final stretch of production.

Still others within the New Museum lent support to the volume in crucial ways. Karen Wong, Deputy Director, was instrumental in advancing discussions

xii DIRECTORS FOREWORD DIRECTORS FOREWORD / xiii

about reviving this series, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director,

and Dennis Szakacs, Associate Director, Institutional Advancement, contributed

to the realization of this volume as well. At the MIT Press, in addition to Roger

Conover, we extend our thanks to Matthew Abbate and Victoria Hindley, with

whom we have worked with great synergy on the preparation of the manuscript,

as well as Emily Gutheinz for her design for this and all other volumes in the

series. To Faith Brabenec Hart, we offer appreciation for her excellent and thor

ough indexing. We also extend our gratitude to Paula Woolley, who contributed

to this volume in substantial ways. Finally, we are most grateful to the artists, organizers, theorists, historians,

activists, critics, curators, and collectives represented in this volume, all of whom,

in addition to contributing texts, dialogues, roundtables, dossiers, images, and

other materials, were distinctly invested in seeing the discussions in which they

are engaged brought together here. The individuals and groups who produced

new work and those who agreed to have previously published texts contextualized

within this new framework provide inestimable contributions toward further

ing this rich dialogue and making it visible. The materials brought together

here engage in an urgent contemporary exchange by asking a number of vital

questions whose very importance lies in the possibility that they may not find

immediate answers.

Lisa Phillips Toby Devan Lewis Director

NOTES

1. Marcia Tucker, “The New Museum: A Forum for Dialogue, Controversy, and Visual

Provocation,” Art Journal 37, no. 3 (1978): 244.

xiv I DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

KNOWN UNKNOWNS: AN INTRODUCTION TO TRAP DOOR

Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton

An image is powerful not necessarily because ofanything specific it offers the viewer, but because ofeverything it apparently also takes away from the viewer.

—Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Beware of Wolf Intervals”

TRAPS

We are living in a time of trans visibility. Yet we are also living in a time of anti-trans violence. These entwined proclamations—lived in the flesh—frame the conversations, interventions, analyses, and other modes of knowing that are captured in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Consequently, we come to this project with a deep sense of possibility that also exists in an interval of anxiety. All three of us, in different yet sometimes overlap ping capacities, and via different yet sometimes overlapping self-identifications, utilize and are imbricated in the production, presentation, and circulation of visual culture. At the same time, we know that when produced within the cos mology of racial capitalism, the promise of “positive representation” ultimately gives little support or protection to many, if not most, trans and gender non conforming people, particularly those who are low-income and/or of color—the very people whose lives and labor constitute the ground for the figuration of this moment of visibility.1

This is the trap of the visual: it offers—or, more accurately, it is frequently offered to us as—the primary path through which trans people might have access to livable lives. Representation is said to remedy broader acute social crises rang ing from poverty to murder to police violence, particularly when representation

is taken up as a “teaching tool” that allows those outside our immediate social

worlds and identities to glimpse some notion of a shared humanity. To the degree

that anyone might consider such potential to exist within representation, one

must also grapple and reckon with radical incongruities—as when, for example,

our “transgender tipping point”2 comes to pass at precisely the same political

moment when women of color, and trans women of color in particular, are expe

riencing markedly increased instances of physical violence.3 Many of the essays,

conversations, and dossiers gathered in Trap Door attempt to think through this

fundamental paradox, attending to implications for the political present and the

art historical past, particularly with regard to persisting—if incomplete—legacies

of representation. Perhaps inevitably, such a perspective on representation is deeply rooted in

our personal experiences, which render the questions at hand less “contemporary”

than historically insistent, and less abstract than emphatically concrete. Indeed,

when first approaching this project—considering how art, fashion, and other

image-based works more generally function in culture—Reina was immediately

reminded of an invaluable lesson learned early on as a community organizer: that

immense transformational and liberatory possibilities arise from what are other

wise sites of oppression or violent extraction—whether the body, labor, land, or

spirituality—when individuals have agency in their representation.

Through such a lens, one may recognize more clearly the living stakes for

current representations of trans culture, insofar as they are necessarily a kind of

extraction and instrumentalization—if not outright recoding—of the artwork

and experiences of marginalized peoples and communities. In this regard, the

very terms of representation should not be considered apart from public life and

its regulation. Consider how Seymour Pine, the New York Police Department

officer who led the raids at the Stonewall Inn that preceded the uprising of 1969,

would later speak about the city’s moralizing penal code, which he was enforc

ing on the night of the Stonewall riot. In a 1989 interview, he observed that

these statutes, which formed the basis for New York’s anti-cross-dressing laws,

specifically targeted people in public spaces; as a result, the laws underscored

the power of being together and of fashion’s potential to destabilize the state-

sponsored morality underpinning the gender binary and, moreover, the basis

for who should or should not appear in public.4 In other words, to violate the state-

sponsored sanctions—to render oneself visible to the state—emphasizes that

there is power in coming together in ways that don’t replicate the state’s moral

imperatives. Fashion and imagery hold power, which is precisely why the state

seeks to regulate and constrain such self-representations to this very day.

The politics of such a turn are not monolithic, however, and if there is one trap in representation’s instrumentalization, so is there another in its figuration and, more precisely, its simplification. This issue has persisted since the very beginnings of the gay and trans movements in the United States. Notably, in the shadow of the gay political landscape that developed after the Stonewall up rising, a group of street queens—including Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Bubbles Rose Marie, Bambi Lamor, and Andorra Martin—started organizing together under the name Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). STAR engaged a particular set of issues generally overlooked by the white middle-class gay movement, whose realization was so encapsulated by the mo mentous events at Stonewall. Put more bluntly: although their life, fashion, and labor shared the same constitutional ground on which the entire early gay rights movement was built, poor people, mostly of color, as well as trans people who were sex workers did not find their own issues addressed or accommodated by the larger movement. The members of STAR gathered enough resources to rent an apartment in the Lower East Side, calling it STAR House. This small, personal act of resistance and refusal created space for those unruly to the demand of assimilation to come together and to support one another. At a time of height ened violence, just by hanging out with and taking care of one another, the members of STAR were doing revolutionary work.

STAR’s example, and the ultimate fate of its endeavor, bridges the gap be tween representation and reality in stark terms. As writer Arthur Bell outlined at the time in “STAR Trek: Transvestites in the Streets,” published in the Village Voice, STAR was evicted from its tenement brownstone when the landlord de cided to turn the building into a gay hostel. This was an example, Bell asserted, of how gay New York was being gentrified and whitewashed, while people who were poor or of color were being pushed out of the newly recognized and po litically defined nomenclature. Significantly, STAR’s landlord, Mike Umbers, owned a gay bar on Christopher Street (called Christopher’s End) that became commercially successful during the rise of the gay liberation movement.5 In fact, Umbers later became a sponsor of the 1973 Gay Pride rally—the infamous and first “nonpolitical” iteration—during which Rivera broke out onstage to remind people about their gay brothers and sisters who were still in jail,6 despite the progress being made in the larger cultural context. At least in part, Trap Door aspires to similarly resist resolution.

xvi I REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON K NOWN UNKNOWNS I xvii

DOORS

Being mindful of how representation can be and is used to restrict the possi

bilities of trans people flourishing in hostile worlds, we persist. This anthology

takes seriously the fact that representations do not simply re-present an already

existing reality but are also doors into making new futures possible. Indeed, the

terms of representation require novel critical attention today precisely because

of their formative and transformative power. Put simply, if we do not attend to

representation and work collectively to bring new visual grammars into exis

tence (while remembering and unearthing suppressed ones), then we will remain

caught in the traps of the past. Trap Door utilizes the most expansive examples of art and visual culture we

can imagine. Resistant to the canonization of trans art (although we have in

cluded many artists who might appear in such a project), we want to radically

undo the boundaries of cultural production so that the category can come to

include modes of self-fashioning, making, doing, and being that fall outside the

properly “artistic.” Partly this approach arises from our own divergent creative

practices, which include artistic, activist, critical, and curatorial endeavors. Yet

our individual approaches should be taken to underline our collective desire for

a different visual grammar. For example, Eric’s film Homotopia (2006) and its sequel, Criminal Queers

(2016), codirected with Chris E. Vargas, respond to conversations in trans/queer

contemporary politics and utilize camp and humor to unfold difficult and knotty

issues. Homotopia is a radical queer critique of the institution of gay marriage. As

both a theoretical commitment and a material limit, it was made with no budget

and no grants. All the actors on-screen were friends, lovers, or exes who worked

collectively, writing their own scripts and developing their characters. Criminal

Queers was, in turn, a kind of response to questions audiences would pose at

screenings of Homotopia. People would often ask, “If we shouldn’t put all our

time and energy into gay marriage, then what should we fight for?” While not

wanting to be overly prescriptive, Eric and Chris suggested, through Criminal

Queers, that prison abolition might be one of the many struggles that trans/

queer and gender nonconforming communities should work toward.

Importantly, in both films, gender and trans identities are left unstable. Eric

and Chris knew that they did not want to traffic in the dominant visual econo

mies of trans images. There were no binding scenes, no “undressing,” no visual

cues that might lead the viewer to assume they “know” who these characters

“really are.” In contrast, they let the actors work with and convey their gender

however they felt: the actors might well have developed an on-screen persona

who is more or less similar to who they are in their daily lives, or perhaps they developed a character who is more adjacent. In effect, Eric and Chris chose to center a trans/GNC universe without giving the viewer the visual satisfaction of

“discovery.” This has led individuals who have watched the same film to variously ask, “Why do you have only cis people in your films?” and, “Why do you have only trans people in your films?” While the majority of the people in both films identify as trans, Eric and Chris have left the question of gender open in order to see in what other directions we all might take such projects.

Reina’s film Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018), codirected with Sasha Wortzel, tells the story of Marsha P. Johnson in the hours leading up to the Stonewall riots. The film stars Mya Taylor as Johnson, a disabled Black trans artist and activ ist who was one of the first people to resist the police raid at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the riots. Beyond simply portraying a time when trans people of color were oppressed or acted exceptionally, the film tells a much more complex story that challenges the hierarchy of intelligible history and the archive that keeps our stories as trans and gender nonconforming people from ever surfacing in the first place. Following Saidiya Hartman, Happy Birthday, Marsha! enables a story to emerge “that exceed[s] the fiction of history. ..that constitute[s] the archive and determine{s] what can be said about the past.”7

Through making the film, Reina came to realize that aesthetics and image matter deeply and can exist against the current instrumentalization of trans visibility as an advertisement for the state. Happy Birthday, Marsha! achieves its goals by focusing on Marsha’s beauty and the beautiful ways that she and her fel low street queens made life and meaning out of the world around them, outside of the gaze of the state. The film shows something not normally seen on screen: a trans life, with its intimate sociability and relationships. What is visible in the film exists as fugitive to both the rational and the moral: how Marsha and her friends came together, laughed and worked together, made meaning of the world together, and, thanks to Marsha, how they dreamed together.

One of the scenes in Happy Birthday, Marsha!, not coincidentally, was filmed at the New Museum—not in its exhibition spaces, but in its adjacent building, a floor of which currently houses working studio space for artists in residence. Via Sasha (who was then working as an educator at the New Museum), Johanna was introduced to Reina and to the extraordinary film project in process. That encounter began a dialogue about institutional responsibility and chains of affili ation, about the politics of alliance, friendship, and platform-building. And that encounter eventually led to a conversation about this book.

Johanna’s own longstanding commitment to education and pedagogy, manifested within the museum and academic contexts, bridges engagements

xviii I REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON KNOWN UNKNOWNS I xix

with representation in art with those being articulated in discourse, viewing

present circumstances in historical perspective. Seeking alternative approaches

to representation—or perhaps better said, clarity around the stakes of represen

tation—has defined her curatorial and discursive projects, which have always

been moored in feminism and its continuously necessary expansions and self-

evaluations. Yet, recognizing the historical specificity and limits of dialogues

devoted to subjectivity, and juxtaposing contemporary developments in art and

culture with previous efforts, may now allow for an elaboration and a recasting

of critical language. The altered landscape for arts institutions, artistic produc

tion, and even identity in a swiftly changing political climate lends real urgency

to such considerations—to say nothing of the need to commit to projects dedi

cated to resisting increasingly complex modes of incorporation and repression.

While our cultural moment feels, in this way, quite precarious, it also opens up

to radical new possibilities, and these are what we most hope to foreground here.

To this end, we have included reflections by contributors who take up aspects

of self-styling, drag, direct action, voice, sound, care and protection, technology,

documentation, and labor, among many other topics. In every case, the ques

tion arises of whether visibility is a goal to be worked toward or an outcome to

be avoided at all costs. Indeed, this question—unresolved and unresolvable—

shapes discussions that, however varied, share an urgency that might be named

existential. In other words, many of the contributors reflect on what it is to be,

and then, what it is to reckon that being with structures that either refute or

appropriate it (and sometimes do both at the same time). Our gambit is that

in the face of such a paradox, we must challenge the very notion of being itself

and name (though not codify) new modes of recognition, identification, and col

lective endeavor. As authors Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade

have asserted elsewhere—and as Jeannine Tang reiterates in the final lines of

her essay—”Impossibility may very well be our only possibility.” Bassichis, Lee,

and Spade continue provocatively, “What would it mean to embrace, rather than

shy away from, the impossibility of our ways of living as well as our political vi

sions?”8 Such impossibility, however, should be seen not as dire nor as a state

of crisis but, rather, as a radical invitation to fantasize and to dream otherwise.

This book aims to point unflinchingly to a cultural context that has little use for

the impossible and yet is forced to grapple with its existence and persistence.

Gathered in these pages are twenty-one contributions that take various

forms: individually authored and collaboratively written essays, historical and

contemporary illustrated dossiers, and transcribed roundtables and dialogues.

Most were produced specifically for this volume and, as such, might be understood

as consciously participating in an evolving discourse whose very contours should

be and are questioned here. To this end, even those texts that take up the task of providing a historical framework for today’s trans landscape offer versions of the past rather than postulating master narratives of it. For instance, in plumbing the radical politics of several historical organizing groups, Abram J. Lewis’s “Trans History in a Moment of Danger: Organizing Within and Beyond ‘Visibility’ in the 1970s” explores the complex and sometimes opposing strands driving these groups’ activities and thinking—from anti-patriarchal feminism to interspecies animal communication to pagan magic. “Out of Obscurity: Trans Resistance, 1969—2016,” a companion piece by Grace Dunham, surveys and analyzes con temporary activist organizations in relation to their 1970s forebears, paying particular attention to prison abolition and health care. In “The Labor of Werqing It: The Performance and Protest Strategies of Sir Lady Java,” Treva Ellison ex plores the life and work of historic 1960s performer Sir Lady Java in order to issue a critique of racial capitalism that easily extends its reach to our present moment. And, in “Cautious Living: Black Trans Women and the Politics of Documentation,” activists Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and CeCe McDonald similarly reflect on the perils of representation—and day-to-day life—that they have each negotiated for decades, in a conversation organized by journalist Toshio Meronek.

Such negotiations are at the heart of texts focusing specifically on artistic production: Roy Perez’s “Proximity: On the Work of Mark Aguhar” examines the late artist’s decision to make her body her art and asks where representa tion begins and ends in such a configuration. In “Dynamic Static,” Nicole Archer also pushes back on the notion that one can locate something like a queer or trans “aesthetic,” and posits, through a close reading of several artists, a mode of pattern-jamming that has roots in older models of institutional critique. Jeannine Tang takes institutions themselves to task in “Contemporary Art and Critical Transgender Infrastructures,” demanding from them a new awareness of their imperatives, which tend to exclude (or to absorb) trans practitioners. In

“Introducing the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art,” on the other hand, Chris E. Vargas uses satire and biting humor to call for real changes and alterna tive models for showing and contextualizing trans art.

A shared thread running through many of the pieces here is, not surprisingly, the archive—or, perhaps better, the archives (plural). In Stamatina Gregory and Jeanne Vaccaro’s “Canonical Undoings: Notes on Trans Art and Archives,” the authors assess the current structural impasse many feel when writing histo ries that have effectively been refused or erased. They, like Morgan M. Page in

“One from the Vaults: Gossip, Access, and Trans History—Telling,” propose alterna tive models of retrieving and disseminating the past. But in both of these texts, archives stand for much more than repositories of history: the archive is seen as

xx I REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON KNOWN UNKNOWNS I xxi

an active, present site, one that undergirds and supports the very people who

seek it out and, in doing so, contribute to its evolving contents. To this end, Mel

Y. Chen’s “Everywhere Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet”

considers the ways in which user-generated archival structures such as YouTube

tags can remap gendered and racial identifications.

Two roundtables take up the relationship between histories and futures.

“Representation and Its Limits,” moderated by Tavia Nyong’o and with partici

pants Lexi Adsit, Sydney Freeland, Robert Hamblin, and Geo Wyeth, focuses

on the pitfalls of visibility and trans representation within institutions that

continue to operate in exclusionary, violent ways. “Models of Futurity,” mod

erated by Dean Spade and with participants Kai Lumumba Barrow, Yve Laris

Cohen, and Kalaniopua Young, focuses on contemporary instances of structural

violence, while speculating on potential futures and alternatives that operate

outside of their logic. The current landscape, however, is stark with such violence, and as many

contributors to this book note, art’s operation within the symbolic has limits.

micha cárdenas’s “Dark Shimmers: The Rhythm of Necropolitical Affect in Digital

Media” meditates on the ways we are increasingly unable to escape the physical

and psychic effects and affects of technologically driven violence. In “Blackness

and the Trouble of Trans Visibility,” Che Gossett addresses how the legacy of

racial slavery inflects contemporary anti-Black and anti-trans violence, as well

as the interventions of Black radical thinkers to destabilize human/animal and

gender binaries. And Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos poetically take

up the fragility of bodies and the strength of collaboration, while considering

ideologies of ableness in “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things.” Various modes of

affinity and alliance are explored—and questioned—in Heather Love’s “The Last

Extremists?,” which considers mainstream media’s embrace of queer and trans

content in the face of an increasingly conservative gay mainstream. Relatedly,

in “An Affinity of Hammers,” Sara Ahmed analyzes the ways in which feminism,

which is often seen as aligned with trans and queer politics, is wielded by trans

exclusionary radical feminists as a violent tool against trans women.

In “Existing in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans Visibility,” a conver

sation between Juliana Huxtable and Che Gossett, Juliana suggests that existing

and persisting are acts not only of resistance but also of interference. This idea

resonates with Eva Hayward’s “Spiderwomen,” in which the author explores the

possibility that corporeality embodies a kind of sensuous transaction not only

between body and environment but also between species in an encounter that

changes both parties—an idea with immense political ramifications. ‘All Terror,

All Beauty,” a conversation between Wu Tsang and Fred Moten, concludes that in

nonbinary thinking, conclusions themselves are a moot point, though this hardly means reverting to relativism. As Fred says, “The absoluteness is in the attempt, not in the achievement.”9

The biggest effort for this volume—its absoluteness, if that exists—is to allow the paradox of trans representation in the current moment to find form in conversations that don’t attempt to smooth the contradictions. In order to facilitate an open network of resonances and to allow through-lines to emerge among the texts—for instance, the figures of the threshold and the trap, the reconfigured parameters of the archive and the institution, and claims to beauty and glamour as modes of trans worlding—we have resisted grouping them into thematic categories. Issues of representation inevitably summon questions of self-representation, and to that end, we wish to be forward about the terms we bring to the subject. (In this regard, we should note that we have elected not to standardize terms that allow for self-determination; for instance, the words “Black” and “trans” and their affiliates appear in many variations here, as requested by the writers using them.) In today’s complex cultural landscape, trans people are offered many “doors”—entrances to visibility, to resources, to recognition, and to understanding. Yet, as so many of the essays collected here attest, these doors are almost always also “traps”—accommodating trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew to hegemonic modalities. This isn’t a new story; various kinds of “outsider art” have histori cally been called upon by an art market or academic cadre that utilize them to advance dominant narratives before pushing them back out. Yet, in addition to doors that are always already traps, there are trapdoors, those clever con traptions that are not entrances or exits but secret passageways that take you someplace else, often someplace as yet unknown. (It is precisely this ambiguity between seeing and knowing, between figure and the new ground that thresholds open up, that initiates McArthur and Zavitsanos’s text: “What about a door is a trap when it’s known, or known to be unknown?”)1° Here is the space we believe exists and a third term that acknowledges the others but refuses to be held to them.

THRESHOLDS

Trap Door, then, is offered as an imperfect experiment. We do not claim to be the first voice, or even a definitive one, on the many ways “trans” and “art” might collide. In this respect, we must note that the bulk of the people gathered

xxii / REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON KNOWN UNKNOWNS I xxiii

here, with important exceptions, are based in or primarily work in the United

States. The scope of the book is thus geopolitically limited. At the same time,

from the beginning of the project, we felt committed to including the voices

of emerging artists and cultural producers recognized mostly outside of the

art world. Given that gender always lives in the idiom of race (to say nothing

of disability, sexuality, class, and so on), we wanted to work to disrupt the as

sumed whiteness of both trans studies and visual culture. Also, while we point

to political roots for the present dialogue, we must underline that this collection

has been compiled in a time of specific struggle. From prison abolition work

to #BlackTransLivesMatter, we have wanted to continue to center the ways in

which the question of the visual is always also a question of the political. For

that reason, as noted previously, we have included the work of numerous activist

collectives, as we know their work to be a vital intervention of its own. But we

would hasten to add that art itself can and should be seen as activist, and we do

not wish to mark any clear-cut division between what counts as “political” and

what as “artistic,” even as we certainly see some people put themselves at far

greater immediate risk in their activities.

A central aspect of this book, even while it meditates on the unthinkably

difficult terms of our contemporary moment, is to insist on pleasure, self-care,

beauty, fantasy, and dreaming as elements key to sustained radical change.

Therefore, we consider the efforts of those included in this book as exhibiting

some combination of artistic and activist impulses, conceived via both deeply re

searched and wildly speculative thought. In putting such an extraordinary range

of making and imagining into the world, we hope we have enabled others to do

the same and more. In fact, the present volume demands responses and further

dialogues from readers and the larger public: if we offer here another image of

trans experience and culture, it is necessarily to the exclusion of so much else at

hand. The very problems of representation we seek to engage are reproduced in

the making of this volume, and yet we continue to name and unname the known

and the unknown, without guarantees, toward the aesthetics—which is to say

the materiality—of trans flourishing.

EDITORS’ NOTE, MARCH 2017

The questions of art are always posed in relation to the shifting terrain of the so

cial world, and such a counterpoint is, in fact, the explicit and historical purpose

of the New Museum’s Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture. Accordingly, when

this volume was conceived in 2015, and its contents gathered and produced

during the better part of 2016, the editors sought to grapple with a structured contradiction in which—as the title Trap Door suggests—trans people were at once gaining unprecedented representation in the mass media while remaining subject to explicit forms of prejudice and violence. The urgency of understand ing this double bind has been heightened in the intervening time. While the texts in this volume were commissioned and assembled during the American presidential election season, our endeavor was not conceived with the election of Donald Trump in mind, to say nothing of the immediate actions of his ad ministration. Less than two months after his inauguration, the few legal protec tions that existed for trans people have been stripped by executive order. We might, then, understand this moment as both radically rearticulated and as yet another iteration of US settler colonialism, which is to say white cis normativity. It is our hope that the writings in this publication will go some distance toward generating a deeper analysis of the deadly constrictions many trans people are compelled to survive while also revealing the beautiful force of cultural produc tion and the people that bring it into the world. Indeed, when the brutality of US empire floats closer to the surface, as it now is, we must reaffirm that art, in its most expansive definition, is central to our collective liberation.

NOTES

1. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign is worth discussing with regard to this point. A number of recent texts point out that Trump’s rise is explicitly tied to deeply held white supremacist ideologies and circles in America. See, for example, the Editorial Board, “Donald Trump’s Alt-Right Brain,” New York Times, Opinion Pages, September 5, 2016, http://www .nytimes.com/2Ol6/09/06/opinion/doflaldtmmpsa1t...ightbraintm; Donald Nieman, “Donald Trump Is Taking a Page From Reconstruction-Era White Supremacists,” US. News & World Report, October 12, 2016, http://www.usnews,com/news/articles/20161012

Peter Holley, “Top Nazi leader: Trump will be a ‘real opportunity’ for white nationalists,” Washington Post, August 7, 2016,

d5c3f530d77e; and Paul Holsten, “Experts say white supremacists see Trump as ‘last stand,” PBS Newshour, August 11, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/experts

-say-white-supremacists_seetrump_1aststand/,

2. Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier,” Time, May 29, 2014, http://time.com/135480/transgendertippingpoint/.

3. For more information, see Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition, “Addressing Anti-Transgender Violence: Exploring Realities, Challenges and Solutions for Policymakers and Community Advocates” (Washington, DC: Human Rights Campaign, November 2015), accessed October 11, 2016, http://hrc-assets.s3-website-useast1 .amazonaws

. com//files/assets/resources/HRCAntiTransgenderViolenceos 19 .pdf; and

xxiv / REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON KNOWN UNKNOWNS / xxv

National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer

and HIV-Affected Hate Violence in 2015” (New York: New York City Gay and Lesbian

Anti-Violence Project, Inc., 2016), accessed October11, 2016, http://www.avp.org/storage

/documents/ncavp_hvreport_2015_final.pdf. These important studies demonstrate the

unprecedented rise in violence against LGBT communities in 2015. See also Haeyoun Park

and laryna Mykhyalyshyn, “L.G.B.T. People Are More Likely to Be Targets of Hate Crimes

Than Any Other Minority Group,” New York Times, June 16, 2016, http://nytimes.com

!interactive/2016/06/16/us!hate-crimes-against-lgbt.html; and Jos Truitt, “Transgender

People Are More Visible Than Ever: So Why Is There More Anti-Trans Legislation Than Ever,

Too?,” The Nation, March 4, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/transgender-people

-are-more-visible-than-ever-so-why-is-there-more-anti-trans-legislation-than-ever-too/.

4. See Reina Gossett, “Sylvia Rivera & NYPD Reflect on Stonewall Rebellion,” blog post, Reina

Gossett, February 23, 2012, http://www.reinagossett.com/sylvia-rivera-nypd-reflect-on

-stonewall-rebellion!. In her post, Gossett pulls an excerpt from a 1989 discussion recorded

by Sound Portraits titled “Remembering Stonewall,” which originally aired on NPR. The

audio piece, featuring Pine, Marsha P. Johnson, and Village Voice reporter Howard Smith, was

publicly available when Gossett linked to it in 2012. At the time of this writing, the link, via

Sound Portraits, had been disabled.

5. See Arthur Bell, “STAR trek: Transvestites in the street,” Village Voice, July 15, 1971,

https:Hnews.google.com!newspapers?id=Us1HAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7YsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2943

%2C838144; and Arthur Bell, “Hostility comes out of the closet,” Village Voice, June 28, 1973,

https:Hnews.google.com!newspapers?id=mtRHAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_YsDAAAAIBAJ&dq

=hostility-comes-out-of-the-closet&pg’3148%2C6605538. Notably, after Bell profiled STAR,

several of its members, including Johnson and Rivera, were arrested one by one while they

were working. Johnson reflected on this moment in an interview, noting that for the article

“we all gave our names ... and [then] we all went out to hustle, you know, about a few days

after the article came out in the Village Voice, and you see we get busted one after another,

in a matter of a couple of weeks. I don’t know whether it was the article, or whether we just

got busted because it was hot.” Marsha P. Johnson and Allen Young, “Rapping with a Street

Transvestite Revolutionary: An Interview with Marsha Johnson,” in Out of the Closets: Voices

of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York and London: New York University

Press, 1992), 112—20.

6. For footage of Rivera’s comments, see “Sylvia Rivera—’Y’all better quiet down’ (1973),”

YouTube, video, 4:08 mm, accessed October 10, 2016, https:Hwww.youtube.com!watch

?v=9QiigzZCEtQ.

7. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” SmallAxe 26, no. 2 (June 2008): 9.

8. Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and

Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the

Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oakland, CA, and Edinburgh:

AK Press, 2011 and 2015), 36. For Jeannine Tang’s invocation of Bassichis, Lee, and

Spade’s work, see “Contemporary Art and Critical Transgender Infrastructures” on page 363

of this volume.

9. Fred Moten, “Interview with Wu Tsang and Fred Moten,” 356 S. Mission Road, accessed

October 8, 2016, http:!!356mission.tumblr.com!post!150698596000!interview-with-wu

-tsang-and-fred-moten; and “All Terror, All Beauty” on page 339 of this volume.

10. See “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” by Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos

on page 235 of this volume.

THE LABOR OF WERQING IT: THE PERFORMANCE AND PROTEST STRATEGIES OF SIR LADY JAVA

Treva Eliison

“Werq Queen.!” “Yaaaas.” “Slay!” These terms, which have become mainstream in US popular culture, circulate through Black queer and trans culture and social life to affirm and express excitement over a performance and praxis of existence that exceed the commonsense of normative categories of social being like gen der, race, class, and sexuality. In the house and ball scene, the declarative “Werq!” asserts the sartorial, the expressive, the performed, and the embodied over the biologic, the state record, the birth certificate, the checkbox; it affirms the potential and creativity in being surplus and the potential of reworking and repurposing the signs, symbols, and accoutrements of Western modernity. Werqing it is a relational gesture of world-making at the spatial scale of both the body and the community that aligns sender and receiver in a momentary net work of fleshly recognition. That is to say, wer4ing it and having that werq seen, felt, or heard is a power-generating praxis, a force displacement in and over time, that arises from Black queer and Black trans culture, performance, and poli tics and through the re/production of Black trans social life. It reminds us that under racial capitalism, all Black life is trans, transient, transductive, and trans formative. To werq is to exercise power through the position of being rendered excessive to the project of the human and its dis/organizing social categories: race, gender, sexuality, and class. Werqing it deforms, denatures, and reforms the very categories in which werqers can find no stable home.

As an act of making power, werqing it has become attractive; it’s trending.1 We are in a moment in which everyone wants to “werq werq werq werq werq,” from Young Thug to Jaden Smith to Beyoncé, each of whom has adopted either sartorial strategies, terminology, or other performative elements arising from Black queer and trans culture and presented them to more mainstream audi ences. A 2014 issue of Time magazine that features Laverne Cox on the cover

xxvi I REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON

National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer

and HIV-Affected Hate Violence in 2015” (New York: New York City Gay and Lesbian

Anti-Violence Project, Inc., 2016), accessed October 11, 2016, http://www.avp.org/storage

/documents/ncavp_hvreport_2015_final.pdf. These important studies demonstrate the

unprecedented rise in violence against LGBT communities in 2015. See also Haeyoun Park

and laryna Mykhyalyshyn, “L.G.B.T. People Are More Likely to Be Targets of Hate Crimes

Than Any Other Minority Group,” New York Times, June 16, 2016, http://nytimes.com

/interactive/2016/06/16/us/hate-crimes-against-lgbt.html; and Jos Truitt, “Transgender

People Are More Visible Than Ever: So Why Is There More Anti-Trans Legislation Than Ever,

Too?,” The Nation, March 4, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/transgender-people

-are-more-visible-than-ever-so-why-is-there-more-anti-trans-legislation-than-ever-too/.

4. See Reina Gossett, “Sylvia Rivera & NYPD Reflect on Stonewall Rebellion,” blog post, Reina

Gossett, February 23, 2012, http://www.reinagossett.com/syhria-rivera-nypd-reflect-on

-stonewall-rebellion/. In her post, Gossett pulls an excerpt from a 1989 discussion recorded

by Sound Portraits titled “Remembering Stonewall,” which originally aired on NPR. The

audio piece, featuring Pine, Marsha P. Johnson, and Village Voice reporter Howard Smith, was

publicly available when Gossett linked to it in 2012. At the time of this writing, the link, via

Sound Portraits, had been disabled.

5. See Arthur Bell, “STAR trek: Transvestites in the street,” Village Voice, July 15, 1971,

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Us1HAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7YsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2943

%2C838144; and Arthur Bell, “Hostility comes out of the closet,” Village Voice, June 28, 1973,

https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=mtRHAAAAIBAJ&sjid_YsDAAAAIBAJ&dq

=hostility-comes-out-of-the-closet&pg=3148%2C6605538. Notably, after Bell profiled STAR,

several of its members, including Johnson and Rivera, were arrested one by one while they

were working. Johnson reflected on this moment in an interview, noting that for the article

“we all gave our names ... and [then] we all went out to hustle, you know, about a few days

after the article came out in the Village Voice, and you see we get busted one after another,

in a matter of a couple of weeks. I don’t know whether it was the article, or whether we just

got busted because it was hot.” Marsha P. Johnson and Allen Young, “Rapping with a Street

Transvestite Revolutionary: An Interview with Marsha Johnson,” in Out of the Closets: Voices

ofGay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York and London: New York University

Press, 1992), 112—20.

6. For footage of Rivera’s comments, see “Sylvia Rivera—’Y’all better quiet down’ (1973),”

YouTube, video, 4:08 mm, accessed October 10, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch

?v=9QiigzZCEtQ.

7. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” SmallAxe 26, no. 2 (June 2008): 9.

8. Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, “Building an Abolitionist Trans and

Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the

Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oakland, CA, and Edinburgh:

AK Press, 2011 and 2015), 36. For Jeannine Tang’s invocation of Bassichis, Lee, and

Spade’s work, see “Contemporary Art and Critical Transgender Infrastructures” on page 363

of this volume.

9. Fred Moten, “Interview with Wu Tsang and Fred Moten,” 356 S. Mission Road, accessed

October 8, 2016, http://356mission.tumblr.com/post/150698596000/interview-with-wu

-tsang-and-fred-moten; and “All Terror, All Beauty” on page 339 of this volume.

10. See “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” by Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos

on page 235 of this volume.

THE LABOR OF WERQING IT: THE PERFORMANCE AND PROTEST STRATEGIES OF SIR LADY JAVA

Treva Ellison

“Werq ueen.” “Yaaaas.” “Slay!” These terms, which have become mainstream in US popular culture, circulate through Black queer and trans culture and social life to affirm and express excitement over a performance and praxis of existence that exceed the commonsense of normative categories of social being like gen der, race, class, and sexuality. In the house and ball scene, the declarative “Werq!” asserts the sartorial, the expressive, the performed, and the embodied over the biologic, the state record, the birth certificate, the checkbox; it affirms the potential and creativity in being surplus and the potential of reworking and repurposing the signs, symbols, and accoutrements of Western modernity. Werqing it is a relational gesture of world-making at the spatial scale of both the body and the community that aligns sender and receiver in a momentary net work of fleshly recognition. That is to say, werqing it and having that werq seen, felt, or heard is a power-generating praxis, a force displacement in and over time, that arises from Black queer and Black trans culture, performance, and poli tics and through the re/production of Black trans social life. It reminds us that under racial capitalism, all Black life is trans, transient, transductive, and trans formative. To werq is to exercise power through the position of being rendered excessive to the project of the human and its dis/organizing social categories: race, gender, sexuality, and class. Werqing it deforms, denatures, and reforms the very categories in which werqers can find no stable home.

As an act of making power, werqing it has become attractive; it’s trending.1 We are in a moment in which everyone wants to “werq werq werq werq werq,” from Young Thug to Jaden Smith to Beyonce, each of whom has adopted either sartorial strategies, terminology, or other performative elements arising from Black queer and trans culture and presented them to more mainstream audi ences. A 2014 issue of Time magazine that features Laverne Cox on the cover

xxvi / REINA GOSSETT, ERIC A. STANLEY, AND JOHANNA BURTON

termed this current moment a “transgender tipping point,”2 a histo rically

significant time of representational saturation of transgender people, i dentity,

and struggles in popular culture, media, and public discourse and de bate. The

visual economy of the so-called transgender tipping point is driven by Blackness

and Black femme embodiment. Black women have become emblema tic of and

instrumental to the tipping point narrative: they are the representational figures

of transgender issues and politics and the martyrs of political struggl es for civil

rights for trans people—a hyper-present absence. The facts that trans is trend

ing and that Black trans performance, embodiment, and politics are desirable

are tempered by the images of spectacular violence against transgend er people,

particularly Black trans women. Black trans women like Cox, CeCe M cDonald,

and Janet Mock have named and resisted the exceptionalism/death b inary that

pervades popular culture narratives of transgender rights and transgen der vulner

ability, insisting on visibility and representation as limited and partial strategies

for transgender people of color that do not challenge structures and s ystems of

violence and oppression.

This essay thinks through the labor of werqing it—the practices, pe rfor

mances, and protests that constitute Blackness, queerness, and tra nsness as

relational and para-identitarian approaches to existence, knowledge, a nd power.

To do this, I focus on the protest and performance strategies of Sir Lady Java,

a Los Angeles—based Black femme performer who rose to nationa l and inter

national acclaim in the 1960s. As Java ascended to local and nation al promi

nence, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) began to track and monitor

her performances: they sent plainclothes officers to observe her perfor mances;

they attempted to strip search her to confirm her “real” gender; they s ent a police

battalion to intimidate her and other Black femme performers; and, in October

1967, they even attempted to get her off the stage by filing an injunction against

one of the bars that regularly employed her. Using archival documen ts and ex

cerpts from an April 2015 conversation I had with Sir Lady Java and C. Jerome

Woods, founder and director of the Black LGBT Project,3 this essa y outlines

Java’s strategies in the context of her struggle against LAPD harassm ent, the

burgeoning gay liberation movement, and the rise of Black middle-cla ss power.

Java’s struggle against the LAPD elucidates the labor of werqing it: both

the labor politics of being a Black gender nonconforming woman and entertain

ment industry worker in postwar Los Angeles and the liminal lab or of insisting

on and inventing an undercommons for Black and queer social life t hrough and

under the oppressive forces of racial capitalism. Her protest and per formance

strategies evince a nuanced, nimble analysis of the position of Black f emme em

bodiment in the postwar Los Angeles political economy. Java’s fight a s a Black

Sir Lady Java and Redd Foxx in front of the Redd Foxx, October 22, 1967. Originally published in Jet 33, no. 6 (November 16, 1967): 37. Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo: Howard Morehead

2/ TREVA ELLISON

THE LABOR OF WERQING IT /3

femme performer and her fight against the LAPD emphasize that under racia l

capitalism, visibility is a flexible capacity whose motive potential is derived from

the conjoining of subjection and subjectification.4 Gender studies scholar Grac e

Kyungwon Hong argues that the political and intellectual formations of women

of color mark the violent transition between US capital’s national phase and its

global phase after World War II. Hong argues that before World War II attempts

to resolve contradictions between the abstract labor needs of racial capital and

the coherence of the nation-state hinged on abstraction. The universal citize n-

subject of US democracy is defined by a capacity for ownership of self and o f

objects, but racial capital operates precisely by dispossessing racialized subjects

of land, property, and the capacity of self-actualization and self-possession.5 Afte r

World War II, Hong explains, attempts to resolve contradictions between glob al

racial capital and an increasingly delocalized nation-state started to hinge not on

the abstraction of difference but on the fetishization of difference, which she calls

“flexibility.”6 This formulation of flexibility riffs on the concept of flexible accu

mulation, which marks a transition from a Fordist model of production charact er

ized by the incorporation of labor into highly formalized production processes ,

to a post-Fordist model characterized by the integration of informal productio n

processes alongside formal processes. We can witness the expansion of flexibil

ity as a cultural project or as a logic that organizes postwar US social and polit i

cal subjectivities in the growth of voluntary sector governance and community

policing, for example. The cultural project of flexibility is also exemplified in the

War on Poverty’s community empowerment programs and the extent to whic h

they instrumentalized racial, class, gender, and sexual difference to reproduce

governance and re-territorialize state power.7 The development of these kinds

of political, social, and cultural institutions integrate semiskilled or unskilled

laborers and more informal networks of political and social action, such as

grassroots political groups, into formal processes and structures of governance

and management. As a logic that underwrites the articulation of subjectivity,

flexibility is, in part, a response to the long arc of anti-imperialist and Black free

dom struggles in the US that threw the abstract citizen-subject of the US racial

state into crisis. Flexibility is itself an abstracting logic because it repositions

the racial state as the purveyor and guarantor of racial, class, gender, and sexual

citizenship and demands a constant forgetting of the exclusions and erasures

that imbue race, class, gender, and sexuality with the appearance of stability

and coherence. Flexibility facilitates the consolidation of normativity as an epistemology

of progress and a method of building class power. Both Sonia Song-Ha Lee and

Christina Hanhardt detail how the rise of the War on Poverty’s Community

Action Agencies in New York led to the creation of internal fissures among groups using the categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality to challenge state power and the distribution of resources.8 Both note that the escalating professional requirements coming from the federal government, the limited availability of resources, and caps on wages for workers in Community Action Agencies created hierarchies and fractures within political groups organized around racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual identities. Federal requirements privileged professionalism, training, management, and rationality, qualities that are them selves raced, gendered, and classed. Flexibility, as a logic of the post-Keynesian racial state, overwrites oppositional social formations with propriety and at tempts to position self-possession and self-actualization as the end goals of social movements. It is a mechanism of subjectification via strategic disavowal. Under the logic of flexibility, sex workers, people who are regular drug users, people with mental illnesses, people with disabilities, and people who in general cannot perform a hegemonic ideal of professionalism or rationality become re-thingified. As an expression and accretion of racial progress or class power, they become the objects of recovery, renewal, and remediation, often by people who claim an identitarian commonality with them. To follow Hong’s argument, in racial capi talism’s flexible phase, political and cultural visibility and representation, which were never not commodifiable to begin with, find new and multiple pathways for commodification and instrumentalization. Java’s struggle calls our attention to those rendered surplus even to oppositional social movements, and reminds us that Black women’s political and intellectual formations are capacious ter rains that facilitate the coherence of race, gender, class, and sexuality as social and political categories. This, then, is what is encapsulated in the phrase “the labor of werqing it”: Black femme embodiment and labor act as the fulcrums of racial capital’s flexible capacity in the articulation of politics and culture. That is to say, Black femme embodiment is one point of passage through which sub jection and subjectification reach a dynamic (and often deadly) equilibrium via mechanisms of power and social sedimentation, including visibility, recognition, legibility, and representation.

In the hegemonic visual and political culture of the United States, Black femme embodiment appears as that which flits in and out of sight and sound, that which can be simultaneously erased and affirmed, enlivened with vitality and agency or rendered void in order to tell someone else’s story. Understanding Java’s struggle in relation to the burgeoning gay liberation movement in Los Angeles and the context of the rise of the Black middle class throughout the 1960s underscores the limits of visibility as a tool of political power, as both of these groups instrumentalized Black femme embodiment and labor to build