Trap by stephen gregg pdf

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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

[

4 TREVA ELLISON

THE LABOR OF WEROING IT /5

political power but failed to disrupt the relationships and logics that undergird

Black femme precarity.

I am using the terms “Black femme” and “Black femme embodiment” to de

scribe Java because, while she never labeled herself or identified her gender during

the course of our interview, she lived her life as a woman. I am also using “Black

femme” in a similar vein to critical studies theorist Kara Keeling to think about

how Black trans and gender nonconforming femme labor, politics, and cultural

production pose challenges to social and identity categories that were themselves

constructed as a response to racism, sexism, and homophobia.9 Keeling writes

that the Black femme as a figure “exists on the edge line ... between the visible

and the invisible, the thought and the unthought. ... [I]t could be said that the

Black femme haunts current attempts to make critical sense of the world along

lines delineated according to race, gender, and/or sexuality. Because she often is

invisible (but nonetheless present), when she becomes visible, her appearance

stops us, offers us time in which we can work to perceive something different, or

differently.”1° Sir Lady Java’s protest and performance strategies ask us to think

different and differently by putting pressure on the normative categories and

epistemologies of progress that both scholars and activists use to build power—

terms and ideas such as transgender, the transgender tipping point, transgender

history, and the Black community. It is my humble hope that the telling of this

story offers time and space to think different and differently about the terms

and narratives through which we envision and articulate political struggle, LGBT

history, transgender studies, and Black studies.

SIR LADY JAVA AND RULE NO. 9

Sir Lady Java was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1940, the eldest of six chil

dren. Java climbed through the ranks of the entertainment industry working as

a go-go dancer at a club in Hemet, California, doing stand-up comedy and female

impersonation (the term used at the time). Java has described her stage act as

combining the humor of Pearl Bailey, the facial beauty of Lena Home, and the

sartorial style and presence of Josephine Baker.11 The fact that Java lived her

everyday life as a Black woman but earned her living as a female impersonator

and performer made “passing” an incoherent framework for her. She instead lev

eraged passing as a source of livelihood while using her performances to poke fun

at and question the coherence of gender. During her performances, Java would

often come on stage dressed in a full suit, portraying a debonair gentleman, and

Flyer for Sir Lady Java’s regular performance at Memory Lane, Los Angeles, Ca. 1970. Courtesy Division Leap and Sir Lady Java

6 TREVA ELLISON THE LABOR OF WERQING IT /7

take the audience through her gender transition over the course of her stage

act, metamorphosing first into a femme in the style of Home or Baker and end

ing her shows in a sequined bikini. Java’s stage act challenged viewers’ trust in

gender as a visually verifiable trait. While many drag performers of the era wore

elaborate gowns, suits, and costumes, Sir Lady Java performed primarily in bi

kinis, which allowed her not only to stand out, but also to invoke the spectacle

of her body as a challenge to the audience’s faith in the rigidity of gender: “I

came in a bikini. That’s what made me famous. [Knocks on the table.] Even at

the drag shows, when they had a ball, the girls wore such outlandish gowns that

I couldn’t compete with. So I’d come in chiffon and floral prints and a bikini on

where they could see it. You know, and that would win the ball. All the time.”12

Reviews of Java’s performances made continual reference to how spectacular

and unbelievable her appearance was,’3 and Java has recounted that employ

ers and co-performers (notably Richard Pryor) voiced disbelief and overzealous

interest upon learning that she was not a cisgender woman. Java’s ability to

earn a living as an openly gender nonconforming performer troubles today’s tip

ping point narrative and asks us to think about public interest in and discourse

around gender and sexuality as iterative and connected to conflicts or crises of

economic, social, and political capital. For example, at the turn of the twentieth

century, gender impersonation was considered family entertainment, and the

conservative capitalist elite of Los Angeles—the Merchants and Manufacturers

Association—used to sponsor a huge gender-bending party in Los Angeles

called All Fools’ Night, which was celebrated as a successful tourist event until

the growing Protestant merchant class decried its immorality and had the party

outlawed in 1898.’ As a Creole woman, Java also troubled racial boundaries and emphasized

throughout our interview that she “chose” to be Black, as she could have passed

as Latina in the racial visual economy of Los Angeles at the time.15 Java’s ability to

slip between identities was always tempered by the possibility of harassment and

violence from employers or obsessed audience members.16 Although she empha

sized that she did not “walk in fear,” Java recounted experiencing and witnessing

multiple incidents of anti-Black racial profiling and anti-Black gendered violence

throughout her young adult years.’7 Java actively built community with Black

trans and gender nonconforming femmes, whom she refers to as her sisters, and

hosted an annual Halloween ball that flexed her personal notoriety and connec

tions to create a performative and labor undercommons for other Black femme

performers to hone their craft.’8

As Java gained local and national prominence, the LAPD began to target her

by sending plainclothes and uniformed officers to monitor her performances

Advertisement for Sir Lady Java’s performance at the Mermaid Room, Los Angeles, Ca. 1970. Courtesy Division Leap and Sir Lady Java

It is interesting to note that the image on the left is the same photo the LAPD has on file in the investigator’s report about Java’s performance at the Redd Foxx, October 8, 1967.

Opening Wednesday, Aptil 9th

.7he &auii/uf

SIR LADY JAVA

.7h. S1010,1 2)aflcep of ,2)ance,a

Crtttcs have billed Java as America’s loveliest

female ia,tpersonator of today. This enteeg,,,e,’

has the following statistics: age 24, eyes green,

skin olive, ttebht 5’ 7”, bust 35”, waist 22”,

hips 37”. has never shaved, He is indeed o,,eof

the World’s seven wonders. His acts are full

pulsating and provacatise iotprevsionv including

a wardrobe that stuns the imagination, You can’t

aflord to miss this limited engagement. Make

your reservations, Front Coast In Coast, ss-hereser

stw s engaged, there is standing coon, only.

SHOWS

11:30 1:30 3:30

MERMAID ROOM Pt,. 272-9677

8 TREVA ELLISON THE LABOR OF WERQIN G IT ‘9

and to warn bars against employing her. This harassment reached a fever pitch

in October 1967, when the Los Angeles Police Commission (LAPC) filed an

injunction against the Redd Foxx, a Black-owned bar that employed Java, de

manding that the bar cancel all of her upcoming performances or risk losing its

business license. Before filing the injunction, an LAPC investigator went to the

Redd Foxx and attempted to strip search Java to confirm her “true” gender, but

Java refused to comply. The LAPC claimed that by employing Java, the Redd

Foxx was in violation of one of the commission’s rules governing public enter

tainment venues, Rule No. 9, which read: “No entertainment shall be conducted

in which any performer impersonates by means of costume or dress a person

of the opposite sex, except by special permit issued by the Board of Police

Commissioners.”9 Java responded by staging a picket outside of the Redd Foxx

on October 21, 1967, and later, with the help of the American Civil Liberties

Union (ACLU), filed a lawsuit against the LAPD.2° The LAPD’s harassment of

Java and other femme of color queens and werqers occurred in a climate in

which gender nonconforming people could be arrested for “masquerading,” or

dressing as the “opposite” gender. Java’s struggle against the LAPD and the

LAPC is a powerful story in the unkempt and unruly archive of the labor of

werqing it. LGBT studies scholars have been quick to fold Java’s struggle against Rule

No. 9 into genealogies of male-to-female transgender activism, gay history, and

struggles over queer spaces without acknowledging that her protest was, at its

core, a response to anti-Black racjsm.2’ In news articles and interviews at the

time, Java framed her struggle against the LAPD and Rule No. 9 as a workplace

discrimination issue: “It’s discrimination, allowing some people this privilege

and not others. ... It’s got to stop somewhere, and it won’t unless somebody

comes forward and takes a stand. I guess that’s me.”22 But, reflecting on the in

cident in 2015, Java framed her fight with the LAPD as a struggle against anti-

Black and gendered racial profiling:

We didn’t know of any establishment that was white that they [the

LAPD] were stopping [from employing impersonators], but they were

definitely targeting me, because I was queen of the Black ones and they

feel that they had more trouble out of the Black ones. You see, we didn’t

have places to go to, places to eat, and they would not allow us in the

places and it was against the law to wear women’s clothing, you know

that? They could arrest you if you walk down the street in women’s

clothing [if you were being read as biologically male], in male clothing

[if you were being read as a biologically female].23

Java felt that the LAPD chose to suspend the Redd Foxx’s business license rather

than the licenses of the numerous other venues where she performed across

the city because the bar’s owner, Redd Foxx, stood out in the area as one of the

few Black club owners on the Westside. LAPC records corroborate this: the in

vestigator’s report about Java’s scheduled performances at the Redd Foxx notes

that other venues had been “warned about employing this individual”; warned,

but not threatened with the loss of livelihood.24 Also, Java was granted a permit

from the Police Commissioner to perform for a charity benefit at the Coconut

Grove, a club with a mostly white patronage, weeks after the incident at the Redd

Foxx.25 Java recalled that the performance at the Coconut Grove was the first

time she had performed in front of a majority white audience.26 She links the

LAPD’s effort to make female impersonators unemployable to larger issues of

employment for gender nonconforming people and the criminalization of sex

work, noting:

You have to understand that we didn’t have jobs, because they wouldn’t

hire us and those that would dress, the pioneers ... it hurts to talk about

it ... We could not ... But they wouldn’t let us work, so we had to turn

tricks to work. And, baby, that was so-called “our job” and we’d get ready

to work at night, and baby, we was come out! Police or no police, we was

coming out, snapping our wrists, flirting, walking down the street. ... I

told them [the American Civil Liberties Union] that we have no place

to work and the only place we can work is at night in the club. We had

no right to work. [When] we come to work, we had to come as men

[because it was illegal to dress as the “opposite” gender on the street]

and then transform ourselves into women when we get on stage. Well,

that was hard to do both. I won the fight for us to appear on stage, but

I didn’t win the fight for us to walk the streets.27

When Java asked the ACLU of Los Angeles to sue the LAPC after the commis

sion tried to pull Redd Foxx’s business license, she ran into difficulty. While Rule

No. 9 targeted drag performers, it made the bar owner the subject of the law. Thus, Java’s civil suit required a bar owner willing to be the named plaintiff. Her

case could not be heard in a court of law with Java as the sole plaintiff and was

eventually rejected by the courts on these grounds. So, while the LAPD could track

Java from venue to venue under the guise of Rule No. 9, she had little recourse to

challenge the LAPD. Unable to legally challenge Rule No. 9, Java effectively sub

verted it by finding a way to adhere technically to its requirements: she tested

the threshold of its stipulation that performers must wear at least three items

10 TREVA ELLISON THE LABOR OF WERQING IT / 11

of “properly gendered attire” by incorporating a wristwatch, a bowtie, and men’s socks into her act. This became a strategy, according to Java, that other per

formers mimicked: “They [other female impersonators] say: We’re able to work,

and we’re all going [to] work the next day, and we’re going to put on the three male articles [of clothing], and they did the same thing I did: socks and the wristwatch and the bowtie if they wore bikinis; if they wore gowns, they wore little bowties, some of them were jeweled.”28

The transgender tipping point narrative suggests that public interest in

transgender people, transgender representation, and transgender power is

progressive and has reached an apotheosis in our current time. Even critical

counter-narratives of the tipping point stage their arguments by remarking that

despite advances in visibility and representation, violence against trans people has reached a climax today.29 Besides being hard to verify, both of these narra

tives also miss the way that the visibility and containment of gender and sexual

nonconformity are cyclical and related to crises in capital. By framing her chal

lenge to Rule No. 9 and LAPD harassment as a labor issue informed by anti- Black racism, and by connecting unemployment for gender nonconforming people to the criminalization of sex work, Sir Lady Java calls our attention to the

linked histories of containing gender nonconformity and criminalizing sex work

in Los Angeles and how these histories intersect with the racialization of space and ruptures in capital.

THE LABOR OF WERQING IT:

CRIMINALIZING BLACK FEMME EMBODIMENT IN LOS ANGELES

Public interest in and discourse around gender and sexual nonconformity in

Los Angeles have been iterative and related to dramatic, qualitative changes in the organization of economic, political, and social life. For example, in 1942, when faced with the threat of the disintegration of the nuclear family and tra ditional gender roles because World War Ti production needs had shuffled the

gendered division of labor, then-mayor Fletcher Bowron petitioned the city council to make it illegal for women employees to wear pants in city hall.’°

And slightly earlier than that, in the late 1930s, policing gender and sexual deviance became a way to resolve a political fissure between middle-class re formers and organized labor on one side and the mayor and the LAPD on the other. Middle-class reformers and organized labor pointed to the unchecked

spread of sex work, gambling, and the immorality of night life as evidence that

the LAPD and mayor were under the control of commercial vice organizations. However, the racialization of space served as a primary organizing trope for the criminalization of gender and sexual deviance, as Bowron’s predecessor, Mayor Frank Shaw, and the LAPD responded to reformers’ critiques by pun ishing the most vulnerable people in the social hierarchy, reinforcing race- and class-based spatial containment strategies such as redlining, racially restric tive covenants, and vigilante violence. The LAPD responded by increasing the number of arrests of Black and Mexican women for sex work and by establish ing a Sex Crimes Bureau in 1937 to fingerprint, study, and contain so-called sexual criminals.3’ Earlier, between 1932 and 1933, the LAPD had responded to the increasing popularity of impersonation by raiding the pansy clubs where impersonators performed.’2 Raiding drag venues and criminalizing women of color were convenient ways to temporarily resolve a political crisis without actually disrupting the more powerful commercialized vice conglomerates that had already paid off the LAPD and city hall. Sir Lady Java’s insistence on her struggle as an issue of gendered racial discrimination is an insistence that we not forget that the racialization of urban space is a structuring phenomenon for queer and trans criminality. It’s not surprising, then, that after winning office on an anti-vice platform, Bowron would try to ban women from wearing pants in an effort to stave off gender inversion, which he saw as a consequence of wartime labor needs.

Throughout the late 1960s, LGBT activists in Los Angeles increasingly used visibility as a strategy to build political power. Activists held touch-ins and kiss- ins at public parks and bars, led public consciousness-raising circles in the new Gay Community Services Center (now the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center), held political forums for local politicians to meet with the “gay electorate,” and organized marches and protests against LAPD harassment. However, as a politi cal strategy, LGBT visibility became increasingly anchored to the neighborhoods of West Hollywood and Hollywood. Even when the acts of police harassment and deadly police violence that cohered LGBT as an oppressed cluster targeted racial ized LGBT people outside these two neighborhoods, gay liberation groups in Los Angeles still mostly failed to understand how the racialization of space and the criminalization of cross-dressing and sex work underpinned the criminalization of sexual deviance. Gay Liberation Front Los Angeles, for example, had internal fissures develop both around including trans people in the group—especially trans women—and around taking up issues that impacted people who were not cisgender men.33 At the same time, Gay Liberation Front and other groups struggled to welcome and retain trans and gender nonconforming femmes, lesbi ans, and people of color.

12 I TREVA ELLISON THE LABOR OF WERQING IT / 13

While gay liberation organizations in Los Angeles failed to see the criminal

ization of sex work and trans and gender nonconforming people as structuring

components of queer criminality, Black middle-class activists fought to curb sex

work in certain sections of Los Angeles throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. In October

1960, a group of Black businessmen led by Cecil B. Murrell formed the Council of

Organizations Against Vice (COAV), which sought to eradicate prostitution in

the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles.34 Murrell, one of the cofounders

of the famed Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, the first Black-

owned insurance company established west of the Mississippi, led an effort to

increase punitive fines for sex workers, not to penalize those soliciting sex work.

Murrell worked with the LAPD and city council to increase the fine for sex work

ers from $50 to $100, and he lobbied municipal judges to sentence sex workers

for the maximum possible 180 days instead of the average ten-day sentence in

1960. Even the Los Angeles Sentinel criticized Murrell’s and COAV’s approach

as shortsighted, arguing that police resources should not be used to entrap Black

women and should instead be directed toward arresting white male motorists,

who residents complained would come through the neighborhood and proposi

tion and harass any Black woman walking down the street.36 Although COAV

noted that sex work was pervasive throughout Los Angeles and that the Central

and Newton districts had the “worst” prostitution, they focused their energy on

Westside, whose Black communities have historically been more middle class.

COAV saw eradicating sex work as a part of a larger self-help politics of racial

equality and progress. A review of LAPC records throughout the 1960s shows

similar instances of Black residents petitioning the police commission for LAPD

intervention to curb prostitution, burglaries, and other proclaimed nuisances in

South Central and West Adams.37 Leveraging Black middle-class political power as a way to curb prostitution

was based on the idea that Black people have the same right to safety, protection,

and a say in policing priorities as middle-class whites. COAV’s anti—sex worker

activism rerouted a real communal concern about racist sexual harassment in

West Adams into a script of gender and sexual conformity as a method of build

ing class power. This framing of equality and identity-based class power rendered

Black femme sex workers outside of the terrain of Black middle-class neighbor

hood politics and disregarded the extent to which gender and sexual deviance

function as the staging grounds for Black fungibility. Gay and lesbian activists,

on the other hand, disavowed the centrality of race and racism in the production

of sexuality-based criminalization. Understanding Java’s struggle as both sur

plus to the gay liberation movement and excessive to Black middle-class activism

and Black middle-class visions of Black neighborhoods and communities, we can

see how flexibility—as a cultural logic underwriting subjectivity in racial capi tal’s global phase—manifests itself in social and political formations organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. For Los Angeles—based gay and lesbian institutions like Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Community Services Center, the local expansion of voluntary sector governance initiatives under the Bradley mayoral administration and the Nixon presidency created opportunities for activists to fund survival programs, which they modeled on those of the Black Panther Party. The professional requirements of these funding initiatives, how ever, privileged the skills and expertise of middle-class and educated gays and lesbians; thus, activists increasingly positioned sex workers, drug users, raucous partiers, people with mental illnesses, gays and lesbians of color, and working- class trans people as excessive to the project of gay Los Angeles. For the Black middle-class activists in COAV, civil rights—era gains created an opportunity for Black middle-class activists to cohere Blackness around middle-class perfor mances of gender and sexual conformity, property ownership, and racial uplift.

Java’s praxis of producing social life—creating an undercommons for Black queer labor, performance, and desire—and her hesitance around transgender as an identity offer us so much to consider. First, Java’s story issues a warn ing against investing in transgender as the penultimate horizon or new fron tier of social difference. Her struggle has been rendered through the language of trans activism, MTF activism, and LGBT history. What does it mean to recover this story as an episode in the production of transgender history, when, from Java’s perspective, so much of her understanding of herself as a woman—the kinds of labor she performed as a lover, a daughter, and a friend—and her framing of her struggle with the LAPD are both anchored in a strident critique of anti- Black racism? Considering Java’s life story on her own terms delivers a word of caution to the burgeoning field of transgender studies: transgender studies becomes a scene of the subjection and instrumentalization of Blackness when scholars and proponents of the field use the lives and stories of Black people to make transgender cohere as a category of analysis and a field of inquiry without a full acknowledgment of how the racialization of space dis/organizes the articu lation and production of queer and trans culture and politics.

For Java—to riff on poet and playwright Ntozake Shange—there wasn’t enough for her in the world she was born into, so she made up what she needed.38 She flexed her hyper-visibility as a gender nonconforming woman as a source of livelihood. She worked to create an undercommons for Black femme labor and expression. Her capacity to do so (her act sold a lot of tickets)—her ability to buy a home for her family with the money she made as a performer in the 1960s and to rent out ballrooms in downtown Los Angeles to host balls that featured

14 TREVA ELLISON THE LABOR OF WEROING IT / 15

only Black femme performers—exposes precisely the lies and abstracted labor that constitute white life, civil society, and Black middle-class propriety. During our 2015 conversation, Java shared a story of negotiating her gender perfor mance with her mother as a young woman: “I’m nineteen years old, and I act like a woman; I look like a woman. I say [to my] Momma: ‘I didn’t ask to come here.’ She say, ‘Stay in your place.’ I was making my own place, and I was breaking the rules, but I didn’t know I was breaking the rules. I just know it was not right to do Black people like they do.”39 This quote emphasizes the para-subjective and para-identitarian movement of the labor of werqing it. Java’s formulation of her femininity is grounded in her relationships to Blackness, Black people, and the ways racial capitalism attempted to circumscribe Black life via the racialization of space. At the same time, as exemplified by the work of COAV, Black politics and Black political power offered no stable home for Black femmes like Java. Her story emphasizes that Black femme embodiment and performance are a con stant crossing between, a flight in and out of, legibility and recognition.

Java’s life and praxis also offer an alternative approach to thinking about Blackness and theories of Blackness and of Black ontology that posit social death as an axiom or universal law of Black existence—namely, Blackness as a relation of ontological death. Such theorizations dismiss the ways that Black femmes, in particular, and Black people, in general, create and exercise power through the production of social life and social underworlds that are always already denatur ing and deforming the “world as we know it.” The over-representation of social death as an axiom of Blackness also relies on a dismissal of gender and sexual ity as one of the staging grounds of Black fungibility. The idea that Blackness is related to death relies on the reality of natal alienation for enslaved Black women as a defining characteristic of “Blackness as social death,” but then twists that fact to render anti-Blackness as the primary structuring mode of the hu man project, relative to gender and sexuality, which, under this framework, be come strategic modes of oppression. This logic de-particularizes and abstracts gendered anti-Black violence to do the work of rendering anti-Blackness as a universal or axiomatic theory of Blackness. For example, Black communal vio lence against gender and sexually nonconforming Black people, as outlined by Black feminist scholars like Beth Richie and Cathy Cohen, becomes reduced to a case of “borrowed institutionality,” or white man mimesis,4° instead of open ing a space and a time to critically reflect on how racial capitalist logics reproduce themselves within oppositional political-intellectual formations precisely through the frameworks of gender and sexual conformity.41 What does it mean to relegate Blackness to the position of social death, when, as Java’s life and times suggest, Blackness itself is uncertain, as it is both a medium and relation of social death

and social life? Black is; Black ain’t; Black is in flux between is and ain’t. This tension is what is summoned in naming the labor of werqing it: the power and potential in creating underworlds and undercommons for Black social life and its collision with logics and strategies of subjectification that rely on Black femme subjection, abuse, and premature death. Naming the labor of werqing it incites and stokes tension and uncertainty because flexibility, as a cultural and episte mological logic of racial capitalism, does try to position Blackness as fungible. At the same time, flexibility is also a Black femme method of cultivating the under- commons, the unkempt, and the unrulable—the very potentialities that drive social and political transformation and threaten the coherence of civil society and the world as we know it.

“The Labor of Werqing It: The Performance and Protest Strategies of Sir Lady Java” by scholar Treva Ellison was written in 2016 for this volume.

NOTES

1. See Manuel Arturo Abreu, “Transtrender: A Meditation on Gender as a Racial Construct,” Newhive, April 18, 2016, https://newhive.com/b/transtrender-a-meditation-on-gender-as-a

-racial-construct!. Abreu raises similar questions about the instrumentalization of transness, writing: “Trans is trending, which may or may not help, but most likely hurts, actually- existing trans people. A concrete institutional definition of trans is still ‘under construction,’ itself having undergone various ‘queerings.’ But both above and under the carnival of signifiers and the circulation of theoretical concepts, trans people, especially of color, still inordinately suffer and die. Our voices are still unheard and ignored, even as aspects of the condition become generalized and hypervisible. The world cheers on as we agonize. Statistics about trans people of color get subsumed into the general trans struggle to intensify empathy. What, precisely, is this necropolitics of conceptualization whereby trans pain, particularly the pain of Black trans people, continues to transmute into metaphors, generalities, theoretical developments, queerings, coping mechanisms for people who think they were ‘born into the wrong race,’ and much more, but basic human rights and even expectancy of life itself still elude many in the global trans community? When did queerness become a post-critical theory clickbait machine?”

2. Katy Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier,” Time, May 29, 2014, http:!!time.com!135480!transgender-tipping-point.

3. The Black LGBT Project, founded and directed by C. Jerome Woods, is the largest and, perhaps, only archive in existence dedicated to preserving the history of the Black LGBT people of Los Angeles and their partners. Woods, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District

16 TREVA ELLISON THE LABOR OF WEROING IT / 17

teacher, started the archive from materials he had collected over the years and creates local

exhibitions of archival materials. The Black LGBT Project consists of over one thousand photos, over one hundred books, thousands of paper documents, and several hundred pieces

of ephemera relating to Black LGBT life in the United States, with the bulk of the materials focused on Black LGBT life in Los Angeles.

4. Several recent books in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies theorize how processes of material and ideological subjection animate and capacitate processes of producing and rendering subjects in the context of US racial capitalism. Jodi Melamed terms

this contradiction “represent-and-destroy,” or the incorporation of the management of

difference into the aegis of the post—civil rights US state, alongside the creative destruction

of racial capitalism evinced in the buildup of the prison industrial complex at state, federal,

and global scales beginning in the late 1960s; see Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Chandan Reddy names this contradiction “freedom-with-violence” to underscore the productive tension between the expansion of sexual citizenship alongside the expansion of raciabzed carceral violence; see Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence:

Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Lisa Marie Cacho uses the term “unprotectability” to identify the gap between the socio-spatial multiplicity that criminality indexes and the particular embodiments that become reified through the production of identity-based political subjects. Cacho argues that when one

is rendered unprotectable, the interpretive violence of the law attempts to make one politically, economically, and socially illegible. Additionally, she argues that these modes of representation and subjectification (the law, law enforcement, and political representation) work and are reconstituted precisely through the very endurance of unprotectability as a

mode of existence, the disciplinary double to political subjecthood; see Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New

York University Press, 2012), 5. These scholars illustrate, in different ways, how the fungibility of criminality marks both the potential and limits of identity-based political formations.

5. Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures ofAmerican Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the

Culture ofImmigrant Labor (Minneapobs: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2, 9.

6. Ibid., 110. Other scholars of race and racial capitalism might disagree with Hong’s

periodization of capital into two major phases in the twentieth century: nation-state and

global. Certainly, we can find many examples of global racial capital before World War II. Katherine McKittrick, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Sylvia Wynter, for example, all chronicle

the formulation of the onto-epistemological creation of “Man” (white, cisgender, able-bodied, propertied) as the corollary project to the world-organizing strategies and projects of racial

capitalism: enclosure, extraction, colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. What is helpful to

me about Hong’s formulation is that she identifies flexibility as a logic that organizes culture,

politics, and subjectivity and manifests alongside the shift in modes of capital accumulation

from more formal, production-oriented modes to more multi-varied ones. Today, even work

once thought of as informal, like domestic work, cleaning, personal assistance, sex work, food

delivery, and even gifting, can be integrated into formal, corporate modes of accumulation. Companies such as Google, Airbnb, Facebook, Instacart, Tumblr, and PayPal fold all kinds

of informal labor into a formal corporate chain of production. Hong asks us to consider how

flexibility as a mode of accumulation for racial capital manifests in our cultural, social, and political formations.

7. Christina Hanhardt and Sonia Song-Ha Lee explain how War on Poverty programs were sites of rupture for coalitions and grassroots groups organized around racial justice and gay liberation in New York City. While Lee examines how the changing rules and regulations governing Community Action Agencies dictated by the federal government created tensions and hierarchies within political coalitions between Blacks and Puerto Ricans, Hanhardt explains how the competition over resources and the discourses of racial liberalism and rational choice theory align LGBT social formations with racist policing agendas. See Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics ofViolence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino CivilRights Movement: Fuerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2014).

8. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, 35—80; and Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City, 131—64.

9. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.