Week 7. Blackness & Gender Normativity

Text by Ellen Herra

This week we asked one another what has emerged in our thinking about the site from our collective study thus far as we imagine a futures for Turk and Taylor. 

The residue of the epidemic is still with us, we meet as pixelated video, dis-integrated audio and so it took us some time to build a collectivity digitally.  Speaking to one another about our in-progress values for Turk and Taylor facilitated some kind of kindredness: what is bringing us together? What is inspiring visioning for queer futurities? How is the urban/historical/public site intertwined in these internal and potential individuated realities? 

We want to unearth layers to enact desedimentation and understand how we got to our current moment by considering what else was possible in past moments that in turn help us understand a new way forward. 

If we do not just accept the current moment as inevitable, as good enough then the future may surpass our humble hopes. 

If we look at the past through a lens of current need it can better orient us to a future that manifests our highest values. We know that ethical futures come from shuttling between time, past -  present - future. 

To ground these wants we will think about what it means to do place-making, to bring beauty to a neglected but meaning-laden corner of the city.  And yet we want to dodge gentrification by being slippery to power structures, the work that comes from the resilience of subversive cultures can often be used against the originating culture, if we come together and create we want to keep an element of illegibility to the outcome. So we are concerned with home, not just as origin but as ritual, a way of thinking that works with the world, not apart, not even a part of it. We are trying to explore what it means to have strained binds to origin and home and yet preserve what can hold justice in solidarity for trans ecological ethics. We have the hope for remembrance of trans life lost, of life lived in spite of the regulatory regimes and oppressive structures, and to make the opportunity for greater togetherness that is not limited by these pasts and ontological categories. 

These statements ended up weaving together beautifully, we had different value focus and yet the collective proposal responded to the excerpts from Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey that we had prepared for this week’s meeting.  

“Opacity in my usage argues that one’s situatedness is important in that it provides access to the mechanisms of power that have created the conditions for ontologized accidents (e.g., epidermal blackness, nonnormative gendered physicality) to be denigrated and expunged from the province of social validity.'“ (Bey, 10).

We worked to question the idea of home and whether it is possible to have a site of origin from the trans experience, as it can have a conflicting relationship with home, origin, body. A collective identity is so important, a helpful troubling of the comfort of the identity. Abolition of a carceral state or even relief of imposed identities is about not making ourselves conform to the way power is operating through the state for efficiency. In so doing we step away from essentialist notions of existence, to learn how to break out of categories and surpass them, dis- establishing through a process of abolitionism. 

We pondered the links between carceral logic and transness. If chattel slavery uses the ideological belief that your body is something that fixes you in place in a hierarchical social system then we can begin to see the ways in which transness push back against body based structural violence. There is an economy of the body having a particular semiotic reality that comes out of the necessities of the slave trade, wedding things to the flesh in a permanent way in order to accumulate and deny simultaneously. Embodied identities have become categories that bind you in place even within activist networks intending to resist oppression, and we don’t need to think of bodies and identities that way. 

Bey, seems to encourage us to think about falling outside of subjectivity, indexed in its folds, gender troubling blackness. And transness as a kind of diaspora. reimagine, the edifice of home and belonging can only exist as a romance of constancy, a foil to a state of constant becoming or change.

Deep theoretical linkages: trans liberation and anti-carceral. 

This location, Turk and Taylor really physically holds that linkage. 

So if one practice of resistance is about reclaiming, Bey asks us what is at stake when we find our power by being bound together in this oppressive identity matrix. To use identity in any way to get closer to an active full citizenship validates these theoretical chains, it drops people into voids if they do not have you legible identity and in a time when historically marginalized are beginning to question the cost-benefit of expanding representation, opacity might still be a necessity of survival.  

Can we walk away, can we step beyond this ensnarement? There is a current need to fight within the system for full dignity within the system. But it is crucial for us to hold on to the wisdom that the system is faulty 

How do we work radically work with systems? Maybe we should come from all the directions at once infiltrating and pleaching state-sanctioned systems, and also working with identity reclaiming remaking them to be less like barbed wire, but most importantly to not neglect the work of trying to be subversive by being slippery to do things that will never make sense to these systems, to build and save our best stuff for new systems. We ask what can you do that doesn’t feed gentrification? Let us not forget that satisfaction with the status quo serves intersectional different positions differently. 

_________

Rituals are a home for those who have been uprooted, for those who have been subject to allelopathic methods of displacement… a home in fleeting moments and in motion, do not think of this as less than because the shimmering means it is alive. Bey says an edifice without a roof or even walls. We are making somethings that aren’t meant to be still, maybe a wormhole.

What if we take on the unbuilding, if we break down the walls, replace stability that was meant to contain us. Can we seek rituals to manifest belonging within an unbounded space while we destabilize fixed location? 

What would these constructions look like, what form could this take?  maybe bridges, corridors, something like Donna Haraway’s String Figures but our connection and ritual are the only anchor points. Just as an unbounded space can bring up feelings of fear, home can be a place of terror. The horror of being penned in with the human connections that seek to undo you, the jaggedness of not be able to get out of a hostile container. So then a more than human out-of-doors could present a kind of spiritual radical openness to nonknowing. Perhaps we can foster safe corridors, sheltered passage, and places to rest but not holdfast to home as a stable constant? not predicated. greens and solace. opacity. A mode of being protected, informed by way that the 20th-century obsession with transparency did not help with equity. So then what of opacity? What if we do something in the street that makes things more private? Do the concerns for safety overshadow a desire to be unregulated? but then again maybe its safer to not be fully seen. As in many of our meetings, we ricocheted in the tension between lived experience and theoretical musings halting proposals of what we might do as a collective at Turk and Taylor. We asked ourselves to be cautious, to respect the line between theorizing beautifully and the reality of living in the street or in any situation that is steeped in precarity. And we also reminded ourselves that in our shared culture of queerness, intimacy is one of our most creative soils. Intimacy is a place for joy and creativity. But what if certain kinds of intimacy are intrinsically intertwined with criminality?

Corridors: could we rebuild networks between the buildings to offset the physical/mental isolation that happens spatially with jailing or incarceration? How much power there is in using buildings to sever - cutting one off from society from other people experiencing a similar reality. 

Sheltered passage: could we activate an archive as a linkage, can it happen in the street, can the physical form of the activation function to help people in their day-to-day activities where the street becomes a living room? What are the different ways we can stitch together something that's been cut apart? 

Places to Rest: little zones, the blur building and what does it do to your relationship to your own body, little spaces where you can choose to enter the sidewalk, overgrown feeling but in an urban setting, a place to do something that you aren’t supposed to do, or disassociate from your physicality. An urban peep show, a peep show of history, stop along the street at a viewfinder and find something unexpected tucked away but not hidden.

We also discussed allowing ourselves the space of doing things imperfectly. Being okay with monstrosity, of fleshiness, with an actual intervention despite the slew of unintended consequences. Even with our own identity we correct or patrol ourselves, which can cause inaction; trapped. Within this internalization of regimes of regulation, survival is criminal behavior. past. present. bodies. obligation to self and others. authentic self. what is the helpfulness of naming things? To give a shorthand to get to know something before the intimacy of knowing, there's a functional aspect of creating a shortcut that can bypass a whole system of knowing. how do you measure which type - care for others - could be a shortcut, and care for ourselves by giving every detail.