(Un)Doing Binaries! Blackness and Transness on the Run

The visibilisation and unmaking of hierarchical binaries are central endeavours of feminist, Black, and anti- and decolonial theory and practice. In this conversation, Marquis Bey, Ana María Miranda Mora, and Philipp Wolfesberger will examine questions of nonnormative subjectivity via race, gender, and class. Focusing on Bey’s Black Trans Feminism as well as the more recent Cistem Failure, it will address how to dismantle the normative frameworks that define the world – such as white supremacy, cisnormativity and heteropatriarchy, but also the categories of race and gender. But our scope also lies beyond critique: We are, moreover, interested in Bey’s attempts to turn a black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered identity and toward a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. For Bey, after all, blackness and transness actualize themselves on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world that we have been given.