General Editors' Introduction

General Editors’ Introduction SUSAN STRYKER and PAISLEY CURRAH rand theory travels. It circulates, colonizes, and globalizes. By contrast, minor- G ity discourses, subaltern voices, and historical formations outside the metro- pole are routinely “conscripted to the realm of the particular” because, Alexander Weheliye reminds us, “minority discourses seemingly cannot inhabit the space of proper theoretical reflection” (2014: 19, 6). Instead, these particularities are con- sumed and discharged in the production of “Theory” with a capital T that pur- ports to abstract, despecify, and ultimately to deracinate. Of course, the universal forms such theoretical knowledges create turn out to be screens for a particular conception of the human—that is, (masculinist, Eurocentric, white, hetero- patriarchal, able-ist, bourgeois) “Man”—which, as Sylvia Wynter writes, “over- represents itself as if it were the human itself” (2003: 260). To what extent does transgender theorizing in the academy circulate as grand theory, subtended and overseen by the Man and all his baggage, and to what extent does it participate in critical minoritarian discourse and contribute to the livability of lives ranked less worthy of living according to Man’s mis- measures? This is the tension that frames this issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, “The Issue of Blackness,” guest edited by Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, C. Riley Snorton, and Matt Richardson. These editors offer blunt provocations to the field of transgender studies and its practitioners: why, in its processes of institutionalization and canon formation, has transgender studies, another “theory in the flesh,” been so remiss in acknowledging women-of-color feminisms—black feminisms in particular— as a necessary foundation for the field’s own critical explorations of embodied difference? Why has it been so complicit in provincializing that body of work, replicating privileged notions of the human as Man, or celebrating in- or post- human figurations of embodied being that can prematurely foreclose humanness to the very beings routinely denied access to it? In what ways does transgender as a mode of analysis, point of theoretical departure, or object of study, in their words, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 4, Number 2 * May 2017 159 DOI 10.1215/23289252-3814937 ª 2017 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/2/159/485958/159Stryker.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 160 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly “always already depend on an abstraction of the racialization of space as foun- dational to the production of gender and sexuality?” And most pointedly, in a historical moment when images of black trans women saturate mass media as never before, yet the precarity of black transfeminine lives has rarely been greater, how might the field of transgender studies be building its relevance and accruing its cultural capital on such black women’s backs and using their lives “as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things,” while doing precious little to interrupt the power that renders black lives “killable and cage- able”? As the editors note, they’ve “got issues” with “the issue of blackness” in trans* studies. Their voices, and the work of the scholars they have selected for inclusion in this issue of TSQ, do the vital work of centering all these issues for any further elaborations of the field. Somewhat unexpectedly, this issue of TSQ also dramatizes the kinships and estrangements of trans* studies and queer studies through the lens of blackness. While it is certainly true that trans* studies has worked to hold queer studies accountable for its unstated cis-centrism and its privileging of sexuality over the forms of gendered embodiment that allow sexuality to “take shape and find its aim” (Stryker 2004: 212), it is nonetheless also true that a field of black queer studies has taken shape that provides an intellectual home for black scholars of trans* phenomena that such scholars have yet to fully seek or claim (or perhaps desire) within trans* studies. When queer theory was first becoming institution- alized in the academy a quarter century ago, it was widely perceived as a white affair, presided over by literary scholars of the Anglo-American canon working at elite private universities. And yet, within a few years, queer-of-color scholars were offering countergenealogies of the field that displayed its other roots, decentered its presumptive whiteness, and grounded its work in different prob- lematics. Transgender studies is at just such a crossroads today. Work such as that collected in this issue can perhaps begin to demonstrate that blackness, rather than being a “new direction” of concern for the field, has in fact always already been a constitutive if rarely acknowledged element in the field’s formation and articulation. As the activist Lourdes Ashley Hunter, the national director of the Trans Women of Color Collective, notes, “Every breath a black trans person takes is an act of revolution” (2015). Each such breath is a radical instance of the persistence of black being, of black mattering and continuing to matter as black, and of the need for and the possibility of deep structural changes that are conducive to black life. How can transgender studies as a field be more inspired by such sentiments so that it conspires with them: literally breathing in, in order to breathe with, a revolutionary black politics? Scholarly attention to the transversal relationality of Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/2/159/485958/159Stryker.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 STRYKER and CURRAH * General Editors’ Introduction 161 blackness to transness within the dominant system of social organization we all live within, which ranks us all according to cultural fantasies about the meaning of our flesh, must surely be part of any such transformative political project. Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona and general coeditor of TSQ. Paisley Currah is professor of political science and gender and women’s studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and general coeditor of TSQ. References Hunter, Lourdes Ashley. 2015. “Every Breath a Black Trans Woman Takes Is an Act of Revolution.” Huffington Post, February 6. www.huffingtonpost.com/lourdes-ashley-hunter/every-breath -a-black-tran_b_6631124.html. Stryker, Susan. 2004. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.” GLQ 10, no. 2: 212–15. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3: 257–337. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/2/159/485958/159Stryker.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 We Got Issues Toward a Black Trans*/Studies TREVA ELLISON, KAI M. GREEN, MATT RICHARDSON, and C. RILEY SNORTON e are in a time labeled the “transgender tipping point,” a period charac- W terized by the scaling up of legal protections, visibility, rights, and politics centered on transgender people. The contemporary visual landscape is populated with the bodies of Black women. How does the language and discourse of the tipping point elide the presence of a saturation of Black bodies? In academia this elision has taken the shape of the expansion and institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline. We are interested in what happens to the category of transgender as it becomes routed through the logics and power lines of institu- tionality and the metrics of administration. This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is the product and process of our attempt to think through how the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness—for Black people and places. We have engaged multiple fields in this issue, and these various intellectual quandaries all signal the simultaneous institutionalization of transgender studies alongside the heightened visibility of transgender people in our current popular and political landscapes. We are interested in the ways that these two simultaneous occurrences affect one another. Black transwomen and transwomen of color have sparked the interests of many because of popular figures like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock; at the same time, there has also been a lot more awareness around Black transwomen’s relationship to premature death. Though the popular representation of fabulousness and the crises of the trans subject are represented primarily by Black transwomen and transwomen of color, the field of transgender studies, like other fields, seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 4, Number 2 * May 2017 162 DOI 10.1215/23289252-3814949 ª 2017 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/4/2/162/485962/162Ellison.pdf by FLORIDA STATE UNIV user on 06 April 2019 ELLISON ET AL. * Toward a Black Trans*/Studies 163 In 2000, the emergent field of Black queer studies brought together scholars from multiple fields asking questions about the relationship between blackness and queerness. The culmination

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