Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble

Abstract

Abstract Marquis Bey's Black Trans Feminism (2022) puts forth radical gender abolition as the necessary actualization of blackness and transness toward hopeful world de/construction. An intentional, ongoing work of stepping aside from expected regimes replaces material identitary stances and aims to embrace possibility rather than hold us down. The present conversational piece, fostering critical reflection in/on kinship and interested in evading disciplinary pledges, explores underlying themes of Bey's fugitive theorization, such as undefining, opacity, queer excess, playful performativity, and the destabilization of “solid” ground. Desloover and Bey discuss the avoidance of ontological gendering violence in practice and the necessary forgoing of identities held near and dear. They touch on xenogender proliferation, which could lead not only to fracturing the oppressive binary but also to obliterating gender as colonial cis-heteropatriarchy knows it — to release the need for “making sense” and let it remake itself over and again. Bey describes the stifling experience of (en)forced embodiment of attributed/assumed privilege, claiming nonbinariness on/as the way to wider spaces that skirt required legibility. How can we run (off) from socially imposed and oppressive terrain that forecloses possible unruly existences? Yearnings for the vastness of the “not quite” that-which-is-given ripple beneath the surface of the nameable and speak ofthe elsewhere Bey desires without tying it too tightly to defining words. Playful joy from and for radically healing openness is shared and upheld here to elude the paralyzing exhaustion caused by a “cistem” that cannot possibly hold us.