#Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

[campgender]

[Quoting Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha] “My bed, heaped with cushions, is my office, my world headquarters. My life is arranged around my bed. There is good art to look at, a window, my vibrator plugged in, a stack of books within easy reach. I lie in it thinking of all my other crip poet friends who spend most of their days in bed too. Draped in pillows, red and plum sheets … curtained by plum sari fabric. This is my place of power, the fulcrum, the place everything emerges from.” Black Power Naps takes the “useless” space of the tired femme’s bed and makes it lushly accessible for public use. And as Acosta and Sosa drape their sleep stations in velvet and chiffon, they literally “make room for the other dreams, the ones that are fertile ground for creating the versions of ourselves that thrive and live long lives.”

from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2022)

[processedlives]

But the longer I sat with this book the more choked, the more stagnant it became. The directions I followed and answers I found seemed too easy, too pat—and while this apparently pleased funders and tenure committees, it left me cold and uneasy. So I went back to texts I’d gathered for my project and other texts I’d loved in the past ten years, looking for what unexpected things they might have to say about Caribbean lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer experience that I was still missing. I quickly found my answer: nothing. This was because the vocabulary I had been using to describe these authors, the descriptors that they used for their own identities—queer, lesbian, transgender—appeared nowhere in their work. Nowhere. No characters, no narrators, no one in the novels used these words. Instead they talked about many kinds of desires, caresses, loves, bodies, and more. And over and over again, they talked about something that was such a big part of my life, but that I never expected to find in most queer fiction: spirituality, Afro-Caribbean religions. Not one of these authors wrote about “queers,” but almost everyone wrote about lwa—that is, about the spirit forces of the Haitian religion Vodou. And, finally, finally tuning into this other vocabulary, I was fascinated by the recurrence of one figure, who multiplied herself in these texts as if in a hall of mirrors: the beautiful femme queen, bull dyke, weeping willow, dagger mistress Ezili. Ezili is the name given to a pantheon of lwa who represent divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. She’s also the force who protects madivin and masisi, that is, transmasculine and transfeminine Haitians. And Ezili, I was coming to see—Ezili, not queer politics, not gender theory—was the prism through which so many contemporary Caribbean authors were projecting their vision of creative genders and sexualities.

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders

[snailg0th]

Mj’s Ultimate Political Reading List (that isn’t just crusty russian dudes)

Hello! Today I’m going to give you a list of books that I recommend that revolve around leftist politics!

Malcolm X Speaks by Malcolm X

Women, Culture, and Politics by Angela Davis

Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

The Meaning of Freedom by Angela Davis

Abolition Democracy by Angela Davis

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

The Prison Industrial Complex by Angela Davis

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution by Judith Butler

Imitation and Gender Insubordination by Judith Butler

Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler

Excitable Speech by Judith Butler

Undoing Gender by Judith Butler

The Souls Of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Black Reconstruction In America by W.E.B. Du Bois

Darkwater by W.E.B. Du Bois

This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga

Ain’t I A Woman? by Bell Hooks

Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Fredrich Engles

Fascism: What is it and How to Fight it by Leon Trotsky

Profit over People by Noam Chomsky

The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemborg

Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault

Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Orientalism by Edward Said

An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory by Ernest Mandel

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Black Women, Writing, And Identity by Carole Boyce Davies

Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

An End To The Neglect Of The Problems Of The Negro Women by Claudia Jones

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life Of Black Communist Claudia Jones by Carole Boyce Davies

The Postmodern Condition by Jean François Lyotard

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Colonize This! by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman

Socialism Made Easy by James Connolly

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay 

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

How To Be An Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Notes Of A Native Son by James Baldwin

Biased: Uncover in the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America 

The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Socialist Reconstruction of Society by Daniel De Leon

7 Feminist And Gender Theories 

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Lavender and Red by Emily K. Hobson

Raising Our Hands by Jenna Arnold

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affects Us and What We Can Do

The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott

The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale

Class, Race, and Marxism by David R. Roediger

Yearning by Bell Hooks 

Race, Gender, And Class by Margaret L Anderson 

Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley 

Working At The Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework” by Moya Bailey 

Theory by Dionne Brand

Dora Santana's Work by Dora Santana

Property by Karl Marx

Wages, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx

Wage-Labor and Capital by Karl Marx

Capital Volume I by Karl Marx

The 1844 Manuscripts by Karl Marx

Synopsis of Capital by Fredrich Engels

The Principals of Communism by Fredrich Engles

Imperialism, The Highest Stage Of Capitalism by Vladmir Lenin

The State And Revolution by Vladmir Lenin

The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

[schooloffeminism]

📕 BEYONCÉ IN FORMATION. REMIXING BLACK FEMINISM ✍️ OMISE’EKE NATASHA TINSLEY

#ReadFeminism

Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives.

Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women’s reproductive justice to the subtext of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics.

In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s best-selling cultural histories, Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.

Más libros feministas 👉 www.schooloffeminism.org/libros

[dowsingfordivinity]

Queer Pagan Reading List 2022

Queer Pagan Reading List 2022

New titles this year by Enfys Book of the Major Arqueerna blog, Casey Giovinco, Fire Lyte of the Inciting a Riot podcast, Aaron Oberon, Fio Gede Parma and Jane Meredith, Lee Morgan, Devdutt Pattanaik, Roberto Strongman, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, plus translations into other languages of Mat Auryn’s book Psychic Witch. Check out the 2015 list, the 2018 list, the 2020 list, and the 2021…

[inclusiveexcellencecca]

“Femmes of Color, ‘Femmes de Couleur’: Theorizing Black Queer Femininity through Chauvet's ‘La danse sur le volcan’” by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Beauty of beauty, oh, the blood dark lipstick and limpid gaze: yes, the first photograph of Marie Vieux Chauvet that I held in my gaze was one that captured my loving imagination and hasn’t let go.  I was writing a senior honors’ thesis with a chapter on Love when my adviser, Dr. VeVe Clark, gave me this photocopied image of her, and I sat with it in my two hands and gazed in silent wonder.  The skillfully arched eyebrows, the widow’s peak accentuated by upswept hair shaping her face into a heart, the curve of rouged lips, the beauty mark begging my touch on her cheek, the laughter without softness in her brown eyes...

[femgeniuses]

The Color Pynk: Janelle Monae, Janet Mock, and Black Femme Futures – a talk by Omise’eke Tinsley, 4/15 Please join us for a public event featuring Dr. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, who will deliver her talk titled ““The Color Pynk: Janelle Monáe, Janet Mock, and Black Femme Futures” at 1:30PM on Monday, April 15th, in Tutt Science Lecture Hall.

[ourqueertheoryqueerlives-blog]

“The Black Atlantic is not just any ocean, and what is queer about it’s fluid amor is that it is always churning, always different even from itself.”

(“Black Altlantic Queer Atlantic” by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley pg 203)

Nya F(NF)

[rienfleche]

Traveling to West Africa in 1555, William Towerson proclaimed that “men and women go so alike that one cannot know a man from a woman but by their breasts which in the most part be very foule and long, hanging down low like the udder of a goat”; Richard Burton saw African females [sic] not only as beasts but as beasts of burden, noting that their “masculine physique” matched males' [sic] in “enduring toil, hardships, and privations”—proving the sexes equally fit for slavery.

[Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature, page 11]

[campgender]

Implicitly and explicitly, Tourmaline’s freedom dreams are always dreams of radical accessibility. As antipolicing protests spread through New York in May 2020, she laid out, “If you’re Black and disabled and feel like you’re missing the revolution cuz you can’t be in the streets, just remember it’s not revolution if it doesn’t include us!”

Marsha and Sylvia, the freedom-dreaming ancestors whose work Tourmaline lovingly, literally carries on her own body, were disabled revolutionaries. “Marsha P. Johnson would sometimes get picked up by the police for walking naked down the street, talking incoherently about her father and Neptune, and be ‘taken away’ for a few months. She would return implanted with Thorazine and ‘would be like a zombie’ for a month or so before returning to ‘the old Marsha,’” Anole Halper notes in a careful consideration of these foremothers’ “mental health challenges.”

“Sylvia Rivera, according to her, had ‘a drinking problem,’ used heroin, and attempted suicide at least twice in low periods. Even though these facts are well-documented, they seem omitted from the mythology that is emerging about these remarkable people.” Tourmaline’s films are jewel-toned exceptions to this pattern of omission. Visualizing transfemme ancestors’ neurodivergence as a “privileged relationship to the immaterial,” Happy Birthday, Marsha! and Salacia take seriously Marsha’s proclamation, “I may be crazy, but that don’t make me wrong.”

In Tourmaline’s films, Marsha’s and Sylvia’s disabilities are neither hidden nor romanticized. Her characters wear “crazy” neither as a cloak of shame nor as a crown of glory, but in the everyday, intimate, creative ways Black women wear headscarves.

from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2022)

[queerandpresentdanger]

And in the last fifteen years queer theory has harnessed the repetitive, unpredictable energy of currents, waves, and foam to smash and wash into bits many I’s — from the gendered self to the sexed body, from heterocentric feminist speech to homonormative gay discourse. In this field where groundlessness is celebrated, writers also explicitly or implicitly rely on metaphors of fluidity, which provide an undercurrent for expanding formulations of gender and sexual mobility. Judith Butler’s praise of the resistant power of drag’s fluid genders and sexualities in the pivotal Gender Trouble is echoed by many a queer theoretical text: “Perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the right to claim naturalized or essentialist gender identities.” 29 This proliferation multiplies the genders and sexualities explored by queer theory beyond women and men, gay and straight. They soon include, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, “pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leather folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes.” 30 No deviant is a desert isle here, but part of an archipelago rushed together by a common sea of queerness. Does this queer sea have a color, though? As the cascading, un-color-coded sentences of Butler and Sedgwick suggest, in the early 1990s prominent queer theorists denaturalized conventional gender and sexuality while renaturalizing global northernness and unmarked whiteness, initially unreferenced as if they were as neutral as fresh water. In both theorists’ early genderscapes, the bodies and selves rendered fluid are first and foremost gendered and sexualized, only faintly marked by other locations — only secondarily racialized, nationalized, classed. When Butler acknowledges that codes of (presumably white) racial purity undergird the gender norms disturbed in her initial consideration of “fluidity of identities,” she does so belatedly and between parentheses (as part of a long list of clarifications to her discussion of drag in the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble). 31 Sedgwick’s list, somewhat differently, momentarily parts the waves of queer theory’s uncommented whiteness as race fades in subtly with the African American – associated terms bulldagger and Snap! queen. Not only is this faint racialization limited to the black-white landscape of the contemporary global north, keeping terms like mahu, mati, tomboy, tongzhi unlistable, but the particularities of this possible racialization remain as unspecified as the color of the leather favored by “leather folk” or the jacket cut of the “ladies in tuxedoes.” The list’s sheer heterogeneity sweeps the bulldagger’s racial particularities into the same washing currents as the butch bottom’s sexual particularities. These queer theorists are innovative, rigorous scholars whose work focuses on a predominantly white global north but who do — often in introductions— acknowledge how racialization intersects the construction and deconstruction of ossified genders and sexualities. Shortly after her list in Tendencies’ introduction, Sedgwick contends that “a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses.” 32 This is not her work in a text that goes on to deftly engage Jane Austen and Sigmund Freud, but she does gesture toward the importance of “other” scholars taking it up. Similarly, in the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Gender Trouble, Butler remarks that “racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit” and concedes that if she rewrote the book she would include a discussion of racialized sexuality. In thinking through performativity and race, she suggests that “the question to ask is not whether the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race.” 33 But of course there is not just one question to ask of the meeting point between Butler’s theory and race, and those I would pose would be different still. Namely, what happens when queer theories start with explicit formulations of racialized sexuality and sexualized race, rather than add them in after theories like performativity have already been elaborated? How does this change in point of departure change the tidal pattern of queer theory? How might it shift the field’s dominant metaphors, decentering performativity’s stages and unearthing other topoi?

Black Atlantic, Queer Atlanic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

The entire piece is great and I encourage anyone who can find it to read it!

[campgender]

“Lady Java’s Tignons” from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2022)

image text under the cut

Viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses shaped like butterfly wings, edged in rhinestones, and fringed with hanging beads, Sir Lady Java identifies herself to interviewer Pasqual Bettio in 2016: “We’re called transsexuals, basically, because I’m in a trance about my sex.” Born in New Orleans in 1940, Java—who transitioned with family support at a young age—was a mainstay of Los Angeles’s nightclub scene in the 1960s and ’70s. Billed as the “World’s Loveliest Female Impersonator,” she “appeared in shows all over the West Coast with such personalities as Nancy Wilson, Redd Foxx, Lena Horne, Louis Jordan, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Joe Tex, Ray Charles, B.B. King, and Quincy Jones,” according to the brochure “Who Is Java?”

As she rose to prominence, she became a target for police harassment. In 1967, the LAPD raided the Redd Foxx Club to arrest her for violating Rule No. 9, an ordinance that prohibited trans women from appear- ing in public with less than three articles of male clothing. But when Java—performing in a bikini, bow tie, slim men’s wristwatch, and tiny socks—proved unarrestable, police threatened to revoke the club’s license or to imprison Foxx himself.

Java understood this police harassment as racialized: “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.” Java responded by picketing the Redd Foxx Club (which dropped her act) and hiring the ACLU to mount a lawsuit against the LAPD.

Lady Java’s stage career continued brilliantly through the ’70s and ’80s, garnering positive press from Jet, Ebony, Sepia, and L.A. Advocate. Her career highlight, she tells Bettio, was performing for Lena Horne at a 1978 birthday party that Horne hosted for her “sister Cancerian, Gertrude Gibson,” where Horne enthused to Jet about her interaction with Java: “I had the feeling I was talking to a friend I had known for a long while... I feel sort of... protective [of Java]. I don’t know, because that’s my sign—Cancer—always trying to be somebody’s mama!”

To impress Ms. Horne, Java wore a spangled bikini and towering beaded headpiece whose curving contours—like many of the dramatically draped cloth, carefully sculpted tulle, and angel-wing feather wraps she crowned herself with—recall the tulip-shaped tignons (cloth turbans) made famous by her sister Louisiana Creoles. In an attempt to curb their social and sexual power, in 1786 Louisiana governor Esteban Miró decreed all women of African descent must cover their hair with knotted cloth and refrain from “excessive attention to dress.” But as Carolyn Long notes, “Instead of being considered a badge of dishonor, the tignon became a fashion statement. The bright reds, blues, and yellows of the scarves, and the imaginative wrapping techniques employed by their wearers, are said to have enhanced the beauty of women of color.” When Java turned her three articles of “male” clothing into high-femme sexiness, she followed in the footsteps of these foremothers’ fashion warfare.

Transforming the accessories meant to shame Black women into sexlessness into pure sexiness, Java declares, she chose “to wear beautiful outfits so a woman can be proud of me when she sees me. I don’t dress for men; I dress for women.”

By the 1990s Java was “enjoying a quieter life, retiring and, sadly, undergoing some serious health challenges,” according to Transas City. These challenges include a stroke from which, Java tells Bettio, “I lost a portion of my brain.” During her 2016 interviews with Bettio, her memories and historical records part ways: sometimes in small ways, as when she remembers performing for Horne at the Memory Lane supper club rather than the Pied Piper; sometimes in more significant ways, as when she proudly recalls winning her lawsuit against the LAPD.

“I went to court on it, and I won LAPD. I won the right for Java to work, meaning other impersonators could work also,” she recounts—though in fact her case was thrown out on a technicality. It would be easy to indulge the incoherence of her memories as post-stroke cognitive impairment. But it would also be easy to honor that incoherence as its own kind of freedom dream—an alternative history that translates the sinuous, undocumentable ways that change can happen.

After the publicity of her case, she reports, “They [other female impersonators] say: We’re able to go 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 . . . little bowties, some of them were jeweled.” Isn’t a flock of jeweled bow ties bouncing light off foremothers’ jeweled tignons another kind of win—another something to celebrate? How do we count and commemorate ways rewired and differently wired Black femme senses make a true story truer, more plentiful, more splendored?

[campgender]

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley on Indya Moore’s Calvin Klein ads, ballroom hands as gender performance, & imagining + valorizing femme penis

image description: four cropped screenshots of text from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley.

excerpt 1:

In their “I Speak My Truth in #MyCalvins” spot, Moore gives viewers hands performance while perched gracefully on the balcony’s edge. The ball of their left foot balanced on the ledge, right leg extended to the floor, and thighs in an open V, their right hand holds the railing while the left circles on the soft, limp wrist characteristic of vogue femme. At this moment—also the beginning of the voiceover that “speaks truth”—Moore seems at once grounded and ready to fly, their crotch bulge, breasts, and ballroom hands gesturing toward femme flight.

In the companion video “Convention Killer,” Moore—now advertising a black lace bodysuit from Calvin’s “womenswear” line—again gives us hands performance along with floor work, rolling and twisting with arched back and circling wrists as they dance in a mirrored glass cage. A black shirt tied around their waist swings between their legs as they work vogue performance style “soft and cunt,” which “consists of clean, soft, and smooth hand/arm movements in a fluid and flowing way.”

Mobile hands, not pendulous flesh of any kind, are the body parts that tell stories of gender in vogue femme, Tente argues: “The hands mark every presence and activate all bodies, from the voguers to those who came to look or judge... They frame the face, create boxes and flows of energy, they tut, twist and draw eights, they tell a story, point to certain parts of the body that need to be looked at and admired.”

excerpt 2 (images 2 & 3):

Moore’s styling and posing in the Calvin Klein videos use hands performance to point to ways Moore alters not only the body itself but their understanding of what their body means. In the “Convention Killer” spot, their hands deftly circle both their face and upper thighs as “parts of the body that need to be looked at and admired.”

Their vogue femme hands point to their crotch in a way that, in the words of my brilliant Femme Theory student Elijah Ezeji-Okoye, “begs us to imagine a biologically femme, non-binary penis”: that is, Moore’s voguing femme choreography in their slightly bulging Calvins “allows us to include the biology of the penis in a more representative femme-ininity while resisting the gender binaries that are imposed upon us from birth.”

I love Ezeji-Okoye’s idea that Moore dresses and dances a biologically femme penis, which aligns with Moore’s self-identification as “nonbinary, femme,” and decidedly not female. I also love that when I write something like this—Moore gestures toward her biologically femme penis with soft and cunt hands—I’m putting together words that make little sense in relation to each other in straight common sense but signify generously in Black queer world making.

Like Black pussy in Shoniqua Roach’s theorizing, cunt and cunty don’t reference genitalia in ballroom. Cunt and pussy are “criteria for gender performance in ballroom culture, as opposed to insults or demeaning expletives hurled at women and femme queens,” Bailey points out. (Comedian D. L. Hughley once called Moore a pussy for objecting to his homophobic jokes, to which they responded, “Pussy’s are warm, have depth and are strong enough to take a beating... Pussy is absolutely complimentary to who I am.”) Bailey notes, “When these terms are used, the speaker does not typically say ‘you are a cunt.’ Instead, the speaker says, ‘give me pussy’ or ‘you look cunt,’ meaning give me femininity in your performance and self-presentation.”

In Bailey’s examples, cunt functions as an adjective rather than a noun: and while concrete nouns suggest “permanency, stability, fixity,” as Gloria Wekker writes of Dutch nouns describing sexuality, adjectives—whose semantic role is change, modification of a noun’s meaning—are more supple, more suited to the malleable, unfinished understanding of sex and gender Bailey attributes to ballroom.

Cunty is a descriptor Moore themself uses, as in their tweet about Janet Mock’s work on Pose: “Goddess @janetmock teleported from the universe of infinitely cunty magical stuff and crushed some sugar, some spice and everything transsexual & softly blew the con- tents with her hand using her holy afro futuristic breath unto the book of Pose. & then our cast was born.” Nobody’s cookie-cutter, heteronormative femininity, the infinite cuntiness in Moore’s fabulous description is a femme-ininity that multiplies gender possibilities like grains of sugar, births something new with hands and mouth instead of uterus, and creates beautiful Black femme futures that were never supposed to exist.

excerpt 3:

In a roundtable on colorism, Moore cites white woman cunt—“a phrase in the ballroom scene that is commending somebody that is beautiful”—as proof that decolonization of queer bodies is ongoing, painful, and powerful even in our own spaces. Black femme cunt, Black femme penis as standards of excellence, they know, are “holy afro futuristic” dreams yet to be realized.

end image description.

[campgender]

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley on Miss Marsha P. Johnson, transmisogynoir, and Black femme ornamentation & excess

from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival (2022). image description below the cut.

image description: three screenshots of an ebook section titled “Star Pynk” in pink text. the excerpt reads:

Triangles, double moons, handkerchiefs, pansies, roses while we’re still here: of course, of course, so many shades of pink sing queerness without saying a word. Writing this book, I spent uncounted hours gazing at very, very queer pink pantsuits, pink eye makeup, pink ribbons, pink altars, pink survival gear, even pink HuCows. But the sources of femme pinkness that drew me in deepest... that I returned to again and again like a river... were the gowns, flowers, and aura of Stonewall veteran, activist, artist, model, and performer Marsha P. Johnson. I fell into rose-colored time warps watching her on Tourmaline’s Vimeo, Randolfe Wicker’s YouTube, and Michael Kasino’s love letter of a documentary, Pay It No Mind.

On February 14, 2019, I brought art supplies to my Femme Theory class at Harvard so students could make valentines for Miss Marsha and leave them in public places. I entreated my amazing Harvard colleague Robert Reid-Pharr, who knew Marsha in the 1980s, to tell me stories. Gifted with a chance to moderate a conversation with CeCe McDonald and Elle Moxley in February 2021, I asked these brilliant women to talk about their love for the Queen Mother. Marsha P(ay It No Mind) Johnson is the color pynk to me—the femmebodiment of all its queer nuances, loving generosity, and improbable joys.

One of Mother Marsha’s most circulated images— the header on the Marsha P. Johnson Institute website and the model for murals in Dallas, Denver, Portland, and Jersey City—shows her smiling radiantly in an off-the-shoulder fuchsia taffeta dress, haloed by a crown of roses, carnations, daisies, peonies, and baby’s breath. In one of my favorite images she poses at Gay Pride in a shimmering, rose-gold gown, crowned with a wide-open wreath of pink and red flowers and adorned with a lav- ender sash embossed stonewall. In these and other images that live on my screen, Miss Marsha is always fabulously, fantastically ornamented to the hilt in ways that look like love.

Let me be more specific, though: Mother Marsha is gorgeously or- namented in ways that look like Black love. Everyone knows Black people love shiny things, right? That “aesthetical Negroes [are] content to waste money on extravagance, ornament, and shine.” That “things that bling, shine, or shimmer, that emit light are especially privileged” in the “everyday aspirational practices of black urban communities, who make do and more with what they have, creating prestige through the resources at hand,” as art historian Krista Thompson elucidates.

In his influential, unabashedly racist 1908 treatise “Ornament and Crime,” Viennese archi- tect Adolf Loos was indulgent of so-called Kaffirs’ love of the ornamental since, unlike “modern man,” they “have no other way of attaining the high points of their existence.” Twenty-first-century racists are less tolerant of African American accumulation of “bling, shine, and shimmer.” Noting derision of Hurricane Katrina survivors’ jewelry, Humvees, Louis Vuitton bags, and flat-screen TVs, Lisa Marie Cacho observes, “Poor African Americans are not only represented as unentitled to ‘luxuries’; they are also denied the power to decide what constitutes a ‘luxury’ and the power to define what they need and what they can live without.”

Not (only) luxuries, ornaments can be lifesaving shields more resistant than levees. “The ostentatious display of things might be interpreted as a protective means. We might understand the use of material goods and the production of blinding light as a shield or apotropaic, simultaneously reflecting and deflecting the deidealizing gaze on black subjects,” Thompson offers. “The beauty of black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise,” Hartman states in no uncertain terms, “is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”

For Black trans women, transfeminist scholar Eve Lorane Brown describes, the beauty of black ordinary—the “extravagance, ornament, and shine” of hormone therapy, hair extensions, contouring kits, or other everyday accessories of black femme-ininity—saves lives in more immediate ways. White trans women forgo makeup, breasts, or shaved legs and walk through her majority-Black Oakland neighborhood unharassed, she notices, benefitting from residents’ knowledge that interfering with any white person risks police intervention. The same isn’t true for Black trans women.

“No matter how unclockable” a trans femme of color might be, “no matter how well she could blend in, she still carried that seed of fear about being found out . . . fetishized, ridiculed, rejected, or attacked,” Janet Mock writes. “We don’t have to search for too long to watch footage of a girl being attacked on public transit or in the restroom, or read a story about the killing of yet another black or Latina woman.” Femme tech— manicures, wigs, foundation makeup, dresses, waist trainers, handbags, hormone therapies, plastic surgeries—are “‘luxuries’ [that] may be regarded as meeting basic physiological and safety needs for African American trans women,” Brown concludes. Diving into ornament as a daily practice of beauty and safety, Treva Ellison remarks, Black trans femmes engage “the sartorial, the expressive, and the performed” with a view to “reworking and repurposing the signs, symbols, and accoutrements of Western modernity” in ways that guard against “Black femme subjection, abuse, and premature death.”

But Marsha’s pink, shiny, frilly, plastic, floral femme tech wasn’t curated to blend seamlessly with—well, anything. She stood out, always. Queen Mother wasn’t shy to walk through town half en déshabillé: “She’d be coming up Christopher Street with the rolled-down stockings, fuzzy slippers, her wig in beer-can rollers: ‘Hello, everybody! What a wo-o-onderful morning!’” Sasha McCaffrey laughs. When fully dressed— gloriously “over the top with the jewelry, flowers in her hair, very creative looking, very commanding of attention,” performer Ron Jones recalls— Marsha embodied the Black aesthetic Hartman lyricizes as the “tendency to excess, the too much, the love of the baroque; the double descriptive: down-low, Negro-brown, more great and more better; the frenzy and passion; the shine and fabulousness of ghetto girls.”

Like her spiritual daughter Tourmaline, Marsha dressed as her “fullest and freest self in the most public of places”: “I remember seeing Marsha walk down the street in a miniskirt that she had made with nothing on underneath and it was clearly see-through. Clearly!” Rick Shupper emphasizes. “She wasn’t the kind of queen you questioned her drag,” Martin Boyce explains thoughtfully. “Because she had very little. And, you know, she wasn’t a well-dressed, coordinated kind of queen. She put on what was available and what, you know, fulfilled her idea of being a woman to some extent. It was a very, very natural look—and all her own.”

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[campgender]

genuinely this book is so fucking good… i did not realize how much faster i would be at reading when i’m not stopping every paragraph to either refigure decent conceptualizations of femme-ininity to not be transmisogynistic as hell or deconstruct theorizations too flat & rigid to be applied beyond a cis audience. but this author is intentional about engaging with Black transfem(me) community knowledges so instead of feeling frustrated by how the analysis was limited by the authors’ biases i’m like using my energy on thinking about + learning from the actual content of her ideas rather than predominantly playing in its gaps

[ourqueertheoryqueerlives-blog]

“Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist” 

- Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

(hg)