Abstract

Black gender nonconformers embody an aspect of black queer life in America wherein actions and systems used to discipline deviance are dismissed through fugitive performance. These intentionally defiant performances hold what Alexander Weheliye has described as “a centrifugal factor in the theorization of political violence, racialization, and modern politics” (Habeas Viscus, 52). While concepts of camp, cross-dressing, drag, female masculinity, gender-bending, and trans studies occupy positions within queer and sexuality studies, sustained attention to how gender performances by black bodies outside of these aforementioned labels is altogether lacking. Literary representations of gender nonconformity can be found within the genre of slave narrative and its fictional offspring, neo-slave narratives. In the slave narrative Running A Thousand Miles to Freedom, fugitive slave Ellen Craft impersonates an elderly white slave master in order to facilitate her and her husband’s escape from the antebellum US South. This double transgression - the first of race, the second of gender - is similarly embodied in the persona of Jules Zen from Alexis De Veaux’s novella Yabo, whose androgynous and racially ambiguous appearance triggers a change of circumstances for this intersex character. Across and between Running and Yabo, this paper seeks to excavate how a continuum of the sometimes strategic, sometimes detrimental performances of gender nonconformity in African American literature: how are these approaches to freedom queering the subject, and what potential for fugitivity is made possible within queer black performance? What is at stake when we read black performance queerly? How do these surpluses of flesh - the zone of indistinction erupting out of the entanglement of racial, gender, and sexual illegibility - exhibit a potentiality for humanness not fully explored in Black studies?

Author

• William H Mosley, University of Texas at Austin