Issued by Way of “The Issue of Blackness”

Abstract

Abstract In 2017, TSQ published its special issue on the convergence of blackness and trans*ness, “The Issue of Blackness.” In their introduction, “We Got Issues,” editors Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton offer a vision of a black trans* studies that acknowledges twentieth-century black feminist thought as its primary genealogy. For Ellison et al., the move to make black feminism the intellectual center of black trans* studies not only resists black women's persistent erasure from institutional narratives of knowledge making but also opens the contributions of trans* studies onto new fields of possibility for thinking and feeling embodiment, sociality, and memory otherwise. Aiken, Modi, and Polk build on Ellison et al.’s vision for a black trans* studies by bringing the concerns of “The Issue of Blackness” into conversation with recent black feminist critiques of disciplinarity and representation to imagine again how a black trans* studies rooted in black feminism might take shape in the university today.